Online Sleuthing Is Out of Control, and the Vitriol Against Patrick Clancy Proves It
The trial of Lindsay Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse who admitted to strangling her three young children before attempting suicide in January 2023, has become the latest true crime sensation largely d...
The trial of Lindsay Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse who admitted to strangling her three young children before attempting suicide in January 2023, has become the latest true crime sensation largely due to social media. Amateur sleuths, armchair lawyers and influencers have turned the soon-to-conclude trial into snackable, whodunit content, dissecting every detail and advancing their own theories across TikTok and other social platforms.
Rather than focusing on the established facts — particularly Lindsay Clancy’s own admission that she killed her children — a growing number of internet investigators have cast her ex-husband and the children’s father, Patrick Clancy, as the villain. The murderer.
“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 he killed them. Framed her. Sent her to prison,” one Instagram user wrote in a widely shared post.
In a TikTok video posted on Aug. 17, Lisa Rinna, the former star of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” said, “All right, he did it. Patrick did it. Patrick’s the one who did it. Not Lindsay. Patrick did it. Because, you know, I also heard that women typically don’t strangle.”
But the Lindsay Clancy case is not a cold case. There is no mystery to be solved. Lindsay did it.
She’s on trial because prosecutors argue that Clancy, 36, was clear-minded when she planned and carried out the killings. Her lawyer, Kevin Reddington, argues that she was overprescribed psychiatric medications and was suffering from postpartum psychosis. Jurors are currently deliberating on whether Clancy spends the rest of her life in prison or in a locked, state-run psychiatric facility.
Whatever the verdict, the Massachusetts mother’s story will almost certainly become entertainment fodder soon enough. As Page Six Hollywood reported today, “numerous studios and streamers are interested in bringing Clancy’s story and trial to the screen.” And rumors are circulating that a well-known documentarian is currently making a documentary about the case. Others are likely to follow in his footsteps, because docs about the worst day of someone’s life and the terrible things people do to one another is a genre of entertainment that audiences can’t get enough of. Netflix docs “Crash,” “Maternal Instinct” and “Unknown Number: The High School Catfish” each spent time on the platform’s Top 10 chart this year. Earlier this month, “The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare” garnered 18.2 million views in its first week on Netflix.
No one in the courtroom is debating Patrick Clancy’s guilt or innocence. But that still hasn’t stopped online communities from perpetuating harmful theories about him.
Included among those theories: Lindsay was “shaking” when she saw Patrick walk into the courtroom to testify, and therefore, she was scared of him during their marriage. Patrick took his eldest child skiing after dropping Lindsay off at a mental institution, which means he didn’t care about his wife’s mental state. Patrick was an absentee father because he worked so much. (He was the only source of income for the family of five at the time of his children’s murders.) Patrick was a narcissist, because after Lindsay told him, and notably her mother, that she was suffering from postpartum depression and feared harming her children, he brunched with friends and took a two-day trip to New York (it’s unclear whether that was for work or not). But what citizen detectives hate the most is that Patrick moved on too quickly: He remarried earlier this year.
“The ONLY way I would consider marrying a man whose ex-wife supposedly murdered their 3 children and is now on trial for it….. is if I was already with him before it happened,” reads one Facebook comment.
Here’s another: “Dude, just hear me out. Patrick Clancy was cheating on Lindsay for at least 3 known years before the murders took place.
Kathryn Coduto, a professor of media science at Boston University who studies social media and true crime, said the online effort to put Patrick Clancy on trial in the court of public opinion reflects a desire for a more familiar, coherent narrative.
“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,” said Coduto. True crime, she noted, has a particularly large audience among women, many of whom consume it to understand “how to not be a victim.”
“So, when you look at this case, to have a woman, and not just a woman, but a mother, saying, ‘Yes, I murdered my three kids,’ that’s really hard for people to accept. It doesn’t fit into the neat worldview that they have created around true crime.”
Crime is hardly a new obsession, of course. In 1892, the trial of Lizzie Borden, who was accused of murdering her father and stepmother with an ax, became a national sensation. Her notoriety and the public’s fascination with the case, some historians have argued, led to Borden’s acquittal. Decades later, Truman Capote’s 1966 book, “In Cold Blood,” which chronicled the brutal and seemingly inexplicable murders of a Kansas family of four, became a bestseller, and is considered to have started the true crime genre. And on Oct. 3, 1995, an estimated 150 million Americans — roughly 57% of the country — tuned in to watch the verdict in the O.J. Simpson murder trial.
One argument for televising the Simpson trial was that cameras would give the public an unfiltered view of the proceedings, without relying on third-party accounts. But even that case was riddled with conspiracy theories, including one that accused Simpson’s son Jason of killing his stepmom and her friend. But social media has dramatically changed the way people consume true crime over the past three decades, replacing a passive viewing with a constant stream of commentary, speculation and reactions unfolding in real time.
“It’s really easy to watch something from the third person and feel like you would know better, or you would have done something differently,” said Coduto. “If you come up with a theory, a conspiracy, or if you have an idea of what might have happened, you can log on anytime, and you can see what other clues people have found. You can throw your own ideas in there.”
For some, she said, there is an added incentive, she added: “There are a lot of people on social media hoping that their one video will take off and go viral.”
Documentaries like Netflix’s “Don’t F**k With Cats” and “Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel,” and HBO Max’s “They Called Him Mostly Harmless” highlight online communities that have played a role by identifying clues, tracing identities or helping piece together what happened.
But the Lindsay Clancy case is not a cold case. There is no mystery to be solved.
“For every case, there’s the real trial, and there’s the social media trial,” said criminal defense attorney Peter Elikann. “It has become almost a staple. But as far as the rumors of Patrick Clancy, it just seems like there isn’t one iota of evidence whatsoever at all to back this up. Lindsay’s attorney, an extraordinarily talented counsel, has said that she [Lindsay] was the one who did it.”
To repeat: Lindsay Clancy’s own lawyer has said she killed her children.
In a GoFundMe started in 2023 to raise money for his murdered children’s funerals, Patrick Clancy wrote: “I want to share some thoughts about Lindsay. She’s recently been portrayed largely by people who have never met her and never knew who the real Lindsay was. Our marriage was wonderful and diametrically grew stronger as her condition rapidly worsened. I took as much pride in being her husband as I did in being a father and felt persistently lucky to have her in my life. I to forgive Lindsay.” In a New Yorker article published in October 2024, Patrick told a reporter that he “wasn’t married to a monster – I was married to someone who got sick.”
His support of his ex-wife has been twisted around by citizen detectives who have accused Patrick of money-grabbing.
“Patrick Clancy walked out of this as a millionaire,” reads yet another Facebook comment. “He got $1.7 million in GoFundMe, sold the house and kept all the sale proceeds and has an active civil lawsuit against hospitals and docs who treated her which I’m sure will settle for millions considering the publicity around the case. So he got his new wife, new baby and became a multimillionaire for being an absentee father and husband. He failed his wife and his children.”
Amateur sleuths’ attempt to destroy an innocent person’s life is also nothing new.
During the Idaho college murders investigation in 2022, strangers online sleuths raced to identify a suspect long before Bryan Kohberger was caught (and pleaded guilty) for fatally stabbing Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Ethan Chapin and Xana Kernodle. Speculation about how the killings unfolded, why it happened and who was responsible spread rapidly across social media, fueling conspiracy theories that resulted in several innocent people being harassed and, in some cases, falsely accused.
Bethany Funke and Dylan Mortensen, the surviving roommates of the four slain victims, faced severe online harassment and death threats from trolls following the murders. These unfounded leaps of logic can have real-world repercussions: In February 2026, a federal jury ordered influencer Ashley Guillard to pay University of Idaho professor Rebecca Scofield $10 million in damages for falsely claiming on TikTok that Scofield was responsible for the murders.
There’s also the example of the murder trial of Karen Read, which became a media sensation, after she was charged with the 2022 death of her Boston police officer boyfriend John O’Keefe. O’Keefe’s family and friends Jennifer McCabe, Brian Albert, Colin Albert and Brian Higgins allege that Read worked with Aidan Kearney, the blogger known as “Turtleboy,” to falsely implicate them in the death of John O’Keefe. That lawsuit is still playing out in the courts.
When the Lindsay Clancy trial concludes soon, Patrick Clancy will remain a free man, regardless of online speculation about his guilt. Whether or not the man who lost his three children will continue to be abused online is anyone’s guess.