Jury Rejects Insanity Claim, Convicts Mother of Murder

A jury took less than four hours Tuesday to find housewife Andrea Pia Yates guilty of capital murder for drowning her children in the family bathtub on a sunny summer morning.

The 37-year-old mother, who said she was insane at the time, could be executed for systematically putting her five children to death in a tub of water. A second round of testimony is to begin Thursday to decide Yates’ punishment.

After a stunningly fast review of weeks of complex psychiatric testimony, the panel of four men and eight women rejected Yates’ insanity claims. From the time Judge Belinda Hill uttered the first “guilty,” the hushed rows of witnesses, family members and friends sat motionless with shock. Even when court was dismissed and the audience filed out, somber silence filled the room and the corridors beyond.

Yates turned to look at her mother and brother, and choked back a sob. She did not glance in the direction of her husband, who testified in her defense. When the verdict was read, Russell “Rusty” Yates gasped and dropped his head into his hands. He stayed hunched in his plastic chair, stared at the floor between his knees and shook his head from side to side.

The jury spent Tuesday morning listening to angry prosecutors argue in fiery inflections that Yates must be punished. She plotted the deaths meticulously, carried them out mercilessly and showed clear signs of understanding what she’d done, they said.

“The children had become a hindrance, and she wanted them gone,” prosecutor Kaylynn Williford said, pacing before the jury. “She made the choice knowing it was a sin in the eyes of God and a crime in eyes of the state.”

Yates waited until her husband left for work last June, then filled the bathtub and drowned her children. Months later, she told a state psychiatrist “it was a bad idea” and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. For years, the former nurse and high school valedictorian had struggled through hospitalizations, suicide attempts and bouts of depression. Her lawyers had hoped the Yates case would go down as a landmark in women’s mental health.

But an insanity plea is difficult to pull off in Texas, where the definition is narrow. Yates needed to convince the jury she couldn’t tell right from wrong when she killed the children--even though she told detectives she understood what she’d done and deserved to be punished.

“The problem with the Texas definition of insanity,” said Gerald Treece, associate dean of South Texas College of Law, “is a person can be totally psychotic and still in that world they know right from wrong.”

After deliberating for two hours, the Yates jury asked a single question: What is the definition of insanity? Soon thereafter, they had a verdict.

“It seems to me we are still back in the days of the Salem witch trials,” said defense lawyer George Parnham, who listened to the verdict with one arm wrapped around a slumped Yates. Her lawyers had called her a loving but sick woman and implored the jury to spare Yates from execution or prison.

“If this woman doesn’t meet the standard for insanity, nobody does,” Parnham said in his subdued closing argument. “We might as well wipe it off the books.”

Yates Tried for Only 3 Killings

Yates stood trial for just three of the killings, a decision that leaves prosecutors the possibility of bringing her back to court in the deaths of Paul, 3, and Luke, 2, if they think her punishment is too light. She has been found guilty of murdering Noah, 7, and John, 5, and in the drowning death she described as the easiest of the five, 6-month-old Mary. She was charged with one count of multiple murder and one count of killing a child younger than 6. Both are capital crimes.

“It’s ludicrous--this woman shouldn’t even be standing trial,” said Cyndie Aquilina, a jury expert for the defense. “You can look at her eyes in the mug shot. That woman was on another planet.”

Defense lawyers described a woman who scratched “666”--the sign of Satan--into her scalp and had hallucinations of cartoon characters talking to her from the television screen. In her psychosis, they said, Yates had come to believe that her children were tainted and bound to go to hell if they grew up.

“She was doing the only thing in the world she thought would save her children from hellfire and damnation,” defense lawyer Wendell Odom told the jury.

But prosecutors insisted Yates knew she had committed a terrible crime. Worried about making a bloody mess, she had decided against stabbing the children, prosecutors said.

Yates held her flailing children underwater so firmly that John’s dead fist still clutched a clump of her hair, prosecutors reminded the jury.

Husband Depicted as Domineering

Yates was a despondent wife who was domineered by a zealously religious Rusty Yates, prosecutors argued. Andrea Yates was haunted by guilt because she was too busy to care for her father, who died of Alzheimer’s a few months before the children’s deaths.

“Maybe she wanted to punish her husband for what she’d been through,” Williford said. “Maybe she wanted to punish her children for taking her away from her father. . . . She was overwhelmed.”

Tuesday morning, as lawyers made their closing arguments, Rusty Yates bounced his legs nervously. He shook his head and heaved sighs during prosecutors’ arguments, jotted notes on a tiny pad and muttered to himself.

“There were a lot of factual errors,” he said afterward. “Anyone who has a mental illness and watched that would be offended.”

Andrea Yates wept quietly when Williford described the deep bruises on the children’s bodies from their struggle against their mother.

Williford’s characterization was relentless: Yates locked the back door and hid the bodies of the first drowning victims lest their older brothers have a chance to escape, she said. Yates later spread the bodies over the bed she shared with her husband and phoned police. When the first officer arrived, she answered the door and said, “I killed my kids.”

Prosecutors have asked for the death penalty, but Yates can only be sent to death row if the jury votes unanimously in favor of execution.

When they decide, jurors will be asked whether Yates poses a continuing threat to society and whether there are mitigating factors against her execution.

“They’re not just her children; they’re not her possessions,” prosecutor Joseph Owmby said. “They belong to us. This will stab your heart every time you see a child laugh.”

Times researcher Lianne Hart contributed to this report.