Crimes of the Century (2013) s01e03 Episode Script

1
An unspeakable crime, an unlikely
criminal, the ultimate tabloid murder
Your thoughts
on this Andrea Yates story.
It's a horror.
This was the very definition of
Madonna and child turned upside down.
Five young children dead at the
hands of their own mother.
She was the sickest woman
I'd ever seen.
She may have been in left field,
but she was in the stadium.
Was she simply cold-blooded,
or was something else to blame?
If you commit a crime and are found
not guilty by reason of insanity,
and it's a very horrendous crime, you
will probably never leave a Texas prison.
It was a terrible, personal tragedy that
became a white-hot media spectacle
She drowned her kids 'cause she
didn't want them to go to hell.
Captivating and horrifying
viewers from coast to coast.
Did he know that his wife would be
a danger to those five children?
She did not show remorse.
She did not show regret.
She believed that she had arranged
for her children to go to heaven.
The murder case
that shocked the nation
and cast a harsh, new light on
the very nature of motherhood
I view her as a victim.
I don't view her as a criminal.
The state of Texas
vs. Andrea Yates, next.
The woman on the phone is
Andrea Yates.
She is living the American dream a house
in the suburbs, an R.V. In the backyard.
They all seemed so happy five healthy
children, a loving mother, and a successful dad
who worked for NASA.
It's a Tuesday morning,
just after 9:00.
Yates has just fed the kids.
Then, she draws the bath.
The dispatcher assigned me that
particular call for service,
being that it was
in my zone of responsibility.
Another unit, David Knapp, he checked
by with me, which is common practice.
You know, it's day shift.
It's slow.
Guys are killing time
helping each other out.
Eight minutes after dialing 911, Andrea
Yates calls her husband, Rusty Yates,
and tells him
it's time to come home.
It's not yet 10:00 A.M.
I couldn't imagine what actually happened,
but I was worried because I'm like,
"Well, Andrea called me with a firm
tone, said I needed to come home."
And so I did.
I moved into the house, and David
approached me right at the hallway.
And I said, "What's going on?"
And he looked at me,
and he said, "it's a homicide."
So, I looked to my right
and down, and there was Yates.
She was sitting on a couch.
She's just sitting there.
She never looked at me.
I walked into the room, and I was expecting
to find a man on the floor, a body.
And I was looking around,
looking around, saying, "What?"
And I seen this little, tiny head
and it was looking right at me.
And that little head was about maybe 10 or
15 feet from me at the edge of the bed.
And I said, "What in the world?"
And I thought it was a doll.
And I walked over
to that little, tiny head,
and I touched it right here put my
finger on it, and I said, "What in the"
And I picked up the blanket, and
there was that little, tiny body.
It was a human being.
And I said, "Oh, my," And I picked up the
And as I continued to pick up the blanket,
it was one body after another
one, two, three, four.
I walked back down the hallway, made
a right turn after the bathroom,
and there I found the oldest one
floating facedown in the tub.
A devout Christian dedicated to having
as many children as God would allow,
Andrea Yates had methodically drowned her
own kids, one by one, in the family tub.
We didn't know what to do.
We just looked at each other, and there was this
moment in time where all the training, you know,
all the scenes that you have made,
everything that you have been taught
and learned and instinct went
right out the window.
The police were there
in my yard.
I wanted to go inside.
They wouldn't let me inside.
They told me what happened,
and, you know, I just
I remember laying in the grass
and just bawling.
And the husband showed up, and he started
screaming, "Andrea, you finally did it!
Andrea, you really did it!"
She just sat there and just stared at the
door with this blank look on her face.
It was just, like,
devoid of anything.
But everybody was affected,
and anyone that says they weren't,
they're not telling the truth.
-The story spread like wildfire.
Reporters and first responders
swarmed the area.
Frank Stumpo was assigned
to take Andrea Yates to jail.
The news media were
there en masse.
They were there
50, 60, 70 people.
A woman can wipe out five of her kids, wipe
out her whole family, and become a star,
and that's what she was.
And I told her that.
I says,
"Now you're a celebrity."
And I brought her into the homicide division,
brought her upstairs and that was it.
A mother killing
her own child is unthinkable.
A mother killing all five of her
children is completely unimaginable.
How can we begin
to comprehend the circumstances
that brought Andrea Yates
to that point?
She was a perfectionist.
She did very well
in high school.
I think she was Valedictorian
of her high-school class.
Grades were
very important to her.
Being a good daughter was
very important to her.
She went to nursing school and went to a
very prestigious nursing school in Texas,
did very well in nursing school, and then
married and started having children,
and her goal was
to be a wonderful mother.
They met in 1989.
They were both 25.
Four years later, they married.
Almost immediately,
Andrea was pregnant.
I think the thing that surprised
us was how fast that happened.
She used to joke I mean, she
wouldn't like me to say this,
but she called herself "Fertile Myrtle" That's
what she'd say, because seemed like every
You know, it wasn't hard.
They would give
each child a biblical name.
I know that Rusty knew and believed that, you know,
"We'll have as many kids as God will permit."
The Yates family was
very religious.
From the religion standpoint, I would
say we were both pretty conservative.
Rusty had been serious
about religion since college.
He introduced Andrea to the unconventional
preachings of a man named Michael Woroniecki.
Woroniecki and his family traveled around
the country or certainly around Texas
in a bus proselytizing, I think,
mostly on college campuses.
Yelled at female students
that they were all going to hell
because they were studying
and learning in a material world
when they should be
out there reproducing.
The dilemma with his message,
as I understand it, is
that if you think you're saved,
if you think you're a Christian,
if you think you're going to heaven,
then that proves you're going to hell
because that's prideful, and only
God knows who's going to heaven.
You sort of got painted into a
corner in that way of thinking.
By 1996, the Yates had two children, Noah and John,
and a short-term job opportunity in Florida.
Rusty opted not to be burdened
by owning another house.
Going into an R.V. was kind of
more of an experiment for us.
And so what we did is we rented our house that
we had here and bought a 38-foot travel trailer
and pulled it to Florida
and lived at a campground
in Florida during the course
of that assignment.
At the time,
Andrea was again pregnant.
She miscarried
just after the move.
In 1997, the Yates return to Houston,
where their third son is born.
In 1998, they trade in the R.V. for
a renovated, 350-square-foot bus,
a bus they bought
from Michael Woroniecki.
Baby number four arrives
a few months later.
I went on the bus.
It was a bus.
It was small.
And there was a trapdoor that lifted up, and
you'd look down in the luggage compartment.
And there were pallets on the
floor where the children slept.
-Mrs. Yates was overwhelmed.
She was had begun homeschooling,
and she just couldn't handle it.
You can imagine homeschooling
A-B-C-D ♪
se was changing diapers 24/7, washing
diapers not permitted to use Pampers
had to use cloth diapers
because they were more basic.
They were the salt of the Earth, return to
you know, disassociate from materialism,
return to the basics.
So, there's no question
that she was stressed.
Andrea Yates' life had
begun to unravel.
She seemed perfectly fine
up until
after we had Luke,
which was our fourth.
After her fourth child was born, she actually
struggled with the thought of killing her child,
and she made a suicide attempt
rather than risk harming her child.
And there was one psychiatrist who saw her who
told her and Rusty, "Don't have any more children.
You need to stop."
Here we are, on our way home.
What does that say, boys?
It says "Congratulations,
Rusty & Andrea.
It's a boy!!"
That's so cute.
- It's on both sides. - Giving us a little
welcome home. - Bringing home the baby here.
Yeah.
Just a year later, the Yates were
expecting their fifth child.
36-year-old Andrea Yates shows no emotion minutes
after admitting to police the unthinkable
murdering five children.
Andrea Yates was a major story.
Number one,
there were five children.
Number two, Rusty Yates was very forthcoming
with the press and was very willing to speak.
What happened was just,
you know, incomprehensible.
So, a confluence of various factors came
together to make that not only a national case,
but an international case.
Given the circumstances,
it was inevitable.
Almost overnight, Andrea Yates
became a household name
and a condition called postpartum
psychosis a hotly contested topic.
It's not the same as the baby
blues, which are very common.
Postpartum psychosis is only
about one case in 1,000 births.
Often, a woman is very psychotic
hallucinations, delusions, confused
usually so severe,
it requires hospitalization.
On June 20, 2001, Andrea Yates
called police to her home,
showed them the bodies
of her drowned children
Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 3,
Luke, 2, and Mary, 6 months.
You know, I had no idea
what was going on.
I mean, I didn't know anything
about mental illness
or postpartum depression
or psychosis or anything.
If you have more and more children,
the risk that you're going to have
more of these episodes is
higher,
and with the psychotic episodes,
they tend to get worse.
After you drew the bath water
Andrea Yates never denied
that she killed her children,
but was she cold-blooded
or desperately ill?
By all accounts, she was a devoted mother, but her
defense doctors say she became more desperate
and secretive
with each pregnancy.
The crisis point came in 1999
after the birth
of her fourth child.
There were two suicide attempts in these
pregnancies, and what she said to me was
she didn't want
to hurt her children.
She wanted to hurt herself.
Andrea Yates was hospitalized
after both attempts.
The second time,
she was put on the powerful
antipsychotic drug Haldol.
And it worked so well, in fact, that she and
Rusty were soon talking about a fifth child.
You know, the decision
to have more children in 2001
was based on information we got from the doctor
because we'd successfully treated it in '99.
If it happened again,
we knew how to treat it now.
Thinking ahead, we were thinking, "Well,
this will be If it happens at all,
it's gonna be
a relatively short spell.
She'll be down,
at worst, for a while.
For the Yates, adding to their
family outweighed the risks.
To ensure a healthy pregnancy, Andrea
Yates went off all her medication.
If you're on medication and you
come on and off of it a lot,
we think that it does something
to your brain.
And then, if you get sick, you often get
sicker, and then it becomes harder to treat
the second, third, fourth time.
Following
the first hospitalization,
the Yates had moved out of the
bus and into a new house.
In November 2000, they welcomed their
fifth child and first girl Mary.
This is our little girl,
that was born today.
Everything seemed fine until the following
March, when Andrea's father died.
Andrea is such a wonderful,
caring person
and cared deeply for her father and
felt a great deal of responsibility
because she was the nurse
in the family.
Come March the 31st, she is taken
by Rusty to Devereux hospital.
Rusty's concerned about her.
Andrea was diagnosed with major
depressive disorder postpartum onset.
At that time, hospitals weren't
educated about postpartum illness.
Psychiatrists weren't educated
about postpartum illness.
After the 2001 hospitalization, Andrea continued
seeing a hospital psychiatrist as an outpatient.
But she wasn't put back on Haldol, and
Rusty hesitated to question the doctor.
You know, if I were to challenge him and say,
"Well, this medicine worked for her in '99.
Why aren't we trying it now?"
"I'm confident this will work,"
you know,
and kind of looks back to his,
you know, diploma on the wall.
Rusty flew
his mother out to Houston
to help Andrea with the kids.
What she saw frightened her.
Her mother in law, Rusty's mother, was in the
house and said, "Andrea, why are you filling
the bathtub
at 4:00 in the afternoon?"
And Andrea gave a vague answer
"I might have use for it."
That so concerned Rusty's mother
that they then arranged
for her to be hospitalized
within 24 hours.
When Andrea was sent home from Devereux the second
time, she was just as disoriented as before.
Rusty took her back
to the outpatient facility.
Rusty said,
"I'm very concerned about her.
She's not responding to this
antidepressant medication."
Rusty reported that the doctor's comment was,
"Andrea, you have to think happy thoughts."
Two days after that
appointment, on June 20, 2001,
Andrea Yates drowned
her children one by one
and then patiently waited
to be arrested.
When I saw her in the jail that first
time, I would ask her questions,
and she would answer it
in nonsense.
She heard the TV talking to her, and she was
picking her scalp, which I saw her do
later to learn that the belief was that the
number 666 had been branded into her scalp.
As irrational as Andrea's symptoms sounded,
at least one expert had a scientific term
for her condition
cacodemonomania.
Cacodemonomania, it's literally
believing one is possessed by a demon,
and it is a known phenomenon that occurs
in people with religious delusions.
She loved her children, and the
message she was getting from the TV,
from her religion was that she was
a bad person she was Satan.
When she became psychotic, it tied in
with her religious beliefs at the time.
At least
some of those beliefs seem
to have been influenced by the
writings of Michael Woroniecki,
the preacher Rusty
and Andrea once followed.
The one that stands out in my mind the most is a
pamphlet that showed a mother and her children.
And it said something like,
"Jezebels are gonna throw
their children in the river
and destroy them."
She believed that one son was
gonna become a serial killer,
one son was going to become a mute, homosexual
prostitute, and she had these fantastic beliefs
that each of her children was gonna end up in
some evil way and would literally go to hell.
I didn't know that someone's beliefs, someone's
thoughts, you know, that they become delusional,
that they were believing things
that weren't true
or even seeing or hearing things
that weren't there.
I asked her I said, "Do you believe you were
possessed by adevil or the one and only Satan?"
And she said, "The one and only Satan,
I believe, was literally within me."
Okay, today's February 26th.
Noah turns how old?
- 7.
- 7.
Let's do that interview.
- All right!
- Yay!
The last one was her oldest son.
He was strong and a big kid.
He resisted most being drowned, that he got
his head above water, and he said, like,
"Mommy, I'll be good,"
as if he believed he was being
punished by being drowned.
Then, she took each child and
placed the child on their bed,
the master bed
in the master bedroom.
And one of the children was a particularly
good big brother I believe it was John.
And she took the baby, the 6 month old baby
girl, and put it in the crook of John's arm
so he could look after her
in the afterlife as
as he had been
a good big brother
during their lifetime together.
It promised to be the trial of
the century in Houston, Texas.
There was no question regarding
the basic facts.
On the morning of June 20, 2001,
36-year-old Andrea Yates
systematically drowned
all five of her children.
Defense attorney George Parnham knew that his
client's only chance was to plead not guilty
by reason of insanity.
But as the details emerged,
the public outrage grew.
- Give us some room.
- Back. Move back.
The public opinion about Andrea, obviously,
was negative, to say the very least.
People did not understand
the issue of mental illness.
Overwhelmingly, the people were
very harsh in their assessment.
The community of psychiatric workers, doctors
were horrified that we would prosecute someone
who had a legitimate mental
illness, but that was a minority.
Andrea Yates' actions were certainly
incomprehensible, but did that mean she was insane?
You can be mentally ill, and the standard under
the law is that, if you know right from wrong.
That's not a medical standard.
That's a legal standard.
There's no legal definition
for what's right or wrong.
And the law tells us that,
if there's no legal definition,
then a juror is able to use the common,
everyday meaning of those words.
Whatever the legal arguments, the public ire was
also stoked by the way Rusty Yates was reacting,
both to the murders and
to the surrounding media circus.
The woman here is not the woman
that killed my children.
She obviously wasn't herself.
And I think that'll come out,
you know?
I'm just completely surprised that people think
that, well, because I defend Andrea as being
a wonderful mother that she shouldn't
be punished, that somehow, you know,
I'm condoning her actions,
you know?
Her actions were almost indescribably
devastating to me and my family.
He took it upon himself like it was
like some kind of badge of honor,
and he was on TV giving interviews and
all kinds of stuff, which was macabre.
And then, at the funeral, he actually
had a slide show of his kids.
The funeral took place one week after the murders
and sealed the public's view of Rusty Yates.
I think people want to assign blame How
did this happen? Why did this happen?
Who's at fault?
And if you believe that
Andrea Yates was mentally ill,
then then you say, "Okay,
well, it wasn't her fault.
She was sick.
It must be Rusty's fault."
I think what turns people off is that he
smiled a lot.
He didn't show the kind
of emotion that was expected.
And once he was kind of typecast
as not showing enough emotion,
no matter how much he showed after
that, that's how he was viewed.
Rusty's demeanor so incensed the Houston
community that some people believed
he was complicit in the murders.
The Harris County
district attorney's office
received so many inquiries about whether he was
also liable for the deaths of these children.
And if you talk
to people on the street,
there are a lot of people that
will express that idea to you.
Did I do everything that I could and knew to
do to help Andrea and protect our children?
And I'd say that's the case.
I mean, I didn't I really didn't
know much of what else to do.
I mean, she was sick.
We went to the doctor.
You know, we followed
the doctor's orders.
No one ever said to him, you know, "Your children
might die because of your wife's illness."
Nobody said, you know, "The risk is, with postpartum
psychosis, that the children are in danger."
I personally did not see Rusty
as such a bad guy.
I think he cared deeply
for his wife.
He cared deeply
for his children.
In the end, the Rusty Yates
controversy was simply a sideshow.
His wife was the main event,
and the state was going to try
the case to the fullest extent
of the law,
seeking nothing less
than the death penalty.
She's gonna say that Noah got
his head up a couple of times
and that she was able to push him down and
control him and force him under that water
until he lost control
of his body.
It's always an unthinkable act.
Psychiatrists have a name for it,
filicide, when a parent kills a child.
Almost from the beginning, the
state of Texas was determined
to charge Andrea Yates
with capital murder.
The defense would enter a plea of
not guilty by reason of insanity.
In my almost 16 years on the bench, the
Andrea Yates case was the only one
where that defense was
actually asserted and litigated.
It's a small number of persons who are found
excused because their mental illness is so severe
it causes them either not to know what they're
doing or not to know the wrongfulness
of what they are doing.
People often ask me, "Well, listen, why didn't
she kill herself instead of drown her children?
The kids would still be alive."
The problem is, she becomes more
and more ill with each pregnancy.
The sicker you become, the less
alternatives are available to you.
While awaiting trial,
Andrea Yates was placed
in the jail's medical facility
and treated for psychosis.
From the time of the tragedy to the time of the
trial, she improved I mean, to the point
where she wasn't having
hallucinations.
On September 22, 2001, just three
months and two days after the murders,
Yates was deemed competent
to stand trial.
The prosecution planned to argue
that Andrea's motive was
to get back at her husband for perceived
wrongs, like living in a bus, homeschooling,
and the inconveniences
of a simpler lifestyle.
The defense knew better than to
bring Rusty into the equation.
Had I gone after Rusty, as people wanted me to do,
then the jury could be told by the prosecutor
in summation or at the end, she, in effect, by
killing the kids, she was getting back at Rusty
for the various things that he had done
and would give her an ulterior motive.
The trial began
in February 2002.
Both sides brought in preeminent
psychiatrists to testify.
Dr. Phillip Resnick led
for the defense.
His counterpart was Dr. Park Dietz, renowned
for testifying in the John Hinckley case.
Dietz was also a consultant
on the hit series "Law & Order."
On several points,
the experts agreed.
We both agreed that she had a severe mental
disease when she drowned her children.
We both agreed she believed she was doing what
was in the best interest of the children.
And we both agreed she knew what
she was doing was against the law.
Where we differed, then, was
on whether, in spite of knowing
it was against the law, she believed she
was doing what was right for her children.
The prosecution contended there
was more method than madness.
She said Satan was telling her this,
and if you are a religious person
and Satan is telling you to do something, you
start out with the assumption that it's wrong,
that it's bad conduct.
So, starting from that simple proposition,
we knew that she knew that it was wrong,
and she expressed
that she knew it was wrong.
So, Dr. Dietz testified that Mrs. Yates knew
it was wrong, not just against the law,
but against society
and against God.
That's pretty powerful
testimony.
Dietz took it one step further
and also presented a likely inspiration
for Andrea Yates' actions.
He testified that she had watched a "Law &
Order" episode that week in which a woman,
to be free of her responsibilities, drowned
her children and got away with murder.
The show we almost always
watched was "Law & Order."
And the ones that she watched,
I watched with her, you know?
And so I'd heard, you know,
about that testimony.
And I'm like, "I don't think
that happened," you know?
But there was nothing solid to refute Dietz's
testimony, and after three weeks of trial,
the jury deliberated
for just under four hours.
The jury came back, and I knew, when I saw
that jury, what that verdict was going to be.
We the jury find
the defendant, Andrea Pia Yates,
guilty of capital murder
as charged in the indictment.
I was devastated.
Knowing how much Andrea loved our
children and how much they loved her
and knowing that she would never have harmed
them had she not been mentally ill All right?
I view her And I know it's hard for people
to see this but I view her as a victim.
I don't view her as a criminal.
In the punishment
phase of the trial,
the jury sided with the defense
and rejected the death penalty.
Andrea Yates was sentenced
to life in prison.
Yeah, I never thought
about losing.
I went back in the back with Andrea, and
she said, "what happens now?"
And I said,
"Don't worry, Andrea.
You'll be fine," you know?
Patted her on the knee and then came back
and heard the rumbles in the courtroom
about this testimony you know,
the "Law & Order" testimony.
The sentencing phase was barely over before
questions arose about the Park Dietz testimony.
Word was spreading that the "Law
& Order" episode did not exist.
Suddenly,
the defense had new hope.
We were at the office,
looking through the scripts
on the Internet trying
to come up with titles of shows
that could have reflected that a "Law & Order"
show existed about a woman who drowned her kids
and couldn't find any
never did find a script.
Suzanne O'Malley, one of the reporters covering
the case, had written episodes for "Law & Order."
She put Parnham in touch with
the show's creator, Dick Wolf.
And Dick Wolf said, "Well, Mr. Parnham, I can
guarantee you I have great respect for Park Dietz,
but no such show ever aired,
nor had it ever been planned."
Parnham immediately
filed for a mistrial.
The motion was denied.
What does the Park Dietz
testimony have to do with that?
That had nothing to do with
overturning this conviction.
I mean, she got the idea from a TV show, and the
TV show never existed, so you're gonna overturn
the conviction of a person
that kills five children?
That's absurd.
- Say "Daddy."
- Dada.
- "Mommy."
- Dada.
"Mommy"?
- Say "Mama."
- Mama.
On March 15, 2002, Andrea Yates was sentenced to
life in prison for the murder of her children.
She was incarcerated at the Mountain
View Unit, a state psychiatric prison.
In a hospital for the
It's called "for the criminally insane"
you are locked in with people
who have committed
violent crimes,
and they're mentally ill.
They're not places
you want to be.
Naturally, the defense was gunning
for a reversal of the verdict.
Among the many points of argument was the
questionable testimony given by Park Dietz,
lead psychiatrist
for the prosecution.
There has never been an episode
that has aired on "Law & Order"
involving the topic
that Park Dietz testified about.
And we confronted Park Dietz with
that, and he said he was mistaken.
He must have been in error.
The appeals process
would take months
of meticulous preparation
for multiple arguments,
but in the end everything hinged
on the Dietz testimony.
We had 19 points of error, and
only one point was ever addressed,
and that was point number one
and that was his testimony.
And the case got reversed,
so we started back to trial.
I thought it was great that Mrs. Yates would
have another opportunity to have her case heard.
Dr. Dietz, in my view, made
an honest mistake.
The reversal,
though a major victory,
was only the start.
The defense team pressed for an outright dismissal
of all charges, arguing that a second trial
would constitute
double jeopardy.
Finally, in January 2005, some 3 1/2
years after the original conviction,
the Texas state Supreme Court issued an
opinion double jeopardy did not apply,
but Andrea Yates would be
granted a new trial.
Tonight, she drowned her five children, was
sentenced to spend the rest of her life in prison,
but recently a Texas appeals court
overturned Andrea Yates' conviction.
Pending the new trial, the defense
succeeded in having Yates moved
from the Mountain View prison
unit to Rusk State Hospital.
How's she being treated?
On the whole, I think
they've treated her pretty well.
For the defense, trial prep
included community outreach.
They did all they could to educate
the public and change perceptions
of both Andrea Yates
and mental illness.
There were six victims in this case, and one
was Andrea herself because of mental illness.
By the second trial,
there had been research articles
and talks, and it became much more in the public
vernacular, particularly postpartum depression.
In June 2006, five years to the month after the
tragedy, Andrea Yates' second trial commenced.
The defense kept their arguments
very specific.
We focused on wrongfulness mental health
and wrongfulness and postpartum issues
wrongfulness more so
than in the first trial.
We were learning.
I think the defense felt that,
because of the time that had passed,
perhaps people were
more sensitive to the issue.
By the time we had the second trial, I think
that, if there was a measurable opinion,
I think it had swung
to, like, maybe neutral
and neutral in the sense that she should
be convicted, she should go to jail.
But the "tie her behind the car and drag her
through the streets" crowd had gone away.
After a month of testimony, the jury
deliberated for 13 hours over three days.
And the jury, after three days of deliberation,
wanted to see the pictures of the children.
And about 30 minutes later, we had two
buzzers, and they had reached a verdict.
And some of the jurors
were crying.
And the reason they asked for the pictures
They took two minutes in silence
of each child
in memory
of that child's legacy.
And I thought that was probably the most powerful
moment that I have experienced in the courtroom
in 45 years of doing this.
You know?
The court has been advised
that the jury has reached
a verdict.
And now the jury must decide.
Did Yates know right from wrong when she drowned
her five children in the family bathtub?
All rise for the jury, please.
The court has been advised that
the jury has reached a verdict.
We the jury find the defendant, Andrea Pia
Yates, not guilty by reason of insanity.
- Juror number 15?
- Yes.
- Juror number 37?
- Yes.
- Juror number 52?
- Yes.
It had been five years, one month,
and six days since the tragedy.
We're all, you know,
thrilled with the verdict.
You know, last time, the judge said, you
know, "I find the defendant guilty."
And we just thought she left out
the word "not," you know?
And this time,
we heard it, so we're happy.
Andrea Yates was placed under the jurisdiction
of the Department of State Health Services.
She currently resides
at Kerrville State Hospital.
There is no timetable
for her release.
I don't think that any judge will ever sign a paper
that says Andrea Yates can be completely free
from supervision.
I don't think Andrea,
figuratively, will ever be free.
She lives with the memory
of her children.
She misses them terribly.
This didn't happen to Andrea Yates because
she's an evil, criminal, bad person
that needs to be killed.
This happened to Andrea Yates because she has
a biologic, medical illness called psychosis.
We don't understand it
very well.
We can't predict
who's gonna get it and why.
I can forgive her, and in fact, in
many respects, I've never blamed her.
But yet, I could never live
with her again.
Rusty Yates divorced Andrea
after the first trial.
He enrolled in law school and is
now remarried with a young son.
He remains in contact
with Andrea.
I can say that coming to a decision to divorce
Andrea was a really difficult decision.
And it took me probably more time than it should
have, but I finally came to the understanding
that there's a difference between
forgiveness and consequences.
I talk to her Andrea
probably four times a week.
I long ago crossed the line from professionalism
to, you know, personal involvement.
And she's a daughter, basically,
and that's the way I treat Andrea.
George Parnham and I and the Mental Health
Association of Houston and some other people started
the Yates Children's Memorial Fund
in honor of the five Yates children,
who are the real tragedy
of the story.
Ours was an extreme case.
You know, we lost our family, and Andrea was
charged with capital murder, and it was a big case
because she didn't get adequate
mental healthcare treatment.
So, from that facet of my life,
you know, I'm doing my best
to try to redirect and say, move in that direction
to where I can help mentally ill people.
- Hello.
- Hi!
How old are you today?
How many is that?
- 4. See?
- 4?
1, 2, 3, 4.
I think, if we can take
the Andrea Yates
the generic Andrea Yates,
the whole story of her kids,
and we can move forward in
the area of mental healthcare,
I think we will have
accomplished a lot.
Not everyone agrees.
One of the things
I wanted to do was every
every June 20th, I wanted to
send her a postcard of her kids,
wherever she was.
But I says,
"What does that solve?"
That doesn't do anything for me, and it
certainly doesn't do anything for that woman.
So I didn't do that.
I wish they had a third trial.
I find her quite sympathetic, and not only do I
think that she's not criminally responsible,
but the fact that she has to live with what
she's done and live childless and so forth,
that's the tragedy
in its own right.
In the eyes of the state, Andrea
Yates is now simply a patient.
She is no longer considered
a criminal.
Only Andrea knows if she can ever
forgive herself for her actions.