Lindsay Clancy Copycats Were Inevitable

As my PJ Media colleague Catherine Salgado previously reported, Corie Walsh, 38, of Frankfort, Ill., has been charged with three counts of first-degree murder in the death of her 2-year-old son, Barrett Walsh. Three of Walsh's other children were unharmed, and her husband was reportedly out of state when the killing occurred.

Prosecutors say Walsh had become intensely interested in the Clancy trial and was participating in a group text with friends about the case at approximately 12:30 p.m. that Tuesday, roughly three and a half hours before her son was found dead. Prosecutors allege Walsh believed her son was the "devil" and the "anti-Christ."

Clancy does not dispute killing her three children. Her trial was never about whether she did it. It was about whether she was criminally responsible. Clancy's attorneys argued she suffered severe postpartum psychosis and was therefore not criminally responsible, despite the extensive planning she undertook to commit the murders.

At the exact moment Walsh was allegedly strangling her son, jurors in Massachusetts were deliberating whether Clancy should be held criminally responsible for strangling her own three children. It has since ended in a mistrial after reportedly a single juror couldn’t be convinced that she was not guilty by reason of insanity.

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So how did we get here? Liberal women, in particular, have spent years cultivating a habit of treating accused child killers as sympathetic victims of mental illness rather than people responsible for their own actions. Clancy is the biggest beneficiary of that habit, and she's cashing in on it. She has been made a celebrity by liberal women around the world. She literally gets fan mail from around the world.

Given all that, it's hardly surprising that copycats would come. Corie Walsh spent her final hours before the alleged murder immersed in a group chat about a woman on trial for the same crime, a woman treated less like a defendant and more like a folk hero.

And let’s not forget: Clancy is hardly the first woman to become a feminist icon after killing her children. Andrea Yates drowned all five of her children in 2001, became a major symbol of postpartum psychosis and maternal mental illness, and was found not guilty by reason of insanity at her retrial. These aren’t women who defended themselves from an abusive husband. These are women who admitted to killing their own children.

Elevating a woman who strangled her own children into a martyr for the postpartum-psychosis cause was always going to produce more of this. Every sympathetic profile, every op-ed questioning her guilt, and every piece of fan mail is a signal to the next unstable mother that killing her children might make her a cause instead of a criminal.