Lindsay Clancy's own attorney does not dispute that she killed her children. Neither does the prosecution. Northeastern law professor Daniel Medwed put it plainly: "It's not a 'whodunnit?' case, right?" The only question in that Massachusetts courtroom is whether she was criminally responsible on January 24, 2023, when she strangled Cora, five, Dawson, three, and Callan, eight months, in the basement of the family's home in Duxbury. Clancy, a labor-and-delivery nurse, then went out a second-story window and survived. Her lawyers say postpartum psychosis left her following voices telling her to kill her children and herself.

The internet decided it was a whodunit anyway. This week the reality-television star Lisa Rinna told her followers she had solved the case. Her verdict was that the children's father did it: "Alright, he did it. Patrick did it. Patrick's the one who did it. Not Lindsay." Her reasoning was that "that isn't what a woman would do. They don't strangle." Her therapist agreed with her.

No evidence supports any of that. Patrick Clancy has never been charged, never been named a suspect, and his movements that evening are on surveillance video. Rinna accused a man of murdering his own three children on the theory that women do not strangle people, which is not a fact about the world and never has been. A television star and a licensed therapist talked each other into it.

That is pathological.

Lindsay Clancy's lawyer says she killed them. Her donors say she didn't.

Prosecutors rested Monday after fourteen days of testimony. Clancy's plea concedes the killings and asks the jury to excuse them under the Massachusetts version of the insanity defense.

But her supporters went further than she did. Brandee Mulligan, a Wisconsin woman with no connection to the family, opened a GoFundMe page for Clancy's parents on August 11. Boston.com reported it past $800,000 within six days. It stands at $899,077 from 27,400 donations.

Then came the theories. That Patrick Clancy changed his shoes between the pharmacy and the restaurant, on the errand run his wife sent him on that evening. That his remarriage this April is a motive. The Boston Globe quoted one poster: "I now believe Patrick Clancy drugged Lindsay . . . pushed her out a window, and strangled his children with exercise bands so he could marry his new wife."

Her defense then tried to put a TikTok creator on the witness stand. Judge William Sullivan denied it: "this is not TripAdvisor." Her own attorney, Kevin Reddington, said in the middle of trying to call her: "I hardly know what TikTok is."

True crime audiences invent cases where none exist

Kathryn Coduto, who studies media at Boston University, calls this forensic fandom: "not only are you invested in a story, but you think you can solve it." The audience for it is enormous. Edison Research surveyed 3,148 Americans aged thirteen and up and found 84 percent consume true crime in some form. Half of them said the part they enjoy is trying to solve the mystery. Pew Research Center found the podcast audience is nearly twice as female as male.

A genre trains its audience to want a particular kind of question. This one has spent a decade teaching Americans that the question is who did it, and that anyone with a phone can answer. So when a case arrives where nobody disputes who did it, the audience does not put the tools down. It goes looking anyway, and lands on a suspect no prosecutor ever named.

No one cares about the families of real victims

On July 24, in Grand Haven Township, Michigan, Kristopher Karolkiewicz shot his wife Mandy and their six children, set the house on fire, and killed himself. The children were four boys, fifteen, twelve, eleven and five, and two eleven-year-old girls. Mandy's parents, Becky and Steve Lawwill, lost their daughter and six grandchildren in one morning.

A fundraiser for the Lawwills opened three days later. It has raised $43,881. Lindsay Clancy's parents, Mike and Paula Musgrove, have raised $899,077. Two sets of grandparents, two pages, two weeks apart on the same website.

Twenty times the money.

And Karolkiewicz is not alone this year. In April, Shamar Elkins killed eight children in Shreveport, Louisiana, seven of them his own, six weeks after a suicide attempt and treatment at a Veterans Affairs hospital. He had what Clancy's lawyers are arguing: a psychiatric history and recent hospital treatment. Nobody opened a page for his parents, and nobody opened one for the family of Ronald Williams Sr., who called 911 in Winfield, Kansas last week to say he had killed his partner and their four young children.

Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry said of Elkins: "It wasn't a fit of rage when he snapped once. It was systematic." Prosecutors say Clancy did the same thing, one child and then the next and then the next. Nobody has called her systematic, and no prosecutor's word has cost her a dollar of support.

This is documented, not felt. Susan Hatters Friedman and Phillip Resnick of Case Western Reserve University, the psychiatrists most cited on parents who kill, put it flatly: "fathers are more often incarcerated than mothers, while mothers are more frequently hospitalized." A Finnish review of these killings found 76 percent of mothers held not criminally responsible, against 18 percent of fathers.

Luigi Mangione confessed to murder and his donors kept giving

On Friday Luigi Mangione pleaded guilty and told a federal judge in Manhattan: "I shot Mr. Thompson in Manhattan and he died." And: "I knew what I was doing." Brian Thompson was fifty, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, shot in the back on his way to a morning meeting. His wife and two sons sat in the front row and listened. His legal fund had passed $1.5 million from more than 28,000 donors, and after the confession it stayed open.

That same day Briana Rose Lee, operations director for Representative Ilhan Omar, posted this: "You'll never convince me that Luigi is a villain while everyone in the Epstein files is roaming free." Lee watched a man admit a murder that morning and spent the evening litigating whether the victim was worth mourning.

Briahna Joy Gray, Bernie Sanders' national press secretary in 2020, wrote that calling Mangione a killer without listing "the tens of thousands of deaths Brian Thompson was responsible for" is "manufacturing consent for corporate genocide." But Thompson did not decide insurance claims, and no court has found he killed anyone. Gray is calling a bureaucracy a body count so the actual body on the sidewalk stops counting.

And the public followed her. Emerson College Polling asked a thousand registered voters about the killer's actions. Twenty-two percent of Democrats called them acceptable, against 12 percent of Republicans. Among voters under thirty, 41 percent did.

People lost their jobs for Tyler Robinson's act

Charlie Kirk was thirty-one, and had spent a decade arguing with college students about guns and abortion, when a sniper shot him at Utah Valley University last September. Tyler Robinson is charged, and his lawyers are arguing over whether the state may execute him, not whether he pulled the trigger.

Nobody made Robinson a hero. There is no defense fund, the largest petition on his behalf has 82 signatures, and nobody turned out for him at his hearings. They did not need him. NPR, citing a Reuters investigation, reported that more than 600 people were fired, suspended, or investigated over what they said about Kirk's death.

Some held serious positions. Felicia Branch ran a law-school tax clinic at the University of Arkansas, and wrote on Facebook of a man who spent his career defending gun rights: "I will not pull back from CELEBRATING that an evil man died by the method he chose to embrace." Steve Cody, a Florida village councilman, called the killing "a fitting sacrifice to our Lords: Smith & Wesson." Asked to resign, he refused.

The Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago asked Americans whether the attack on Kirk "was acceptable." Nearly six percent agreed. That is roughly fifteen million adults.

Kirk's widow, Erika, answered them last December: "You're sick. He's a human being. You think he deserved that? Tell that to my 3-year-old daughter."

A country that worships killers is a sick country

Twenty-seven thousand people put money behind Lindsay Clancy's family while she stood trial for strangling three children. Twenty-eight thousand paid the lawyers of a man who admitted shooting a father of two in the back. Six hundred lost their jobs saying out loud that a man shot in front of college students had it coming. None of them was arguing about whether killing is wrong. They decided first how they felt about the person who died, then worked backward.

Lisa Rinna performed the whole trick in public this week. She started with a woman she found sympathetic and went looking for someone else to blame.

Cora, Dawson, and Callan died in January 2023, and no stranger opened a page for them then. The page opened when their mother went on trial, and it was named for her.

A society that worships murderers is sick. The people building fan clubs around Lindsay Clancy, around Luigi Mangione, and around what Tyler Robinson did are all showing the same sickness.