What’s just as astonishing is the way Andrea Yates has triggered feelings of-and there’s no other way to say this-sympathy. So far, her deed has been blamed on her post-partum depression after the birth of her fifth child, her fundamentalist religious beliefs, her doctors, her husband, who supposedly didn’t do enough for her, her extended family, who could have helped her more during her times of stress, and her suburban neighbors, who apparently were too consumed with their lives to notice what was going on in hers. The attempt to answer the question of why she did it has become a small industry in this country. Even now, more than a month since the drownings, people cannot stop talking about Andrea Yates.
She gave each of her children a baptism, then laid them out on the bed (except for Noah, who was left in the bathtub) like perfect little Christian saints.Īnd that, in three short paragraphs, sums up one of the most sickening and yet mesmerizing murder stories in modern Texas history. She was a bad mother, she said, and she felt that the children were disabled and not developing normally.Īnd so she decided to send them to God. But she had caught him, brought him back to the tub, and then held him under the water until he could hold his breath no longer. The only one who had given her a problem, she noted, was seven-year-old Noah, who had tried to flee when he saw her drowning his baby sister, Mary. In a calm voice she described how she had filled up her bathtub with water, then held the children, one by one, under the water until their little bodies had stopped squirming. She led the officers past the plaque in the living room that read “Blessed Are the Children” and took them to a back bedroom where four of the Yates children lay shoulder to shoulder, their eyes wide open. Andrea Yates, 36 years old, called the police and asked them to come to the family’s one-story, Spanish-style house in Clear Lake, southeast of Houston. On June 20 she decided she had had enough.
She was so protective of her brood that on trips to the grocery store, she had each of her four boys hold on to a corner of the grocery cart while her infant daughter sat in a car seat in the basket.
#Andrea yate free#
She gave them homemade valentines on Valentine’s Day with personalized coupons promising them free hugs and other treats. She constructed Indian costumes for them from grocery sacks. She was a devout Christian who read Bible stories to her five children. She was such a familiar woman-a quiet, thoughtful, suburban mother with dark brown eyes and a generous smile on her good days.