Megyn Kelly Believes Lindsay Clancy Is ‘Far Closer to Sane’ Than Serial Killer Jeffrey Dahmer

Megyn Kelly isn’t buying the insanity defense at the center of Lindsay Clancy‘s ongoing murder trial.

Clancy, 36, has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in the January 2023 strangulation deaths of her three children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8, at the family’s Duxbury, Massachusetts, home. If convicted, she faces life in prison without parole.

On the Tuesday, August 25, episode of The Megyn Kelly Show, Kelly, 55, argued that Clancy’s case does not meet the legal standard for insanity. To make her point, she compared Clancy to Jeffrey Dahmer, the notorious serial killer who killed 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991. Dahmer pleaded guilty but insane to 15 murders in Wisconsin, but a jury found him legally sane in 1992, despite testimony about his mental and personality disorders, Live5News reported. He was killed in prison in 1994, at age 34.

“If anybody would ever meet the definition of legally insane, it should be somebody like a Jeffrey Dahmer,” Kelly said on the podcast. “A jury rejected the insanity defense of Jeffrey Dahmer. I’m sorry, but Lindsay Clancy is far closer to sane than Jeffrey Dahmer was, but she’s trying the same defense.”

On the episode, Kelly said Clancy’s trial has centered on whether she suffered from severe postpartum psychosis, but she isn’t convinced that diagnosis should excuse her from criminal responsibility.

“Even if you accept it, that doesn’t necessarily mean we are in a place where she is unable to tell right from wrong, or have logical, reasoned thinking, or plan with malice aforethought the death of her children,” Kelly said. “There’s too much ordered behavior and thinking around these crimes. This is not somebody who’s clearly out of her mind.”

Still, during the podcast Kelly acknowledged why the case has stirred such division. “Mental illness is really not the fault of anybody to whom it happens,” she said, noting it “can be a chemical thing” or “inherited or hereditary.” She added that Clancy was “by all accounts, a loving mother” before her mental state changed after the birth of her third child.

As Globe previously reported, a forensic psychiatrist testified for the defense on August 21 that Clancy believed she was “doing her children a favor” by killing them alongside herself, describing a delusion that convinced her they would be better off in heaven than living without her.

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