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

August 21, 2026 — 3:30pm

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WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT

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........

© The Sydney Morning Herald