Rusty Yates, wife of ex-wife Andrea Yates, who drowned their five children one by one in 2001, has reportedly forgiven the notorious murderous mother and speaks to her monthly.
Yates, 59, regularly calls Texas’ Kerrville State Hospital, a facility that holds offenders deemed unfit to stand trial or “not guilty by reason of insanity,” to talk to his ex-wife, 60, who has also been deemed incompetent to stand trial. The New York Post reported.
According to the paper, the former couple spoke about their murdered children – Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 3, Luke, 2, and Mary, 6 months – and said that all five would be adults by now if it weren’t for their mother’s actions.
Rusty Yates could not be reached for comment.
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This undated family photograph shows four of the five children of 36-year-old Andrea Yates, who confessed to murdering her children by drowning them at her home in Clear Lake, Texas, a suburb south of Houston, on June 20, 2001. Children pictured are, from left, John, Luke, Paul and Noah. (The Yates Family/Getty Images)
Rusty Yates divorced Andrea Yates in March 2005, three years after he was sentenced to life in prison for second-degree murder for drowning his children in a bathtub.
An appeals court subsequently overturned those convictions based on erroneous testimony from a psychiatrist, and he was acquitted by reason of insanity at a retrial in 2006.
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Rusty Yates had another child, but that marriage also ended in divorce. He still works as an engineer for NASA, the same job his then-wife had when she chased after their children and systematically drowned them.
“Andrea was a wonderful mother,” he said. News Nation In an interview last year, he said: “When someone acts out of character like this, it’s a sign that there’s something else going on. As far as forgiveness goes, it’s kind of the beginning.”
Andrea Yates: A Difficult History
Rusty Yates was photographed in Houston, Texas on January 5, 2002, prior to his divorce from Andrea Yates. (Pam Francis/Getty Images)
“If I was driving down the street in my Suburban and I had a heart attack and drove into oncoming traffic and everyone in the car was killed except for me, would they charge me with murder and rub my face in the crime scene photos? On my kids’ faces?” he asked rhetorically in the interview. “I don’t think so. But to me, it’s 100 percent the same.”
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Andrea Yates attempted suicide at least four times before taking the lives of her children: after giving birth to her fourth child in June 1999, she attempted a pill overdose, then held a knife to her neck, and begged her then-husband to let her die shortly after being released from hospital.
After two more suicide attempts that summer, she was diagnosed with postpartum psychosis.
Her first psychiatrist, Dr. Eileen Stabrunch, recommended that Andrea and Rusty hold off on having children, but she testified in court that despite this, they became pregnant with their fifth and final child seven weeks after she was released from the hospital, Fox News previously reported.
Andrea Yates cries in court after watching video of dead children
This undated family photograph shows Mary, the youngest of Andrea Yates’ five children. (Philip Diederich/Getty Images)
Rusty Yates was also advised not to leave his children alone with his wife.
Andrea Yates’ family also previously told Fox News that Rusty didn’t do enough to help his spouse or children, with his mother, Karin Kennedy, saying her stepson told her he never changed a diaper after their fourth child was born.
“When they came to my house, I said to Rusty for the first time, ‘Luke needs to be changed,'” Kennedy said. “He said, ‘That’s a first. I’ve never changed a diaper before.'”
After the June 20, 2001 murders of her children, Andrea Yates told a prison psychologist that she had delusionally considered killing her children to save them from eternal damnation.
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Andrea Yates sits with her lawyer, George Parnham, after the verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity was read during her retrial in Houston on July 26, 2006. (Brett Kumar Poole/Getty Images)
“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.”
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According to the New York Post, Yates last month declined a hearing to determine whether she was competent to be released from a psychiatric hospital – she is eligible for annual reviews to be released, but has repeatedly declined.
