I met Lindsay Clancy supporters who also suffered serious trauma — but it can’t lessen the brutality of her killings

When I drove to Plymouth Superior Court on Thursday morning to speak with supporters of Lindsay Clancy, I expected to meet a bunch of ghouls.

But it quickly became clear that the people dressed in bright pink outside the courthouse, supporting the triple child killer have their own psychological struggles. They are using Clancy to symbolize of a larger critique of our mental health system.

“I think she’s a victim of a failed medical system, and I think women’s mental health isn’t taken seriously enough,” 41-year-old Melissa Merrill said. “I’ve been a mom where you don’t want to say how you feel because of the stigma… ‘If I say I feel this way, what if my kid gets taken away?’”

To them, Clancy was a woman prescribed too many drugs and not taken seriously enough when she said her postpartum mental health was deteriorating. They believe she’s only in her current position because doctors and the medical industrial complex fail to take women seriously.

But it seems to me there are a million better ways to raise awareness for postpartum mental health struggles than standing outside a courthouse in support of a woman who admits killing her own toddlers.

“I felt like I needed to be here,” Sarah Miller, a 38-year-old mother, told me. She had driven 17 hours from Indiana and slept in her car to be outside the courtroom as the jury broke for deliberation on Thursday.

Miller told me she had experienced postpartum depression after giving birth to her second child and related to Lindsay because they had both become a “guinea pig for medications.”

“As a mother, as a female, as someone who has struggled with mental health themselves… I understand,” she told The Post.

She’d watched every moment of the case from start to finish on YouTube. The only moment Miller missed were the closing arguments delivered on Thursday while she was driving, before jurors broke for their first day of deliberations about Clancy’s fate.

The 36-year-old mother sent her husband out for takeout in Jan. 2023, then strangled her three young children — aged five, three, and eight months — with exercise bands, slashed her own wrists and attempting suicide by jumping out of a second story window. She survived, but is now paraplegic.

She does not dispute that she killed her children, but her defense attorneys say it happened as the result of postpartum psychosis — the culmination of a months long mental health struggle during which psychiatrists failed her by prescribing a cocktail of drugs.

“She’s in her own hell. She lost all of her babies. She lost her husband. She’s in a wheelchair. I mean, she’s going to live with this for the rest of her life,” Merrill said. “I don’t think prison is going to help her with her mental state.”

Merrill came out from Saugus, Mass., to support Clancy and brought her 20-year-old son, Joshua, with her. Like just about every other supporter there, postpartum mental health disorder was in her past.

“I had suicidal ideations against myself — and nobody else — so it kind of touched some heartstrings because I had been there,” she told The Post. “I had the anxiety of a new mom of being like, am I doing things right?”

I’ve been following this gruesome case for a while, baffled by the women who have gone so far out of their way to not just defend, but support a woman who allegedly murdered her own small children. However, meeting them in real life made clear that it was less about the facts and patterns of Clancy’s case and more about their own pain.

This was especially clear talking to Danielle Buckley, a 53-year-old from Maine, who drove down on Wednesday with the cremated remains of her 22-year-old son, Evan, who died by suicide in 2024.

“I wanted to make a bold statement,” she told me. “I went to the closet where I keep him, and I said, ‘Do you want to come?’ And I think today he would be like, ‘We’re going to do this for Lindsay.’”

Buckley, an electrician’s helper, told me being outside the courtroom was “therapy” for her. She’d experienced postpartum depression after giving birth and believes both she and her late son were failed by mental health professionals.

“I’m not really thinking about the children,” she admitted. “I think probably my son’s death has colored that because I’m in grief over my own child… That disconnects me from the trauma of the kids, and I’m more one-to-one with Lindsay.”

The whole spectacle at the courthouse was a living testament to how mental illness rips apart lives. It was hard not to feel for these women. But it seemed to me like part of an emerging trend in the digital age — of turning hideous stories into fables about larger social ills, and making perpetrators into quasi-heroes. 

The obvious parallel is Luigi Mangione supporters, who consider a young man who killed a father and insurance executive a hero for calling attention to problems with the health industry.

Here, outside the courthouse, the brutality of Clancy’s crime could be overlooked because she’d transformed into a symbol of maternal pain, postpartum struggles, and the shortcomings of mental health treatment.

But we’re losing the plot if we begin seeing innocent lives as collateral in our social critiques.