Content warning: contains mentions of death and abuse.
Image Credits: Colin via Wikimedia Commons
The rise of social media as a preferred news source has dramatically fuelled the world’s appetite for true crime entertainment. More recently, short-form coverage of murder trials has proven to be a disturbing source of political polarisation online. But can a trial with 300 exhibits and 80 testimonies really be condensed - comprehensively - into an informed 30-second reel?
Even those who don’t closely follow the news will have heard the reports of Christa Pike and Lindsay Clancy. The former is an American death row inmate sentenced for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Earlier this month, she survived two supposedly lethal doses of pentobarbital. The latter: a mother charged with three counts of murder over the deaths of her children, while allegedly suffering from postpartum psychosis. In both cases, lawyers have argued that trauma and psychiatric disability were primary catalysts for their crimes. Pike and Clancy have each faced a jury of twelve, but their real trial is being held before millions online. In a time of live-streamed court cases, each woman must endure her own cyber-courtroom before the face of the public, while an army of armchair sleuths (online “detectives”) rush to investigate their crimes and publish conspiracies, all without ever leaving their houses.
Clancy’s case was far from straightforward to begin with, and following its churning through the social media mill, has become warped by conspiracies and misinformation. Clancy was already experiencing severe mental health issues after the birth of her first two children, Cora and Dawson. Postpartum depression developed into psychosis after her last son, Callan, was born; Clancy reported hearing voices and struggling with suicidal thoughts. Her defence maintains she was in a manic spiral the day she fatally strangled her three children using exercise bands, before attempting to take her life by jumping out of a second-storey window. Curiously, neither Clancy’s struggle with mental health nor the insufficient medical guidance she received has become the center point of the discussion online. Instead, her trial has snowballed into a deeply divided political debate, with opposing sides being driven by the strict precepts of their respective ideologies, rather than empirical facts. On one side, predominantly male users condemn Lindsay Clancy, insisting she was fully lucid during the murder. On the other, primarily female commenters devise conspiracies accusing Patrick Clancy, the father, of framing his wife. Patrick and Lindsay Clancy have thus become stand-ins for their respective genders in a much wider culture war, one that asks: which sides' suffering takes precedence and who deserves to be believed? Their real story, one of the destruction mental illness can cause, has been drowned out.
Similarly, Pike’s botched executions have prompted a stream of conflicting posts, with right-wing circles defending the death penalty and progressive commentators denouncing it as inhumane. Admittedly, Pike’s case has brought about a much needed conversation regarding the moral legitimacy of state executions, but, yet again, the online debate is missing a crucial point. Christa Pike was a victim before she was a murderer. Her story raises a question social media rarely asks: whether understanding the causes of violent crime should matter more than deciding how to punish it.
Here is the truth the average news-skimmer just wouldn’t find: Christa Pike was born with organic brain damage resulting from her mother’s consumption of alcohol while pregnant, resulting in frequent seizures during infancy. She was sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriends during childhood and beaten by seven family members, causing her suicide attempt at age twelve. She was diagnosed with both Bipolar Disorder and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, yet was never treated during her childhood or adolescence. The information listed above does not absolve her of her horrific crimes, yet it does provide us with a lens with which to understand her.
Social media was not created to be a news source. Algorithms reward content that provides the biggest response: shock, horror, outrage, sympathy. Because sensationalism always requires the sacrifice of detail in exchange for sweeping generalizations, Pike and Clancy become props of culture wars, whilst their real stories, however uncomfortable, are left unheard. Next time you find yourself a couch warrior, try to resist the intoxicating pull of an easy narrative; lift up the bonnet instead.