Andrea was born in Hallsville, Texas, the youngest of the five children of Jutta Karin Koehler, a German immigrant, and Andrew Emmett Kennedy, whose parents were Irish immigrants. She suffered from bulimia during her teenage years. She also suffered from depression, and at 17 she spoke to a friend about suicide.
She graduated from Milby High School in 1982. She was the class valedictorian, captain of the swim team, and an officer in the National Honor Society. She completed a two-year pre-nursing program at the University of Houston and graduated from the University of Texas School of Nursing. From 1986 until 1994 she worked as a registered nurse at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. In summer 1989 she met Russell “Rusty” Yates, two months her junior, at the Sunscape Apartments in Houston. They soon moved in together and were married on April 17, 1993.<1>
Just after Andrea and her husband Rusty were married in 1993, they proclaimed they “would seek to have as many babies as nature allowed.”
On June 20, 2001, Rusty went to work and left Andrea and their five children at home. She then drowned all of them.
She had been suffering for some time with very severe postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis, and schizophrenia. She was represented by Houston criminal defense attorney, George Parnham. Chuck Rosenthal, the district attorney in Harris County, asked for the death penalty in her 2002 trial. Her case placed the M’Naghten Rules, along with the Irresistible Impulse Test, a legal test for sanity, under close public scrutiny in the United States. She was convicted of capital murder. After the guilty verdict, but before sentencing, the state abandoned its request for the death penalty in light of false testimony by one of its expert psychiatric witnesses. She was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years. But then her verdict was overturned on appeal.
On July 26, 2006, the Texas jury in her retrial found Yates was not guilty by reason of insanity. She was consequently committed by the court to the North Texas State Hospital, Vernon Campus, a high-security mental health facility in Vernon, where she received medical treatment and was a roommate of Dena Schlosser, another woman who committed infanticide by killing her infant daughter. In January 2007, she was moved to a low-security state mental hospital in Kerrville: the Kerrville State Hospital.
CITED REFERENCES
1. Wikipedia contributors, “Andrea Yates,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Yates (accessed April 4, 2019).
