Lawyers for an Illinois mother accused of killing her 2-year-old son and who was following the Lindsay Clancy murder trial said the case was not a “copycat” crime.
Corie Walsh is charged with murder in the death of her son Barrett, who was found unresponsive on Sept. 1 in the family’s home in Frankfort, Ill. According to court documents, Walsh was texting friends about the Clancy trial hours before the homicide, NBC Chicago reported.
Walsh’s attorney Andrea Lyon said Tuesday the two cases were “not correlated at all.”
“We have to be conscious of what the judge has told us, we can talk about and not talk about, but that speculation that this has anything to do — that it’s a copycat or anything like that — is baseless and cruel,” Lyon said, speaking with members of the news media outside court.
Lyon previously represented Casey Anthony, who was acquitted of killing her daughter Caylee in a widely publicized murder trial.
Ken Gray, a former FBI special agent, said certain types of crimes do cause copycat crimes.
In many school shootings, “the shooter was inspired by prior shooters,” said Gray, now a professor of practice of criminal justice at the University of New Haven. Bomb threats, especially those threats made against schools, also often are “copycat type incidents,” he added.
Gray said he thought it was possible there may be people who are mentally unstable and have “these types of ideation that might be inspired to carry them out because of this trial, the support that Lindsay had gotten.”
He noted that there was a “large outpouring of support” for Clancy, including women who showed up at the court dressed in pink.
Walsh appeared Tuesday in court where a judge denied her pretrial release, ABC7 Chicago reported.
NBC Chicago reported that Walsh’s defense attorneys unsuccessfully asked for inpatient medical care, arguing the 40-year-old woman was suffering from a psychotic episode during the killing.
“This is not a case of first-degree murder, it’s anything but that,” attorney Robert Kerr, who is also representing Walsh, said outside the courthouse.
“All we can say is that we are looking forward to our next motion for pre-trial release, and if the state does not come to its senses, trial,” he added.
Lyon said only a few of Walsh’s family members were with her in court because Barrett’s funeral was being held Tuesday morning at the same time.
Walsh’s case is one of several that has drawn comparisons to the Clancy trial. Gray pointed to the cases of Dimone Fleming, Latarsha Sanders, Andrea Faust and Andrea Yates as other examples of other mothers accused or convicted of killing their children.
In New York, a judge found Fleming was not criminally responsible for killing her 3-year-old and 11-month-old sons. The outcome of the case also occurred while the Clancy trial was ongoing.
In Massachusetts, the state’s highest court ordered a new trial for Sanders, who was convicted in 2022 of killing her two sons, as the Clancy trial was ongoing. The case involved the same judge and the office of the same district attorney involved in the Lindsay Clancy trial. The court ruled that Judge William Sullivan had erred by not allowing the defense to cite Sanders’ medical records until after the prosecution “opened the door” on cross-examination.
Faust, a North Carolina mother, plans to plead not guilty by reason of insanity to murder and attempted murder in the death of her 3-year-old son and the attempted killing of her 2-year-old son in February, WRAL reported.
Yates, a Texas mother who drowned her five children in 2001, initially was convicted of the killings but was found not guilty by reason of insanity after a second trial.
“The Clancy trial is not the only trial on this, and it is not the first trial on this, but it’s certainly one that has really captured the attention of the American public, especially through social media,” Gray said.
Mike Stanton, a journalism professor at the University of Connecticut, said nothing jumped out at him as excessive in the media coverage of the trial.
“I think this is a story a lot of people can relate to because, you know, postpartum depression and mental health are often issues that are given short shrift,” he said. The Clancy case “came to represent that to a lot of people,” he added.
Police said they found Walsh fully clothed in a bathtub filled with bloody water, while a neighbor held a towel against her left inner thigh. Walsh had cuts on her wrists and thighs, NBC Chicago reported.
An autopsy found that Barrett died of “asphyxia due to ligature compression of the neck,” according to court documents cited by NBC Chicago. Walsh was taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
Walsh told police that she killed her son “because he was the ‘devil’ and the ‘anti-Christ,'” NBC Chicago reported.
The killing occurred as Massachusetts jurors were deliberating in the Clancy trial, which ended with a hung jury on Friday.
Clancy, 36, was charged with murder in the killings of her three children in 2023. The former labor and delivery nurse from Connecticut has not denied killing her children. Her attorney, Kevin Reddington, argued during the trial that Clancy had been experiencing postpartum psychosis. Prosecutors alleged she bore criminal responsibility and intended to kill the children before taking her own life.
Includes previous reporting by Staff Writers Richard Chumney and Sandra Diamond Fox.
Peter Yankowski; Connecticut Post, Bridgeport; (TNS) || © 2026 the Connecticut Post (Bridgeport, Conn.). Visit www.ctpost.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
