Killings Put Dark Side of Mom’s Life in Light

Andrea Yates was the shy, pretty baby of a suburban family, a girl who spoiled the German shepherd, raced on the swim team and graduated valedictorian of her high school class.

Until this summer, her story appeared to be that of a simple, quiet and utterly unremarkable Christian woman. She wore neat spectacles and had streaming hair. She married a NASA computer expert, settled in a plain brick house a few miles from her childhood home and had five babies.

Family members describe a woman who doted on her four little boys and baby girl, tooled around town in her Toyota and toiled for hours to concoct elaborate cookies and cakes.

June 20 dawned muggy and hazy in south Houston. Andrea Yates awoke and waited for her husband to pull out of the driveway. She stopped the drain and splashed the bathtub full of water.

And then, she told police, she drowned Mary, Luke, Paul, John and Noah, in quick succession.

A morbid mystery festers here in these sleepy, working-class streets cut like verdant tunnels between the Christian churches and gasoline stations: What happened to Andrea Yates?

A woman without so much as a speeding ticket. A mother who delighted her children with American Indian costumes fashioned from grocery sacks and shepherd suits made of blankets.

Docile, clever Andrea, the family’s selfless caretaker, had battled depression for years and had attempted suicide. But this woman, a modern-day Medea? Talk to her neighbors, her family, her husband. They mouth the same words, over and over.

I don’t know.

On July 2, Andrea Yates turned 37, locked away in the psychiatric wing of the Harris County Jail. When her older brother and sister came to visit, she spoke through a glass wall, telling them Satan had seeped into her soul.

“How long do you think the devil has been in me?” she asked.

Andrea is 5 feet, 6 inches. In the old photographs, her eyes are bright, her cheeks full. She wears neat clothes, and a crescent smile reveals perfect teeth.

“Andrea is a beautiful person,” says her mother-in-law, Dora Yates.

When the family talks about Andrea--even, it seems, when Andrea talks about Andrea--there is a gully between the woman and her sickness. These are not Andrea’s deeds, the language implies. Andrea is light; insanity is shadow.

“I’m torn. One side of me, you know, blames her because she did it,” said Russell “Rusty” Yates, her husband. “But the other side of me says, ‘Well, she didn’t, because she wasn’t in the right frame of mind.’ ”

Everybody knew about Andrea’s sickness. It punctuated the barbecues and picnics, the Christmases and Easters. The suicide attempts, stony silences and stints in the mental hospital drew exclamation points in the family’s history.

Who can say when it began? Two years ago, maybe three or four. Looking back, nobody can be sure.

Rusty Yates blames the heavy wave of postpartum depression that washed his wife away after the 1999 birth of her fourth child, Luke, and resurged after Mary arrived in November.

Family members blame grief over the Alzheimer’s disease that ate away their father, thought by thought, pound by pound. They blame his March death. They say sadness runs in the family. They blame genetics.

Two years ago, Andrea gulped a handful of her father’s pills and lay down to die in her childhood home. Jutta Kennedy discovered her daughter, and Andrea was revived.

Andrea was committed to a mental facility. She hated the cold, clinical corridors. She glared and muttered. “She was angry,” said her brother, Andrew Kennedy, 46. “She didn’t like being there, that’s for sure.”

This spring, Andrea stood in her mother’s bathroom, clutched a knife to her own throat and threatened to cut. She wound up back in the hospital.

Doctors set her on a rotation of psychiatric drugs: Wellbutrin and Effexor. Haldol, used to treat psychosis.

She came home again, but she was disappearing, her bones showing beneath her skin. She didn’t eat or talk or smile. Telephone calls to the house went ignored. One day, Andrew Kennedy realized he hadn’t heard his sister laugh in years.

The family strained to cope. Rusty Yates’ mother moved down from Tennessee and took an apartment close to the Yates’ home. She’d help baby-sit.

Even 7-year-old Noah worried about his mother. Rusty Yates said his oldest son helped him draw up a list of ideas. How can Mom cope with her stress? They tacked their brainstorm to a wall in the house.

In early June, Andrea’s family met for a steak dinner in a suburban restaurant. Andrea was skinny and silent, but she ate. Looking back, her brother can’t remember a single word she said.

“She didn’t really talk,” Andrew Kennedy said, shrugging. “But, see, she was taking care of the kids.”

It was the last time he saw the children alive.

Insanity: the simplest and shortest explanation. The defense Andrea’s attorney might present to a jury, a classification that could spare the mother from lethal injection in a county notorious for doling out death sentences.

But insanity can’t explain itself. Where does it come from? How can one Andrea Yates take the place of another?

She was the youngest of five children born to a Massachusetts mechanic and his immigrant wife. Andrew Kennedy was a World War II Air Force pilot stationed in Hanover, Germany, when he lost his heart to Jutta Karin Koehler, a local translator. They married, crossed the Atlantic and settled in Houston.

It was a simple Roman Catholic family. Jutta minded the children; her husband taught auto shop at a high school.

There was water everywhere back then; the geography of Andrea’s childhood was liquid. She came of age on the salty lip of the Gulf of Mexico.

If she wasn’t on the beach, she was splashing in the YMCA pool. If she wasn’t sailing the choppy Gulf waters, she was shoving a fast flip turn through the chlorinated depths. She was captain of her high school swim team.

Andrea took after her father: stoic, carefully controlled. Years later, when her father lay dying, Andrea haunted his bedside. When his body had crumbled, faded too weak to breathe or eat, she wanted to keep him on feeding tubes.

“It was real hard on her,” her brother Andrew said.

In high school, the dark, lithe Andrea shied away from dances and parties, stuck close to home, lost herself in biology and chemistry tomes.

On gray mornings, the kids hauled themselves from warm beds before sunrise to tend to their paper route. Andrea dangled her legs over the back of her mother’s station wagon, heaving Houston Chronicles to porches and curbs.

In those days, an introspective Andrea fretted over theology. She conferred with her brother about God, mysteries of existence and the human soul. She was full of questions.

As an adult, Andrea Yates knew death. She’d seen it before, had mopped its sweats, massaged its cramps and drugged its aches. She earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, then worked downtown at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, a celebrated research hospital.

In 1989, she met the National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist who rented a neighboring unit in her apartment complex. She fell in love. Rusty Yates was the first boyfriend her family can recall.

Norman Rockwell could have painted Rusty Yates into the world, sketched his jug ears and freckles; his clipped hair and the bland, hopeful light in his eye. He was everything Andrea wasn’t. He was charismatic and outgoing, a star football player at his Tennessee high school.

Time had nothing on Rusty and Andrea. Just 10 months after their wedding day in 1993, she gave birth to Noah.

“Both of us really went into our marriage saying, you know, we’ll have as many kids as come along,” Rusty Yates said.

Rusty Yates, a summa cum laude graduate of Auburn University, was bringing home $80,000 a year. Andrea quit her job to care for Noah.

The young family lived in the extended bedroom of the Johnson Space Center, a landscape of banana and chestnut trees; subdivisions arranged in leafy patches around squat strip malls. This is where NASA’s workers raise their children, shop in cavernous, air-conditioned plazas and chomp burgers at neon-lit eateries.

To their neighbors, the Yateses were an attractive family. He showed the boys the finer points of dribble and shoot; she cuddled her babies in the grass.

“She used to sit under the tree with the kids,” said Rafael Badillo, a cook who lives across the street from the Yates house. “But she didn’t talk to no one.”

The children stayed home all day. Andrea gave them lessons on letters and numbers; phonics and Christian theology.

Rusty Yates coached a T-ball team of home-schooled kids, and the older boys played. The games were comfortable. Like the Yates kids, most of the children on the team had biblical names. They prayed before taking to the field.

The family belonged to no particular congregation. She grew up Catholic and he was Methodist.

The couple contributed money to a religious ministry based in the Pacific Northwest, Andrea’s brother said. Her siblings and mother didn’t even know about the group until they found proselytizing letters in their mailboxes months ago. The missives mixed Bible verses with the announcement that Catholics are hell-bound.

In the late 1990s, the couple traded their first house for a smaller, cheaper home a few miles away. And they bought a bus.

The genesis of the hulking vehicle is unclear. The couple told Andrew Kennedy they bought it from a member of the ministry. Complete with kitchen, lined with bunk beds, it reminded Andrea’s family of a rock ‘n’ roll tour bus. The gasoline tank holds 400 gallons; it has an electric generator. It is still parked in the Yateses’ frontyard, the roof peeking over a pine fence.

The couple dreamed of cross-country travel, of hauling their house on wheels. They rumbled off to Florida at least once and stayed for a time at a campground. Noah spent long afternoons hunting exotic bugs.

But the trip, apparently, did little to soothe Andrea’s depression. And despite her frazzled state, the babies kept coming, regular as the seasons.

So many things were never discussed. Andrea stayed behind her walls.

“Are you all right, Andrea?” her brother often asked.

“Fine,” she’d say, and that look came over her face, just like her father before he melted into the fogs of Alzheimer’s.

“That robotic stare,” Andrew Kennedy said.

On June 20, Rusty Yates hadn’t been at work an hour yet when the telephone rang.

“You need to come home,” Andrea said.

Her tone scared her husband. “Is anybody hurt?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“The children,” Andrea said. “All of them.”

A week later, in the thick moments before an afternoon rain swept in, Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 3, Luke, 2 and Mary, just more than 6 months old, were buried in donated plots in a lush cemetery near the interstate.

Afterward, Andrew Kennedy visited his sister. She stared blankly and asked whether there was a funeral.

Yes, he told her gently. It went all right.

After that, he couldn’t coax much conversation from his stony, silent sibling. In the end, worn out by Andrea’s empty eyes and limp shoulders, he got up and walked away.

That night, Rusty Yates went home. He dribbled his basketball out onto the blacktop. He shot it into the sky, basket after basket.

His neighbors watched, silent and invisible in their homes, as the night spilled over the street. They filled with sadness but stayed put, because there was nothing to say.