Lindsay Clancy’s trial has laid bare how online fandom, snap judgments, and sympathy can bend facts, fuel conspiracies, and pour money into causes that reshape public perception.
Northeastern law professor Daniel Medwed put it plainly: “It’s not a ‘whodunnit?’ case, right?” The parties agree on that basic point: on January 24, 2023, Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children, Cora, five, Dawson, three, and Callan, eight months, in the family basement in Duxbury. Clancy then exited a second-story window and survived, and her lawyers have argued postpartum psychosis drove her to follow voices telling her to kill her children and herself. The legal fight in Massachusetts is over criminal responsibility, not identity.
Even with that clarity, a crowd of online detectives decided the answer needed rewriting. Reality-television star Lisa Rinna told followers, “Alright, he did it. Patrick did it. Patrick’s the one who did it. Not Lindsay.” She added, “that isn’t what a woman would do. They don’t strangle.” A therapist on her side agreed, and the theory spread despite no charges, no suspect designation, and surveillance video documenting Patrick Clancy’s movements.
No hard evidence supports the claim that Patrick Clancy killed his children, yet strangers kept inventing motives and oddities: shoe changes between stores, remarriage as motive, and fantastical scenarios involving drugs and exercise bands. The judge refused to add a TikTok creator as a witness, saying “this is not TripAdvisor.” Even Clancy’s attorney admitted in court, “I hardly know what TikTok is,” underscoring how social media theories collide with courtroom procedure.
Prosecutors rested after fourteen days of testimony, and Clancy’s plea concedes the killings while asking a jury to apply the Massachusetts insanity defense. Still, a GoFundMe opened by a stranger for Clancy’s parents drew massive attention: $899,077 from 27,400 donations. That outpouring contrasts sharply with other families who lost children in similar tragedies, and it highlights how public sympathy can be selective and performative.
On July 24 in Grand Haven Township, Michigan, Kristopher Karolkiewicz shot his wife and six children and killed himself, leaving two sets of grieving grandparents. A fundraiser for those grandparents raised $43,881, a small fraction of what Clancy’s parents received. That difference—twenty times the money—was not driven by the facts of each case but by timing, narrative, and where the online spotlight landed.
This pattern repeats in other cases. In April, Shamar Elkins killed eight children in Shreveport, Louisiana, after recent hospitalization; no comparable fundraising frenzy followed. Ronald Williams Sr.’s case in Winfield, Kansas, also drew minimal sympathetic crowdfunding. Experts who study filicide note a persistent imbalance: “fathers are more often incarcerated than mothers, while mothers are more frequently hospitalized,” and a Finnish review found 76 percent of mothers held not criminally responsible versus 18 percent of fathers.
Public reactions can stay irrational even when defendants confess. Luigi Mangione told a federal judge, “I shot Mr. Thompson in Manhattan and he died.” He added, “I knew what I was doing.” Brian Thompson, the victim, was the CEO of UnitedHealthcare; Mangione’s legal fund nonetheless passed $1.5 million from more than 28,000 donors and remained open after the guilty plea. Online commentary then shifted to debates over the victim’s worth rather than the act itself.
Voices defending or excusing killers often recast victims as villains. Briahna Joy Gray argued that calling Mangione a killer without listing “the tens of thousands of deaths Brian Thompson was responsible for” is “manufacturing consent for corporate genocide.” Others used political or moral frameworks to justify or minimize violence, and some of those arguments attracted public support despite thin or incorrect premises about the victims.
The Charlie Kirk assassination produced another dynamic: the accused, Tyler Robinson, faces legal questions about execution, not guilt. Yet more than 600 people were fired, suspended, or investigated over what they posted after the killing. Some public figures celebrated the death; others lost jobs or positions for endorsing or praising the act, and the widow, Erika Kirk, answered critics directly: “You’re sick. He’s a human being. You think he deserved that? Tell that to my 3-year-old daughter.”
Across multiple cases, people tend to decide how they feel about a victim first and then rationalize violence after. Twenty-seven thousand people supported Lindsay Clancy’s family during her trial; twenty-eight thousand backed the lawyers of a man who admitted shooting a father of two. Hundreds lost jobs for celebrating an assassination. Those numbers show not only how social media amplifies certain sympathies but how it can invert justice and empathy.
Online true crime fandom trains audiences to solve mysteries, and Edison Research found 84 percent of Americans consume true crime in some form, with half enjoying the puzzle-solving. That appetite turns many into amateur prosecutors in cases where the legal record is plain. When the crowd prefers a whodunnit, it invents suspects and builds fan clubs around killers, and those clubs can reshape real families’ grief into ideological statements.
What ties these episodes together is less the facts than the public’s hunger to place blame, to cheer or to defend, and to convert tragedy into a story that proves them right. That impulse funnels attention, money, and reputation in ways that often ignore victims, distort nuance, and reward spectacle over truth.
