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Corie Walsh allegedly killed her 2-year-old, planned to kill her husband, and attempted to take her own life.
She is said to have already been “obsessed” with the Lindsay Clancy case.
Before and even after the deadlocked jury resulted in a mistrial, the postpartum psychosis tragedy captivated the nation.
Did that same tragedy unfold here? Is Walsh a copycat of some kind? Is something else going on?
What did Corie Walsh’s attorney say in court?
NBC 5 Chicago reported on the bail hearing for 40-year-old Corie Walsh.
She is accused of having murdered her 2-year-old son, Barrett, who died via hanging.
There, prosecutors claimed that she had made statements about “poisoning [her husband] with a drink.”
Walsh also apparently tried to take her own life, as she was found fully clothed in a bloody bathtub with wounds on her wrists and thighs.
Additionally, she was reportedly in such a delusional state that she believed that she had killed all of her children, rather than only the 2-year-old. She reportedly told investigators that her toddler was “the devil.”
It sounds like her behavior worried friends
Defense attorney Robert Kerr informed the court that Walsh is “severely mentally ill” and and should be placed in “immediate” care to prevent her from harming herself further.
Their argument is that she was in psychotic episode when she allegedly hanged her 2-year-old until he died from asphyxia.
Apparently, in the hours before this tragic killing, Walsh was spiraling, sending frantic and “confusing” messages to friends.
The messages seemed “out of character” to them, as at least some of them would presumably testify.
Some of the messages were related to the Lindsay Clancy trial during jury deliberations.
The ‘Lindsay Clancy copycat’ theory is ‘sickening’
“It was manslaughter, please I’m really freaking out,” Corie Walsh allegedly messaged on September 1.
At times, Walsh allegedly seemed to believe that Patrick Clancy, not Lindsay Clancy, had killed the couple’s children.
(This is a debunked conspiracy theory. Lindsay and her attorney do not claim this, and it has been widely debunked.)
Kerr condemned any claims of Walsh being a “Lindsay Clancy copycat” as “sickening.”
He says that she was diagnosed with “grief psychotic disorder” at the hospital, and that her husband has “unwavering” support for her.
What is the truth?
We do not know what Walsh’s true mental state was, and we do not claim to know what really happened. Three main possibilities have been floated on social media.
The first is a genuine psychotic episode. There are several signs, from the alleged murder to the alleged attempt to take her own life.
The second is that Walsh, for whatever reason, consciously and deliberately wished to commit this heinous crime, and fabricated symptoms of psychosis (and perhaps ensured that she would survive the apparent suicide attempt) in order to get away with it. This could mean deliberately copying elements of the Clancy family’s tragedy.
And the third option is that there was some other mental illness at play, one different than a psychotic episode. That one’s pretty broad. We’ve seen people float the idea that someone with rare forms of OCD might feel compelled to enact a murder similar to one described in detail on the news, but that is so rare that it boggles the mind.
(Despite apparently labeling the toddler “the devil” and “the Antichrist,” religious psychosis usually takes a different form than this, but many cases of psychosis may involve religiously inspired delusions.)
All that we truly know is that another family has endured another tragedy. It will be up the experts and the courts to determine, to the best of their ability, who if anyone is at fault.
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