In 2018, I published a book about a woman who threw her two young children from a bridge in in Portland, Oregon in the middle of the night. Her four-year-old son drowned. Her daughter, age seven, survived by screaming for forty minutes until she was pulled from the Willamette River by good Samaritans.
I spent seven years looking into this story, trying to figure out the stressors that the mother, Amanda Stott-Smith, had endured and believed she endured. In the process I learned a lot about maternal filicide, including that most of these child murders are considered altruistic filicides, meaning the mother believes the child will be better off dead than left in whatever situation she believes is oncoming.
The trial of Lindsay Clancy, accused of strangling her three young children to death in 2023, before stabbing herself and throwing herself from a second-story window in a failed suicide attempt, has pulled me back into the worlds where mothers kill their children. That this is a very uncomfortable place is proven by people who learn of Clancy’s and like crimes and immediately peg the perpetrators as “evil” or “crazy.” It is extremely difficult to see past these two categories, as entertaining other reasons why mothers might kill their children—free will, revenge, feeling overburdened or under-supported—goes against everything we assume about maternal love and, taken to its end point, can lead to the extermination of the human race…
