Tuesday, July 09, 2024 - Andrea Yates, the Texas mom who drowned her five young children in 2001 while suffering postpartum psychosis, has refused a chance to be set free from the mental hospital where she has been held.
Yates declined a hearing last month that would have
determined whether she was competent to be released from the hospital.
Under the terms of her conviction, Yates is eligible to
undergo a review each year. She has repeatedly declined to be assessed,
according to The Post.
Yates, 60, lives a quiet life inside Kerrville State
Hospital, which is intended for those acquitted of a criminal offence and
committed by a court to receive inpatient mental health services.
She spends her days making greeting cards and other crafts,
often featuring rainbows and butterflies. She sells her crafts at art shows and
festivals. The proceeds from her sales go to the Yates Children’s Memorial
Fund, which helps people suffering from postpartum depression.
Yates has access to the internet and often spends time on
the family website launched by her husband, where she can look at photos of the
children she killed.
Yates was 37 on June 20, 2001, when she drowned her five
young children in the bathtub of their suburban Houston home.
According to court testimony, she waited for her husband,
Rusty, to go to work. When he was gone, she began to kill her children — Noah,
7, John, 5, Paul, 3, Luke, 2, and Mary, 6 months — one by one.
After she drowned the children, she called 911 repeatedly.
She reported the children’s deaths, then called Rusty, a NASA engineer and told
him to come home from work.
Yates was charged with five counts of capital murder. The
prosecution called the crime “heinous” and advocated for the death penalty.
But the defence argued that Yates suffered from severe
depression and psychosis as a result of her recent delivery — and that caused
her to kill her children. They sought intensive mental health treatment rather
than prison.
She was initially convicted of capital murder and sentenced
to life.
Even behind bars, she expressed delusional thoughts, telling
authorities that she had considered killing the kids for two years, to save
them from eternal damnation.
“My children weren’t righteous,” she told her jail
psychiatrist, according to court documents. “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.”
Based on her mental state, Yates’ lawyers appealed the case
and were granted a retrial.
She was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 2006. A
judge sent her to Kerrville.
While Yates is eligible for a hearing to determine her
sanity, she is not required to seek release. According to the courts, she can
spend the rest of her life in the facility.
She talks to her husband monthly, even though they divorced
and he has remarried.
Her defence attorney, George Parnham, has long maintained
that Yates is happy and thriving at Kerrville, the only place she’s called home
for the past 17 years. “She’s where she wants to be. Where she needs to be,”
Parnham told ABC News in 2021. “And I mean, hypothetically, where would she go?
What would she do?”
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