It’s the primally terrifying case that’s gripping America. But is this mother a murderer or a victim?

It was the heaving shoulders that unravelled me; the sight of a mother, bowed in grief at the death of her own three beloved children – deaths that, shockingly, occurred by her own hands.

Lindsay Clancy was bent over in a court in Massachusetts, a curtain of black hair falling over her face, wracked with sobs as a medical examiner sat in the witness box detailing the extent of the strangulation injuries that killed her children. She has cried in court before, so much that the prosecution lawyers had been caught saying “shut her up” on a hot mic.

It’s the most inexplicable, primally terrifying and devastating of crimes: a mother, who birthed and raised children she dotes on, one cold day, slaughters them.

If you have missed this case unfolding in the US, here is the background.

Clancy is a 36-year-old labour and delivery nurse, who had desperately been seeking help for wild moods, insomnia, depression, confusion, intrusive, racing and suicidal thoughts, hallucinations and delusions for months.

Her mental health had grown worse after the birth of her youngest son.

She called a suicide hotline, walked into an emergency service, went to a range of outpatient medical clinics, got prescriptions for 13 different medications, and signed herself into a psychiatric hospital for several days. She tried to get into a hospital clinic for women with post-natal mental health problems, but she was refused.

Her condition worsened. Medical experts now believe she had an underlying bipolar disorder. She told her mother that she couldn’t sleep and was “really sick”. Her mother-in-law, Susan, testified in the murder trial that she was “begging for help”: “She had insomnia. She was losing her appetite. She was very anxious and sad.” But she was “very nurturing, very loving” with her kids.

On January 24, 2023, Clancy asked her husband Patrick to go to the pharmacy and to pick up some takeaway. She then strangled all three of her kids, Cora, five, Dawson, three, and Callan, eight months. She then tried to commit suicide, cutting herself and diving out of a window on the upper floor of her house. She is now paralysed from the waist down. She has been appearing in court in a wheelchair.

Her husband Patrick, who has since divorced Lindsay and remarried – too quickly for the likes of those supporting Lindsay on social media – told The New Yorker he didn’t “marry a monster”, but “someone who got sick”.

The court case is centring not on whether she killed her kids – this is not in dispute – but whether she did so deliberately and therefore is criminally responsible. Clancy’s lawyers blame her postpartum psychosis and have pleaded not guilty to murder due to temporary insanity.

A murder conviction would mean a life sentence without parole.