19 August 2026 - 4:00pm
Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial is still ongoing. But in the court of public opinion, internet sleuths seem to have already reached their verdict. Clancy, who admitted to murdering her three young children in 2023, is currently entering an insanity plea as she says that she was not criminally responsible for her actions due to suffering from postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder at the time.
TikTok armchair detectives, however, are rabidly pursuing other conspiracy theories, the most popular being that she is actually being framed by her ex-husband, Patrick Clancy. In a recent TikTok poll of over 130,000 people, 93% said they believed Patrick was responsible for the murders. Fixated on irrelevant minutiae and armed with baseless accusations, numerous vloggers have scrutinised his shoes, the errands he ran that night, his Apple Watch data, his body language, his subsequent remarriage, and other supposed pieces of “evidence” in order to create a true-crime fandom of epic proportions.
There is obviously a financial incentive for content creators, who see the potential to cash in on the popularity of true-crime content. One influencer’s videos have racked up millions of likes and views hypothesising that Patrick was drugging Lindsay and killed his children because he was having an affair with his now-wife. It’s worth mentioning that this influencer is not a journalist, doctor or former detective, but a beauty blogger who sells self-tanner. His posts previously averaged around 5,000 views; now they average around 500,000.
How did 121,000 people become more certain about who killed the Clancy children than the woman who admits she killed them? Why are so many people more willing to trust someone who sells bronzer than they are to trust actual experts on the case?
At the heart of all this wild speculation is, ultimately, denial — a refusal to confront the horrifying reality of the murders. True-crime fanatics want an emotionally satisfying explanation, an “easier” narrative with a male villain and a female victim, rather than the “messy” reality that sometimes tragic things happen because several complicated systems fail simultaneously. In this case, Lindsay Clancy’s lawyers have argued that her psychosis was exacerbated by the poor-quality treatment she received, and the fact she was prescribed an incorrect mix of over a dozen psychiatric medications.
Some content creators have also imposed their apparent authority by drawing upon their own mental health experiences. For example, YouTuber Annie Elise talks about suffering from postpartum depression herself — yet PPD is a much more common, far less dangerous condition than postpartum psychosis, and it is wildly misleading to conflate the two.
We have seen this pursuit of an “alternative truth” before. In 2025, Karen Read was acquitted of murdering her boyfriend after a local blogger — Aidan Kearney, known as Turtleboy — aggressively covered the case, protesting her innocence and claiming she had actually been framed by local law enforcement. It happened in 2023 with the obsessive speculation around the disappearance of Nicola Bulley, in which amateur analysts also tried to frame her husband for her death. Or consider the clickbait coverage of Gabby Petito in 2021, when commenters speculated that her boyfriend had faked his death or that Petito had been pregnant when she died.
What is different about the Clancy case, though, is that it forces us to question one of our most fundamental sacred beliefs: that a mother should love, and care for, and protect her children. There is something very human about wanting to exonerate or infantilise Clancy, and perhaps it is no wonder that so many people readily accept the confirmation bias of their social media algorithm.
After all, by constructing elaborate conspiracy theories, we avoid the uncomfortable conversation this case demands: that sometimes mental illness doesn’t look sympathetic, and sometimes its consequences can be horrifying. It’s easier to frame Patrick Clancy as a narcissistic manipulator who didn’t care about his wife and children than it is to accept that a woman can be a devoted mother but also become so psychiatrically unwell that she does something unthinkable. It is hard, sometimes, to acknowledge that women are capable of doing evil things.
