Earlier this September, the Lindsay Clancy case, characterized by months of online controversy, courthouse rallies and incessant media coverage, ended in a mistrial. A lone juror prevented the jury from reaching a unanimous verdict, which would have found Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity for the murder of her three children.
The insanity defense presented by Clancy’s lawyers never disputed that she had committed the crime, but instead argued Clancy was in the throes of postpartum psychosis and could not have acted with premeditated, malicious intent. Despite Clancy’s own admission of guilt, online commentators remained suspicious of the facts.
“This is why I think Patrick [Clancy] did it,” said TikTok user @ja.kramer before presenting a laptop with a PowerPoint presentation. “This is all my opinion, this is all alleged. Please do not come for me. I can’t afford a lawyer.”
The conspiracy theories generated by true crime sleuths vary in audacity and ambition. Some claim that Clancy’s ex-husband Patrick ignored the severity of Clancy’s postpartum depression and was therefore equally responsible for the murders. Some go as far to claim that Patrick strangled the children himself and framed Clancy. Most accusations towards Clancy’s ex-husband contain similar epithets as @ja.kramer’s –– users find ways to make sure they can’t be held responsible for their opinions.
But they should be held responsible for their opinions because true crime’s tendency to equate real-life suffering with hobbyist entertainment causes tangible damage. In an interview with 60 Minutes, Patrick Clancy confessed that speculation about his involvement in the case has made it difficult to be in public. In other high-publicity cases, families of victims reported severe harassment both online and in-person to US News, alleging that some perpetrators went so far as to visit the families’ homes. More often than not, true crime fans reject empathy in order to sensationalize and leverage victims’ situations in favor of their own narrative. They forget that, on some fundamental level, they are discussing real people. Violence becomes tabloid fodder.
The truth behind most criminal cases, like Clancy’s, is that there is no great mystery to be unraveled. There is no story behind the story. Ordinary circumstances and ordinary people produce horror at the same rate as anyone else. Once we come to terms with that, we can also understand that people like Clancy or her ex-husband aren’t evil or alien. They are both deserving of empathy in their own right, but true crime narrative tries its hardest to remove any nuance in favor of witch-hunting an arbitrarily guilty party. True crime and its constituents should be held more accountable, or at the very least, less cruel.