The Case of Andrea Yates

1292 Words6 Pages
The Case of Andrea Yates On the morning of June 20, 2001, around 10:00am, Rusty Yates received a frighting phone call from his wife Andrea. She said “you need to come home, it’s time, I did it”. Not knowing what she meant entirely he asked her to explain and she said “it is the children”. After hearing that he asked “which one” and she responded by saying “all of them”. He headed straight home to find his house surrounded by ambulances and police cars. They would not let him into the house, and as he laid there in a fetal position, screaming “how could you do this”, he watched as his wife was being led off, in handcuffs, by police officers. On a double bed, in the back master bedroom. Four children were laid out, in a row side by side, underneath a sheet, clothed and soaking wet. All of them were dead, with their eyes wide open. In the bathtub, a young boy was found submerged amid feces and vomit, floating on the surface. In less than an hour that morning, all five children had been drowned, and the responding officers were deeply affected. When Andrea let the officers in she told them without emotion that she had killed all of her children, and she just sat there while they checked the damage that had been done. She told the officer that she was a bad mother and expected to be punished. This crime will unravel the reasons why a loving mother, of five, had drowned all of her children, tangled in issues of depression, religious fanaticism, and psychosis. Why would any mother murder all of her children? When Andrea was brought in for questioning she was asked “who killed your children” and she said “I killed them”. Then she was asked “why did you kill your children” and she replied “because I am a bad mother”. Now that kind of confession leads me to believe that she knew exactly what she was doing. By this time her husband had told the police
Open Document