Charged with five ghoulish murders, Yates now faces the death penalty in a trial whose every detail is steeped in tragedy. Last week prosecutors showed the heartbreaking videotape police shot at the Yates home last June 20–four tiny corpses in wet pajamas side by side on their parents’ bed and the body of Noah, 7, lying facedown in the bathtub where he died. They also played an audio tape in which Yates told a police interrogator how she drowned the children in chilling detail–catching Noah, who was the last to die, and holding his head underwater despite his frantic struggles. She admitted thinking about killing her kids for two years and acknowledged she deserved to be punished. That could be crucial. The prosecution argues Yates knew right from wrong and shouldn’t get the insanity defense. “There is no question that Andrea Yates had some form of mental illness,” prosecutor Joe Ownby told the jury. But, he added, “you will hear evidence that she knew [murder] was an illegal thing. That it was a sin. That it was wrong.”
The defense is now presenting the evidence on Yates’s tormented state of mind. Ferguson, the first defense witness, seemed close to tears herself as she described their jailhouse interviews, particularly when Yates referred to her children as “precious.” She said Yates told her she heard Satan growling in the Harris County Jail and that she saw “satanic” ducks and teddy bears on the cinder-block walls of her cell. Sometimes, Ferguson said, Yates thought she had killed her children because she was possessed by Satan, and sometimes because she thought she was carrying out a prophecy. “Of all the patients I’ve treated for major depression with psychotic features, she was one of the sickest,” Ferguson said.
She also has a well-documented history of postpartum psychosis. In 1999 Yates tried to commit suicide after the birth of her fourth child, Luke. She was hospitalized but tried to commit suicide again a month later. Treated with Haldol, a powerful antipsychotic drug, she was warned that having more children would lead to further psychotic episodes. But she and her husband, Rusty, wanted to have another child, and Mary, their fifth, was born about a year later. In March 2001, Yates’s father died and she went into deep depression. Yates was hospitalized for 12 days and seemed to improve–but in May, Rusty Yates took her back to the hospital after his mother caught her grimly filling the bathtub. Yates later told police she had once before prepared to kill the kids, possibly then.
Her psychiatrist during both of these hospital stays, Dr. Mohammed Saeed, treated her with Haldol and found that she improved. In early June, Saeed took Yates off Haldol and, according to her medical records, examined her again on June 18, two days before the murders. Saeed is expected to testify that he did not believe Yates was psychotic at that time. Rusty Yates has said repeatedly that Andrea’s final breakdown was probably caused by the decision to stop her Haldol prescription (she is back on the medication these days). “We don’t have to prove whose fault this is,” prosecutor Ownby said last week.
One question is whether Yates got adequate care–but ultimately, the jury will have to decide whether she knew right from wrong. Ferguson testified that Yates said, “I need to be punished. I’m guilty. Destroy Satan.” Is that an admission of culpability, or is it a cry of anguish?
