Remember Andrea Yates? The Houston woman who on June 20, 2001 systematically drowned her five young children in the bath tub and then calmly called the police? She is up for retrial. She will be tried a second time for the murders and her insanity or the lack of it will again be an issue. The defense lawyers are expected to argue aggressively that Andrea needs treatment, not incarceration. The prosecution will argue that she knew what she was doing. The most damning evidence against Andrea is the 911 phone call she made after she killed the children. Much more has become known about the Yates family in the intervening years. But there is no change in Texas insanity laws. So Andrea will be retried with the same evidence under the same laws.
"Between 2001 and 2004, four Texas women became famous — notorious, actually — for the deaths they inflicted on their children. Two opted for drowning, one grabbed a knife and the other used a heavy rock. But their choice of method was less significant than the method in their madness. All were convinced they were doing right by their children, according to their attorneys. So intense was their disturbed mental state that it was capable of overpowering the strongest, most basic human instinct.
In the aftermath of their horrific acts, the most pertinent question was not the most obvious one. Why they did it was not really answerable except in the vaguest of ways: They’re insane. Of greater urgency was the one thrown in the lap of the legal system: What to do with them? In each case, prosecutors offered the same response: Try them, convict them, send them to prison — save for the case of Andrea Yates, where they chose the extreme option of attempting to have her executed. Even a Harris County jury would not agree to that, convicting her of capital murder and giving her a life sentence for drowning her children in the bathtub of their Clear Lake home.
This week a new jury is expected to begin wrestling with that issue again as Yates stands trial a second time. Her 2002 conviction was thrown out because of erroneous testimony by a psychiatrist.
Although they won a conviction in the Yates case, prosecutors have had less luck with the others. Deanna Laney, who bludgeoned two sons to death outside of their Tyler home in 2003, was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Lisa Diaz of Plano, who drowned her two daughters later that year, received the same verdict. Last month, Dena Schlosser’s trial ended in a hung jury, with 11 voting for acquittal. Prosecutors intend to retry Schlosser, also from Plano, who cut off her infant daughter’s arms in 2004.
"The fact that you have different results in these cases is itself a problem," said Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who has written about the insanity defense. "I’ve yet to meet anyone who seriously argues Andrea Yates was not insane. But by sticking to a rigid standard of only knowing right and wrong, you exclude the most common forms of insanity: people responding to evil voices."
Damning phone call
Texas law requires only that the jury find that the defendant knew his or her conduct was wrong. The fact that Yates called police after drowning her children indicates that, at least, she understood that society considered it wrong. Such knowledge often trumps an otherwise delusional state.
"People like Yates may very well be able to articulate that they knew what they were doing was wrong," Turley said, "yet they were unable to keep from yielding to an irresistible impulse."
Turley and others argue that the insanity definition should be broadened to where it used to be. Juries used to be allowed to consider irresistible impulse. That was the basis upon which John Hinckley was found not guilty of the attempted assassination of President Reagan."
From the very beginning public opinion about Andrea Yates has been evenly divided between those who saw a monstrous murderer and those who recognized in Andrea a severely disturbed individual who needed psychiatric care urgently. No one doubts Andrea’s sickness – she had attempted suicide twice and had been treated for mental illness several times. No one questions the fact that she killed her children. The disagreement is over "why". Andrea’s husband Rusty Yates is the most enigmatic character in this sordid saga. It is very puzzling why Rusty – a seemingly clean cut, sane, devoutly Christian NASA engineer who lived day in and day out with this woman, did so little to help her. Family members and friends of the Yates saw a zoned out, paranoid Andrea who for some time before the murders, had even stopped caring for her personal hygiene. Many of them alerted Rusty to the alarming deterioration in Andrea’s personality and asked him to take her to the doctor.
"You’ve got a pre-June 20th Rusty and a post-June 20th Rusty," said Bob Holmes, who met Yates in 1989, when the couple was dating. Holmes is counted among those who knew the couple and who question the way he dealt with his wife’s mental illness, which seemed to materialize in their marriage after the birth of their fourth child, Luke.
"Did he lose his children? Yes. Do I feel bad for him? Absolutely," said Holmes, who along with his wife, Debbie, met then-Andrea Kennedy 20 years ago. "But he’s the one person who could have stopped it."
Thirteen days before she systematically drowned her children, Bob Holmes saw the Yates family in the grocery store. The woman he had known for years as a "24/7" mom was alone with a cart. Her children, who had always gathered around her, grouped around their father.
"She looked like a paranoid animal," Holmes recalled. "A dangerous animal. If you see a dog in the corner, with that kind of look, do you care what’s going on in his head? She was very scary during that period."
The second criminal trial of Andrea Yates begins this Monday. Houstonians will be watching it with as much interest as the Enron trial which is currently under way. And what about Rusty? Well, he just got married again.
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