The Lindsay Clancy trial has been one of the top stories in the news over the last month or so, and part of the reason why is because the crime was so horrific: A mother killed her three beautiful babies, all of whom were so young that they were literally defenseless.
For many of us, it's hard to imagine, either because we grew up with loving mothers or have become loving mothers ourselves. While I don't have children, I had a mother who would have done anything she could to protect me from the horrors of the world. I can't imagine her willingly becoming one of those horrors herself.
But there's something else I've noticed in the last month or so: More and more headlines featuring women harming or even murdering their children are popping up in the news.
In early September, my colleague Catherine Salgado reported on Corie Walsh, an Illinois mom who strangled her two-year-old and "told investigators her baby boy Barrett was a 'devil' and the 'anti-Christ,' and that she had to kill him." Walsh had apparently been following the Clancy trial.
News broke on Tuesday that a Florida mom, Nathalie Belizaire, had been arrested for leaving her four children — including a two-year-old and a two-month-old — home alone while going on a cruise to the Bahamas. The father of the infant saw Belizaire post a picture of her cruise ticket on social media and went to the home to find out what was going on. He called 911, and police came out and found the children hiding in a bathroom.
Just last week, I wrote about a woman in Missouri who literally baked her baby to death. She claims she put the child in the oven, thinking it was a crib. She will only serve 13 years in prison.
And the news out of South Carolina alone this week is horrific. First, you have Taylor Gosnell, whom Catherine also covered. Deputies entered her home over the weekend and found her three- and six-year-old covered in at least 50 stab wounds. The oldest child may have to have some fingers or his entire arm amputated, never mind the psychological effects he'll live with for the rest of his life.
In Anderson County, S.C., Tynisha Lashae Jones was arrested this week after toxicology reports came back showing that her 10-month-old son died from drug toxicity from combined morphine and hydromorphone.
News broke on Wednesday that a woman in Charleston County, Justine May, was arrested and charged with two counts of homicide by child abuse after deputies visited her home for a welfare check and found her two toddler daughters dead. May told them the last couple of weeks had been a "blur," and she could not remember the last time she fed the children or gave them anything to drink. The deputies had been to her house before for previous welfare checks, and May has posted on social media that her family was constantly calling the police, mental health experts, and child protective services on her.
There are many more I could have pulled, but this gives you an idea of what I'm reading. And it's important to note that all of these crimes didn't happen this month. They simply made the headlines because of arrests, sentencing, autopsy/toxicology reports coming back, etc. But seeing it all together is enough to make you wonder if there's something going on in this country with the mothers of young children or if it's just a case of media fixation and coincidental timing.
Based on my research, there's not really a clear answer. While homicide rates in the United States are at a historic low, domestic and family violence remains consistently high. But it's not just the women who are killing their children — men are doing it too — and while filicide makes up a small percentage of all homicide arrests, the stats may not tell the whole story because it's easy to conceal or misclassify this sort of death.
A study published in May of this year looked at 25 years of data on filicide — the killing of a child by a parent or parental figure — between 1999 and 2023. It divided these types of killings into four victim age categories: "neonaticide (within 24 hours of birth), infanticide (1–364 days), child filicide (1–17 years), and adult filicide (18+ years)."
The study concluded that neonaticide is, indeed, generally committed by younger women who have "crisis pregnancies" or experience "socioeconomic distress," and often use "personal weapons like hands or asphyxiation."
But for older children, men are just as guilty and, in some cases, more so:
Infanticide shares similar patterns but involves a higher proportion of male offenders (65.2%). Child filicide reflects intrafamily conflicts, with a balanced mix of both male and female offenders and a notable increase in firearm use (28.2%). Adult filicide, in contrast, is dominated by older male offenders (82.5%) using firearms (78.8%), suggesting patterns consistent with long-standing family conflict or mental health challenges.
Historic data that goes back to the 1970s also suggests that men and women are nearly equally likely to be guilty when it comes to killing their own children.
"From 1976 to 2007, filicide arrests in the United States comprised 2.5% of all homicide arrests, totaling approximately 500 annually, though these figures likely underestimate the true scope due to underreporting, particularly for neonaticide, which can be concealed or misclassified," according to the same study.
There's also evidence in the study that the homicide of toddlers and young children up to the age of five was also on the decline up until 2020, but the data in more recent years is quite lacking.
I'd be interested to learn more about what has happened in the past six years. Our world has changed a lot in that short time period — we went through the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to worsening mental health, economic and educational setbacks, more social division, and increased isolation. I would think these are definitely factors that could change these numbers for the worse.
And then there's the Clancy trial. I've never seen the left fall all over itself to defend a woman who admitted to killing her own children like it has, so it will be interesting to see if the wall-to-wall cover of that impacts the numbers in the near future. Will there be more copycats, like Walsh, inspired by her actions?
