10 Years Ago Today: Andrea Yates Child Murders

10 years ago today, on June 20, 2001, mentally ill Houston mother Andrea Yates murdered her five children. Yates is currently confined at a state mental institution in Kerrville, Texas, and will be eligible for release in November if the state cannot show cause to hold her. She is one of seven filicidal mothers covered in "(Bad) Mothers of the Year," one of the chapters in the "Murder" section of Texas Confidential.

When they were married in 1993, Andrea and Rusty Yates declared that they “would seek to have as many babies as nature allowed.” For the next six years they stayed true to their promise, with Andrea bearing four sons and raising them in a succession of cramped trailers and motor homes while Rusty spent most of his time at work.

By June 1999, however, Andrea’s role as breeding stock had begun to take a heavy psychological toll on her, and she began to suffer signs of severe postpartum depression and psychosis that were exacerbated by her fixation on the message of fire-and-brimstone preacher Michael Peter Woroniecki. She attempted to commit suicide twice and was committed to a mental hospital and prescribed antidepressants and the antipsychotic drug Haldol.

Rusty condescended to move the family into a small house at that point for the sake of his wife’s mental health. By July, however, she had a nervous breakdown, made two more suicide attempts, and spent periods of time in two psychiatric wards, where she was diagnosed with postpartum psychosis.

Despite the urgings of her psychiatrist and warnings that doing so would “guarantee future psychotic depression,” Andrea and her husband conceived their fifth child just seven weeks after her release from the hospital. She went off her medication soon thereafter, and her daughter was born at the end of November 2000.

As predicted, Andrea’s mental state deteriorated rapidly and within a matter of months she had ceased talking, started mutilating herself, and stopped feeding her daughter. She had also taken to reading the Bible feverishly. Between April and June 2001 she became nearly catatonic a number of times and had to be hospitalized.

On June 20, Rusty Yates went to work an hour before his mother was scheduled to arrive at the house and left Andrea alone with the five children, ages six months to seven years, against the instructions of her psychiatrist.

“She drowned the four youngest children in the bathtub and placed them on a back bedroom bed and covered them with a sheet,” the Houston Chronicle reported. “When the oldest boy walked into the bathroom and asked what was wrong with his sister, Andrea Yates told investigators she ran after him and then drowned him,” leaving him floating in the tub.

Yates later claimed that she had killed her children in order to ensure their salvation.

“My children weren’t righteous,” she said. “They stumbled because I was evil. The way I was raising them, they could never be saved. They were doomed to perish in the fires of Hell.”

Andrea’s defense attorneys argued that she was not guilty by reason of insanity but, during her trial in March 2002, a jury rejected this and found her guilty of murder and sentenced her to life in prison with eligibility for parole after forty years. In January 2005, however, a Texas Court of Appeals reversed Andrea’s convictions because one of the prosecution’s expert psychiatric witnesses admitted to giving false testimony.

Yates was retried, and in July 2006, a jury found her to be not guilty by reason of insanity. She was initially sent to the North Texas State Hospital (Vernon Campus) but, in January 2007, was transferred to the low-security state mental hospital in Kerrville.