Cora Clancy was five years old.
Dawson Clancy was three.
Callan Clancy was eight months old - - - still young enough that his mother was the whole world to him.
All three were strangled to death in their own home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, on a January evening in 2023, while their father was out picking up dinner. He came home and found them.
I'm pretty sure you have already heard about this case. You've likely seen some variation of the headlines, the courthouse footage, the debates. And there is a very good chance that you did not know those three names until just now.
I need you to know that is not an accident. That is the story.
What the Crowd Chose
Last Friday, a judge declared a mistrial. After seven days of deliberation, a jury of nine women and three men could not agree on whether Lindsay Clancy should be held criminally responsible for killing her children. A single juror stood against finding her not responsible. The district attorney has not yet said whether he will try her again.
But the courtroom was never the real story.
Three weeks before that, roughly three hundred people gathered outside the courthouse in matching pink shirts. The signs read "Believe." "She Needed Help." "Peace for Lindsay." On social media, mothers filmed themselves holding their own crying babies and captioned the videos "Me too, Lindsay," set to her diary entries. Fundraising on her behalf has climbed toward two million dollars.
Two million dollars.
And for Cora, Dawson, and Callan - - - nothing. No march. No pink shirts. No fund. No trending phrase. Three children were killed and many in this country organized themselves entirely around the murderer in the room.
That is a travesty. But, it's exactly where we are.
Just Say the Word Already
What happened in that house was evil.
Frankly, I don't care whether there was psychosis. I do not care whether there were voices. I don't care whether it was a mother or a father, and I would say the identical thing if it had been the husband. I realize mental illness is real, postpartum psychosis is real and serious, and I have pastored long enough to have heard about women who have been to the edge of something very dark and told nobody. I am not mocking that, and I never will.
But illness may explain a thing. It does not unmake it.
Three children were alive at four o'clock and dead by dinner. Whatever was happening inside that woman's mind, the deed was done, and the deed was evil. Proverbs 6:16-17 tells us that among the things God calls an abomination - - - the things that genuinely sicken Him - - - are "hands that shed innocent blood." God did not attach an exception clause to that verse for state of mind.
And the saddest thing about this entire moment is not that a woman did something monstrous. Monstrous things have happened since Cain. The saddest thing is that there are now millions of Americans who cannot look at three strangled children and get the word evil out of their mouths.
That is not a legal problem. That is a spiritual one.
We Labeled It Backwards
Here is where our own country has helped train the reflex.
Massachusetts does not even use the phrase "guilty." The verdict her defense sought was "not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility." Read that again. We have constructed a legal category so carefully worded that the word guilt never has to appear in the same sentence as three dead children.
That is exactly backwards. Insanity may be an explanation. It is not an eraser. The children are still dead. A father still walked into that house and found his precious children murdered in cold blood. A family is still destroyed. Something was still done - - - and the doing of it does not evaporate because the doer was unwell.
Please hear what I'm about to say and read it a few times if need be. The honest verdict can't be "not guilty by reason of insanity." The honest verdict is "guilty by reason of insanity." Yes, she did it. Yes, she was sick. Both of those are true at the same time, and a just society should be able to say both out loud without one canceling the other.
I actually found a wise option that many know nothing about: that verdict already exists. It is called "guilty but mentally ill," and Michigan created it back in 1975, after men found not guilty by reason of insanity walked out of hospitals and hurt people again. Roughly a dozen states have adopted it since. It holds the person responsible for what they did and gets them treatment for what they have.
Massachusetts never adopted it (shocker, I know). So the jury was handed two boxes - - - fully guilty or fully not - - - and one juror out of twelve refused to pretend the first box wasn't true. I'm thankful for him.
Living Without Natural Affection
Now it's time to get to the part that I've waited this whole article to get to. What I'm about to say should concern every Christian reading this, because this senseless tragedy is not fundamentally a story about the law.
Romans 1 describes what happens to a society that will not retain God in its knowledge. God gives them over to a reprobate mind - - - a mind that has lost the capacity to judge right from wrong. And when Paul lists the symptoms in verse 31, one of them stops me cold every time I read it:
"Without natural affection."
That phrase is not about strangers. The Greek word underneath (astorgos) is all about family affection. It literally means "being hard-hearted toward your kin, your family." We could also call it Motherly love. The bond so deep that God Himself used it in Isaiah 49:15 as the outer boundary of the unthinkable: "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb?"
God named it as the last thing that should ever fail. And then He said: "yea, they may forget."
Then Paul lands the hammer in verse 32. The final stage of a society under judgment is not so much that the people commit the sin, it is that they "have pleasure in them that do them." They celebrate it. Their applause is the symptom. Not the act - - - the applause.
Read that verse, then look at three hundred people in pink shirts.
A darkened mind never feels dark from the inside. Those women do not believe they are defending child-killing. They believe with their whole hearts that they are defending motherhood. That is what the reprobate mind looks like when it arrives.
To the owner of the reprobate mind, it doesn't feel like wickedness. To them, it actually feels like compassion. This is how they can look at you taking a stand on righteousness and call you heartless, mean, and uncaring.
Where This Reaction Was Trained
Now we need to ask the obvious question. How does a country get here?
The catalyst I'd like to point out is not too inconspicuous. This darkness of heart we see is a natural outworking of Roe v. Wade passing in 1973. In just over 50 years, this reprobation has taken hold over many.
We are two generations into a national catechism that teaches a child in the way is a problem to be solved, a life to be snuffed out. That the mother's circumstances are the thing that matters and the child's existence is the thing that must adjust. Say that long enough, defend it in enough courtrooms, chant it at enough rallies - - - and you do not just change a law. You change an instinct.
So when this nation was finally handed three actual bodies, small enough to carry, the godless reflex fired exactly the way it was trained. The first question out of the culture's mouth was not what did those children lose. It was what did she need.
Abortion did not only take lives. It rewired the part of us that was built to protect them. That is the downstream cost nobody put on the brochure.
And here is the tell that gives the whole thing away: not one of those three hundred people would have shown up if she had strangled somebody else's children. I cannot tell you how hard that sentence is for me to write. Furthermore, had Clancy murdered the children of these women, they would not have marched in her honor either. At least I hope they wouldn't. Maybe?
An Honest Word to the Young Men
I need to say something directly, and I am very well aware of how it will sound.
If you are a young man engaged or seriously involved with a woman who has publicly defended what happened in that house, you have just been handed information about her that most men do not get until it is far too late.
I am not telling you she is dangerous. I have no way of knowing that, and neither do you. That is not the point.
The point is that she has told you what she believes a child is worth. Three of them were strangled, and she could not find the word. That is not a political disagreement. That is a reading of her moral instrument - - - and that instrument is the one she will use to raise your children, to teach them what is true, to tell them what is right when you are not in the room.
Look hard. Ask the hard questions and make the hard decisions. It is better to learn this now than at the fifteen-year mark.
Just saying: I have heard of young men breaking off engagement to their bride-to-be over this very issue. I admire them for this and I support it. And if you're a woman reading here and I've just offended you, how would it make you feel if your "hubby-to-be" just stated his support of a father who strangled his three children while his wife was out getting dinner? Wouldn't that be concerning to you? Yes, it would (and it should) be.
Say Their Names
The mistrial in this case means things are not over. There may be another trial, and there will certainly be another round of hashtags, another wave of videos, and very likely another fundraiser.
When that comes, do not argue about her mind. You will not win it and frankly, that is not the argument. Just ask everyone the one question the crowd has spent eight months refusing to answer:
What about the children?
Not what Clancy, as a mother, suffered. Not what the system failed to provide. Not walking a mile in her shoes. None of that…
What about the children.
Because three of them lived in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and they had names, and they had birthdays, and they were made in the image of Almighty God - - - and there is not a pink shirt in this country with their names on it.
So let us, as followers of Christ, be the ones who say them out loud.
Cora.
Dawson.
Callan.
We are so sorry you had to go through this.
In solidarity with you, we do not celebrate your murderer.