Andrea Yates

• 1. Introduction

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  Andrea Yates, a woman from Houston, Texas, was alone with her five children on the morning of the 20th of June 2001. Her husband's mother was due to arrive one hour later to take over. In that hour, Yates drowned all five children in the family bathtub. She confessed, and the case that followed forced Americans to ask what the law really means by insanity. What did the people around her know about her illness before that morning? What does Texas law ask of a jury when a defendant is psychotic? And why did the first verdict not stand?

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• 2. Valedictorian and Nurse

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  Andrea Pia Kennedy was born in Houston on the 3rd of July 1964, the youngest of five children. Her mother, Jutta Karin Koehler, was an immigrant from Germany. Her father, Andrew Emmett Kennedy, was the son of Irish immigrants. Her teenage years were troubled. She suffered from bulimia and depression, and at 17 she spoke to a friend about suicide.

  Her school record looked very different. At Milby High School she was class valedictorian, captain of the swim team, and an officer in the National Honor Society. She graduated in 1982. After a two-year pre-nursing program at the University of Houston, she graduated from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. From 1986 until 1994 she worked as a registered nurse at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

  In summer 1989 she met Russell Yates, known as Rusty, at the Sunscape Apartments in Houston. He was an engineer at NASA. They soon moved in together, and they married on the 17th of April 1993. Rusty was a devout evangelical Christian. The couple announced that they "would seek to have as many babies as nature allowed." They 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. The move put the family in a small trailer in Seminole. By the time their third child, Paul, was born, they were back in Houston and had bought a GMC motor home.

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• 3. Breakdowns and Warnings

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  After the birth of her fourth child, Luke, Yates's depression returned. On the 16th of June 1999, Rusty found her shaking and chewing her fingers. The next day she tried to kill herself by overdosing on pills. She was hospitalized and prescribed antidepressants. Soon after she came home, she held a knife to her neck and begged Rusty to let her die.

  She went back into the hospital, where she was given several medications. One was Haldol, an anti-psychotic drug. Her condition improved immediately, and Haldol was prescribed when she was released. Rusty moved the family into a small house for the sake of her health. For a while she appeared to be stable.

  In July 1999 she had a nervous breakdown. It culminated in two suicide attempts and two psychiatric hospitalizations that summer. She was then diagnosed with postpartum psychosis.

  Her first psychiatrist, Dr. Eileen Starbranch, saw the danger plainly. She later testified that she urged Yates and Rusty not to have more children, because it would "guarantee future psychotic depression." She was shocked, she said, when the couple raised stopping the medications so that Yates could become pregnant again. Two days after that visit she wrote in the medical record that the couple seemed set on a large family and that this would surely bring on more psychotic depression.

  Yates was discharged from Dr. Starbranch's care on the 12th of January 2000. She became pregnant with her fifth and final child about seven weeks after her discharge. She stopped taking Haldol in March 2000, and her daughter Mary was born eight months later.

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• 4. The Final Months

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  Yates's father died on the 12th of March 2001, and her fragile stability ended. She stopped taking her medication, mutilated herself, read the Bible feverishly, and stopped feeding Mary. She became so incapacitated that she needed immediate hospitalization. On the 1st of April 2001 she came under the care of Dr. Mohammed Saeed, who treated her and released her.

  On the 3rd of May 2001, she sank into a "near catatonic" state and filled the bathtub in the middle of the day. She would later tell police that she had planned to drown the children that day but decided against it. No one knew that at the time. She was hospitalized the next day, after a scheduled doctor visit. Her psychiatrist concluded that she was probably suicidal and assumed she had filled the tub to drown herself.

  By June 2001 the family lived in Clear Lake City, a suburb of Houston. Dr. Saeed had instructed that Yates be supervised around the clock. On the morning of the murders, Rusty left for work and left her alone with the children.

  Yates started with Paul, Luke, and John, and laid them on her bed. She then drowned Mary and left her floating in the tub. Noah came in and asked what was wrong with Mary. He ran, but Yates caught him and drowned him too, leaving him floating in the tub. She placed Mary in John's arms on the bed.

  After that, she called the police. She repeated that she needed an officer but would not say why. She then phoned Rusty and told him to come home right away. Yates confessed to the killings, and Rusty asked a family friend, George Parnham, to act as her attorney.

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• 5. Two Trials

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  In March 2002, Yates went to trial after turning down an offer to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence. Chuck Rosenthal, the district attorney for Harris County, asked for the death penalty. Experts for the defense agreed that she was psychotic. Texas law, however, set a narrow test. To succeed with an insanity defense, a defendant had to prove she could not tell legal right from wrong at the time of the crime. The case placed the M'Naghten rules and the irresistible impulse test under close public scrutiny.

  The jury rejected the insanity defense and found her guilty of capital murder. It also refused the death penalty option. The court sentenced her to life in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, with eligibility for parole after forty years. The prosecution had implied that spousal revenge was her motive, although defense experts found no evidence for it. The jury accepted that she knew right from wrong but did not accept the revenge theory.

  On the 6th of January 2005, a Texas Court of Appeals reversed the convictions. The reason was the testimony of Dr. Park Dietz, a California forensic psychiatrist called by the prosecution. He admitted that his testimony had been materially false. At trial he had said that shortly before the murders, an episode of Law & Order had aired about a woman who drowned her children and was acquitted by reason of insanity. No such episode existed.

  Suzanne O'Malley was covering the trial for O: The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and NBC News. She had once been a writer for Law & Order, and she reported the error immediately. The appeals court held unanimously that the jury might have been influenced, so a new trial was necessary. A later episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent was based in part on Yates's case.

  Before the second trial, Yates told the psychiatrist Michael Welner that she had waited for Rusty to leave because he would have prevented her. Rusty told Welner that the family dog normally ran free and had been loose when he left. Welner alleged that Yates locked the dog in a cage so it could not interfere.

  On the 9th of January 2006, Yates again pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Her lawyers rejected an offer of a 35-year sentence for non-capital murder. On the 1st of February 2006 she was released on bail, on condition that she enter a mental health treatment facility. After three days of deliberations, on the 26th of July 2006, the jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity, as Texas defines it.

  The court committed her to the high-security North Texas State Hospital in Vernon. There she received medical treatment and shared a room with Dena Schlosser, another woman who had killed her infant daughter. In January 2007 Yates moved to Kerrville State Hospital, a low-security state mental hospital in Kerrville, Texas.

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• 6. Rusty's Role

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  Testimony at the 2006 trial showed that in the weeks before the drownings, Rusty had begun leaving his wife alone with the children for short periods. He apparently believed this would build her independence, despite her doctors' instructions. At a family gathering the weekend before the killings, he announced that he would leave her home alone for an hour each morning and each evening. He wanted to keep her from becoming totally dependent on him and on his mother.

  Yates's mother was shocked when she heard the plan. She said her daughter was not stable enough to care for the children. As evidence, she pointed to a time when Yates nearly choked Mary by trying to feed her solid food. Yates's brother, Brian Kennedy, later claimed on CNN's Larry King Live that Rusty had told him, while driving her to a treatment facility in 2001, that depressed people needed a "swift kick in the pants."

  According to the authors Suzy Spencer and Suzanne O'Malley, Dr. Saeed learned that Yates was not being supervised full time only during a phone call with Rusty, as news of the killings broke.

  Rusty told the media that psychiatrists never said Yates was psychotic or that she could harm the children. He said he believed she was "sick" and could be cured by medication. He told the Dallas Observer, "If I'd known she was psychotic, we'd never have even considered having more kids."

  Yates gave a different account to her prison psychiatrist, Dr. Melissa Ferguson. She said that before their last child, she told Rusty she did not want to have sex because Dr. Starbranch had warned that she might hurt her children. By her account, Rusty cited his religious beliefs about procreation, praised her as a good mother, and persuaded her she could handle more children. O'Malley wrote that even later he "had fantasies of having more children with her after she was successfully treated."

  In August 2004, Rusty filed for divorce, saying the two had not lived together as a married couple since the day of the murders. The divorce was granted on the 17th of March 2005. He then began dating Laura Arnold, and they married on the 25th of March 2006 and had one son. Arnold filed for divorce in 2015.

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• 7. Doctors and Drugs

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  Outside the courthouse after the 2006 verdict, Rusty asked how his wife could have been "so ill and the medical community not diagnose her, not treat her." He held that Dr. Saeed, as a psychiatrist, was responsible for recognizing her psychosis, not a layman like himself. According to Rusty, he urged the doctor to check her records for the treatment that worked in 1999. He said Dr. Saeed refused to continue Haldol.

  Rusty's testimony described a more complicated sequence. After Yates was released from Devereaux, Dr. Saeed reluctantly prescribed Haldol. A few weeks later he took her off it, citing concern about side effects. Two days before the drownings, Rusty drove her to Dr. Saeed's office because she seemed to be getting worse. The doctor refused to try Haldol longer or to return her to the hospital. Rusty also testified that he never knew she heard voices and saw visions, or that she had considered killing the children.

  Rusty added that his wife was too sick to be discharged from her last hospital stay, in May 2001. He said he saw staff lower their heads as if in shame. The hospital, he said, had no choice because of a ten-day limit on psychiatric stays set by their insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield, whose coverage was subcontracted by Magellan Health Services.

  Rusty and his relatives blamed a combination of antidepressants that Dr. Saeed prescribed in the days before the killings. Dr. Moira Dolan, executive director of the Medical Accountability Network, noted that "homicidal ideation" was added to the warning label of the antidepressant Effexor as a rare adverse event in 2005. Yates, she said, had been taking 450 mg for a month, twice the recommended maximum.

  Dr. Lucy Puryear, an expert hired by the defense, disagreed. She said the doses Dr. Saeed prescribed are not uncommon in practice and had nothing to do with the return of Yates's psychosis. She argued instead that the psychosis came back because Dr. Saeed had stopped the Haldol two weeks earlier. Oral Haldol takes 4-6 days after discontinuation to reach a terminal plasma level under 1.5%, a medical standard for complete elimination from the body.

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• 8. Faith and Legacy

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  Michael Woroniecki was an itinerant preacher whom Rusty had met while attending Auburn University. Media outlets alleged that he bore some responsibility for the deaths because of teachings in his newsletter, The Perilous Times. The Yates family had received it on occasion, and it was entered into evidence at the trial.

  Both Woroniecki and Rusty rejected the accusation. Rusty said his family's relationship with the preacher was not close and that Woroniecki did not cause her delusions. Woroniecki said his letters were meant to help the couple strengthen their marriage and find the love that he says his own family found in Jesus. Both men called the alleged connection "nothing more than media-created fiction."

  Yates's own explanation, given in custody, was a religious one. She told a jail psychiatrist that she had considered killing the children for two years. She said they thought she was not a good mother and that her sons were developing improperly. "It was the seventh deadly sin," she said. "My children weren't righteous. They stumbled because I was evil." She added that they were "doomed to perish in the fires of hell."

  In the years afterward, her attorney and friend George Parnham and his wife, Mary Parnham, founded the Yates Children's Memorial Fund. It was created to educate people about the plight of postpartum mental illness. The fund now operates under Postpartum Support International as the PSI Yates Children Memorial Fund Justice and Advocacy Program. Its stated aim is to support families and professionals involved in legal cases concerning perinatal mental illness.

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