The Sad Saga of Andrea Yates, 2001
For those of us living in Houston, we vividly remember this story, the trial and the events leading to the verdict; Only to be exonerated several years later for this heinous and vicious act. Everyone blamed the Husband (I was one of them), and felt he should have gone to prison just as she did.
While the article by TIME (below) gives insight into the crime, you can also go here to read the drama as it unfolded on that terrible day in 2001.
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The prosecution in the trial
of Andrea Yates argued that she may have drowned her four young sons and
infant daughter in the family bathtub as a kind of symbolic revenge for
the emptiness of her life with their father, Randy. However, as
shocking as the June 20, 2001 drownings were, much of the speculation
was over Yates' mental condition. Did the fact that she had five
children, each spaced about two years apart, have anything to do with
mental illness, brought on perhaps by repetitive post-partum depression?
And what of her conservative Christian husband and the home-schooling
of the children? How much time did the young mother have to herself?
Absent from Yates was the viciousness of Susan Smith, who had locked her
two young sons in a car on Oct. 25, 1994, let them slide into a lake,
all in order to be free to run off with a wealthy lover. Instead, the
focus was the insidiousness of mental illness. Yates confessed to the
murders and would undergo two trials. The first rejected insanity as a
defense and sent her to prison for life. An appeal gave her a second
trial in which she was found not guilty by reason of insanity. She has
since been committed to a mental health facility. Her husband has
remarried.
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TIME Magazine posted this article online several years ago, along with a list of 24 additional notorious crimes that I have been posting and will continue to post every Saturday on my blog. Hope you enjoy.
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To read the previous 22 crimes - click my logo below.
