Andrea Pia Yates confessed to drowning her five children in their bathtub on June 20, 2001. She had been suffering for some time from very severe postpartum depression, post partum psychosis and schizophrenia. Yates was convicted of capital murder, but the jury refused the death penalty option. She was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years. The verdict was overturned on appeal, in light of false testimony by one of the expert psychiatric witnesses.
About Andrea Yates in brief
Andrea Pia Yates confessed to drowning her five children in their bathtub on June 20, 2001. She had been suffering for some time from very severe postpartum depression, post partum psychosis and schizophrenia. Yates was convicted of capital murder, but the jury refused the death penalty option. She was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years. The verdict was overturned on appeal, in light of false testimony by one of the expert psychiatric witnesses. On July 26, 2006, a Texas jury in her retrial found that Yates was not guilty by reason of insanity. In January 2007, she was moved to Kerrville State Hospital, a low-security state mental hospital in Kerrville, Texas. She stopped taking Haldol in March 2000 and gave birth to her daughter, Mary, on November 30, 2000. Yates then stopped feeding herself, mutilated herself, and read the Bible feverishly. On April 1, 2001 she came back into the care of Dr. Mohammed Saeed and was treated and released. At the time of the murders, Yates was living in the suburb of Clear City in the state of Houston. She then filled the bathtub in the middle of the day; she would later confess to police that she had planned to drown the children that day, but had decided against doing it then. She became degenerated back into a catatonic state and was hospitalized the next day after a doctor determined she was probably suicidal and probably had filled the tub to drown herself.
In July 1999, Yates suffered a nervous breakdown, which culminated in two suicide attempts and two psychiatric hospitalizations that summer. Yates’s first psychiatrist, Dr. Eileen Starbranch, testified that she urged her and Rusty not to have any more children, as it would \”guarantee future psychotic depression\”. They conceived their fifth and final child approximately 7 weeks after her discharge. On June 16, 1999, Rusty found her shaking and chewing her fingers, The next day, she attempted to commit suicide by overdosing on pills, She was admitted to the hospital and prescribed antidepressants. Soon after her release, she begged Rusty to let her die as she held a knife up to her neck. In summer 1989 she met Russell \”Rusty\” Yates at the Sunscape Apartments in Houston. From 1986 until 1994 she worked as a registered nurse at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. She also suffered from depression, and at 17 she spoke to a friend about suicide, and she was the class valedictorian, captain of the swim team, and an officer in the National Honor Society. After the birth of their third child, Paul, they moved back to Houston and purchased a GMC motor home. After that, Rusty moved the family into a small house for the sake of her health. She seemed to be coping well until the death of her father on March 12, 2001, and became so incapacitated that she required immediate feeding medication.
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This page is based on the article Andrea Yates published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 07, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
