The murder trial of Lindsay Clancy has transfixed the nation for weeks, but commentators are now pointing to a disturbing development they say was all but predictable: a copycat killing allegedly inspired by Clancy’s case.
Corie Walsh, a 38-year-old from Frankfort, Illinois, has been charged with three counts of first-degree murder in the death of her 2-year-old son, Barrett Walsh. Prosecutors say Walsh’s three other children were unharmed, and her husband was out of state when the killing took place. Walsh’s alleged fixation on Clancy’s trial is central to the case.
Clancy Trial Fixation Alleged
According to prosecutors, Walsh had become intensely interested in Clancy’s trial, which centers on Clancy’s admission that she strangled her three children. On the day of the killing, Walsh was reportedly participating in a group text with friends about the case at roughly 12:30 p.m. — about three and a half hours before her son was found dead. Prosecutors allege that Walsh believed her son was the “devil” and the “anti-Christ.”
The timing is striking: At the moment Walsh was allegedly strangling her son, jurors in Massachusetts were deliberating whether Clancy should be held criminally responsible for killing her own children. That deliberation ended in a mistrial after one juror reportedly could not be convinced that Clancy was not guilty by reason of insanity.
A Pattern of Sympathy?
PJ Media’s Matt Margolis writes that the Illinois case is hardly an isolated phenomenon. He argues that liberal women and sympathetic media coverage have spent years treating accused child killers as victims of mental illness, not as people responsible for their actions. Clancy, he says, is the most prominent beneficiary of that habit — and one who has been celebrated rather than condemned.
Clancy has received fan mail from around the world, with supporters rallying outside the courthouse and casting her as the real victim. Her attorneys argued she suffered severe postpartum psychosis, despite the extensive planning she allegedly carried out. But Margolis notes that Clancy does not dispute killing her children; the trial was never about whether the act occurred, only about her criminal responsibility.
He points to Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children in 2001 and was later found not guilty by reason of insanity at her retrial, as another example of what he calls a troubling trend of elevating child killers to folk-hero status.
‘Inevitable’ Copycats
Margolis argues that the messaging surrounding Clancy’s case — every sympathetic profile, op-ed questioning her guilt, and piece of fan mail — sends a dangerous signal to other unstable mothers. “Elevating a woman who strangled her own children into a martyr for the postpartum-psychosis cause was always going to produce more of this,” he writes.
The Walsh case appears to fit that pattern. Walsh allegedly spent her final hours before the murder immersed in a group chat about a woman on trial for the same crime — a woman who, in some circles, has become less a defendant and more a cause.
The case has reignited debate over how the justice system and society treat mothers accused of killing their children, and whether sympathetic narratives can inadvertently encourage future violence.
Source: pjmedia.com — https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2026/09/05/lindsay-clancy-copycats-were-inevitable-n4956939
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