Her Dark Places
Up until the moment Andrea Yates murdered her five children, she could have been any mother in America: setting aside her own wants and needs for her loved ones. Which is why, in addition to being horrified, so many of us are sympathetic.
(Page 2 of 2)
You would have thought she would go down in history as the modern-day Medea. But within 48 hours of the murders, Yates had become a symbol of the precarious nature of American motherhood to a host of journalists, academics, and psychiatrists. The night after the killings, Nightline gathered a group of experts to talk about Yates and the potential dangers of post-partum depression in young mothers. Newsweek put together a cover story on Yates with a headline that read “Motherhood and Murder.” As part of the magazine’s package of stories, columnist Anna Quindlen wrote, “Every mother I’ve asked about the Yates case has the same reaction. She’s appalled; she’s aghast. And then she gets this look. And the look says that at some forbidden level she understands.”No one was quoted more in the aftermath of the drownings than Michelle Oberman, a professor at DePaul University College of Law and the co-author of Mothers Who Kill Their Children, which was recently released not by some cheesy paperback true-crime publisher but by the esteemed New York University Press. Citing research into a decade’s worth of child murders at the hands of mothers—there are some two hundred such murders a year in the United States—Oberman told me that a murderous mother “is often a reflection of the society in which the murder occurs. There are women with serious disorders who cannot parent their children the way social norms dictate, so they begin to feel more and more desperate.”
Meanwhile, a new generation of psychiatrists was leaping into the Yates media fray to state that the medical establishment was still not grasping the significance of the emotional anxieties in new mothers. They pointed out that some 80 percent of new mothers reportedly experience some form of depressed mood within the first two or three weeks of giving birth; between 5 and 20 percent experience more severe post-partum depression; and roughly one in one thousand experiences a devastating post- partum psychosis in which she loses contact with reality, starts hearing voices, and experiences hallucinations that could lead her to take her own life or the life of someone else.
One of those frequently interviewed psychiatrists was 41-year-old Lucy Puryear, who is on the faculty of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. She said she was “amazed” at how many women she meets suffer from this kind of depression, which has never been properly diagnosed. When I asked Puryear how quickly post-partum depression, which is characterized by withdrawal, despondency, and fatigue, could lead to post-partum psychosis, she replied that such an event would be “extremely rare.” But if it did happen, she said, “it could happen in the space of a week or two.”
All this talk in the news media set off something of minor panic—at least in Houston. Within a week after the drownings, four women called Child Protective Services and asked that someone come get their children because they were suffering from post-partum depression and were not sure what they might do. It was an interesting response considering that no one was sure what level of post-partum depression Yates had endured and what the long-term mental repercussions had been. (The only information about her post-partum problems has come from her brothers and her husband; the doctors who have treated her remain tight-lipped.)
In fact, no one had any real idea when Yates’s mental illness began—one longtime friend said she had displayed minor depression back in high school—and no one was sure what caused it to escalate. One of her brothers said he noticed “changes” in Yates’s demeanor even before she began having children in 1994. The slide continued with a miscarriage between the births of her third and fourth children. Little by little, she withdrew. Her first suicide attempt—she took an overdose of her father’s Alzheimer’s medication—came in June 1999, four months after the birth of her fourth child. Back then, a neighbor would later say, she seemed to be struggling, trying to care for her father and her children at the same time. But if that was the source of her stress, Yates never talked about it. She had become so private, one of her brothers later said, that she wouldn’t tell anyone what led to her attempted suicide.
After hospitalizations and intensive drug treatments, there were times when her condition seemed to improve. Her husband said that at one point she completely “snapped out of it” after a regimen of anti-depressants and Haldol, a powerful drug used to treat delusions, schizophrenia, and mania. But after her father’s death this past spring, in a bedroom at her mother’s house, she held a knife against her throat and threatened to kill herself. She was hospitalized again. When she was released, Russell’s mother came each day to help her care for the children. One day she saw Andrea in one of the rooms, straightening it to make room for the baby’s crib. She decided that Andrea must be feeling better. But the next morning, one hour before her mother-in-law was scheduled to arrive, Andrea and the children kissed her husband good-bye as he left for work, then she took the children inside to drown them.
Today, what’s left is a lot of finger-pointing, and much of it is directed at Russell Yates. “Am I the only person wondering exactly what Russell Yates was thinking every morning when he left his house and went off to work … leaving his five children at home alone with a mother who was so depressed that in 1999 she tried to kill herself?” snapped Jan Jarboe Russell in her San Antonio Express-News column. Andrea’s brothers and sister have told the press that Russell did not give his wife a break from the stress—they say she never had time away from the kids—and that there was no reason for him to try for a fifth child after the depression Andrea had experienced from the birth of their fourth.
Did Russell spend more time trying to hide his wife’s illness than trying to fix it? His friends insist he was doing everything he could to help Andrea get well, taking her to a variety of hospitals and doctors, keeping track of her prescriptions on a board at home, and even inventing little games with his children that they hoped would coax her out of her dark mood. “He didn’t see what was coming,” says his friend Rick Mayfield. “Do you really think that if he thought his wife was going to kill his children, he would have gone to work?”
It could well be that none of this would have happened if Andrea had remained on the anti-psychotic drug Haldol. According to Russell, she was taken off the medication two weeks before the children’s deaths. But who knows if that would have saved her? Who knows what might have happened if she had spent more time away from the kids, if she had not led such an isolated life (the Yateses didn’t even attend church), or if more of her neighbors had taken the time to talk to her?
Andrea herself certainly isn’t offering any insight. When her brother and sister visited her recently in jail, she stared blankly at a wall, her long hair askew and her arms tightly folded. She didn’t seem to know what had happened to her children, but at one point she did ask if a funeral had occurred. They told her it had. It had been a beautiful funeral, in fact. Russell himself had delivered the eulogy, speaking for nearly an hour about his kids. At the end, he approached each of the children’s small white caskets and tucked their baby blankets over their bodies. Then, just before he left each child, he bid them farewell. To Noah he said, “You’re in a better place.”
It was an odd comment to make—for that was exactly what had driven his wife to murder the children. She too had wanted them to be in a better place.
Pages: 1 2
My Library
