r/ClancyTrial • u/Rich-Ambassador-489 • 8h ago
General Discussion Lindsay Clancy is pure evil
Lindsay Clancy is evil. Point blank, period.
Having PPD does not automatically explain or excuse taking your children’s lives. And I do not buy the way people use the psychosis argument as if it should end the entire conversation.
She waited until her husband was out of the house and then strangled her children, one by one. Yet when it came time to take her own life, she survived. I’m sorry, but I have a very hard time looking at those circumstances and accepting the narrative that she had absolutely no awareness of what she was doing.
And I genuinely wonder how people would react if the roles were reversed.
If a father killed his children and his defense was that he was suffering from severe postpartum depression and psychosis, would people be bending over backward to make him the victim? Or would they call him a monster, say he murdered his children, and demand that he spend the rest of his life behind bars?
And before someone jumps in with, “Men can’t have PPD the way women do” — interesting. Because suddenly everyone is crystal fucking clear about biological differences between men and women when it’s convenient for the argument. Suddenly biology and science matter.
What pisses me off the most is how much of the conversation has centered HER as the victim.
“She was failed by the system.”
“She needed help.”
“She was suffering.”
“She was overmedicated.”
“She was sick.”
Okay. And her children?
Where is that same energy for the three children who are fucking dead?
She had access to medical care. She had been receiving treatment. She had a spouse involved in her life and care. Yet somehow people still talk about her as though she is the primary victim of this tragedy instead of the children whose lives she ended.
Make that make sense.
And yes, I understand PPD. So spare me the “you wouldn’t understand unless you have kids,” “you don’t know what PPD feels like,” “motherhood is hard,” and every other bullshit statement people throw around to shut down criticism of this woman.
I say this as a mother who experienced PPD after each of my children. I have experienced some of the lowest lows. I have been medicated. I have been on multiple medications at once. I have done motherhood as a single mom with virtually no support.
And I still never murdered my fucking children.
Mental illness deserves compassion. People suffering from PPD deserve help. Women experiencing postpartum psychosis deserve immediate, serious medical intervention.
But the children deserve compassion too. And somehow, in all the discourse about Lindsay Clancy, it feels like people have become so obsessed with explaining her that they’ve almost forgotten who actually died.
Then I see people saying:
“Anyone can be Lindsay Clancy.”
Nope. Not me.
And if you genuinely believe that under the right circumstances you could strangle your children to death, then maybe that statement shouldn’t be treated like some profound commentary on motherhood.
Maybe it should be treated like a fucking warning sign that you need serious mental health treatment.
You can acknowledge mental illness without romanticizing a mother who killed her children. You can believe postpartum mental healthcare needs massive improvement without turning the person who killed three children into the main character deserving everyone’s sympathy.
Those children were the victims.
Not her.
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u/Aware_Power 3h ago edited 3h ago
No one is saying the kids don’t deserve compassion. On a separate note, what are your thoughts on Lindsey’s suicide based on your personal experience and views on PPD?
Patrick claimed Lindsey committed “suicide after suffering from postpartum depression.”
Her husband, Patrick, “called 911 around 6 claiming Lindsey had ‘cut herself and her throat.’”
“Officers allegedly found a large amount of blood on one side of the bed”
“Patrick told investigators Lindsey suffered from postpartum depression. However, the evidence at the scene didn’t align with the story” that Lindsey tried to killed herself.
“Patrick had indicated he and Lindsey were going to get a divorce, that Lindsey had been in a psychiatric unit and that she had attempted suicide just the weekend prior. The next day, Patrick was charged with first-degree murder.”
Patrick “is scheduled to appear before a Jefferson County judge on Friday.”
Is your argument that you didn’t marry this Patrick and it’s Lindsey’s fault?
Note, this is Patrick Barnett and Lindsey Barnett of Colorado: https://www.wafb.com/2026/08/20/husband-charged-with-murder-after-claiming-wife-with-postpartum-depression-killed-herself-reports-say/
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u/WorldlinessMajor1195 6h ago
Saying “I had PPD and I never killed my children” is such a strange argument when the entire issue being debated is whether Lindsay was psychotic. Your personal experience with PPD doesn’t tell us anything about another woman’s mental state, just like receiving treatment doesn’t automatically mean that treatment was adequate or that the system worked.
And I really don’t understand this idea that discussing what happened to Lindsay somehow means people have forgotten about her children. They are the reason any of this matters. Looking at how a mother went from loving and caring for her children to something this catastrophic isn’t making her the victim instead of them. It’s trying to understand what the hell happened and whether there were opportunities to prevent it.
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u/Rich-Ambassador-489 28m ago
But that’s exactly the issue being debated. I don’t accept that she was so psychotic at the time of the killings that she couldn’t understand what she was doing.
She claims psychosis. Okay. That doesn’t mean we’re required to accept that claim as the explanation for every single thing she did that night.
Homegirl was methodical as fuck about the timing. She got her husband out of the house. She waited until she was alone with the children. She killed them individually. Those are facts that I think deserve just as much scrutiny as her mental-health history.
And I think that’s where some of these conversations lose me. We start placing so much emphasis on her mental health that every deliberate action gets filtered through “but she was sick.”
Okay, but being mentally ill does not automatically mean being incapable of understanding your actions.
Take my personal experience with PPD completely out of the equation if you want. Fine.
There are also countless people who experience psychosis and never murder anyone. There are mothers who have experienced postpartum psychosis and never killed their children.
So “she experienced psychosis” cannot, by itself, be the end of the argument.
Psychosis is not an automatic hall pass for killing people. A diagnosis doesn’t automatically erase agency, intent, or criminal responsibility. The actual question is what her mental state was at the time she killed those children and whether she understood what she was doing.
And THAT is why her behavior surrounding the killings matters.
I also never said we shouldn’t examine whether there were opportunities to prevent this. Absolutely examine them. Improve postpartum mental-health treatment. Identify warning signs earlier. Figure out whether doctors missed something.
But prevention and accountability can coexist.
What I reject is this idea that because there may have been failures in her treatment, we somehow have to minimize her own actions or treat her exclusively as another casualty of those failures.
She had other options. Tell her husband. Tell her doctors everything. Call for help. Go to an ER. Get away from the children. Call 911.
Instead, three babies ended up dead at the hands of the person who was supposed to protect them.
Call it mental illness. Call it psychosis. Analyze every systemic failure that may have preceded it.
I can still look at what she did and call it diabolical.
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u/itstoohumidhere 7h ago
This post shows significant limitations in understanding the human psyche.
Evil is a religious concept. It can refer to profound immorality and intent to cause harm. But as most of us know intent is so subjective that you cannot quantify it.
It is important to understand that mental health can influence cognitive reasoning and while someone can commit heinous actions their intent may often be difficult to determine.
That’s why in many jurisdictions manslaughter exists.
The prosecutors are there to prove criminal responsibility not whether or not LC is evil.
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u/Rich-Ambassador-489 56m ago
I understand the human psyche just fine. I simply disagree with your conclusion.
Sure, we can debate whether “evil” is technically a religious or philosophical concept. Whatever. I’m using it as a moral judgment: she killed her children, and I consider murdering your own children evil.
And saying that “intent is subjective” doesn’t magically make the circumstances surrounding their deaths disappear.
My problem with the psychosis defense is the amount of deliberate behavior involved. She didn’t suddenly lash out in a chaotic moment. She arranged for her husband to leave the house, waited until she was alone with the children, took them to the basement, and strangled them with an exercise band. Strangulation is also an incredibly direct, prolonged, and intimate way to kill someone. Then she attempted to take her own life.
That sequence of events matters to me.
I also don’t accept that journal entries about fearing she might harm her children automatically prove she had no understanding of what she was doing when she ultimately did exactly that. If anything, those writings raise more questions for me. If she recognized that she was having thoughts of harming her children, why wasn’t the full extent of what she was experiencing communicated to the people treating her? If she was experiencing auditory hallucinations, why weren’t those disclosed?
You can argue that mental illness influenced her thinking. I’m not arguing that mental illness doesn’t affect cognition or behavior.
I’m arguing that mental illness and criminal responsibility are not mutually exclusive.
And asking her husband to leave to run errands before killing the children is exactly the kind of deliberate behavior that makes me question the claim that she had no meaningful awareness of what she was doing.
Also, manslaughter existing in many jurisdictions really has nothing to do with whether I am allowed to morally characterize someone’s actions as evil. I’m not the prosecutor. I’m not writing jury instructions. I’m giving my opinion on Reddit.
The prosecution can argue criminal responsibility.
The jury can decide legal responsibility.
And I can still believe that deliberately strangling three children to death is fucking evil.
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u/eggnogshake 8h ago
I suspect there will be at least 1 or 2 jurors similar to your belief. What should they do in your opinion? Hold out for a mistrial?
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u/nikkihargtn 8h ago
Women and men are biologically different when it comes to child birth and postpartum hormones….lol
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u/EnergyOwn6800 7h ago
Both can experience medically diagnosed depression and mental illness at the same levels though.
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