I had been following the case of Lindsay Clancy before her trial began. As a resident of Massachusetts, it was difficult to dismiss it as if it were a tragedy taking place somewhere far away. The names of Duxbury and Plymouth were familiar places, and the deaths of three young children in January 2023 had remained in the background of my thoughts as the case slowly moved toward trial. During the trial I began thinking about Alexandros Papadiamantis’ The Murderess (Η Φόνισσα), a novella written more than a century earlier that also confronts the almost unbearable subject of a woman who takes the lives of children, beginning with her own grandchild. Last week, while I was passing the Duxbury and Plymouth area on my way to Cape Cod, I took a detour and visited some of the places associated with the case. There was something sobering about seeing the ordinary landscape in which this terrible event had taken place. The story I had been following for weeks suddenly had a physical setting: ordinary roads, houses, and neighborhoods where ordinary life continues. It made me think less about a case being argued in court and more about the reality of three children whose lives had ended there, and the tragedy their parents now faced.
The trial has now ended without a verdict. After seven days and more than thirty-eight hours of deliberation, the jury remained deadlocked and the judge declared a mistrial on September 4. Clancy does not dispute that she killed her three children. The question before the jury was whether she was criminally responsible for what she did. The defense argued that she was suffering from severe postpartum psychosis and that her mental state had made her legally incapable of understanding or controlling her actions. The prosecution argued that, whatever her mental-health difficulties, she deliberately planned the killings and understood what she was doing. After hearing weeks of testimony and competing expert opinions, the jurors could not reach a unanimous conclusion. The mistrial is neither a finding of innocence nor a finding of guilt; it leaves the question unresolved. Prosecutors have not yet decided whether to seek another trial.
This is what makes Papadiamantis' story so difficult. Hadoula is not presented simply as a monster who has appeared without history or explanation. Papadiamantis allows us to see the life that produced her thinking. The poverty is real. The burdens placed upon women are real. The oppressive dowry system is real. The suffering she has witnessed is real. Even her fear of what awaits poor girls is not without foundation. What becomes monstrous is the conclusion she draws from these things. She takes suffering and turns it into authority. Because she believes she knows what the future holds for another human being, she assumes that she has the right to decide whether that life should continue. Her pity becomes judgment, and her idea of mercy becomes murder.
This seems to me to be where the comparison with Lindsay Clancy becomes meaningful, while also requiring great care. The two women should not be equated. Hadoula develops a distorted moral reasoning of her own. In the Clancy case, the defense has argued something fundamentally different: that postpartum psychosis had so profoundly altered her mind that she could not properly understand the nature or wrongfulness of her actions. The prosecution has disputed this interpretation and argued that she understood and deliberately carried out what she did. The distinction matters. Yet both cases confront us with the difficult question of what happens when we are forced to look beyond the deed itself and consider the person who committed it.
There has been considerable sympathy for Clancy, particularly among people who believe that she was desperately ill and that the medical system failed to respond adequately to the deterioration of her mental state. Supporters gathered outside the courthouse during the trial, and her former husband, Patrick Clancy, has publicly spoken of forgiving her. That sympathy can be difficult to reconcile with the deaths of the children. But sympathy and absolution are not the same thing. To pity a person does not mean approving of what she has done. To believe that someone was gravely ill does not mean that the victims cease to matter. And to ask whether mental illness can diminish or eliminate criminal responsibility does not mean that an act ceases to be terrible.
Papadiamantis understood this tension. He makes the reader sympathetic toward Hadoula without ever making her murders acceptable. We come to know her suffering, but we are not asked to forget her victims. In fact, our understanding of her makes the tragedy more disturbing because we see how something true can become the foundation for something terribly false. She is right to see suffering; she is wrong to believe that she therefore possesses the authority to end another person's life. Her error is not simply a lack of compassion. It is that she mistakes compassion for the right to judge another person's destiny.
The spiritual dimension of The Murderess makes this still more important. Hadoula lives within an explicitly Orthodox Christian world, and her distorted idea of mercy is not unrelated to that world. She begins to interpret her actions through religious categories, even wondering whether she has somehow been chosen to fulfill a divine purpose. Yet Christian mercy does not mean taking God's place in deciding the value or destiny of another human being. A person may pray for someone who suffers, sacrifice for that person, and do everything possible to relieve suffering; what a person cannot do is declare that another life would be better ended. Hadoula sees suffering and cannot see beyond it. She gradually convinces herself that she knows the future of these children better than God does.
There is a religious dimension to the Clancy case as well, although I think it needs to be approached cautiously. Clancy was raised Catholic, took her children to church, and questions of God, Catholic morality and heaven appeared in the testimony. A hospital chaplain testified that after the killings Clancy said she was glad her children were safe, after the chaplain told her that they were safe in heaven with God before praying with her. There was also testimony concerning the voice and beliefs that formed part of the defense's account of her psychotic state. None of this tells us what role her faith played in what happened, and I would not presume to say that it did. But it does remind us that the case cannot be understood entirely through the language of diagnosis and criminal law. Questions of death, guilt, suffering, God, and the fate of the children inevitably enter into it.
Perhaps this is why the ending of The Murderess has stayed with me. After Hadoula's crimes have finally brought human authority after her, she attempts to reach the Hermitage of Saint Sostis to confess her sins. Instead she dies about ten steps before reaching the hermitage, at the passageway between the rocks and the land, drowning in the sea below, and Papadiamantis leaves her “between divine and human justice.” It is one of the most striking endings in Greek literature because Papadiamantis does not resolve the tension for us. Hadoula has done terrible things and human justice is pursuing her. Yet the final judgment of her soul is not something the novelist claims for himself. She dies between the two.
The Clancy case has now reached its own, very different kind of place between judgments. The jury did not acquit her, but it did not convict her. Human beings were unable to reach a unanimous judgment about the extent to which her mental state should determine her responsibility. Whatever ultimately happens in the legal proceedings, the mistrial itself is a reminder of how difficult that judgment can become when a terrible act and a deeply troubled mind are placed before us at the same time.
I found myself thinking about all of this again while driving through Duxbury last week. It is one thing to read testimony about an event and another to stand in the place where it happened. The landscape itself is ordinary. There is no visible mark upon it that tells a stranger what occurred. People still drive those roads, live in those houses, and go about their lives. Yet three children once lived there too. Their deaths are now part of the history of that ordinary place, and their mother is forever connected to them. It is difficult, standing there, to reduce any of it to a diagnosis, a legal category, or a single moral description.
That is perhaps the greatest value of Papadiamantis for thinking about a case such as this. He does not make Hadoula innocent by making her understandable. Nor does he make her suffering disappear because she has committed terrible acts. He leaves both realities before us. And perhaps that is what makes sympathy so difficult. We want to place people into categories that allow us to stop thinking about them: innocent or guilty, victim or perpetrator, sane or insane, deserving of punishment or deserving of pity. But a human being can be more complicated than any of these categories without the categories themselves becoming meaningless.
Hadoula dies between human justice and divine mercy. Lindsay Clancy's trial has ended without reaching even the first of those judgments. There may be another trial, and there may eventually be another human judgment. But the other judgment remains beyond the courtroom. What happens ultimately belongs to divine justice.
