Watch The 45 Minutes After A Mom Kills Her Two Sons

We are taking a look at the Tiffanie Lucas case out of Kentucky.

Tiffanie Lucas just got two life sentences for killing her two sons in November 2023. The sons were by different guys — apparently the father of the nine-year-old son was kidnapped and murdered in 2019 (gruesome), and the father of the six-year-old son had “disappeared,” although in media reports, someone named Michelle Rice claims to be the stepmother of the six-year-old, I.e. Michelle would have to be with the second father. I’m unclear on all the specifics of paternity, but it really doesn’t matter.

This case initially got attention because Lucas was claiming she was “manipulated” by WiFi and Facebook. For a while, her defense team was going for insanity. She had pleaded not guilty. About a year into the process, she had a change of heart and pleaded guilty, and I think she went for a bench situation where the judge decides the fate. The judge handed down two life sentences.

There were other things going on with Lucas, including:

• She apparently was at a Waffle House, with the sons, the day before the murders — and the servers said she was “in her own world.”

• She told a neighbor that “God was talking to her” (not necessarily a bad thing) and when the neighbor asked if she (the neighbor) could help, Lucas said “I need a friend. I need an anchor. I need good people in my life.”

Well, Law and Crime got the body-cam of Lucas’ arrest and initial interrogations, and weirdly, they actually found Lucas laying face down in her neighbor’s driveway. Not sure if it’s the same neighbor she talked to about God.

There is a lot going on here, most notably probably (a) drugs and (b) mental health. There’s one article in the ether saying she had a few drug convictions, with the last apparently in 2018. I guess that would make sense, as she was maybe running in a crowd where the father of her oldest child might end up kidnapped and murdered. The mental health piece is obvious with the WiFi stuff and needing help.

I don’t know much about Bullitt County, Kentucky — but the neighborhood in this body-cam footage looks pretty nice. That Michelle Rice lady above, the stepmother of the second child, said Tiffanie “never worked,” further doubling down to “never had a job.” I don’t know the full context of how she was in what seems like a pretty nice house, but I would assume there was some government or family help there.

I don’t want to take a child-killer and say “Oh, the system failed her,” but since it goes against essentially every biological imperative and logical brain function to kill your own children, something about the vague notion of “the system” messed her up along the way. In a much different socioeconomic structure up in Mass, we saw this with Lindsay Clancy.

P.S. when that Clancy body-cam comes out, which it will after that trial, I’ll probably write a post that will be about a 39-minute read. I’m fascinated by this kind of stuff.

I weep for those boys, even though I never knew them, and I weep also for a system that clearly lets a lot of people collapse through its gaping mental health cracks.