Andrea Yates


Andrea Pia Yates is an American woman from Houston, Texas, who confessed to drowning her five children in their bathtub on June 20, 2001. The case of Yateswho had exhibited severe postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis, and schizophrenia in the years leading up to the murdersplaced the M'Naghten rules, along with the irresistible impulse test for sanity, under close public scrutiny in the United States.
At Yates' 2002 trial, Chuck Rosenthal, the district attorney for Harris County, asked for the death penalty. Yates was convicted of capital murder, but the jury refused the death penalty option. She was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after forty years. The verdict was overturned on appeal, in light of false testimony by a prosecution witness, forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz.
On July 26, 2006, a Texas jury in her retrial found that Yates was not guilty by reason of insanity. She was consequently committed by the court to the high-security North Texas State Hospital in Vernon, where she received medical treatment and was a roommate of Dena Schlosser, another woman who committed infanticide by killing her infant daughter. In January 2007, Yates was moved to Kerrville State Hospital, a low-security state mental hospital in Kerrville, Texas.

Background

Andrea Yates was born Andrea Pia Kennedy in Houston, Texas, the youngest of the five children of Jutta Karin Koehler, a German immigrant, and Andrew Emmett Kennedy, whose parents were Irish immigrants. Yates suffered from bulimia and depression during her teenage years, and at age 17 spoke to a friend about suicide.
Yates graduated from Milby High School in 1982. She was the class valedictorian, captain of the swim team, and an officer in the National Honor Society. Yates then completed a two-year pre-nursing program at the University of Houston and graduated from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.
From 1986 until 1994, Yates worked as a registered nurse at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. In summer 1989, she met Russell "Rusty" Yates, a NASA engineer, at the Sunscape Apartments in Houston. They soon moved in together and were married on April 17, 1993.
Yates and her husband, a devout evangelical Christian, announced that they "would seek to have as many babies as nature allowed" and bought a four-bedroom house in Friendswood, Texas. Their first child, Noah, was born in February 1994, just before Rusty accepted a job offer in Florida, causing them to relocate to a small trailer in Seminole. By the time of the birth of their third child, Paul, they had moved back to Houston and purchased a GMC motor home.
Following the birth of her fourth child, Luke, Yates' depression resurfaced. On June 16, 1999, Rusty found her shaking and chewing her fingers. The next day, she attempted suicide by overdosing on pills, leading to her being hospitalized and prescribed antidepressants. Soon after her release, Yates begged Rusty to let her die as she held a knife up to her neck. Once again hospitalized, she was given several medications, including Haldol, an anti-psychotic drug. Yates' condition improved immediately, and she was prescribed it upon her release. After this incident, Rusty moved the family into a small house for the sake of her health. She appeared temporarily stabilized.
In July 1999, Yates had a nervous breakdown, which culminated in two suicide attempts and two psychiatric hospitalizations that summer. She was subsequently diagnosed with postpartum psychosis.
Yates's first psychiatrist, Dr. Eileen Starbranch, testified that she urged her and Rusty not to have any more children, as it would "guarantee future psychotic depression." They conceived their fifth and final child approximately seven weeks after her discharge. Yates stopped taking Haldol in March 2000 and gave birth to her daughter, Mary, eight months later.
Yates seemed to be coping well until the death of her father on March 12, 2001. She then stopped taking medication, mutilated herself, read the Bible feverishly, and stopped feeding Mary. She became so incapacitated that she required immediate hospitalization. On April 1, 2001, Yates came under the care of Dr. Mohammed Saeed; she was treated and released. On May 3, 2001, she degenerated back into a "near catatonic" state and filled the bathtub in the middle of the day; she would later confess to police that she had planned to drown the children that day but had decided against doing it then. Yates was hospitalized the next day after a scheduled doctor visit; her psychiatrist determined she was probably suicidal and assumed she had filled the tub to drown herself.

Murders

At the time of the murders, the Yates family was living in the Houston suburb of Clear Lake City. Yates continued under Dr. Saeed's care until June 20, 2001, when Rusty left for work, leaving her alone to watch the children against Dr. Saeed's instructions to supervise her around the clock. Rusty's mother, Dora Yates, had been scheduled to arrive an hour later to take over for Andrea. In the space of that hour, Andrea Yates drowned all five children.
Yates started with Paul, Luke, and John and then laid them in her bed. She then drowned Mary, whom she left floating in the tub. Noah came in and asked what was wrong with Mary. He then ran, but Yates soon caught and drowned him. She left him floating in the tub, and laid Mary in John's arms in the bed. She then called the police, repeatedly saying she needed an officer but refusing to say why. She then called Rusty and told him to come home right away.

Trials

Yates confessed to drowning her children. Prior to her second trial, she told Michael Welner that she waited for Rusty to leave for work that morning before filling the bathtub because she knew he would have prevented her from harming them. After the murders, police found the family dog locked up; Rusty advised Welner that it had normally been allowed to run free, and was so when he had left the house, leading the psychiatrist to allege that she locked it in a cage to prevent it from interfering with her killing the children one by one. Rusty got a family friend, George Parnham, to act as her attorney.
Prior to her trial, Yates rejected an offer to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence. Although the defense's expert testimony agreed that Yates was psychotic, Texas law requires that, in order to successfully assert the insanity defense, the defendant must prove that they could not discern right from wrong at the time of the crime. In March 2002, a jury rejected the insanity defense and found Yates guilty. Although the prosecution had sought the death penalty, the jury refused that option. The trial court sentenced Yates to life imprisonment in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice with eligibility for parole in forty years.
On January 6, 2005, a Texas Court of Appeals reversed the convictions, because California psychiatrist and prosecution witness Dr. Park Dietz admitted he had given materially false testimony during the trial. In his testimony, Dietz had stated that shortly before the murders, an episode of Law & Order had aired featuring a woman who drowned her children and was acquitted of murder by reason of insanity. Author Suzanne O'Malley, who was covering the trial for O: The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and NBC News, had previously been a writer for Law & Order and immediately reported that no such episode existed. The appellate court held unanimously that the jury might have been influenced by Dietz' false testimony, and therefore a new trial would be necessary.
On January 9, 2006, Yates again entered pleas of not guilty by reason of insanity. Her lawyers rejected a plea offer for a 35-year sentence for non-capital murder. On February 1, 2006, she was granted release on bail on the condition that she be admitted to a mental health treatment facility. On July 26, 2006, after three days of deliberations, Yates was found not guilty by reason of insanity, as defined by the state of Texas. She was thereafter committed to the North Texas State Hospital–Vernon Campus. In January 2007, she was moved to the Kerrville State Hospital, a low security mental facility in Kerrville, Texas.
Although psychiatrists for both the prosecution and the defense agreed that Yates was severely mentally ill with one of several psychotic diseases at the time she killed her children, the state of Texas asserted that she was, by legal definition, aware enough to judge her actions as right or wrong—despite her mental defect. The prosecution further implied spousal revenge as motive for the killings, despite the conclusion of defense experts that there was no evidence to support such a motive. Although the original jury believed she was legally aware of her actions, they disagreed that her motive was spousal revenge.

Rusty Yates

According to trial testimony in 2006, Dr. Saeed had advised Rusty Yates not to leave his wife unattended. However, Rusty began leaving her alone with the children in the weeks leading up to the drownings for short periods of time, apparently believing it would improve her independence, despite her doctors' instructions. Rusty had announced at a family gathering the weekend before the drownings that he had decided to leave Yates home alone for an hour each morning and evening, so that she would not become totally dependent on him and his mother for her maternal responsibilities.
Andrea Yates' brother, Brian Kennedy, claimed during a broadcast of CNN's Larry King Live that Rusty expressed to him in 2001, while transporting her to a mental treatment facility, that all depressed people needed was a "swift kick in the pants" to get them motivated. Her mother expressed shock when she heard of Rusty's plan while at the gathering with them, saying Yates wasn't stable enough to care for the children. She noted that Yates demonstrated she wasn't in her right mind when she nearly choked Mary by trying to feed her solid food.
According to authors Suzy Spencer and Suzanne O'Malley, who investigated her story in great detail, it was during a phone call Dr. Saeed made to Rusty during the breaking news of the killings that Saeed first learned that she was not being supervised full time. Yates' first psychiatrist, Dr. Starbranch, says she was shocked to disbelief when, during an office visit with the couple, they expressed a desire to discontinue her medications so she could become pregnant again. She warned and counseled them against having more children, and noted in the medical record two days later: "Apparently patient and husband plan to have as many babies as nature will allow! This will surely guarantee future psychotic depression." Nevertheless, Yates became pregnant with her fifth child, Mary, only seven weeks after being discharged from Dr. Starbranch's care on January 12, 2000.
Rusty stated to the media he was never told by psychiatrists that Yates was psychotic nor that she could harm the children, and that, had he known otherwise, he would have never had more children. "If I'd known she was psychotic, we'd never have even considered having more kids," he told the Dallas Observer." However, Yates revealed to her prison psychiatrist, Dr. Melissa Ferguson, that prior to their last child, "she had told Rusty that she did not want to have sex because Dr. Starbranch had said she might hurt her children." Rusty, she said, simply asserted his procreative religious beliefs, complimented her as a good mother and persuaded her that she could handle more children.
O'Malley highlighted Rusty's continuing sense of unreality regarding having more children: