The mental health issues associated with Andrea Yates in tandem with the killing of her five young children led to conflicting interpretations of right and wrong in the insanity defense.
After the birth of her first son, Noah, Andrea Yates started experiencing symptoms of postpartum psychosis, which is an extreme and rare postnatal mental illness that occurs in approximately 1 to 2 out every 1,000 deliveries. She had thoughts and visions about knives and stabbing people and thought she heard Satan speaking to her. Andrea hid these signs away from everyone because she wanted to be perfect and wanted to be seen as such. Over the next two years, Andrea and her husband Rusty had two more sons and had started following of a street preacher Michael Woroniecki, who constantly reiterated that only a select few of people who make it salvation. At this time, Andrea Yates was living in a converted Greyhound bus with her three children and husband, homeschooling the kids, and following a radical preacher all while caring for her sick father; neighbors that lived in the RV park where the Yates’ were and Andrea’s parents knew that something was not right with Andrea and tried to get Rusty to help her, but the teachings of Woroniecki insisted that living in a house meant that you were participating in an evil conspiracy against God. Andrea was in constant communication with Michael Woroniecki and a former follower of his said, “He’s like a doctor: he diagnoses your spiritual state by what you write to him,” and picks out all your flaws. Michael Woroniecki’s wife often wrote to Angela and called her evil, wicked, a daughter of Eve, and told her that the window of opportunity for them to minister to her is closing so she must repent now. The writings of Michael Woroniecki were specifically judgmental in regards to raising children, often stating that today’s mothers are too permissive. The Woronieckis often recited this poem:
Modern Mother Worldly was very, very lazy. All her children drove her crazy. The Bible told her to spank and train them. But society said she must never constrain them. The fruit of rebellion she did now see. On the day of judgment she will have no plea. Modern Mother Worldly cast in hell! Now what becomes of the children of such a ‘Jezebel’!
This made Andrea see herself as the Jezebel and made her think that her kids were going to hell.
Andrea had her fourth child, Luke, and when he was four months old, Rusty got a call from Andrea telling him to come home and that she needs help. Rusty left work and went home to find her shaking and chewing her fingers — not fingernails, her fingers — and Andrea tells Rusty that she needs help; this is her first nervous breakdown. Rusty took Andrea and the kids to her mother’s house the next day and this is when her first suicide attempt occurred. She was taken to the hospital and then transferred to a psychiatric unit where she was diagnosed with a major depressive disorder and prescribed with the antidepressant Zoloft. She stayed at this center for a week but was released because her insurance ran out; not because she was ready. Andrea was referred to another psychiatrist who suggested switching from Zoloft to Zyprexa. However, she didn’t want to be on medication because Michael Woroniecki believes that medicines and doctors are bad, so she flushed the medication down the toilet and used a method called ‘cheeking’ where she’d stick the medicines in her cheek to make it look like she had taken it when she hadn’t and then would spit it out later. Andrea was staying at her parents’ house to recover, scratching bald spots on her head and picking sores on her body; showing little signs of recovering. She also began to hallucinate again, often re-experiencing the visions she had after her first son was born. Her visions kept telling Andrea to get a knife over and over again until she finally grabbed a steak knife from the kitchen and holds it to her throat. Rusty came to the house and found Andrea and as he tried to stop her, she begged him to let her do it, but Rusty was able to get the knife from her and take her back the hospital. At this point, Andrea has claw marks up and down her legs from trying to hold herself back from hurting anyone. She was then taken to a private center for psychiatric treatment. She was given an emergency dosage of Haldol, an antipsychotic, and then confessed to doctors that she had suffered those visions of a knife as much as 10 times over a several day period. At this center, a psychiatrist diagnosed Andrea with a major depressive disorder that was severe and reoccurring with psychotic features. Doctor’s found out through talking to her family that a majority of her family had suffered from mental illnesses like depression and got professional help; women with relatives who have manic-depressive illnesses are at a much greater risk of postpartum psychosis. To help treat this disorder, doctors suggested electroshock therapy but Andrea and Rusty turned it down, and after staying in this treatment center for three weeks she was released with multiple medications, including antidepressants Effexor and Wellbutrin and the antipsychotic Haldol, and had monthly follow-up appointments with her doctor. During her time at the treatment center, Rusty bought a real house for his family and her condition started to improve once she had come home. Everything had been going relatively well for the four months after her release until Andrea and Rusty decided to have another baby. It’s important to note that the Yates’ were still following the teachings of Michael Woroniecki and part of his teachings involved the belief that married couples should have as many kids and possible. So Andrea stopped taking her medications and birth control, even though they were warned that Andrea had a 50-80% chance of having another psychotic episode. Rusty thought of it like this: if you were given a brand new Mercedes Benz and was told it’s free, but if you take it you’re going to have the flu for two weeks, would you do it? Rusty said that while Andrea might get sick, the two of them knew there were medications out there and that they could get help for it. After the birth of their fifth child, Andrea’s father died and her mental state began to decline rapidly; she stopped talking, refused to drink anything, scratched bald spots on her head. Recognizing these symptoms, Rusty had Andrea committed to another private treatment center twice in a two month period, where psychiatrists put her back on medication and were constantly looking to improve her state by changing the type of medication and dosages; Andrea and Rusty were also warned and told not to leave Andrea with the kids unsupervised. After her release, she was taken back for a follow-up visit and Rusty told the psychiatrist that she was not getting better, so they adjusted the dosages again. Unfortunately, two days after this appointment on June 20, 2001, Andrea drowned all five of her children starting with John, 5, then moving onto Paul, 3, Luke, 2, Mary, 6 months, and finally Luke, 7, between 9 a. After drowning the first three boys she laid them in her bed, and after Mary had passed she left her floating in the tub, then Noah came in asking what was wrong with Mary and tried to run but Andrea caught him, and left him floating in the tub and moved Mary into John’s arms. Andrea then called the police telling the 911 operator that she needed an officer but wouldn’t say why and after hanging up with the operator, she called Rusty telling him to come home right away because something happened to the kids.
Andrea confessed to killing her children and had to be found legally sane in order to be found criminally responsible. The insanity defense is used in fewer than 1% of all cases and has a success rate of about 26% and in Texas, where Andrea resided and was tried, they have some of the most strict guidelines. The trial began eight months after the murders and the state tried Andrea for three of the murders. If Andrea was found criminally responsible she faced the death penalty. The prosecution focused on whether she knew right from wrong and not the mental illness aspects. They argued that she was a cold, calculated killer because she had picked a time that she would be alone with the kids and because she killed them in a certain order. However, the defense tried to convince to the jury to look beyond the literal rendition of right and wrong, focusing on what Andrea thought was the right thing and wrong thing and how her illness made her too sick to understand their interpretations of right and wrong. The defense was upset that Andrea’s original confession tape wasn’t recorded since the jury couldn’t see the disheveled state she was in right after the killings, but the jury was shown interviews that were held weeks and months after and because she was on medications she seemed more stable, so they really only got to see that side of Andrea; Dr. Lucy Puryear, psychiatrist for the defense, said it might’ve been to their advantage to leave her “crazy” and unmedicated. Dr. Puryear’s specialty expertise included Manic Depressive Disorder, Schizophrenia, Personality Disorder, Mood Disorder, and five other subjects and she testified that Andrea was so mentally ill and delusional that she thought killing her children was the right thing to do. Along with Dr. Puryear the defense hired Dr. Phillip Resnick who is an internationally known forensic psychologist with expertise in Forensic Psychiatry, Manic Depressive Disorder, hallucinations, along with 15 others. He testified that Andrea completely believed that killing her children was the right thing to and that Satan had taken over body. The other psychiatrist hired by the defense was Dr. Melissa Ferguson who’s specialty expertise was Bipolar Disorder, Mood Disorders, Schizophrenia, Depressive Disorder, and eight others. Her testimony included Andrea’s response to Dr. Ferguson’s question about whether she was suicidal or not. Andrea answered, “I cannot destroy Satan; only the state can,” and this answered provided context for Andrea’s previous suicide attempts: she was trying to kill the devil. Dr. Ferguson also stated that Andrea said her children were “not righteous” and had “stumbled” because she was evil and that her children could never be saved because of the way she was raising them; “I was afraid Satan would ruin my children and that even I had some Satan in me,” Andrea said. Because Andrea had been mentally ill for a long time, it was easy for Woroniecki’s teachings to instill the notion that she was evil and needed to save her children for her sins by killing them, ultimately sacrificing her life. On the prosecution’s side, they hired one of America’s most prominent forensic psychologists Dr. Park Dietz, who’s specialty expertise involved subjects like Bipolar Disorder, Manic Depressive Disorder, Schizophrenia, and five others. He testified that Andrea was not insane and that she knew what she was doing wrong and used her belief that Satan had ordered to kill her children as evidence. He also told jurors that she had never experienced hallucinations and had had noting more than “obsessional intrusive thoughts.” It’s important to note that Dr. Puryear, Dr. Resnick, and Dr. Ferguson had dealt with multiple cases of postnatal mental illness in their careers prior to the trial whereas Dr. Dietz had only come in contact with one or two. Part of his testimony got the prosecution in trouble later because he claimed that Andrea got the idea to drown her children and plead guilty by reason of insanity by an episode of Law & Order and this sentiment was used in the District Attorney’s closing argument. After three weeks of testimony, the jury reached a verdict after three and half hours: guilty of capital murder. Andrea then had to await another trial concerning whether she would get life in prison or death by lethal injection, but the majority of the family members related to victims didn’t want Andrea to die. The jury’s deliberation took 40 minutes and they spared her, so Andrea was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years.
Andrea petitioned for a mistrial after her conviction but before the penalty phase of her trial after