Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her 5 younger kids in 2001 whereas within the throes of postpartum psychosis, stays housed in a psychological hospital — and if she will get her approach, she’ll by no means be launched.
The Submit has confirmed that Yates declined a listening to final month that will have decided whether or not she was competent to be launched from the hospital.
Beneath the phrases of her conviction, Yates is eligible to endure a overview every year. She has repeatedly declined to be assessed.
The Submit has discovered that Yates, 60, lives a quiet life inside Kerrville State Hospital, which is meant for these acquitted of a prison offense and dedicated by a court docket to obtain inpatient psychological well being companies.
She spends her days making greeting playing cards and different crafts, usually that includes rainbows and butterflies. She sells her crafts at artwork exhibits and festivals. The proceeds from her gross sales go to the Yates Youngsters’s Memorial Fund, which helps individuals affected by postpartum melancholy.
Yates has entry to the web, and infrequently spends time on the household web site launched by her husband, the place she will be able to take a look at images of the kids she killed.
Yates was 37 on June 20, 2001, when she drowned her 5 younger kids within the bathtub of their suburban Houston house.
In accordance with court docket testimony, she waited for her husband, Rusty, to go to work. When he was gone, she started to kill her kids — Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 3, Luke, 2, and Mary, 6 months — one after the other.
After she drowned the kids, she referred to as 911 repeatedly. She reported the kids’s deaths, then referred to as Rusty, a NASA engineer, and informed him to come back house from work.
Yates was charged with 5 counts of capital homicide. The prosecution referred to as the crime “heinous” and advocated for the loss of life penalty. However the protection argued that Yates suffered from extreme melancholy and psychosis because of her latest supply — and that brought on her to kill her kids.
They sought intensive psychological well being therapy moderately than jail.
She was initially convicted of capital homicide and sentenced to life. Even behind bars, she expressed delusional ideas, telling authorities that she had thought-about killing the children for 2 years, to avoid wasting them from everlasting damnation.
“My kids weren’t righteous,” she informed her jail psychiatrist, in keeping with court docket paperwork. “They stumbled as a result of I used to be evil. The best way I used to be elevating them, they may by no means be saved. They have been doomed to perish within the fires of hell.”
Based mostly on her psychological state, Yates’ attorneys appealed the case and have been granted a retrial. She was discovered not responsible by motive of madness in 2006. A decide despatched her to Kerrville.
Whereas Yates is eligible for a listening to to find out her sanity, she shouldn’t be required to hunt launch. In accordance with the courts, she will be able to spend the remainder of her life within the facility. She talks to her husband month-to-month, although they divorced and he has remarried.
Her protection lawyer, George Parnham, has lengthy maintained that Yates is pleased and thriving at Kerrville, the one place she’s referred to as house for the previous 17 years.
“She’s the place she needs to be. The place she must be,” Parnham informed ABC Information in 2021.
“And I imply, hypothetically, the place would she go? What would she do?”
