Children or Chattel?
Dimone Fleming, Lindsay Clancy, and the Kindred Spirits of Sovereign Motherhood
September 3, 2026
Lindsay Clancy has been gobbling up the nation’s news coverage faster than a hyena can devour a carcass. But she has a kindred spirit who beat her to the punch. Meet Dimone Fleming, a deposed mother and killer of two. Suffering from (you guessed it) postpartum psychosis, she is now tucked away in a psychiatric ward after being found not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect. Never have two people been seemingly so different yet so identical as Fleming and Clancy.
Fleming and her children were living in a Bronx family shelter. On November 26, 2022, the then-22-year-old mother of two brought a chaotic system failure to its absolute end. After shelter staff smelled smoke coming from her room, police found a partially naked Fleming lighting fires, holding a children’s book upside down, and acting completely irrational. They rushed her to a hospital for evaluation.
It was only after one of the children’s fathers was contacted that he went to the shelter and found both children dead in a bathtub, under a pile of clothing, stabbed to death with a pair of shears. In the meantime, Fleming was making statements about the “devil” and needing to kill her children to protect and cleanse them. That is what a bathtub is for… not a pair of shears!
This case never really went to trial because both the defense and prosecution psychiatrists found Fleming to be suffering from postpartum psychosis and experiencing hallucinations that convinced her “that the world was coming to an end and [she] believed a spirit had invaded her body.” Hence the judge ruled that “Fleming was in a state of psychosis at the time of the bloody killings” and, therefore, not guilty.
She is now tucked away in a mental institution until she is “cured” and ready to re-enter society.
Does this story sound familiar?
It should. But while Dimone Fleming’s case was processed in the shadows of a Bronx shelter, the nation has been entirely transfixed by her affluent suburban counterpart, Lindsay Clancy. Two months after the Bronx killings, a thirty-five-year-old labor and delivery nurse in Duxbury, Massachusetts, executed a chillingly similar timeline. Clancy planned a window of absolute isolation, sent her husband out on a highly specific errand, and went down to her basement. There, she used exercise bands to systematically strangle her three young children: Cora, age 5; Dawson, age 3; and Callan, just 8 months old. Like Fleming, Clancy immediately retreated behind the medical armor of postpartum psychosis, claiming that voices and invading spirits dictated her actions.
Side-by-side, the geometry of the crimes is identical. One, two—five children dead across two state lines, both instances instantly wrapped in the exact same psychiatric mumbo-jumbo.
But pull back the curtain on this diagnostic theater, and you find a terrifying, systemic irresponsibility that the public empathy machine completely ignores. These mothers were not passive victims of a sudden psychological lightning strike; they were gambling with their own cognitive stability while their children paid the ultimate price.
Dimone Fleming didn't just experience a random software crash. She consciously threw away her prescribed stabilization medication and deliberately flooded her brain daily with hyper-concentrated, psychosis-inducing modern marijuana. Meanwhile, Lindsay Clancy, a trained medical professional who fully understood the volatile chemistry of psychotropic drugs, was playing fast and loose with a staggering, constantly shifting cocktail of heavy prescriptions.
Yet, as the legal and medical experts wage a brutal war over text messages, pill bottles, and clinical definitions, the true tragedy is entirely erased. Daishawn (3), Octavius (11 months), Cora (5), Dawson (3), and Callan (8 months) have been completely forgotten by the system. They have no independent advocates standing at those podiums. Because they are dead, their fundamental right to exist has been reduced to background noise for the psychiatric profiles of their killers. They are treated not as independent human souls, but as chattel—extensions of maternal property left blowing in the wind while society fusses over the medical charts of the women who destroyed them.
This is criminal law narcissism, and those five young children have paved its catwalk.
With any other crime against children, the “women in pink” and the mainstream media would be foaming at the mouth in paroxysms of disgust. Imagine if, instead of being wantonly murdered, these children were merely suspected of parental sexual abuse. How long would it take for the state to swoop in, remove them from the home, and appoint an independent Guardian ad Litem? Fifteen seconds? Or, God forbid, a teacher gave one of those children an unprompted hug at school—instant investigation, instant removal.
But somehow, when it comes to the ultimate termination of a life, lunatic parents have to execute galactic threats before the state will step in to negate their property rights over their chattel.
By the time the system finally reacts, the children are already dead, and the comedy concludes with the state spending millions of taxpayer dollars on the prosecution, defense, and high-security medical treatment of the perpetrator. The slaughtered child is dismissed as mere collateral damage to a broken mental health system and a legal carnival—a multi-million-dollar parade of Merlins spinning medical illusions to excuse the inexcusable.
We comfort ourselves with the clinical jargon of postpartum psychosis because admitting that an educated suburban nurse or a Bronx shelter mother can possess the exact same monstrous capacity for moral ignorance is too terrifying for the average population to handle. We would rather believe in a medical ghost in the machine than confront raw, negligent depravity. But as long as the justice system allows psychiatric opinions to drown out the finality of five empty small coffins, the law is making a dark, systemic confession. It is telling us that the scales of justice are heavily weighted not by the act of murder, but by who pulled the trigger. Until we appoint independent advocates for the dead and demand absolute personal accountability for those who engineer their own mental collapses, we are not a civilized society protecting our youth. We are just an audience watching a narcissistic circus, silently agreeing that our children are not citizens at all—they are merely chattel, blowing in the wind.
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