Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five young children in 2001 while suffering from postpartum psychosis, remains in a psychiatric hospital and, if she has her way, will never be released.
The Washington Post has confirmed that Yates last month declined to attend a hearing to determine whether he is competent to be discharged from the hospital.
Under the terms of her conviction, Yates is eligible for annual re-examination. She has refused to be re-examined again and again.
According to information obtained by The Washington Post, Yates, 60, lives a quiet life at Kerrville State Hospital, a facility for people who have been acquitted of criminal offenses and have been court-mandated to commit mental health crimes.
Every day, she makes greeting cards and other crafts with rainbow and butterfly motifs. She sells her crafts at art shows and festivals. Proceeds from the sale go to the Yates Children’s Memorial Fund, which helps people suffering from postpartum depression.
Yates has access to the Internet and often A family website launched by my husbandwhere she can see photos of the children she killed.
On June 20, 2001, at the age of 37, Yates drowned her five young children in the bathtub of her suburban Houston home.
According to court testimony, she waited for her husband, Rusty, to leave for work and then, while he was away, began killing her children, one by one — Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 3, Luke, 2, and Mary, 6 months.
After drowning her children, she called 911 multiple times to report their deaths and called Rusty, an engineer at NASA, to tell him to come home from work.
Yates was charged with five counts of murder. Prosecutors called the crimes “heinous” and sought the death penalty, but the defense argued that Yates had suffered from severe depression and psychosis following a recent birth, which led her to kill her children.
They sought intensive mental health treatment rather than prison.
She was initially convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, but expressed delusions while in prison, telling authorities that she had been thinking about killing for two years to save her children from eternal punishment.
According to court documents, she told a prison psychiatrist, “My children were not righteous. They stumbled because I was wicked. The way I raised them could never save them. They were doomed to perish in the fires of hell.”
Yates’ lawyers appealed the conviction, citing her mental state, and were granted a new trial. In 2006, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity. The judge sentenced her to prison in Kerrville.
Yates is entitled to a sanity hearing but is not required to seek release. She can spend the rest of her life in the facility, according to the court. She speaks to her husband monthly, even though they are divorced and he has remarried.
Her lawyer, George Parnham, has always maintained Yates is happy in Kerrville, the only place she has called home for the past 17 years.
“She’s right where she wants to be. She’s right where she needs to be.” He told ABC News In 2021.
“I mean, hypothetically, where would she go? What would she do?”
