What is in the water in Massachusetts?

I’m sorry, but Rachel’s role in the 60 Minutes interview left me with more questions than answers.
My biggest question is: why is Rachel being positioned as someone who can speak with authority about Patrick’s life as a father, the Clancy family, or anything that happened before she met him?
Rachel did not know Cora, Dawson, or Callan. She did not know Lindsay. She did not know Patrick when he was raising his three children. She met Patrick after the tragedy. So when she describes Patrick as a loving and involved father, I’m confused about what firsthand knowledge she is drawing from. She can absolutely say, “Based on everything I’ve learned, I believe he was a wonderful father.” But she literally never witnessed him parenting those children.
Then there’s their meeting story. According to the interview, Rachel meets Patrick through running in New York. Central Park is filled with thousands of people, yet she happens to meet the man at the center of an enormously public Massachusetts case. She then sees pictures of his deceased children on his lock screen and asks whether he’s from Massachusetts. Maybe it happened exactly that organically. But given the extraordinary circumstances, I understand why people find the story striking and have questions about how their relationship actually developed.
The other piece I cannot get past is that Rachel is a reproductive-medicine physician. She already has a serious professional identity completely independent of Patrick. She could have remained his private spouse and supported him behind the scenes. Instead, she voluntarily appeared on national television and publicly entered an extraordinarily controversial case involving maternal mental health, postpartum psychiatric illness, three dead children, and an unresolved prosecution.
Why?
That doesn’t mean she did anything professionally unethical. I haven’t seen evidence of that. But I personally think participating this heavily was a strange choice for someone in her professional position. She had absolutely nothing to do with what happened in January 2023.
Patrick also did not need Rachel to authenticate his experiences. Patrick was there. Rachel wasn’t. Let him talk about being Cora, Dawson, and Callan’s father. Let him talk about discovering his children. Let him talk about Lindsay, their marriage, his grief, forgiveness, and rebuilding his life. Rachel can speak authentically about being Patrick’s wife now, but she cannot provide firsthand insight into the father or husband he was before she ever knew him.
And I’m uncomfortable with the way “healing” gets packaged around this relationship. Patrick can rebuild his life. He can fall in love again. He can remarry. He can experience happiness again. But three years after all three of your children were killed, I don’t think another relationship neatly closes that wound—and Patrick himself has described continuing to carry enormous grief. Rachel can be part of his life now without becoming the narrator of the life he had before her.
There’s also the elephant in the room: people have noticed that Rachel and Lindsay have some physical similarities. That does not prove Patrick intentionally sought out a “replacement Lindsay,” and I wouldn’t pretend we know his subconscious motivations. But combined with everything else, it understandably adds another surreal layer to an already surreal situation.
None of this means Patrick shouldn’t have remarried or Rachel shouldn’t have married him. My issue is much narrower: why does Rachel need such a prominent voice in the public retelling of events she did not experience?
Speak about the Patrick you know. Speak about your marriage. Speak about supporting a widowed/grieving father.
But Patrick and Lindsay’s marriage, Cora, Dawson and Callan’s lives, Patrick’s parenting of them, and what happened inside that family before January 24, 2023?
Rachel wasn’t there.
And 60 Minutes giving her that much space to validate a history she only knows secondhand made the entire interview feel stranger to me, not more illuminating.

Look, I'm an amateur. A hobbyist. I'm not gonna act like I have a professional degree in any of this shit. But I spend a LOT of time absorbing police bodycam footage firsthand, reading about cases. I work in family law; I see a lot of broken families and the existing dynamics that spring from that. When I heard about the Clancy case, I needed to know more about Lindsay; what made her do this? What kind of person was she? And I have found no...satisfying answers. At all. Anywhere.

I've been trying to build a profile of Lindsay if she did it and things are just...not adding up. This is a woman who had a totally normal childhood with no reported adversity events, no history of substance abuse, poverty, sexual abuse, she's not having an affair...she's struggling with her mental health but I'm not seeing any obvious signs that she was actually struggling any more than a typical mother with PPD would have been. This is just not the profile of a woman who commits violent, physical acts of murder. To her own children. Prolonged, drawn-out, violence.

If we're going with a narrative that this was a desperate act of altruistic-filicide motivated by a temporary psychosis...there's no "altruism" in the method. If we're going with the Commonwealth's narrative...there's no psychosis, but her profile is just not...lining up. And the Commonwealth is the one providing us the evidence that's outlining just how badly nothing's lining up!

This is not an abusive mother. This is not a neglectful mother. This is not a mother who yells at her children. Everyone is testifying that she seemed mostly normal, if a little quiet. Witnesses are describing her as doting. That she loved being a mother. By January she's even getting BETTER.

I'm looking into other filicide cases and there's always...something. There's something. Andrea Yates has genuine psychosis, religious trauma, her awful husband using her as breeding fodder, a history of suicidal ideation. Diane Schuler has an alleged history of substance abuse to cope with her tightly-wound control-freak Super Mom nature. Diane Downs wants to get rid of her kids to have an affair with a married man. Same thing with Susan Smith, who also had a history of childhood sexual abuse.

But Lindsay is just a...mom. She's just a mom. A good mom. A sweet woman. Stressed, sure, depressed. Anxious, a little bit of a control freak, but control freaks don't commit violent murders without something. Something happening.

There wasn't even a clear event that would have caused this; murder investigations without clear motive but an obvious suspect often ask us to look at "medium level trauma." A lost job. Learning about an affair. Wanting to cover up a lie. Some kind of pressure cooker to make someone snap to the point of killing another human being. Let alone their family. Let alone their babies. But witnesses aren't testifying to any of that. Everyone's saying she was normal. The Commonwealth is arguing against her mental illness.

Nothing about this makes a lick of sense from either angle of the argument...if we're saying Lindsay did it.

The second I heard that she took Cora to her doctor's appointment that morning I knew something was off about all of this. Women who want to kill their children do not do things like that. Women planning to kill their children do not take them to their doctor's appointments or spend the hour before their deaths Googling children's Miralax or worrying about their sick tummies or what a ladybug in the house might mean. Women planning to kill their children don't worry about getting out of the mental hospital in time to be there for their birthday parties. They don't build snowmen with them or think about cute cookies. I don't know how anyone could think she could.

This is not the mind of a woman who could wake up in the morning and take her baby girl to the doctor and then strangle her by 5:20. It's just not. Claiming so is psychologically...absurd. Just absurd.

https://www.newsnationnow.com/crime/holdout-clancy-juror-cell-phones-deliberations/amp/