The Women Obsessed With Lindsay Clancy

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.