Patrick Clancy lost his three children in January 2023, strangled by Lindsay, his then-wife, in a Massachusetts home. Cora was 5 years old. Dawson, 3. Callan, just 8 months old.
More than three years later, as Lindsay faces trial while claiming postpartum psychosis, it became known that Patrick had remarried. His new wife is Rachel Danis, a 37-year-old fertility doctor in New York. The news came out during jury selection, and what followed was more than mere morbid curiosity. Social media users began comparing photos of the two women and could not believe what they were seeing. Oval face, brown hair, a similar smile, the same large eyes.
Psychologists have a name for this: repetition compulsion. That impulse, almost always unconscious, to seek out people who remind us of a past pain in the hope that this time it will end differently. Patrick may not have chosen it deliberately. But his story became the perfect example of how the mind tries to rewrite what can no longer be fixed.
