Twenty-five years ago, on June 1, 2001, Andrea Yates drowned her five small children, one by one. She had a long history of psychosis, and her defense was postpartum depression.
Before her breakdown, she was an honor student, a good daughter and sibling, and a dedicated nurse.
She was sentenced to 40 years in prison, but that was overturned after one witness admitted to giving false testimony about a non-existent TV show.
The verdict was overturned on appeal after a prosecution witness, forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz, admitted to giving false testimony about a non-existent TV show. She was granted a new trial and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. There was no doubt she was psychotic.
She was sentenced to life in a mental hospital and is now in a low-security mental hospital.
The Chilling Confession
Andrew Yates did know she was killing the children and that it was wrong legally. But she was psychotic and thought it best to send her children to paradise.
The few who have heard Andrea’s 90-minute taped confession call it chilling. Andrea, 37, first drowned 2-year-old Luke, followed by Paul, 3, and John, 5. She carried each child’s body to the master bedroom, placed it on the bed, and covered it with a sheet. As she was drowning 6-month-old Mary, Noah, 7, confronted her. “What’s wrong with Mary?” he asked and then, realizing what was happening, fled. Andrea chased Noah through the house, dragged him to the tub, and drowned him alongside his dead sister. There is no evidence that any of the children were drugged.
Next, Andrea telephoned the police and said cryptically, “It’s time.”
Then she called her husband, Russell (Rusty) Yates, an $80,000-a-year computer expert for the Space Shuttle Vehicle Engineering Office of NASA. “You’d better come home,” he recalls her telling him. “Is anyone hurt?” he asked, alarmed by her tone of voice. “Yes,” she said. “The children. All of them.”
A Partial Back Story
She was off her meds for more than a year when she had her fifth child, Mary, and became nearly catatonic when her father died of Alzheimer’s. Her doctors recommended admitting her to a mental hospital. Instead, Rusty talked her into admitting herself. She was out in about 12 days.
The doctors never recorded the fact that she was a threat to the children.
By May 2001, almost four weeks before the murders, she was back in the asylum. Two weeks later, her doctor took her off Haldol. When she murdered the children in June, she thought the devil was inside her and irrevocably in the children. She would send the children to paradise and then be executed by George W. Bush.
If only one thing had gone right, the children would have lived.
Her husband, Rusty, an itinerant preacher, said she had postpartum depression and major depression after two suicide attempts and a doctor’s diagnosis.
Yates said one attempt was because she felt she would hurt someone. She heard voices, and envisioned deaths.
She had been released but was never supposed to be left alone with the children. Unfortunately, her husband tried leaving her alone with them for short periods to help her.
Today, Rusty Says Lindsay’s Case Is Not At All Like Andrea’s
Rusty, 61, shared in a new interview with News Nation his opinion on the differences between his ex-wife’s case and Lindsay Clancy’s, as a jury continues to deliberate on whether Clancy should be convicted of strangling her three children.
“I think this case is a little murkier, you know? It’s not quite as clear as Andrea’s was,” Rusty told the outlet.
“I mean Andrea had a— hundreds of pages of medical records, you know?” he continued, referring to Andrea’s records, which documented a recurring history of postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis.