common practice, you know? day shift. slow. guys killing time, helping each other out. eight minutes after dialing 911, andrea yates calls her husband rusty yates and tells him it s time to come home. it s not yet 10:00 a.m. i couldn t imagine what actually happened but i m worried. andrea called me was firm tone, said i needed to come home, so i did. i moved in to the house and david approached me right at the hallway and i said, when s going on? he looked at me and said, it s a homicide. so i looked to my right and down and there was yates. she was sitting on the couch. just sitting there. she never looked at me. i walked in to the room and i was expecting to find a man on the floor. a body. and i was looking around, looking around. saying, what? i see this little tiny head. and it was looking right at me. and a little head was about maybe ten or 15 feet from me at the edge of the bed. i said, what in the world? and i thought it was a doll. and i walked over to that little tiny
permit. the yates family was very religious. from a religion standpoint, i would say we re both pretty conservative. rusty had been serious about religion since college. she introduced andrea to the unconventional preachings of a man named michael woroniecki. woroniecki, his family traveled around the country or certainly around texas in a bus prosthetizing i think mostly on college campuses. the female student that is they were going to hell because they were studying and learning in a material world when they should be out there reproducing. the dilemma with his message as i understand it is that if you think you re saved, if you think you re a christian, if you think you re going to heaven, then that proves you re going to hell because that s prideful and only god knows who s going to
until the following march when andrea s father died. andrea s such a wonderful, caring person. she cared deeply for her father. and felt a great deal of responsibility because she was the nurse in the family. come march 31st, she s taken by rusty to devereaux hospital. rusty s concerned about her. andrea was diagnosed with major depressive disorder, postpartum onset. but at that time, hospitals weren t educated about postpartum illness, psychiatrists weren t educated about postpartum illness. after the 2001 hospitalization, andrea continued seeing a hospital psychiatrist as an outpatient. but she wasn t put back on haldol and rusty hesitated to question the doctor.
whatever the legal arguments, the public ire was also stoked by the way rusty yates was reacting, both to the murders and to the surrounding media circus. the woman here is not the woman that killed my children. she obviously wasn t herself. i think that will come out. i m just completely surprised that people think that, well, because i defend andrea as being a wonderful mother that she shouldn t be punished, that somehow, you know, i m condoning her actions. you know? her actions were almost indescribably devastating to me and my family. he took it upon himself like it was it was some kind of bath of honor and on tv, and giving interviews and all kinds of stuff which is macabre and then at the funeral, he had a slide show of his kids. the funeral took place one week after the murders and sealed the public s view of rusty yates. i think people want to assign blame. how did this happen? why did this happen?
mrs. yates would have another opportunity to have her case heard. dr. dietz, in my view, made an honest mistake. the reversal, though a major victory, was only the start. the defense team pressed for an outright dismissal of all charges, arguing that a second trial would constitute double jeopardy. finally, in january 2005, some three and a half years after the original conviction, the texas state supreme court issued an opinion. double jeopardy did not apply, but andrea yates would be granted a new trial. tonight, she drowned her five children, was sentenced to spend the rest of her life in prison. but recently a texas appeals court overturned andrea yates conviction. pending the new trial, the defense succeeded in having yates moved from the mountain view prison facility to the rusing state hospital. how s she being treated? on the whole, i think they ve treated her pretty well. defense trial prep involved community outreach. they did all they they could to educate the p