The Lindsay Clancy case and the women we make into monsters

The Lindsay Clancy case

0:00Before we start, a warning. This episode contains references to violence, including domestic violence and violence against children, and mentions of suicide. Hey everyone, you're listening to Code Switch, the show about race and identity from NPR. I'm B.A. Parker. And I'm Jean Dunby. Jean, the past few weeks have been filled with discussions and debates around the Lindsay Clancy mistrial.

0:30Yeah. So Lindsay Clancy is the woman who says that while she was suffering from severe postpartum psychosis, that she killed her three children and tried to take her own life. Right. And now, there are many angles to how people are talking about Clancy in this case, whether it's jury selection or who is truly at fault. Yeah, it's just, this story is just so heartbreaking and so wrenching. Like, it's just such a tragedy. Like, even just, like, sitting in the details for too long, it's just, like, hard to sit with as a parent, you know, for everybody, but especially, like, as a parent.

1:03Yeah, understood. And it reminded me of an episode we did earlier this year about the Black male mental health crisis after two shocking murders. You know, like, a father in Louisiana killed eight children, and the former lieutenant governor of Virginia killed his wife and then himself. And sadly enough, those stories have kind of faded. Even I had to dig into the recesses of my brain to remember.

1:33Yeah, I guess the news cycle was wild, because those were such big stories, and I forgot about them too, yeah. I mean, it was only, happened in April. Was it just, was that recent? Oh my God, it felt long. Okay, wow. Yeah. Yeah. But it's also, I don't want to say normalized, but, like, it's common enough that experts have a word for it. Family annihilation. Right. It's the killing or attempted killing of multiple family members. And statistically, men are much more likely to do it. There's been over 20 cases this year.

2:08Wow. And there's also, you know, like, a racial component to how we talk about it too. Like, people have made memes about the fact that, you know, news organizations cover these stories in very particular ways, right? Like, when a white man kills his whole family, you know, you see this, like, post-family photo of, like, everybody smiling, right? Or, you know, a photo with him and his kids on a jet ski somewhere, you know? Right. There's, like, this humanizing that's done for men. But when women commit these kinds of horrific acts, that's not often the case.

2:40These acts are undeniably monstrous. And it's easy to write off the people who do them as monsters, especially when it's a mother, which is what made the Lindsay Clancy story such an outlier. It's the first time I can remember where maternal mental health was seriously considered and reckoned with.

Miriam Gerba on folklore

3:05So I spoke with Miriam Gerba. She's a writer and an activist. And in the Rorschach test of the Clancy trial, Miriam gave me a new perspective. One of the most ubiquitous legends, it's probably the first ghost story that a lot of Mexican kids and kids in the Mexican diaspora hear, is the legend of the weeping woman. That translates in Spanish to La Llorona. And that is a legend about a woman who takes the lives of her children.

3:36La Llorona? La Llorona, who we broadly know as a part of Latin American folklore. And it's a story that's told kind of like a female boogeyman. And Miriam says that when people think of La Llorona, there's not often room for empathy. Yeah, I remember just a couple weeks ago when we were talking about why and how people cut their families off, why they become estranged. And one of the things that come up in that conversation was that moms are less likely to be estranged because mothers occupy this really particular space in people's imaginations, right?

4:10They get valorized, right? And it's, you know, there's a lot of social pressure around cutting off your mom, right? Like there's a lot of stigma around not having a relation with their mother. And because moms get valorized, the flip side of that is that mothers who do things that are really bad are seen as uniquely evil and monstrous. You know what I mean? Right. I mean, think about the stories we tell about women who commit such violence. Think Medea in Greek mythology.

4:41Right, right, right. Think of Setha in Toni Morrison's Beloved. And yes, La Llorona. These are the monsters that we make of women. And that's what we're going to get into today. My name is Miriam Gerba, and I am a writer and a cultural critic. For those who are not aware, how would you describe the Lindsay Clancy case? The Lindsay Clancy case is an incredibly polarizing and galvanizing case that centers on child death and child murder.

5:22It has polarized misogynists and people who oppose misogynists. Feminists, feminists, feminists, and other folks committed to the liberation of women. And that's largely because of the legal defense that was proposed for Lindsay Clancy. And also because of the questions that the case raises regarding women's labor and men's entitlement to that labor.

5:53So why did you decide to write about the Clancy case? I decided to write about the case because of its parallels to a legend that a lot of folks in the Latin American diaspora are quite familiar with. A lot of us are raised with legends, myths, and certain popular folk tales. And one of the most ubiquitous legends, it's probably the first ghost story that a lot of Mexican kids and kids in the Mexican diaspora hear, is the legend of the weeping women.

6:29That translates in Spanish to La Llorona. And that is a legend about a woman who takes the lives of her children. It was one of the first ghost stories that I heard. And myths socialize us. They shape our gender roles. They give us a gender script. And this story has several parallels to the Clancy case. According to this legend, a woman was living in a village and was being treated horribly by her husband.

7:03The mistreatment eventually drove her mad. In her madness, she went to the nearby river and she ended the lives of her children by drowning them, including an infant. And then she ended her own life. And then she ended her own life. So she died by suicide. So this is a legend about infanticide, a legend about suicide. When this story is relayed to children, the monster in this story is the woman. The man who drove her to perpetrate these killings is the sympathetic figure in this story.

7:40I have a friend who is a professor at Cal State Long Beach who uses this story as part of one of her classes. And what she proposes to her students is this question. Why is she the monster? Who is the real monster in this story? Well, so who is the real monster in this story? I think that the abstract monster in this story is colonialism. Because prior to the colonization of Latin America, we had different forms of indigenous government and different types of indigenous societies.

8:22What many of those societies had in common was that gender egalitarianism was practiced and matriarchy was practiced. Patriarchy was introduced by European settlers. And that patriarchy disrupted communal child care practices that eased the burden of labor on women.

8:46Once those were disrupted and patriarchy was installed, there was a major shift in terms of child-rearing labor and the labor involved in social reproduction. And the story of the weeping woman, the story of La Llorona, re-inscribes those social scripts. And it gives these stories to children. Because this is a story that is told to children in Latin America. This is a story that is told to Mexican children.

9:18So when I first heard this story as a little girl, I was incredibly perplexed by it. And the story was intended to scare me because this weeping woman is a figure who now haunts the land looking for children to replace her murdered children with. But as a child, I found the story strange. I didn't understand why she was so villainized. And I remember thinking, after my father had told me this story, I remember thinking, and I was lying in bed, pondering the story, pondering the story like some sort of eight-year-old philosopher.

9:57And I remember thinking to myself, if I come across this ghost, I'm not going to run and hide. I'm going to ask her for her side of the story. But when you have a story like La Llorona, why do you think it is such an enduring story in Latin American folklore? I think that it's such an enduring story because it imposes a controlling image that socializes people to abide by specific gendered scripts that benefit patriarchy.

10:37And patriarchy is a pillar of the state, right? So these myths, they structure power. They support hegemony. And we begin to be socialized into these systems when we're really young. And I think that people don't interrogate myths, legends, and folktales the way that they should. When I published an essay that paralleled the story of the weeping woman to the Lindsay Clancy case, there were a lot of readers who pushed back.

11:10And one of their angry critiques of the piece was, what does a legend have to do with current events? And I thought to myself, where is your critical analysis? Of course, our lives are shaped by legends. And legends are rooted in reality. There are Lloronas who walk among us. Clancy herself apparently attempted suicide just as La Llorona did.

11:41And so there are so many parallels, so many similarities. There is a long history of parents taking the lives of their children that reaches into antiquity. So the legend becomes like this microcosm for a very real issue that women are dealing with. Absolutely. So what the legend teaches girls in Latin America is that no matter how much you are suffering within the confines of a romantic relationship,

12:16your job is to metabolize that suffering and remain present. If you escape it, if you rebel against it, you are a monster. When girls hear this story and puzzle over it, they're rebelling against that indoctrination, just like I did when I was eight years old the evening that I heard that story and stayed up in bed all night wondering what the hell I had just been told.

Professor Domino Perez on La Llorona

12:45My conversation with Miriam made us wonder about the origins of La Llorona and what her story was supposed to mean. So we've reached out to Professor Domino Perez, who wrote a book about La Llorona and its many interpretations. Historically, folklorists have said that she is representative of other figures found in Europe, the Banshee, the Succubus. There are corresponding figures in Europe and that she comes as part of a catalog of stories that the colonizers and the church bring.

13:29It's one of their stories that they use to condemn certain types of behavior. So she is one of many omens that were seen, heard in the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, that foretold that something was going to happen. She was the sixth omen. A woman was heard crying in the nights in the city streets, Oh, my children, my children, we are lost. I think that that idea of her wailing in anticipation of invasion and conquest, I think, is a powerful piece of evidence that she is, in fact, indigenous to the new world.

14:08But she also has antecedents in Aztec deities. She resembles several deities in the pantheon in terms of her symbology and her iconography. There was a goddess who would take children from their cribs and leave an obsidian knife. There is a goddess who is found at the crossroads. So there are a number of different antecedents for her. And ultimately, I end up on the side of that she is very much indigenous in origin.

14:38Professor Perez thinks that La Llorona has endured because, like most legends, its meaning can be understood in many ways. I think in the most conservative interpretation of it, it is a warning to men about the women that they take up with. That they can exact powerful revenge against them and harm their families.

15:10For the women, I think it can also mean that you also need to be careful about the partners that you choose because they can abandon you at whim, leaving you and your children in unfortunate circumstances. And I will say that according to more recent interpretations, there's been a generous view of her in the sense that she's not necessarily acting out of revenge.

15:42But because she's abandoned, she doesn't have any resources available to her, perhaps she's impoverished, the taking of her children's lives represent a kind of tender mercy. Rather than see them starve to death or suffer at the hands of other individuals who might prey upon them, she chooses to take their life. So I guess in all three versions, I would say it's highly interpretive. But she also cautioned us that the legend can only bring us so far in understanding the Clancy case.

16:14I do think we need to be careful about the stories that we point to and the analogies that we make. Yes, do I see similarities between the current case and La Llorona? Yes, but it's in the specifics, right? This is a woman who was diagnosed with postpartum psychosis. This is a woman whose family knew she was struggling with mental health. This is a woman whose husband knew she was struggling with mental health.

16:45And his response was to drop her off at a clinic and then go skiing, right? We're talking about class. We're talking about privilege. Latinos don't talk that much about mental health. The fact that this is such a central part of her story, that's unique to her story. So I think that there are a lot of particulars that come into play looking at class, looking at education, looking at socioeconomic status, looking at circumstance, looking at mental health.

17:16There are a number of issues that are coming into play. La Llorona's story continues to be relevant because she speaks to issues that Mexican and Mexican-American people continue to face. That being said, we are in a position where we adapt her story to new circumstances. And I'm wondering, if and when any sort of mental health issue is going to be brought into her story so that it becomes a factor or a consideration in her actions.

18:02Coming up. That's coming up. Stay with us.

Medical misogyny and isolation

18:33So, Gene, we've been talking with Miriam Gerba, who wrote about the Lindsay Clancy case and its parallels to the Latin American myth of La Llorona. Right, right, right. La Llorona, the legendary weeping woman. Exactly. The Clancy case left Miriam wondering about that old story and why it's so easy to villainize women. I want to pivot a little bit to, like, in discussion of the Lindsay Clancy case.

19:07Like, it's just, like, there have been many other previous ones that have highlighted postpartum psychosis. I think I remember growing up, there was the Andrea Yates story where, like, she drowned all five of her children. And I think, like, given our advances in modern medicine, why do you think postpartum psychosis is such a big problem in our society?

19:37Misogyny. Medical misogyny. When I spoke to women who had experienced postpartum depression, anxiety, and psychosis, they told me that what they were offered was talk therapy. But the talk therapy was difficult to access. And one woman who I spoke to who had had a challenging postpartum period that wasn't impacted by postpartum depression, anxiety, or psychosis, who later had an experience that could be termed psychosis,

20:17she expressed to me that there were two primary factors that seemed to contribute to the development of her psychosis, and they were factors that can't be treated by talk therapy. One, she was incredibly isolated with her child, and so she had no other adults to mirror reality back to her. And then, secondly, she was experiencing sleep deprivation. And sleep deprivation can't be fixed by talk therapy.

20:51And sleep deprivation is incredibly dangerous. I mean, the only real, like, solution to sleep deprivation is, like, let the lady sleep. Let the lady sleep. Somebody needs to take care of the infant while she's sleeping. Who is that going to be? And one of the women that I spoke to told me that when she had her first child, she was living in an intergenerational household. So you had other adults who could divide time into shifts.

21:23Yeah. But we have this hyper-individualistic drive toward maintaining the nuclear family in the United States, which then puts so much of that labor on the mother. And so often, when these cases of infanticide, as perpetrated by women, make the headlines, there will be somebody quoted as saying, this seemed to come out of nowhere, right?

21:56And then, in cases where reporters investigate and continue digging, they always find that this absolutely did not come out of nowhere. And one of the cases that I've written about is the case of Carol Coronado, a Southern California woman who was experiencing postpartum psychosis and took the lives of her three children, including an infant. And when that happened, her husband said that, again, he was shocked at what happened.

22:29He was surprised at what happened. But later, it was discovered that on the day that she took the lives of her children, Carol Coronado spent the morning calling her mother, filling her mother's voicemail system with desperate pleas for help. Those pleas for help were ignored. Carol's husband, Rudy, spent the morning working on a pickup truck parked across the street from their home. At one point, he entered the home and found Carol in their bedroom.

23:04The walls were covered in the children's feces. The bed was covered in feces. Carol herself was covered in feces. And Rudy's response was to verbally abuse her and then leave the home. So it wasn't to clean the home. It wasn't to get his partner help. And it wasn't to get his children to safety either, because clearly his children are in an unsafe environment.

23:35But it seems that many men, regardless of the mental health of the person caring for their children, would prefer to leave children alone with somebody in incredible distress rather than sacrifice any of their freedoms, their leisure or their recreation. When I think about somebody like Rudy Coronado, who's willing to leave his children with a caregiver who's exhibiting these symptoms of psychosis,

24:10I think about men with psychosis and the unwillingness that people have to contact a man with psychosis and have him function as a caregiver. I grew up with an uncle who had schizophrenia and who was often in psychosis, and he was never summoned to be our babysitter.

Family annihilation and domestic violence

24:26I'm thinking about, so I think earlier this year, we did an episode that we reported on a man in Louisiana who killed eight children. And, you know, there was the former Lieutenant Governor of Virginia who killed his wife and himself. And I, like, I feel that we've already forgotten about it. Exactly.

24:53How do you think, how do you think, what do you think is the impact of this normalization of this kind of violence that is perpetuated by men? It creates an expectation that it will happen. It creates an expectation that this violence cannot be restrained, that this violence cannot be constrained, and that it's something that women and children ought to expect in their lives. And it enables men to control women and children.

25:25And I'll give an example of what I mean by that. I'm a domestic violence survivor. And I am now an advocate for survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. Every man who perpetrates domestic violence benefits from the actions of family annihilators. Because those men demonstrate that the threat to take your life is very credible.

25:55Every five days, a man will do this in the United States. And you don't know if you find yourself with an abuser if he belongs to this population. And so when a woman and her children are trapped in one of these scenarios, and these are scenarios of captivity. These aren't ordinary romantic relationships. They're a form of imprisonment. And it makes escaping extremely risky.

26:29It really raises the stakes. Because an attempt at escape could cost you your life.

26:38And so to me, these family annihilators, their actions become a message to every woman who is asking herself, what should I do in this situation? What are going to be the consequences of my actions? Especially if I begin to discuss leaving. Or if I begin to critique this person. If I express my dissatisfaction with this person. I am curious, how do you think race and culture play in all of this?

27:10Like, do you think the Clancy case is seen differently through the lens of Latino culture in the same way that La Llorona is? Absolutely, yes. So many people who I have been in conversation with saw this parallel immediately. Really? And for my, yes, and for my entire life, as these really unusual cases of women perpetrating infanticide make headlines and become sort of like these tabloid spectacles,

27:41I, you know, I have always had the story of the weeping woman immediately come to mind. And whenever I have heard about one of these cases, I have always thought of these women, regardless of their race, as a Llorona. So it doesn't matter the race of the woman, the ethno-racial designation, because this myth was drilled into me, you know, so profoundly as a child.

28:12So to me, that almost becomes like a category of womanhood, the category of Llorona. And so regardless of who the woman is who's taking the life, I've always thought to myself, ah, a Llorona story. Ah, she's another Llorona. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Credits and final thoughts

28:39And that's our show. You can follow us on Instagram at NPR Codeswitch. This episode was produced by Xavier Lopez. It was edited by Jasmine Romero. Our audio engineer for this episode was Kwesi Lee. And a big shout out to the rest of the Codeswitch massive, Christina Kala, Jess Kung, Leah Dinella, Dahlia Mortada, Courtney Stein, Barton Girdwood, Yolanda Sanguini, Kayla Lattimore, and Maya Dangerfield. As for me, I'm Jean Demme. I'm B.A. Parker. B-Z-O. Hydrate.

29:14Miriam, thank you so much. This was great. Thank you. This was fun. This was really insightful. I'm a little stressed out, but I've learned a lot. And I appreciate you for it. You are so welcome. And you know what? If you are fearful of her and you have any concerns about her, maybe, like, you know, bothering you, just sprinkle a little bit of salt in the corners of your room.

29:45Heard. Understood. Understood.