For six weeks, the world was glued to the trial of mentally ill Massachusetts mother Lindsay Clancy, who admitted to strangling her three young kids but argued she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis.
On 4 September, the live-streamed trial collapsed as the jury remained deadlocked, all but one voting her not guilty by reason of insanity. Yet virtually since the first day Lindsay, 36, appeared in court, another person has been unofficially on trial too – her ex-husband Patrick Clancy.
Patrick came home from getting takeaway on 24 January 2023 to find his lifeless kids in the basement and his wife lying outside, paralysed after jumping from a second-storey window.
As Patrick, 38, relived that horror ordeal during two days of testimony, many online sleuths didn’t see a grieving man who had lost his entire family, but
a villain hiding in plain sight.
Trial by social media
As well as so-called inconsistencies with his story, he’s been rebuked for remarrying and accused of being an absent husband who didn’t care much about Lindsay’s mental decline.
In a widely shared post, one Instagram user posted, “He was having an affair, he plotted, drugged her, made her crazy, killed their kids. Tried to kill her. When she didn’t die, he convinced her she killed them. Framed her. Sent her to prison.”
Patrick’s trial by social media has been ruthless and relentless. Despite him being ruled out as a suspect, internet investigators have peddled their theories as gospel and TikTokers spread their speculative videos freely.
Patrick’s lawyer fights back
Patrick’s legal team said law enforcement had been notified about the “destructive” claims, adding, “This spread of blatant and baseless falsehoods must stop.”
After the mistrial, Lindsay’s lawyer Kevin Reddington did a spate of TV interviews defending her ex-husband, calling him
“a man who stood by his wife through all of the difficulty”.
He says Lindsay also rejects those theories and adds that if the conspiracists heard Patrick’s “gut-wrenching” emergency call, they’d think differently.
“Maybe you get a chance to listen to that 911 tape, then you look me in the eye and tell me that you think Patrick Clancy did this,” he said.
“What this guy has been through is horrific.”
The armchair detectives
Along with the public’s insatiable appetite for a true crime story, there are key reasons people might be inclined to pin the blame on the ex-husband.
“Some people want this case to fit in really neatly with others and part of what that entails is an expectation that men are more likely to be perpetrators,” explains Kathryn Coduto, a professor of media science at Boston University.
“To have not just a woman but a mother saying, ‘Yes, I murdered my three kids,’ that’s really hard for people to accept.”
Kathryn also points to the rise of “forensic fandom”, whereby “people engage with media in a way where they think they know more about a story than others”.
Lucy Letby’s doctor crush
As British baby killer Lucy Letby languishes in a Surrey prison for the rest of her days, there’s been renewed interest around her mystery doctor boyfriend in the months after his sudden death.
Dr Mark Deakin, 53, died in July, just weeks after he was fired from Alder Hey Children’s Hospital following an 18-month investigation into his relationship with Letby.
His identity was only recently revealed as he was granted anonymity during Letby’s trial. He was known only as Dr A during her criminal trial and as Dr U at the Thirlwall Inquiry in 2024.
The messages that raised questions
It had previously been suggested that Letby was infatuated with the married father of two and that she had deliberately harmed babies as she enjoyed being beside him while they worked together on the sick infants.
Handwritten notes in which she called him her “love” and “best friend” were found in her home, and jurors heard how Letby and Deakin had met for meals, even taking a day trip to London together.
Though Letby denied they had an affair, the pair had exchanged 1355 Facebook messages since June 2016, including what counsel to the inquiry described as “entirely inappropriate” discussions about newborn patients.
A troubling exchange
The nurse, 36, was convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill seven more between 2015 and 2016 at the Countess of Chester Hospital. In one of their exchanges, Letby asked about the condition of Child N, a baby she was convicted of attempting to murder.
He replied, “Oh, Lucy, poor little thing. I am sure he has had the best care possible and you will have done everything you could for him.”
An investigation later found that Mark had accessed the baby’s medical records inappropriately.
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