Cora Clancy was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months.
I started there because apparently somebody has to.
Their mother, Lindsay Clancy, strangled all three in the basement of their Duxbury, Massachusetts, home in January 2023. She admits it. This week a jury couldn't decide whether she should be held criminally responsible. Eleven jurors reportedly favored acquittal. One didn't. After 38 hours of deliberation across seven days, the judge declared a mistrial.
And outside the courthouse? Pink. Hundreds of people in pink shirts and bows, holding signs reading "Believe," "She Needed Help," and "Peace For Lindsay." Pink was Cora's favorite color.
Yes. The favorite color of the 5-year-old girl Lindsay Clancy strangled became the uniform for people rallying around Lindsay Clancy.
What in God's name is wrong with these people?
Cora isn't here to wear pink. She's dead. Dawson is dead. Callan is dead. And the woman who put exercise bands around their necks has somehow become the sympathetic central character in the story.
No. I'm not doing that.
Bethany Mandel, the conservative columnist and mother of six, pointed out something embarrassingly obvious: everybody knows Lindsay Clancy's name. How many know the names of her children? Learn them. Cora. Dawson. Callan. Those are the victims. Not the woman in the courtroom.
And before the pink people start screaming at me about postpartum psychosis, save it. I know postpartum illness exists. I know women suffer terribly from it. I also know what was presented in this courtroom, and after hearing it, I don't believe Lindsay Clancy's story.
I believe she misled people — telling doctors enough to get help while withholding enough that they never understood what she was capable of. I believe the psychosis explanation became far more useful after three children were dead than it was to the people treating her beforehand. And I believe the prosecution produced serious evidence she knew exactly what she was doing. Dr. Gregory Saathoff testified about inconsistencies in her accounts. Dr. Avram Mack found no evidence of psychosis in the records he reviewed. The prosecution's own experts concluded she could distinguish right from wrong.
The pink people apparently heard something else. They heard "mother," and somewhere between that word and three dead children, Lindsay's agency evaporated — which is particularly rich, given that for my entire adult life I've been lectured by this same strain of feminism that women are strong, capable, fully in command of their own minds, and don't need paternalistic institutions second-guessing their choices. Women have agency. Yes. They do. Which is why this whole spectacle is so insulting to women.
Lindsay Clancy was a labor-and-delivery nurse, an educated professional, a mother who scheduled things, sought treatment, and navigated medications. And according to prosecutors, on the day her children died, she made a sequence of deliberate decisions before strangling them. I believe the prosecution. Apparently, saying that is now cruelty.
But treating an adult woman as a passenger inside her own body while everyone around her bears responsibility — we're supposed to call that enlightened? The doctors did it. The medications did it. The healthcare system did it. Everybody did it except the person who wrapped exercise bands around three children's necks. How convenient. Women aren't helpless. Women are moral agents — deserving credit for extraordinary accomplishments, and capable of bearing responsibility for horrific choices. You don't get equality only when there's a trophy involved.
The "Believe" sign is almost too perfect. Believe whom? Prosecutors spent weeks presenting evidence of inconsistencies in her story. Her husband, Patrick, testified that roughly two months before the killings, she described "intrusive thoughts" about hurting the children — though she told him she had no plan to act on them. We're supposed to skip all that because somebody bought matching bows? Evidence doesn't become misogyny because you don't like where it leads.
When the jury deadlocked, the pink people went from embarrassing to obscene, disrupting DA Timothy Cruz's press conference with accusations of corruption for pursuing a woman who admits she strangled three children. The prosecutor is the bad guy now. Lindsay is the victim. Cora, Dawson, and Callan are background material.
A woman dressed in black reportedly confronted the pink supporters, explaining she wore black because this was, in effect, a funeral. Exactly. Wear black. Wear Cora's picture, Dawson's, Callan's. Those children have been disappearing from their own murder story for three years, and the pink people are helping erase them.
Rep. Nancy Mace asked whether this crowd would have rallied if Clancy were black. Worth asking. I've got another: make Lindsay a man. Larry Clancy waits until his wife leaves, takes his three kids into the basement, and strangles them one by one before trying to kill himself. Now tell me about the rally. Where are the bows? The "Peace For Larry" signs? We both know what that courthouse would look like.
This isn't compassion. It's infantilization dressed in pink — stripping a capable adult woman of her moral agency because acknowledging it would mean confronting something ugly: women are every bit as human as men. They can be brilliant, heroic, capable of leading companies and curing diseases. And yes, they can commit evil. Equality doesn't disappear when accountability gets uncomfortable.
Cora didn't get to choose. Dawson didn't get to choose. Callan didn't get to choose. They were five, three, and eight months old, dependent on the adults around them for everything — especially their mother. And she killed them.
So spare me the pink. Spare me the bows. Spare me the lectures about how holding a woman responsible somehow diminishes women. It's the opposite. Treating women like adults means treating them like adults even when what an adult has done is horrifying.
There are three people in this story who truly had no agency: Cora, Dawson, and Callan. Remember their names. The pink people apparently need reminding.