I can’t bear seeing photographs of Lindsay Clancy’s three children, although avoiding them has become almost impossible. For some reason, I particularly hate seeing the ones in which all three appear together, smiling madly at the camera. Even very small children have an understanding that there is more than circumstance that has brought them together in life. They understand that they are part of a family. Cora is said to have liked taking care of others, a common trait among big sisters. I wonder who they’re smiling at, with such ardor. Perhaps their mother?

I can’t even look at these cheerful pictures, but there are many millions of people who have taken to this baleful case in the spirit that has made true crime stories such a reliably popular genre with women. They discuss its most intimate details with fervor, review previous testimony, and wage long arguments with each other online.

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There is a very large and ever-growing contingent of people, mostly women, who have taken up the cause of Lindsay Clancy. She has already admitted to strangling all of her children to death using exercise bands. But she could be found not guilty by reason of insanity if the jury, now in its third day of deliberation, decides that she suffered from postpartum psychosis, a diagnosis not listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but one widely understood on the level of things not spoken; that of taboos and curses. Here, it refers to women who become prey to delusions, hallucinations, and hearing voices, and possibly to committing terrible acts. It’s as extreme a psychological condition as can possibly exist. And yet the millions of women who support Clancy don’t think it’s rare. What has moved them so powerfully is a shared and strongly held belief: It could have been us...