Rusty Yates, the ex-husband of notorious murderer mother Andrea Yates, has forgiven her for drowning their five young children in 2001 and still speaks to her at least once a month in a psychiatric hospital.
The Post learned that Rusty, 59, regularly called Kerrville State Hospital to speak with his ex-wife, 60, who spoke about his murdered children, who would now all be adults.
Rusty also visited his ex-wife in a facility for people who have been deemed incompetent to stand trial or “not guilty by reason of insanity.”
Rusty Yates infamously divorced his wife in 2002. He remarried and had another child, but that marriage also ended in divorce.
Rusty still works as an engineer for NASA, the job he was in when Yates hunted down and killed the couple’s children, one by one. Website The intention was to keep the children’s memories alive.
“Andrea was a wonderful mother,” Rusty told NewsNation Chris Cuomo “When someone acts so out of character, it’s a sign that something else is going on. As far as forgiveness goes, it’s kind of the beginning.”
“I think the next step in forgiveness is understanding that it was an illness,” he continued. “If it wasn’t an illness, she would never have harmed our children.”
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 Rusty to leave for work and then, one by one, began killing her children: Noah, 7; John, 5; Paul, 3; Luke, 2; and Mary, 6 months.
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.
Yates was initially convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, but expressed delusions while in prison, telling authorities that he had been thinking about killing children for two years to save them from eternal punishment.
“My children were not righteous,” she told a prison psychiatrist, according to court documents obtained by The Washington Post. “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, citing her mental state, and were granted a new trial. She was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 2006. A judge sent her to Kerrville Correctional Facility, where she has remained ever since, refusing to petition the court for release.
In 2001, Rusty was famously skeptical of Andrea’s postpartum depression and mental illness defenses, even going so far as to say that people with depression “just need a light kick in the ass”.
Now, his beliefs have evolved, and Yates likens Andrea’s mental illness to a physical illness.
“If I was driving down the street in my Suburban and I had a heart attack and swerved into oncoming traffic and everyone in the car was killed except for me, would they charge me with murder and rub my face into the crime scene photos? My kids’ faces?” he rhetorically asked Cuomo.
“I don’t think so. But to me it’s 100% exactly the same.”
