Before I say anything else, I want to say their names.
Cora.
Dawson.
Callan.
They should not be dead. What happened to them is a horrible, horrible tragedy. I mourn their loss, and I grieve for everyone who loved them. I hope we never forget their names. I hope we all say a prayer for those babies tonight when we go to bed.
I have been totally sucked into the trial of their mother, Lindsay Clancy.
I have not been reading. Normally I read a book a week. I have not been writing. Normally I write every single day. For weeks, I watched testimony live and streamed it later on Court TV's YouTube channel, after the kids went to sleep. I watched witnesses. I watched lawyers. I watched the jury leave without a verdict and come back the next morning to try again.
Everyone kept asking me why.
My sister said I reminded her of our mom during the O.J. Simpson trial. I remember that trial distinctly because my mom ran an interior design business in Vermont and bought the first television for her shop so she could watch it while she worked.
I had my phone and YouTube, and the same relentless curiosity about Lindsay's case that my mom had about O.J.
I became reacquainted with the case while my family was in the UK. I read a Guardian story about what the trial was exposing in the way the American healthcare system treats postpartum women.
That was a very big stance for a British newspaper to take on American women's mental health.
So I went into the hole.
And then I stayed there.
The question that kept pulling me back was simple: What happened inside that house?
I expected the trial to give me clarity.
It did not.
The defense did not dispute that Lindsay killed her children. The question before the jury was whether she was criminally responsible when she did it. Prosecutors argued that she acted deliberately. Her defense argued that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and could not appreciate the wrongfulness of her actions.
I watched every day expecting the evidence to eventually click into place. Instead, I was stunned by how much remained uncertain.
Three children were dead, and I still did not feel that some of the most basic questions about what happened inside that house had been answered. It felt sloppy. It felt incomplete. It felt like a total fucking whiff by the district attorney's office.
I am not telling you whether she was criminally responsible. I am telling you that in a case of this magnitude, the investigation and evidence should have made the legal question clearer than it was.
The uncertainty kept me watching.
But that was not the only thing.
During the trial, Lindsay's digital life was laid out for the public. Her searches. Her calls. Her messages. Her notes to herself.
In a case involving the deaths of three children, I understand why that evidence was examined. Still, I kept thinking: holy shit. Imagine if someone went through every note I wrote to myself after I had children.
A piece published on Chief Moms by LK had already made me think about the private record we leave behind. After watching the trial, I finally went back through mine.
My second child, Ernie, was born with a cleft lip and palate. I could not breastfeed him. I had to pump and then bottle-feed him. He struggled to gain weight, and his weight went up and down.
My Notes app from those first months reads like the record of a tiny, relentless operation.
Ernie feeding. Goal: 720 ml (24 oz) to 960 ml (32 oz).
3 scoops 5 ounces.
6M 23rd.
Times. Measurements. Milk. More milk. Proof that I was paying attention. Proof that I was doing everything I possibly could to keep this little boy alive and growing.
Then, among all those feeding notes, I found one that said:
Help
That was the entire note.
No additional text.
There was another note that said:
Pills
That was it.
Were the pills for me? Was I reminding myself to take something? Was I asking someone to pick something up? I do not remember.
The notes that mattered least had all the detail. Ounces. Scoops. Dates. Times.
The two notes that mattered most had one word each.
Help.
Pills.
And guess who I wrote them to?
Myself.
For no one else to see.
Finding those notes made one thing impossible to ignore: asking for help is not the same as receiving it.
I am not comparing my postpartum experience to Lindsay Clancy's illness or to what happened to her children. I am not saying every overwhelmed mother is standing at the edge of psychosis. I am saying I recognized something in that private digital trail.
The competent mother keeps the feeding schedule. She records the ounces. She calls the doctors. She makes the appointments. She keeps moving through the day while some other part of her compresses everything into a single word only for herself to see.
Help.
But Lindsay did not only write to herself. Testimony showed that she repeatedly sought care. She spoke to family members. She saw clinicians. She admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital. Her former mother-in-law testified that Lindsay had been "begging for help."
Whether you believe the defense's account or the prosecution's, that part stayed with me.
I called my own mother while I was watching the trial and said, "Mom, if I am ever an inpatient in a psychiatric hospital for nearly five days, I hope to fucking hell you do not let me return immediately to carrying the full weight of ordinary life."
What weight was Lindsay carrying despite asking for so much help?
And what does asking for help actually require when a woman enters a system fragmented into appointments, intake forms, medication changes and brief windows in which she has to explain the contents of her mind?
Nothing in the trial established that telehealth caused what happened. But Lindsay's final psychiatric appointment, the day before the killings, took place through a screen, and I could not stop thinking about the distance that can exist inside modern healthcare. Not because telehealth is inherently bad. For many women, it makes care possible. But access is not the same as attention. A mother can answer ten questions. She can appear composed on a screen. She can say the correct things for fifteen minutes. Then she can close the laptop and return to the life that is swallowing her whole.
I kept thinking about what can be felt when another human being is physically in the room. The energy. The appearance. The things a person says with her body before she can say them with her mouth.
Technology can expand care. It cannot become an excuse to stop looking closely.
Then there was Kevin Reddington, the man who kept fighting.
I thought he was an absolute fucking badass.
He is 75 years old. I want every person who talks about older people as though competence has an expiration date to look at that man. He delivered a masterclass in law with expertise, passion and stamina. He was brash and intense, but there was also something deeply fatherly in the way he fought for his client.
He fought until the bitter end.
After the mistrial, I watched all 28 minutes of his press conference. He praised Judge William Sullivan. He commended the jurors, with one very clear exception. He also commended the work of Assistant District Attorneys Jennifer Sprague and Shanan Buckingham, despite the roles they had played on the other side of the courtroom.
Then, amid all the eloquent language, he said what a person says when there is nothing more polished to offer.
It sucks.
I respect someone who can move between high language and low language and connect through both. Someone who can honor the institution, respect his colleagues and still call out what he believes needs to be called out.
People came into my DMs wanting to turn the case into religion or politics. She did it. She deserves hell. Pick a side. Make the whole thing clean.
This was not clean. It was not a referendum on whether you love children or care about mothers. It was a legal question about criminal responsibility, decided within a justice system that demands certainty before taking away a person's freedom. And in the end, one voice still counted.
According to Reddington, eleven jurors were prepared to acquit and one was not. The foreperson told the judge that a single juror was preventing a unanimous verdict. The defense tried to have that juror removed. Judge Sullivan refused.
I believe he made the right call.
The system did not force one person to agree with the rest of the jury. It did not decide that his voice stopped mattering because it had become inconvenient. The jury remained deadlocked, and the judge declared a mistrial.
It was painful. It was unresolved. It meant that everyone involved had spent weeks inside this horror without reaching an ending.
And in an odd turn of events, it made me feel proud to be an American.
We fight for each other here. Sometimes we fight with each other. We pull ordinary people from the street and ask them to sit with impossible facts, remove as much bias as they can and decide whether the state has met its burden. We do not always get a satisfying answer.
Sometimes justice is the refusal to manufacture a verdict.
I do not know what will happen next. I do not know whether prosecutors will retry the case or whether another jury will hear different evidence and reach a final verdict. I also don't know whether I can keep watching.
Because in my heart, I know that Cora, Dawson and Callan should be alive.
I know that asking for help is not the same as receiving it.
I know that a mother can keep meticulous records of every ounce her baby drinks while writing the word Help somewhere no one will ever think to look.
Until, five years later, she dares to look at her younger self in the mirror and read what's hiding in plain sight.
