Sick Or Evil

On a January afternoon in Duxbury, Massachusetts, a labor-and-delivery nurse built a snowman with her children, took her daughter to the pediatrician, ordered dinner, and asked her husband to pick it up. He was gone forty-five minutes.

Three years later, twelve jurors listened to a forensic psychologist describe voices that commanded a mother to kill. Eleven of them were ready to reach a verdict. One was not. On September 4, 2026, the judge declared a mistrial - and America went back to arguing about the only question that has ever mattered in this case: was Lindsay Clancy sick, or was she evil?

Sick or Evil is the first full account of the Clancy case to include the mistrial, and the first to ask the harder question underneath it. Drawing on the trial record, Patrick Clancy's own on-the-record interviews, decades of psychiatric research on postpartum psychosis, and the peer-reviewed studies on how juries treat mothers and fathers who kill, Dana Holcroft sets the Duxbury case beside two others: Andrea Yates, acquitted by reason of insanity after drowning her five children, and Timothy Jones Jr., who raised the same defense after killing his five - and was sentenced to death after a two-hour deliberation.

Why does one parent get a hospital and another get a needle? Why did TikTok build a shrine while Reddit built a gallows? What did the holdout juror see that eleven others did not - and what happens to a case that cannot end?

Unsentimental, meticulously sourced, and impossible to put down, Sick or Evil is not a book about one mother. It is a book about the line every one of us draws between illness and wickedness - and about who we allow to cross it.