Yates Sobs as Jury Sees Photos of Dead Children

Forced to stare at photographs of five drowned children on Thursday, members of the mostly female jury at Andrea Pia Yates’ murder trial rocked in their seats, chewed their lips and gulped visibly. A few brushed away tears or pressed clenched fists to their mouths.

As one macabre image after the next flickered onto a looming screen, Yates slumped into her chair and shuddered with sobs. The 37-year-old mother has confessed to systematically drowning her children in the bathtub last summer. She has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

Except for the muted weeping of witnesses, the courtroom was silent as prosecutors showed the jury a series of photographs and a video shot by detectives the afternoon of June 20, just hours after the children were killed.

The four youngest children were found curled together on their parents’ bed. Yates told detectives that she had carried their dripping bodies down the hallway one at a time and tucked them beneath a sheet. They looked like they had tumbled into bed and fallen asleep, heads on their parents’ pillows.

The baby, 6-month-old Mary, was snuggled into the crook of 5-year-old John’s arm--her hand limp in his. At the other end of the bed, Paul and Luke lay side by side. When prosecutors showed a close-up shot of Paul’s face, Yates let out a jagged sob.

Down the hall, 7-year-old Noah floated face down in the milky bath water. It was hard to kill Noah, his mother had told detectives. He fought the hardest and had managed to slip his head above water more than once.

Russell Yates will testify in his wife’s defense. He spent Thursday morning seated on a wooden bench outside the courtroom. As witnesses and journalists emerged, red-eyed and sniffling, he looked on with interest. “Looks like they’re having a pretty rough time in there,” he said.

In the afternoon, the jury listened to a recording of the stilted, often monosyllabic confession that Andrea Yates made to homicide detective Eric Mehl on the afternoon of the drownings. In a flat voice, the mother described her morning: She woke up, ate cereal with the children and waited for her husband to drive off to work.

“After Rusty left, you filled the tub with water, correct?” Mehl asked.

“Yes.”

“How high did you fill it?”

“Three inches from the top.”

“What was your intent?” Mehl asked. “What were you about to do?”

“Drown the children,” Yates replied.

“Why were you going to drown the children?” Mehl asked.

She didn’t answer; about 15 seconds passed.

“Was it because the children had done something?”

“No,” Yates said.

“You weren’t mad at the children?”

“No.”

Yates told Mehl that she had been thinking of drowning the children for two years. “Probably since I realized I had not been a good mother to them,” she said. “They weren’t developing correctly.”

She had shoved them all into the water: First Paul, 3, then Luke, 2, followed by John. Then she lifted a sobbing Mary from her carrier and lowered her into the tub. “What’s the matter with Mary?” Noah asked when he entered the bathroom. His mother held him underwater while his baby sister floated alongside, she told detectives. Then she carried Mary down the hall to join her dead brothers.

While prosecutors delved into the grisly slayings, Yates’ lawyers pointed out the domestic details of the household: the photographs on the refrigerator, a football dropped in the hall, rubber ducks scattered in the bathroom. “Bunk beds, toys,” Wendell Odom said. “Looks like boys, doesn’t it?”

“Weren’t those five bodies in absolute, stark contrast to everything else you saw in that house?” Odom asked Officer Glenn West, who shot the video of the Yates household.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

Defense lawyer George Parnham pointed out that Yates gave short, direct answers during her confession. A woman with a long history of depression, psychosis and suicide attempts, Yates was too sick to string together narrative explanations, he said. He pressed Mehl for details of Yates’ behavior. “Did she appear to be emotionless? She wasn’t crying? She wasn’t wailing or moaning?”

“No,” the detective replied each time.

Yates’ lawyers are arguing that she was too delusional to know the difference between right and wrong. If they convince the jury Yates was insane, she likely will be sent to a mental hospital. Otherwise, she could face life in prison or death by injection.

“I realize that it’s time to be punished,” Yates told Mehl in the confession played Thursday.

“How did you see drowning your children as a way to be punished?” Silence.

“Did you want the criminal justice system to punish you or did you . . .”

“Yes,” Yates interrupted.