Crime Scene
Suzanne O'Malley, the author of Are You There Alone? The Unspeakable Crime of Andrea Yates, talks about mental illness, postpartum psychosis, and Rusty Yates.
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SO: In March of 2002, Andrea Yates was found guilty on three counts of capital murder. She was only tried on three counts—for the deaths of Luke, John, and Mary—because the prosecution wanted to preserve its option to prosecute the other two counts in case they could not get a conviction the first time around. Andrea was sentenced to life in prison; she narrowly escaped the death penalty because during the sentencing period, it came out that a key witness for the state had erred in his testimony. Wisely, in light of that information, the prosecution pulled back on its call to give Andrea death, and sent messages to the jury, I think, that giving her life in prison would be just fine.
texasmonthly.com: Now that the criminal trial is over, what are your reflections on the way the Andrea Yates case was handled by the state?
SO: At some point, it occurred to me that one million dollars was a lot of public money to spend on a trial for Andrea Yates. On both sides, prosecution and defense, countless expert witnesses were paid to decide whether Andrea was legally sane at the time she committed the crime. How many expert witnesses do we need to argue over a definition? If you add up the public cost of the criminal trial, the cost of the forthcoming appeals process, and the cost to keep someone in prison for life, you begin to question the logic; perhaps it would have been more economical and humane for the district attorney to say, "Let's accept a plea and put Andrea Yates in a secure mental health facility, maybe for the rest of her life. Let's skip the media circus and the million dollar trial."
texasmonthly.com: Do you think the Andrea Yates trial would have turned out differently in another state? How does Texas compare with other states in terms of laws on mentally ill defendants and insanity pleas?
SO: Without making any judgment as to whether I agree with the way the case was tried, I think Andrea Yates's conviction and life sentence would've been the same in a majority of states. The laws here are nearly identical to sanity definitions in more than half of the states. I think the jurors took their task very seriously, I think they deliberated hard and well, and I think it was a tough case.
texasmonthly.com: Rusty Yates, Andrea's husband, was a rather easy target for the media in the period immediately following the crime; on paper, he looked like an ignorant man who had barricaded his mentally ill wife in their suburban home, forcing her to give birth to his five children against her will. This was, more or less, your opinion of him when you went down to Houston—but something made you change your mind. What did you find out about him, and why the change of heart?
SO: What made me change my mind about Rusty Yates was a two-thousand-page stack of medical records. Within those records were accounts from physicians and nurses who had treated Andrea Yates, and the medical records were very consistent: During Andrea's four hospitalizations prior to the murders, Rusty visited his wife every chance he got, and his dedication is recorded right there in black and white—nurses described him arriving with flowers for Andrea, or calling at midnight to ask how his wife was doing. Sometimes, he brought the five children to visit their mother in the hospital. I am a mother, and I know what it's like to take a child to a hospital, let alone five at once. Just getting them dressed and strapping them into their seatbelts is quite an accomplishment. So it became clear to me that Rusty was not the ignorant, insensitive husband who had deserted his wife in her time of need, but rather a normal man struggling with his wife's illness.
texasmonthly.com: I know you spent many hours interviewing Rusty Yates; based on what he told you, how does he view his wife's horrific act?
SO: Your question reminds me of a particular experience I shared with Rusty Yates: I was with him the day of the Columbia shuttle disaster; he and I were driving to visit Andrea at Rusk Penitentiary when the shuttle broke up over Texas. By the time we arrived at Rusk, pieces of the shuttle were falling on the building's metal roof. Rusty, as irony would have it, is a NASA computer engineer, and shuttle safety systems are part of his job. To me, the shuttle's explosion that day embodied the unexpected, catastrophic collapse of his world. I think he came to view the demise of his family in the same way he saw the shuttle disaster—both were these impossibly terrible, disastrous accidents, and no one really knew how they could've happened. For Rusty, safety is what he does for a living, and he tried to run his family that way, but despite his efforts, his life was struck by this shocking, unbelievable tragedy.
texasmonthly.com: Why do you think the public and the media reacted to the Yates murders the way they did?
SO: I think we need to blame the Yates family rather than think of Andrea's crime as the product of a severe mental disorder. As long as we can find some isolated factor or some bad guy to blame, then it distances us from that kind of horror. We want to be reassured that something so tragic and incomprehensible couldn't happen to our families, and I think that's an understandable, human response to such grim circumstances. But the truth is, the statistics don't lie, and one or two out of every one thousand women will suffer from postpartum psychosis. It's a real medical emergency that threatens the lives of both the mother and her children. In the final analysis, if any one thing had gone right, those children would still be alive today and the Yates family would be living in anonymity; had the doctor decided to change Andrea's medication, had Rusty overslept that morning, this might not have happened.
Resources
The Mental Health Association of Greater Houston http://www.mhahouston.org
Postpartum Resource Center of Texas http://www.texaspostpartum.org
Postpartum Support International
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