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By Wendy M. Yurgo
What if what happened in that basement was evil?
Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. Dawson was killed first, then Cora, then Callan. There was a first child. When that child was dead, there were still two. There was a second child. When that child was dead, there was still an eight month old baby.
I understand there may be a psychiatric explanation for how a mind arrived there. That is different from asking what happened there. Three defenseless children were strangled, one after another, by the person entrusted above everyone else with protecting them.
I do not use the word evil lightly. But if that act does not allow us to use the word, I no longer know what would.
We prefer diagnosis because diagnosis offers hope. If we can diagnose something, we can treat it. If we can treat it, we can prevent it. Evil offers no such comfort. It leaves open the possibility that after every medical record has been reviewed and every expert heard, the moral fact of what happened still stands.
M. Scott Peck’s People of the Lie first made me ask whether our clinical vocabulary had left us unable to talk about evil. I have never been able to shake the question.
Science can study the brain during psychosis. Medicine can diagnose disease. But science cannot tell us whether strangling a five year old is evil. That is not science’s failure. It is not science’s question. The failure comes when we decide that because science cannot answer the question, the question is illegitimate.
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I am an attorney. I believe absolutely in the right of an accused person to a vigorous defense. Present the psychiatric evidence. Challenge the prosecution. Make the state prove its case. But a legal defense is not a moral conclusion. The rest of us are not required to adopt it as our explanation for what happened.
We are allowed to believe Lindsay Clancy was profoundly mentally ill and still judge the act she committed. We are allowed to believe in mercy without pretending there is nothing to forgive.
Three children were killed. That was evil.
After the mistrial, someone shouted at prosecutors, “You only cared when the kids were dead. Why didn’t you care about the mother?”
Because the kids were dead. Three of them.
There is compassion, and then there is moral inversion. One asks us to recognize the suffering of another human being. The other asks us to become so consumed with the suffering of the person who committed the act that the people she killed disappear.
And what happened next took this somewhere darker.
Hundreds gathered outside the courthouse dressed in pink. Hearts made with hands. Applause for her attorney. Letters by the box. A woman who strangled her three children was no longer simply a defendant. She was becoming a symbol, surrounded by something beginning to resemble a fan club.
That should horrify us.
Maybe evil does not spread like a virus. Maybe it spreads as permission.
Contagion would mean exposure causes infection, that watching the coverage could produce violence in someone who wasn’t otherwise capable of it. I don’t believe that.
Permission is smaller and more honest. It says boundaries move. Once someone crosses a line a culture treated as absolute, that line is less absolute the next day for whoever was already standing closest to the edge. It is closer to what researchers have found about suicide contagion than to anything viral. Coverage does not create the impulse, but how a culture talks about an act can shift what a vulnerable person believes is survivable, or even understandable, once it is done.
That is the second horror layered on top of the first. I am watching case after case of mothers killing the children entrusted to them, and at the same time watching a culture answer one of those cases with pink shirts and hearts made with hands for the woman at its center.
Both horrify me. The killing is not less horrifying because a crowd gathered afterward. But the crowd is not nothing either.
I don’t know what was in Corie Walsh’s mind the night her two year old son Barrett was found hanging in a basement, hours after she had been discussing the Clancy trial with friends. She has been charged with murder. That is an allegation, not proof, and I will not claim a link that has not been established.
But I don’t need that link to ask what a culture teaches the people already standing closest to the edge when it spends months turning a woman who killed her children into a cause.
I don’t know whether evil is contagious.
But I think evil can be handed out as permission.
And what happened around Lindsay Clancy makes me wonder whether we just watched it happen.
Not compassion for a mentally ill woman. Compassion is human. Not a vigorous legal defense. That is required. What I cannot get past is the transformation of horror into identification. The shirts. The hearts. The applause. The letters. The gathering around her.
Those things do not change what happened in the basement.
That is precisely what makes them so chilling.
We should be able to demand better psychiatric care without stripping an act of its moral meaning. We should be able to insist on every protection for the accused without joining her defense team in the court of public opinion. And we should still be able to say the word.
Evil.
We have become extraordinarily sophisticated at explaining darkness. We diagnose it. We litigate it. We medicate it. We make content out of it.
Now, apparently, we wear matching shirts for it.
Strip everything else away.
The diagnoses. The experts. The lawyers. The supporters. The pink shirts. The hearts.
There are still three children.
Dawson. Cora. Callan.
One after another.
Medicine may explain how a mind arrived there. The law may decide criminal responsibility. Mercy may ultimately belong to God.
None of that changes what happened.
It was evil.
The question that frightens me now is what happens when we stop recoiling from evil and start gathering around it.
About the Author
Wendy M. Yurgo is a Christian, attorney, entrepreneur, and the Founder and CEO of Revere Payments, a conservative fintech company serving many of the nation’s leading faith based and freedom driven organizations. She writes about where faith collides with the systems shaping our culture, bringing a legal and executive lens to the most urgent issues of our time. Her work is rooted in light, guided by principle, and grounded in truth. Follow Wendy on Instagram @wendyyurgo and X @paymentsSHEEO.
Excellent article. I am also very disturbed by what has happened in this case. Three defenseless children are dead at the hands of their mother! This sets a standard going forward that is so troubling. Should we be surprised when one of our United States just voted that a baby can be aborted/eliminated up to and including birth? I'm old school--this is MURDER. (Do we actually believe that anyone who kills an innocent person is mentally healthy??). Who is to say that she would not repeat this behavior or even something worse if she were ever released from her so-called treatment?? This is why she must be incarcerated for life--and so must the lady that just killed her 2-year old after talking with her neighbors about this case! My heart hurts for her former husband, the children, and our country that is demanding her release!
So disgusting and barbaric we have become. Support of the guilty is getting more and more in the forfront. Should not allow a Go Fund Me for murderers.