It was June 20 of 2001 when Russell ‘Rusty’ Yates went out of his house as he usually did to work.
His wife, Andrea Yates, was left alone at home for the total amount of time of a single hour while his mother arrived home to assist her with her motherly chores: they had five children together, of ages ranging from seven years to six months.
However, in this short period of an hour, Andrea quietly and calmly murdered her five children by drowning them in the bathtub, one by one.
But why did she do it? And exactly, how could she?
In this horrendous case of filicide (the murder of one’s children), there are many loose ends and instances of negligence, and we will review them all as we list ten facts on the story of Andrea Yates, mother, and murderer.
10 /10 The Beginning Of A Disease
Andrea Yates was seventeen when she first became depressed and talked with friends about killing herself in 1981.
She struggled with clinical depression and more or less severe psychotic breakouts throughout her life as a young adult, but things only got scary after she met and married Rusty Yates in 1993.
Both assured friends and family that they would have as many children as God intended to give them, and their first son Noah was soon born after less than a year in 1994.
9 /10 First Displays Of Psychosis
At first, it seemed as if Andrea was a good, if overly-protective mother, but things started taking a darker turn with each of the children that the couple had: her depressive states became longer and the psychotic outbursts more severe, and she started chewing her fingers, harming herself and even becoming catatonic and unresponsive when fully experiencing a psychotic episode.
By 1999, she had attempted suicide at least two times, one of them holding a knife against her throat while asking Rusty to let her die.