“The voice, according to Lindsay, said that if she did not follow its command, neither she nor her children would be safe” – this is what Sheila Cavanaugh, a chaplain, told the court during the Lindsay Clancy murder trial, revealing details from one of roughly 200 interactions she had in the months after the Massachusetts mother strangled her three children and tried to take her own life.Three years and one mistrial later, the ‘voice’ is still the least resolved question in this case. But there’s a second, quieter thread running through- not about the woman who did not dispute she killed her children, but about the man who left the house to pick up dinner, and came home to find them dead.The morning Lindsay Clancy’s children diedIt was an ordinary morning. Possibly even a happy one.Patrick Clancy would later testify Lindsay Clancy was ‘having one of her best days…’‘(She) was playing with the kids… seemed in a good mood’, he told the court. The last image of his three-year-old son, Dawson, was the boy sitting on the couch eating chicken nuggets and green beans.In the afternoon Lindsay texted Patrick – she was with the children, he was in his basement office. ‘Any chance you want to do takeout… I didn’t cook anything. It’s been a long day’. That was at 4.35 pm. A little after 5 pm Patrick Clancy left to buy dinner.Story continues below this ad AI generated image of the street on which Patrick Clancy and Lindsay Clancy lived in Duxbury.Phone records produced in court showed a call to Lindsay at 5.33; they spoke for 14 seconds to discuss which medicine to buy, a side errand Patrick was running.Parents parenting. Even the prosecutors called it ‘a completely normal call’.Patrick later testified Lindsay sounded subdued. ‘Maybe she’s giving the kids a bath’, he thought. He left for home at 5.37 pm. And sometime between then and 6.10 pm his life changed.The afternoon of Lindsay Clancy’s murder trialThree years later, in a Plymouth courtroom, one moment surfaced that had nothing to do with January 24 – and everything to do with Patrick Clancy potentially going from ‘grieving husband’ to ‘person of interest in a murder investigation’.Story continues below this adIt was from August 2022 – five months before the killings. The prosecution had put a Massachusetts police officer on the stand to walk the jury through its primary argument – that Lindsay Clancy researched suicide for a year. Patrick Clancy’s wife, Lindsay Clancy, watches jury members at her murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Mass., Monday, Aug. 31, 2026.The evidence – Patrick’s laptop, a Microsoft Surface Pro in some reports, that was used to log in to Lindsay’s Facebook account and view a page on suicide methods. Pages connecting to the research on suicide were about a singer – Tom T Hall – who died by suicide. This pointed to premeditation by Lindsay, the prosecution argued.But under cross-examination the officer admitted there was no way of knowing who visited the pages – could it have been Patrick Clancy? After all, he was the Tom Hall fan, not Lindsay, the court was told.And Lindsay Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington pointed out that when the search was logged his client was not home; she was with their son at the pediatrician. “That’s it?” court records have Reddington asking the policeman, apparently, incredulous when realising this was the only digital evidence. Reddington wasn’t accusing Patrick of anything.Story continues below this adBut perhaps for the first time in the courtroom, a hint was supplied to the jury – ‘it could have been him, not her’. And it was perhaps the only time that the Patrick Clancy-as-suspect narrative wasn’t driven only by anonymous social media accounts.For his part, Patrick never wavered, at least in public. “She was very dedicated,” he said as the defense showed photos of the children’s artwork on the walls of their home. And in October 2024 he told The New Yorker: “I wasn’t married to a monster – I was married to someone who got sick.”That real-but-almost impossible seed of doubt – a laptop search – was where the evidence stopped. It was not, however, where the internet stopped.The evening of Patrick Clancy’s ‘trial’Before the trial began the defense and prosecution agreed to certain facts. But social media made no such agreement.Story continues below this adOn TikTok (banned in India but popular in the US), self-declared ‘forensics’ experts held forth on the laptop story, and spun it into something much larger and unsubstantiated: – that Patrick Clancy was having an affair, or had somehow drugged Lindsay (the ‘voice’ in her head), and either killed his children himself (and staged his wife’s attempted suicide) or convinced her she did it.But here’s the thing. His alibi for that evening is solid.Surveillance cameras, phone records, eyewitness accounts, and a former New York City police chief who gave his story a clean chit. Patrick’s attorney, Howard Cooper, called the claims ‘patently false and defamatory’, and warned of real consequences for people who repeated them. But they claims continued spreading nonetheless.The day after the Lindsay Clancy trialNow here’s the part that makes this story so strange.Patrick Clancy has been leading a double life, yes.Story continues below this adBut it’s not the kind the internet’s ‘forensic scientists’ want to believe. He has been doing two things in public at once – navigating a murder trial involving his wife and, simultaneously, rebuilding his life with another woman some 400km away, in New York.In April 2026, he married Dr Rachel Danis in a small ceremony in Central Park. Rachel Danis, second wife of Patrick Clancy. Photo: RMA of New YorkNo one knew. Not till Reddington, Lindsay’s defense attorney, told the court in July, before Patrick took the stand. In August – with the trial in its final stages and whispers flying about – the couple were photographed outside their home in Manhattan; TMZ, a celebrity news website, ran that photograph.They looked ‘tense’, the story said.And weeks on, after the mistrial was announced, they were snapped again, this time happy.Story continues below this adWhere it stands: The Lindsay Clancy murder trialThe world likes happy endings. The world also likes murky conclusions. This is both.The wife who killed the children, the remarried husband and his new wife, the photographed tension while he goes through the murder trial. None of this evidence. But it is why, in some corners of the internet, Patrick Clancy is still on trial.As for Lindsay, she awaits her fate. AI generated image showing the outcome of the Lindsay Clancy murder trial that was declared a mistrial.The trial was deadlocked; a lone juror held out against 11 who wanted to accept her plea of temporary insanity. A fresh hearing in end-September, scheduled for the 29th, will establish if the prosecution wants to start a fresh trial, to start this up all over again.Recap | US woman killed her 3 children, tried to die by suicide. Jury can’t agree whyAnd it won’t just be for her. It will be for Patrick too. And this time Rachel also.