A shocking 1954 case is in focus amid the Lindsay Clancy trial, with Netizens discussing it on social media. Constance Fisher, who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, killed three of her children in Maine in 1954.
She spent several years in a mental institution before being released. After her release, she went on to kill three more of her children in 1966.
An X post about Fisher has gone viral amid the Clancy trial, with many weighing in on it.
“Mental illness can explain how a person reaches that point. It does not grant a free pass for murder. It does not entitle anyone to more children. And it does not obligate the rest of society to wait and see whether the next set of children dies too,” the post said.
“The women who kill their kids ARE guilty. But the people fanning the flames of their insanity are also at fault,” one user commented.
“Every person who kills someone, unprovoked, is mentally fu****. That needs to stop being a defense. Full stop,” wrote another.
“If someone takes a life ( except in self-defence), they then forfeit their own,” one said.
The Constance Fisher case
In the town of Waterville, Maine, on March 8, 1954, Carl Fisher returned from his job to find his three children—Richard (6), Daniel (4), and Deborah (11 months)—dead. Constance, his 25-year-old wife, had drowned them in the bathtub one by one.
Constance was found unconscious under the bed after ingesting a toxic medicinal shampoo in a suicide attempt. She survived.
In a note, she claimed that “God had ordered her” to do it to take the children to heaven.
Constance was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and postpartum psychotic episodes. A grand jury subsequently refused to indict her, considering that she did not understand the wrongfulness of her acts. With no criminal conviction, she was committed to Augusta State Hospital.
After five years of treatment, doctors officially declared Constance “cured” in 1959 and granted her a full release. Carl brought her to live at a new home in Fairfield, Maine.
Between 1960 and 1965, the couple had three new children – Kathleen, Michael, and Natalie. On June 30, 1966, twelve years after the first episode, Carl once again returned from work to find his three new children drowned in a bathtub. Chillingly, the children were the exact same ages as the first victims: 6 years, 4 years, and 9 months old.
Constance tried to kill herself through a drug overdose and by shooting herself with a pellet gun. She left the same justification as before in her suicide note before the second attempt.
She survived, and the court again found her not guilty by reason of insanity. She was committed to Augusta State Hospital again but with a condition: she would never be released again.
Constance escaped from the psychiatric facility on the night of October 1, 1973. A hunter found her body days later along the banks of the Kennebec River. Her official cause of death was drowning.
After Carl drowned in 1990, he was buried alongside Constance and the six children in the same family plot at Waterville Cemetery.
The story has resurfaced as the jury deliberates in the Clancy case. The Massachusetts mother faces three counts of murder in the killings of her children Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months.
According to prosecutors, Lindsay, 35, “acted intentionally, rationally and swiftly” when she fatally strangled her three children at their Duxbury home on January 24, 2023. Her defense attorneys, on the other hand, argued that she is not criminally responsible because she was in the midst of a psychotic episode that stemmed from postpartum mental illness.
Lindsay has pleaded not guilty to the murder charges. If convicted of murder, she faces life in prison without parole. In case she is found not guilty due to a lack of criminal responsibility, she would be committed to a state mental health facility.
