I've seen theory after theory about how he did it, or that he drove her to do it. Is it just the slant of my algorithm, or do you feel similarly?” This Reddit post summarizes the forensic fan fiction frenzy of the ongoing trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother charged with the horrifying crime of strangling her three young children. At first glance, there is little mystery there. Lindsay’s defense attorney doesn’t dispute that she did it, but argues that she is not legally responsible because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.
Online, however, many think that the case needs a better plot. TikTok users accuse Clancy’s former husband, Patrick, of framing his wife. There is talk that he drugged her, that he hired a body double to keep his alibi airtight. The videos appeal to a feeling of female camaraderie; we’re all just sticking up for a sister in need, they tell us—while poring over every gruesome detail and hoping for a dramatic ending. “I can’t wait for the Netflix documentary about this so we’re able to find out the husband did it,” as one commenter puts it. Despite the abundance of evidence suggesting otherwise, a sinister husband concealing a crime makes the story all too perfect of an entry in the true crime genre.
In America, a third of podcast listeners regularly choose true crime shows. Women are almost twice as likely as men to do so: 44 percent of female podcast listeners consume the genre regularly, compared with 23 percent of men, according to a 2022 Pew survey. The same gender pattern holds in Britain and Europe. The female appetite for violence extends beyond stories presented as fact. The author Wendy Jones recently examined the Sunday Times list of Britain’s ten bestselling paperback novels, which are written primarily for a female audience, and discovered that nine of them featured the murder of a woman.