At the beginning of one of the nation’s most high-profile murder trials in 2002, prosecutor Joseph Owmby told jurors that Andrea Yates had spent two years planning to kill her five young children.
On June 20, 2001, the stay-at-home mother, then 37, called 911 to say she’d drowned her children, one by one, in the bathtub in their home in the Houston suburb of Clear Lake, Texas.
After drowning sons Luke, 2, Paul, 3, John, 5 and her 6-month-old daughter Mary, Yates put them in bed and covered them with a blanket, as if they were asleep.
Her oldest son, Noah, 7, tried to run away, but Yates wrestled him into the tub and drowned him, too.
Arrested and charged with capital murder, Yates pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
“The breath was taken out of their bodies by their mother,” Owmby told jurors in the trial’s opening arguments.
In his opening arguments, defense attorney George Parnham told jurors about Yates’ history of postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis.
Attorney George Parnham and Andrea Yates in court in 2006 when she was found not guilty by reason of insanity.
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“Postpartum depression with psychotic features,” he said, “is the cruelest and most severe of mental illnesses. It takes the very nature and essence of motherhood to nurture, protect, to love, and changes the reality.”
Unless the mother is properly treated, she and the child “are at great risk for harm,” he said.
Not only was Yates suffering from these illnesses, her doctor took her off the powerful antipsychotic drug Haldol just weeks before the murders.
Spiraling into the throes of psychosis and believing she was doing something good for her children, “on June 20, the inevitable happened,” Parnham said.
In March 2002, Yates was found guilty of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years.
Parnham appealed and the verdict was overturned. The case was retried in 2006, when Yates was found not guilty by reason of insanity. In 2007, she was remanded to Kerrville State Hospital, a mental facility in Texas.
In a recent interview, Parnham tells us that he still keeps in touch with Yates, who has opted to stay at the hospital to continue treatment rather than be released.
He also said he still drives to Clear Lake to leave flowers on the children’s grave.
“There’s a large headstone, with pictures of the kids engraved on it,” he says.
Yates, he says, is thankful for that gesture of kindness. “She is glad someone is putting flowers on the grave,” he says.
“She just loved those children,” he says. “And she, in her psychotic state, believed she was saving their lives, saving their souls.”
This case remains important, he says, because it shines a light on women’s mental health in the criminal justice system.
“I want the general public to be aware of the reality of women’s mental health in the criminal justice system and to be able to understand how through the eyes of a mother [experiencing postpartum psychosis], she believes she’s doing right by her children,” says Parnham.
The prosecution had argued that the murders were premeditated.
“Just because a person who is psychotic plans [something] doesn’t mean that they don’t meet the insanity standard,” Parnham says.
