As Ex-Husband Remarries, Yates Gets Second Trial

March 19, 2006 — -- Russell Yates got married this weekend on a gray, cloudy afternoon, just days before the start of his ex-wife Andrea's second trial in the drowning deaths of their five children.

He married Laura Arnold, a tall willowy blond, whom he met at the church they both attend, the same church where the funerals were held for his children. He left the ceremony in a red Corvette, with his new wife at his side.

Andrea Yates is aware her ex-husband is remarrying, but is not bitter, said George Parnham, one of her attorneys.

"I think that she wishes him the best," Parnham said. "She is grieved that she has put him through what happened. She has accepted complete responsibility for what has happened on June the 20th of '01. She blames nobody but herself, and she understands he needs to get on with his life."

Yates lingers in a mental institution under intensive psychiatric care. But many are still baffled how a loving mother could do what she did to the children she clearly loved.

Once again, she is pleading not guilty by reason of insanity to charges of capital murder in the deaths of three of her five children.

She is being tried a second time because the First Court of Appeals in Houston threw out her conviction last year, citing false testimony from a key prosecution witness.

Thousands of pages of her medical records, which document her slide into psychosis triggered by postpartum depression after the birth of each of her children, have been entered into evidence

Defense attorney Wendell Odom hopes this time he can make a jury understand her mental illness.

"This is a woman whose instincts to save her children were completely warped," he said, "because of schizophrenia and because of this postpartum onslaught and hormones. But what happens is -- try to put logic to her thinking; her thinking is not logical -- she is thinking she is saving them. Her intent was not to murder the children but to save them."