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Rusty Yates, the former husband of Andrea Yates, the woman infamous for drowning their five young children in 2001, has found a way to forgive her. Rusty, 59, communicates with Andrea, 60, who resides in Kerrville State Hospital, at least once a month. Their conversations often center around their deceased children, who would now be adults.
Rusty maintains regular phone calls with Andrea at the mental hospital, which houses individuals deemed incompetent to stand trial or found “not guilty by reason of insanity.” He has also visited her there. The couple divorced in 2002, and Rusty has since remarried and had another child, though that marriage also ended in divorce.
Rusty continues to work as a NASA engineer, the job he held when the tragic incident occurred. He also runs a website dedicated to preserving the memory of his children. Reflecting on the tragedy, Rusty told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo last year, “Andrea was a wonderful mother. When someone acts so out of character like that, it’s a flag that something else is going on. As far as forgiveness goes, it’s kind of the start.”
He further explained, “The next step of forgiveness, I’d say, is understanding it’s a sickness. But for her sickness, she never, ever, ever would have harmed our children.”
On June 20, 2001, Andrea Yates, then 37, drowned her five children — Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 3, Luke, 2, and Mary, 6 months — in the bathtub of their suburban Houston home. She waited for Rusty to leave for work before carrying out the killings. Andrea was charged with five counts of capital murder. The prosecution labeled the crime as “heinous” and sought the death penalty. However, the defense argued that Andrea’s severe depression and psychosis following her recent childbirth led to the tragic event.
Initially, Andrea was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison. Even while incarcerated, she exhibited delusional thoughts, telling authorities she had contemplated killing her children for two years to save them from eternal damnation. She told her prison psychiatrist, “My children weren’t righteous. They stumbled because I was evil. The way I was raising them, they could never be saved. They were doomed to perish in the fires of hell.”
Her lawyers appealed the case based on her mental state, resulting in a retrial where she was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 2006. A judge committed her to Kerrville State Hospital, where she has remained, declining to petition for release.
Rusty’s perspective on Andrea’s mental illness has significantly changed over the years. In 2001, he was notably skeptical of her postpartum depression and psychosis defense, once stating that depressed people “just need a swift kick in the pants.”
Today, he likens her mental illness to a physical ailment, explaining, “If I were driving our Suburban down the street and had a heart attack and swerved into oncoming traffic and everyone in the car died but me, would they prosecute me for capital murder and rub my face in crime scene photos? Of my children? I don’t think so. But to me, it’s 100% exactly the same.”
