Patrick Clancy Lost His Children. We Lost Our Grace

Across from 60 Minutes host Ross Douthat, Patrick Clancy sat somberly with his shoulders slouched slightly. He described the lead-up to the murders of his three children, the aftermath, the five-week trial, and his life as he has moved forward.

In the short interview, Clancy did something much more important than simply adding several new details to what we know of the harrowing case. He is a figure unfamiliar to the click-thirsty internet: a man emerging from devastation with forgiveness in his right hand and hope in his left.

Clancy’s ex-wife, Lindsay, recently stood trial for strangling and killing her three children, Cora, five, Dawson, three, and eight-month-old Callan. The trial ended in a hung jury on September 4, with one holdout refusing to join the eleven other jurors. She will likely be retried for three counts of first-degree murder.

Lindsay and her defense attorneys do not dispute that she killed her children.

In the four days following the stranglings, Clancy’s youngest hung onto life. Doctors told Clancy they’d detected a heartbeat in the eight-month-old. “I really thought there was a chance that Callan would live, and I remember just thinking, ‘Just give me one. Just give me one kid, and I would raise him as best I could. I would give him the best life I possible could. I’d tell him about his brother and sister.'”

“I got to hold him,” he continued. “I got to lay down next to him. And he died in my arms.”

After Callan’s death, Clancy wrote a statement, asking the public to forgive his ex-wife as he had. “I think when it comes to forgiveness, I felt that if I didn’t get there, I would be eaten up inside forever,” he told Douthat. When asked whether Lindsay had asked for forgiveness, Clancy paused, shook his head, and said, “No.”

Returning to everyday life was impossible for Clancy in Duxbury, Mass., where he had lived with his family. After three months, he moved to New York City, seeking anonymity.

As what would have been Callan’s first birthday approached, Clancy wondered, “How do you celebrate your son’s first birthday months after he’s passed away? I went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I lit a candle and said, ‘I love you, buddy.’ And then I walked out on Fifth Avenue and I started crying my eyes out. And nobody cared.”

Douthat asked, “Was that good? Were you grateful for that?”

Clancy responded, “I thought, ‘This is where I need to be. I can grieve.'”

Meanwhile, Clancy has been treated with disdain by large swaths of the internet that believe he, rather than Lindsay, killed his children. Women online have picked apart surveillance footage, what he wore the day it happened, and testimonies in the courtroom, arguing in favor of convoluted theories of his guilt.

The arguments are built on air, but they are not without consequence.

“It makes it difficult to be in public, and it’s possible that some of those people after seeing lie after lie after lie, they start to believe it and that’s what we’re left with,” Clancy said.

While one result of pervasive conspiratorial skepticism is that the public simply misses what’s true, an understated result is the absence of charity.

What should flow to a young father of three murdered children is unbridled compassion. On January 24, 2023, Patrick Clancy not only lost his kids, but he lost his wife, his community, his privacy, and so much more.

To absentmindedly pass a man heaving with sobs on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral is wrong, but the slandering, condemning, and vilifying, which has happened to him on every social media platform in the past year, is so much worse.

It feels ironic that these societal ills seem to be worsening at the time of the most information-rich age humanity has ever known. In the case of Patrick Clancy, there is a deep-rooted willfulness to not see things as they are.

But perhaps it is not ironic at all. The information age has left us prideful, and pride is incompatible with charity — which may be a prerequisite for seeing people as they are.