Yates found not guilty by reason of insanity
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Rusty Yates told The Associated Press that Andrea Yates never told him, ?I finally did it? in her telephone call to him after the drownings, as a Houston police officer testified during her second trial.
?It?s been printed in papers as fact, and it?s absolutely not true,? he said. ?Much of the state?s case was built on lies.?
A jury on Wednesday found Andrea Yates not guilty by reason of insanity in the June 2001 bathtub drownings of her children. She was retried after an earlier murder conviction was overturned because of erroneous testimony about a nonexistent ?Law & Order? television episode.
On Thursday, the 42-year-old will be committed to a state mental hospital.
Rusty Yates said that on the day his children died, Andrea had called him and asked him to come home. When he and his mother arrived and learned the news from police officers, he reminded his mother saying that Andrea had filled the bathtub for no apparent reason about a month or so earlier.
?I said, ?I guess she?d been thinking about this for some time and finally did it,?? Yates said. He said an officer must have overhead the conversation and took it out of context.
Yates, an engineer at NASA?s Johnson Space Center, said he plans to visit his ex-wife regularly, but his role in her life will diminish as he moves on with his own. He remarried in March and has now has two stepsons.
?I don?t forget my children, and I don?t forget Andrea, but I don?t dwell on it either. I try to remember my children fondly,? he said. ?I?m building new life … and have a new family and am more focused on them.?
For his ex-wife to ever be released from the mental hospital will require a complicated evaluation process. Experts say it can take decades before psychiatrists decide a patient is healthy enough to leave, and even then a judge can reject those findings.
Defense attorneys never disputed Andrea drowned the children, but they said she suffered from severe postpartum psychosis and, in a delusional state, believed Satan was inside her.
She believed she was trying to save the children from hell by drowning 6-month-old Mary, 2-year-old Luke, 3-year-old Paul, 5-year-old John and 7-year-old Noah, they told the jury.
?It?s this simple: This lady never did anything, anything wrong in her whole life,? defense attorney Wendell Odom said. ?She?s mentally ill. She wakes up one morning. She drowns her five kids. Come on ? we all know she?s insane, and it?s a shame that it took us this long to finally get the right verdict.?
Prosecutors had maintained that although Andrea Yates was mentally ill, she failed to meet the state’s definition of insanity: being so severely mentally ill that she did not know her actions were wrong.
The foreman of the jury said Thursday that he and the others used both their heads and their hearts in finding her not guilty by reason of insanity. He said they had ?some emotional difficulty? reaching its unanimous verdict would have had an easier time if they could have found her ?guilty but insane.?
Wednesday morning, before announcing the verdict, they asked to see a picture of the five young children, then sat in silence for 10 minutes ? 2 minutes for each child ? remembering the victims, foreman Todd Frank, a 33-year-old marketing manager with his own young son, told ?Good Morning America? on Thursday.