RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Photographs by Alexandra Howland
Updated at 7:35 p.m. ET on August 31, 2026
O n one of the final days of the trial , dozens of women streamed into the back of a Plymouth, Massachusetts, courtroom, filling two long rows of wooden benches. They stood and watched the judge and jury take their seats. Then they strained for a view as a nurse wheeled in the defendant, Lindsay Clancy, who has admitted to strangling her three young children to death in her suburban Boston home in January 2023, before swallowing prescription pills, slashing her wrists and neck, and throwing herself out of a bedroom window headfirst.
Seeing her there in a wheelchair, one woman crossed herself and whispered, “Please, God.” As an officer gaveled the court into session, others pulled out notebooks, folders, and scraps of paper. “WHY,” Marta Quijano wrote as a prosecutor called a psychiatrist to the stand. “Motivation , ” she added, starring the word as the doctor began explaining his opinion that Clancy was not in the throes of psychosis on the night of the killings, as her defense has argued, but deeply suicidal and still capable of knowing right from wrong. In the back row, a woman who had flown in from Cleveland shook her head. She had a true-crime novel in her lap and turned to a blank page at the end. “Stupid experts,” she wrote.
Americans have long been obsessed with murder trials, especially those involving the primal nightmare of mothers who kill their children. The public loves to watch mothers on trial and partake in their judgment. There was Susan Smith, who had drowned her three children in a South Carolina lake and was found guilty of murder in 1995, despite having a history of trauma and sexual abuse. And there was Andrea Yates, who had drowned her five children in a bathtub and was convicted of capital murder in 2002 and then retried in 2006, when she was found not guilty by reason of insanity after witnesses testified that Yates had experienced severe postpartum psychosis and schizophrenia.
The Clancy trial is now part of this sadistic American tradition, but it has also become something else for the women who have been showing up in person. It was not enough for them to watch the proceedings on television, or listen to some lawyer on YouTube, or even stand outside the courthouse wearing pink and waving signs in support of Clancy, as hundreds of women did one day earlier this month. They did not want to be outside rendering judgment; they wanted to be inside, on the third floor, sitting on the wooden benches, as close as possible, in case they could notice some detail, some gesture, some pause or expression or word that might reveal a truth they could recognize from their own experience. Each was there for their own reasons.
A jury of nine women and three men will decide in the coming days whether Clancy, a 36-year-old former labor-and-delivery nurse, is criminally responsible for killing her children or not guilty by reason of insanity. The two prosecutors have argued that the killings were the premeditated decision of an entitled and controlling woman who had been frustrated that she could not master her worsening depression and sought a way out of a life that she no longer wanted. Clancy’s defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, has cast her as a loving mother failed by a fragmented mental-health system even as she repeatedly sought help for intensifying depression, anxiety, and insomnia after giving birth to her third child.
[ Read: Why Lindsay Clancy’s insanity defense might fail ]
Clancy saw her psychiatrist 14 times, tried 13 different medications, called a suicide hotline, went to an emergency room, tried to enroll in an inpatient program, and confided to her husband that she’d had thoughts of harming her children. Defense experts testified that doctors had missed an underlying bipolar disorder and prescribed pills that made Clancy’s symptoms worse, starting a downward spiral that culminated in a rare condition called postpartum psychosis that can cause hallucinations. Clancy has said that she heard a male voice telling her to kill her children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan, on January 24, 2023.
After being resuscitated following her suicide attempt, which left her paralyzed from the waist down, Clancy was handcuffed, placed under armed guard, and arraigned from her hospital bed. A judge allowed the moment to be livestreamed from the courtroom; a video screen showed her unblinking eyes above a white surgical mask. The trial itself has also been livestreamed, fueling conspiracy theories that have tended to blame the killings on Clancy’s husband or an intruder, attempting to find clarity where there is little, as many women at the trial already understood. At first, only a few showed up. By last Monday, they were waiting in an hour-long line to get into the courthouse, and another that stretched down a bright hallway to the courtroom doors.
Alexandra Howland for The Atlantic
A crowd of mostly women waits in line to get inside the courthouse.
“I can’t imagine what’s going through her head,” one woman was saying to her friend.
“It’s not just cold-blooded murder,” the friend said.
“I had suicidal thoughts, clear as a bell,” a retired teacher named Dottie Kiley told another woman in line, explaining her experience with antidepressants. “So bad I called the police and told them, and they had a cop come down and sit with me. It was a small town, and they had time to do that.”
The woman behind her nodded. “She could be any one of us,” she said as the courtroom doors opened.
I nside, the women listened to Avram Mack , a psychiatrist and prosecution witness, explain his clinical opinion that Clancy, having made up her mind to kill herself, then made the decision to kill her children to prevent their suffering a life without her—a theory called “altruistic filicide.” Quijano leaned over to the woman sitting next to her.
“What is the validity of this three years later?” she whispered, shaking ...
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