On Aug. 20, when Lindsay Clancy’s former mother-in-law Sue Clancy took the witness stand, Assistant District Attorney Shanan Buckingham asked her if she was aware that murder is a mortal sin in the Catholic Church.

Judge William Sullivan moved swiftly to strike the reference from the record, but I almost wish he would have let Ms. Buckingham continue. What line of questioning was she pursuing here? It left me considering what God asks of us in the face of such tragedy, what the law requires and where it falls short. 

Lindsay Clancy is the 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse who is accused of strangling and killing her three young children, Cora, Dawson and Callan, in the family’s Massachusetts home on Jan. 24, 2023. Her defense argues that she is not criminally responsible for the deaths because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time they occurred.

I do not typically pay much attention to high-profile court cases as they are playing out. I much prefer to wait a few months for the talking heads on an episode of “Dateline” or “20/20” to neatly summarize the whole thing for me, offering a tidy conclusion. But if you are on social media at all, you will know how hard it is to ignore the Lindsay Clancy case. 

Eventually, it was her iPhone notes that hooked me.

“I’m going to try my best today”

On Aug. 13, Massachusetts State Police Trooper Timothy Chiappini testified that his forensic extraction of Ms. Clancy’s phone had revealed iPhone notes which detailed her struggles with self-doubt, depression and anxiety related to her experience of motherhood.

“I’m sad and depressed because I am not able to parent my third child like my first,” Ms. Clancy wrote. “I want to be able to give him all the love he deserves…I’m going to try my best today…I’m terrified of something happening to my kids or doing something wrong to mess up their development.”

The fact that Ms. Clancy, who had given birth to Callan the previous May, was in the throes of a profound mental health crisis at the time of the murders is disputed by no one—not even the prosecution. Accordingly, Ms. Clancy’s defense has acknowledged that she was, in fact, the person to commit these murders.

The question the trial seeks to answer is this: Is she criminally responsible for them? But the questions raised by Ms. Clancy’s life and actions are much broader. 

To Love, and to Fail

Since Lindsay Clancy’s trial began on July 20, a steady stream of heart-wrenching witness testimony has sought to establish an answer to that first question. Patrick Clancy, Ms. Clancy’s ex-husband and the father of the murdered children, has taken the stand. So have his mother and Ms. Clancy’s parents, along with the family’s former nanny, Ms. Clancy’s psychiatrist, first responders and health care providers who cared for Ms. Clancy on the night of the crime and in the time since then.

The prominence of the trial has meant that many people, especially mothers, have been forced to grapple with what the trial cannot solve. Questions of mental health and motherhood, good and evil, sickness, sadness. It was hard for me to sleep the first night after I read those testimonies. I understood why I had been trying to keep my distance: Lindsay Clancy reminds me of myself in more ways than I care to think about.

I have never experienced intrusive thoughts about harming my children, but I do have a great deal of experience with intrusive thoughts in general, ones I have no intention of, or desire to, act upon. But it can be hard not to feel overwhelmed by them. I have lain awake, Ms. Clancy’s pathetic, optimistic words swirling in my head: “I’m going to try my best today.”

I know what it’s like to be in a dark place mentally. I know what it is like to receive a hopeful text from your mom asking if you are doing any better (as Mr. Chiappini testified Ms. Clancy did). I know what it is like to be prescribed medication and pray that it works—not just for your sake but for your children’s sake, because they deserve so much more than you and your issues.

I know what it is like to face your day with nothing but an iPhone folder full of hopeful affirmations and a hope that today—please, God—when I tell someone “I’m okay,” I mean it.

I know what it’s like to love so hard, and to fail.

I’m not the only woman who identifies parts of Lindsay Clancy’s story. Reports say that women have shown up in the hundreds outside the Plymouth County Courthouse to show support for Ms. Clancy and to bring awareness to issues of maternal mental health inequity. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington has developed a cult following from female TikTok creators who swoon at the sight of a Boomer who takes mental health seriously.

But the conversation is polarized. On the other side, innumerable social media posts have been made with the supposed “hot take” that anyone who kills a child, no matter what the reason, needs to go to jail. The right-wing commentator Matt Walsh posted on X that Ms. Clancy “killed her kids because she hated them and hated being a mother.”

A case like this pulls at the threads of the intricately woven tapestry that is our understanding of human capacity for good and for evil: a devoted mother who kills her children, a husband who forgives her (but divorces her), a system that tells women their mental health struggles are not their fault but is hell-bent on making one woman, whose postpartum struggles are undeniable, pay for something she will never stop paying for anyway.

So is Lindsay Clancy sick, or a monster? The ferocity of public opinion on this trial represents our collective inability to hold two truths at once: that people can sin, sometimes even terribly, and that people can still contain good.

Sometimes, I’m so afraid that I think about dying, so afraid that the fear leaks out of my eyes and onto my face and alarms my children. That is one truth. There is also another: I am a good mother.

Broken Systems

There is a theory floating around on the internet (so take that for what it is worth) that consuming true crime media is a defensive response to internalized trauma. People who carry trauma supposedly cannot help but try to process that trauma by watching horrible things, over and over and over again.

“So, why do you watch these things?” my husband asked me early on in our relationship, when he found me about four hours into a true crime binge-watch. I think he was trying to decide if it was time to break up. “Does it make you feel happy? To see people get murdered?”

I didn’t have a better answer than: “I just like seeing justice served.” But had I been honest about it, I would have said that no, I am not addicted to murder; I am not addicted to violence.

I am addicted to judgment.

The true crime genre makes it so easy. The victim is always an angel who “lit up a room.” The murderer is always a scumbag whose image flickers across the screen with dim lighting and ominous music. We know who to pity and who to condemn. If we are Christians, in our daily life we probably try (or pretend to try) to avoid making wholesale judgments of other people, but when it comes to murder, all bets are off. This is a sin, after all, which the Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us “cries out to Heaven for vengeance” (No. 2268).

In the courtroom, the law is all that matters, and the law is conveniently explicit. Arguing a court case is straightforward and falls within specific parameters. But broader concepts like good and evil are frustratingly gray, and discerning them calls for employing virtues like compassion, patience and charity.

It is difficult to prove to a jury how hard someone tried to love. Often, all they can see is how badly someone failed. 

“This case is not about our mental health system or how it treats women or what’s in the DSM-V and what’s not. That’s a distraction to get you angry and passionate about an important issue, but an issue that’s not on trial here,” Plymouth County Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague said in her closing argument on Aug. 28. “What’s on trial here, what the issue is here, is what Lindsay Clancy did the night of January 24th, 2023, and what her mental state was at the time.”

However the jury decides this case, the opposite side will say that the justice system is broken. I’m not sure they are wrong. I don’t know what earthly justice is possible for Cora, Dawson and Callen. I don’t know what legal justice looks like for Lindsay Clancy. But I know that none of them will receive true justice from any decision handed down by a jury of human beings.

When Sue Clancy left the stand, she exited the courtroom through the main aisle, passing by the defense table. As she did, she looked straight at her former daughter-in-law. The nod that she gave was brief and her gaze unsmiling, but the meaning of both was unmistakable: recognition.

Something tells me that Sue Clancy, a practicing Catholic, knows what a mortal sin is. She knows that such sin separates us from God and one another. And she knows God can forgive it. 

Colleen Jurkiewicz is a staff writer with the Milwaukee Catholic Herald. She writes every week at LPi’s (Practicing) Catholic blog.