Andrea Yates

Andrea Pia Yates ( Kennedy; born July 3, 1964) is an American woman from Houston, Texas, who confessed to drowning her five children in their bathtub on June 20, 2001.

The case of Yates—who had exhibited severe postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis, and schizophrenia leading up to the murders—placed the M'Naghten rules, along with the irresistible impulse test for sanity, under close public scrutiny in the United States.

Yates graduated from Milby High School in 1982.

She was the class valedictorian, captain of the swim team, and an officer in the National Honor Society.

Yates then completed a two-year pre-nursing program at the University of Houston and graduated from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

From 1986 until 1994, Yates worked as a registered nurse at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

In summer 1989, she met Russell "Rusty" Yates, a NASA engineer, at the Sunscape Apartments in Houston.

They soon moved in together and were married on April 17, 1993.

Yates and her husband, a devout evangelical Christian, announced that they "would seek to have as many babies as nature allowed" and bought a four-bedroom house in Friendswood, Texas.

Their first child, Noah, was born in February 1994, just before Rusty accepted a job offer in Florida, causing them to relocate to a small trailer in Seminole.

By the time of the birth of their third child, Paul, they had moved back to Houston and purchased a GMC motor home.

Following the birth of her fourth child, Luke, Yates' depression resurfaced.

On June 16, 1999, Rusty found her shaking and chewing her fingers.

The next day, she attempted suicide by overdosing on pills, leading to her being hospitalized and prescribed antidepressants.

Soon after her release, Yates begged Rusty to let her die as she held a knife up to her neck.

Once again hospitalized, she was given a plethora of medications, including Haldol, an anti-psychotic drug.

Yates' condition improved immediately, and she was prescribed it upon her release.

After this incident, Rusty moved the family into a small house for the sake of her health.

She appeared temporarily stabilized.

In July 1999, Yates had a nervous breakdown, which culminated in two suicide attempts and two psychiatric hospitalizations that summer.

She was subsequently diagnosed with postpartum psychosis.

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 seven weeks after her discharge.

Yates stopped taking Haldol in March 2000 and gave birth to her daughter, Mary, nine months later.

Yates seemed to be coping well until the death of her father on March 12, 2001.

She then stopped taking medication, mutilated herself, read the Bible feverishly, and stopped feeding Mary.

She became so incapacitated that she required immediate hospitalization.

On April 1, 2001, Yates came under the care of Dr. Mohammed Saeed; she was treated and released.

On May 3, 2001, she degenerated back into a "near catatonic" state and 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.

Yates was hospitalized the next day after a scheduled doctor visit; her psychiatrist determined she was probably suicidal and assumed she had filled the tub to drown herself.

At the time of the murders, the Yates family was living in the Houston suburb of Clear Lake City.

At Yates' 2002 trial, Chuck Rosenthal, the district attorney in Harris County, asked for the death penalty.

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 forty years.

The verdict was overturned on appeal, in light of false testimony by one of the supposed expert psychiatric witnesses.

On July 26, 2006, a Texas jury in her retrial found that Yates was not guilty by reason of insanity.

She was consequently committed by the court to the high-security North Texas State Hospital in Vernon, where she received medical treatment and was a roommate of Dena Schlosser, another woman who committed infanticide by killing her infant daughter.

In January 2007, Yates was moved to Kerrville State Hospital, a low-security state mental hospital in Kerrville, Texas.

Andrea Yates was born Andrea Pia Kennedy in Houston, Texas, the youngest of the five children of Jutta Karin Koehler, a German immigrant, and Andrew Emmett Kennedy, whose parents were Irish immigrants.

Yates suffered from bulimia and depression during her teenage years, and at age 17 spoke to a friend about suicide.