Let Yates Live So We Can Seek Root of Her Madness

Let me but nurse my baby once again

I fondled it the livelong night

They took it from me, just to give me pain

And now they say I murdered it outright.

*

And indeed the woman had, by drowning. These aren’t the words of Andrea Yates, the Houston woman convicted Tuesday of killing her children. Instead, these lines come from Margaret, the fictional character in “Faust,” the 1808 play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

But there is one difference. Whereas Margaret lives forever as a symbol of maternal madness, Yates could be executed by the state of Texas--and if she dies, a chance to learn more about infanticide will be lost.

We may not know why Yates killed her five children, but now, too late, we know the signs. Start with the attempted suicide in 1999. “I had a fear I would hurt somebody. I thought it better to end my own life and prevent it,” she said later.

But what made her crazy? Was it the ultrafundamentalist preacher who lived with her family for a time, the man who said that women were the root of evil? Or maybe it was the devil himself; after all, when she was jailed for quintuple murder, Yates wanted to shave her body, looking for the numbers “666”.

Could it have been the drugs? In the two years before June 20, 2001, she received four mind-altering prescriptions: for Haldol, Effexor, Wellbutrin and Remeron. Haldol seemed to help the most, but not long before she killed, her doctor took her off it.

Maybe genetics? Yates’ sister and brother have been treated for depression. Another brother is bipolar. And Yates’ 1999 attempt on her own life involved trazodone, a medication prescribed for her mother.

Possibly an obsessive perfectionism? She cooked meals from scratch and made some of her kids’ clothes; she home-schooled. When the police came to her house, responding to her 911 call, she explained her deed in the language of supermom-dom: “They weren’t developing correctly.”

Meanwhile, an undercurrent of threat bubbles through the mommy culture. The late Erma Bombeck, the housewife-turned-humorist, was a gentle soul, but the titles of her books suggest menace amid the crab grass, including “At Wit’s End” and “I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression.” Just last year feminist author Naomi Wolf published “Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood,” in which she tells of one mother who would flee from her crying baby, “go into her bedroom, close the door, and pray, just to keep from harming herself or her daughter.”

In 1999, 593 children younger than 5 were murdered--about one-third by mothers--according to the latest data from the FBI. That’s 593 reasons for studying Yates and mothers like her.

“You can always see effective modes of treatment over time in a patient,” says Dr. Pogos Voskanian, a forensic psychiatrist in Philadelphia. Indeed, with enough data from enough patients, valuable lessons about child-murder--and child-murder prevention--might be learned, Voskanian believes.

But for now, tragedies accumulate: On March 1, Guadalupe Garcia of Plano, Texas, took her 4-month-old daughter to the hospital, complaining that little Yadira couldn’t sleep. The doctor, finding nothing wrong with the infant, turned the mother away. Five days later, the mother allegedly suffocated the baby.

As both the Yates and Garcia cases demonstrate, we have little understanding of why mothers kill their children, let alone how to stop such killing. Terms such as “post-natal” and “postpartum” depression may sound scientific, but they cover a wide amalgam of ill-understood symptoms. Indeed, for the little that we know about child-murder, we might as well say that such mothers are possessed by demons. That was true of the infanticidal Margaret two centuries ago; she saw the devil, “seething all in hell, holding his awful revel.” But after her evil deed, she said simply, “I never shall again be glad.”

Andrea Yates, too, will never again be glad; five ghosts will haunt her forever. But maybe, if she is spared the death penalty, she could be clinically studied with an eye toward what went wrong--and what could go right in future cases. Then her sad life may bring wisdom about prevention, shedding light upon the darkness of her madness.