Andrea Yates Faces Retrial
June 26, 2006 — -- Andrea Yates has trouble sleeping, and still fights deep depression, despite the medications she will be on for the rest of her life, her attorneys say.
Yates' mother, Karin Kennedy, says she still has hallucinations around the anniversary of her children's deaths. Andrea Yates finds some solace in art. She draws pictures of rainbows and flowers that her mother displays in her home.
For Harris County prosecutor Joe Ownby, the case against Yates is very simple. All he has to do is remember the five children who died when she drowned them in the bathtub of her suburban home five years ago.
The crime scene video tape that will once again be played in court haunts many who saw it during the first trial. The police photographer walks in the front door, shows the children's school room, the living room, the kitchen where cereal bowls sit on the table. The camera tracks through the home, showing a child's wet sock in the hallway, then turns into the bathroom where the body of one of her children is face down in the bathtub. The videotape ends in a bedroom where four tiny bodies were laid neatly on a bed and covered with a sheet.
Fairy Caroland, Andreas' relative from her marriage to Russell Yates, sees it differently.
"Andrea was very sick, is still very sick, and suffered from delusions that her children were irreparably harmed and damaged by her,"Caroland said. "And the only way for them to be 'saved' and go to heaven was for them to die at their young ages, so that they could immediately go to God."
Once again, Andrea Yates is being tried on two charges of capital murder in the deaths of three of her five children. Once again she has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
Her defense team and the prosecution agree on one issue: Yates was clearly a troubled mother. But prosecutors contend she knew what she was doing was wrong.
In Texas, that is all that is needed to convince a jury thatYates was mentally ill, but not insane when she decided to systemically down her children one-by-one, at a time when she knew her husband would be at work.
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