Andrea Yates has not been convicted of anything.
A Houston jury convicted her of capital murder in 2002. An appeals court threw the verdict out three years later because the state's key expert had told the jury something that was not true. At the retrial in 2006 a second jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity, and she has been in a state psychiatric hospital ever since. Every year Texas law entitles her to a hearing at which she could ask to be released. Every year, on her own instructions, her lawyer waives it.
Five children died in the bathroom of a house in Houston on the morning of June 20, 2001. She was charged over three of them.
Noah was seven. John was five. Paul was three. Luke was two. Mary was six months old.
The family was living in Clear Lake City. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Mohammed Saeed, had said she should be supervised around the clock, but Rusty Yates left for work that morning and his mother, Dora, was not due for another hour. Andrea filled the bath. She drowned Paul, then Luke, then John, and laid each of them on her bed. She drowned Mary and left her in the water. Noah came in and asked what was wrong with his sister, and then he ran, and she caught him and drowned him beside Mary's body.
She left Noah in the tub, covered the other four with a sheet, and telephoned the police. Then she telephoned her husband and told him to come home. He asked whether one of the children was hurt. She said all of them.
The first officer to reach the house said she came to the door soaking wet and breathing hard and told him she had killed her children.
Nothing about that morning was ever in dispute at either trial. Neither side questioned that she had drowned them, and neither side questioned that she was severely mentally ill. Texas law turns an insanity defense on a narrower question: whether the defendant knew at the time that what she was doing was wrong.
She was born Andrea Pia Kennedy in Houston on July 3, 1964, the youngest of five children of a German immigrant mother and an Irish-American father. She had bulimia and depression as a teenager, and was valedictorian of Milby High School in 1982 and captain of the swim team. She trained as a nurse and worked at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center from 1986 to 1994. She married Rusty Yates, a NASA engineer, on April 17, 1993, and they said they would have as many children as nature allowed. On May 3, 2001, weeks before the drownings, she filled the bathtub in the middle of the day; she later told police she had meant to drown the children then and had decided against it.
The psychiatric record going into that question was substantial. After Luke was born in 1999 she attempted suicide and was hospitalized. She was admitted twice to the Devereux Texas Treatment Network. She was diagnosed with major depressive disorder with psychotic features and, at other times, with schizophrenia. She had held a knife to her own throat. Antipsychotic medication had stabilized her.
Her psychiatrist told her and her husband that she should not have another child, because a further pregnancy would very likely bring the psychosis back. Mary was born the following year.
Her father died in March 2001 and she stopped functioning. Witnesses described her as withdrawn and robotic. She stopped feeding Mary properly and would not speak, and she was readmitted. In the weeks before the drownings she was taken off the antipsychotic that had been holding her together. She saw her psychiatrist two days before she killed her children.
What she said afterward about why she did it has a religious shape, and it needs handling as belief rather than as fact. The family had followed the teachings of an itinerant preacher named Michael Woroniecki, from whom they had bought the bus they once lived in, and his message dwelt on damnation and on the failures of mothers. What is documented is Yates's own account. She believed she was evil, that her children had been ruined by her and were going to hell, and that killing them was the only way to save them. She told the medical director of psychiatric services at the Harris County Jail that her children were not righteous, that they stumbled because she was evil, and that it was the seventh deadly sin.
A Harris County grand jury indicted her on July 30, 2001 on two indictments of capital murder, covering Noah, John and Mary. Texas allows the murder of more than one person to be charged as a single capital count, which is why three dead children produced two indictments. The deaths of Paul and Luke were not charged at all. The district attorney said at the time that charges in their cases could follow. They never did.
She pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. The state sought her execution. Before trial she turned down an offer to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence.
The trial opened on February 18, 2002 before Judge Belinda Hill in the 230th District Court. Thirty-eight witnesses testified across more than three weeks, and among them was one man whose evidence decided the case.
Dr. Park Dietz was the only mental health expert at the trial who told the jury that Andrea Yates had known her conduct was wrong. Dietz had worked as a consultant on the television series Law and Order, and he testified that shortly before the drownings the program had broadcast an episode in which a woman drowned her children in a bath and was acquitted on grounds of insanity. The prosecution used it in closing. The suggestion was that Yates had taken both the idea and the defense off a television screen.
No such episode existed. Suzanne O'Malley, a former Law and Order writer covering the trial, reported as much at once. The show's producers confirmed it. The defense found out after the guilty verdict and before the punishment phase, and moved for a mistrial. Judge Hill refused.
On March 12, 2002, after less than four hours, the jury convicted her. At the punishment phase it answered the special issue on future dangerousness in the negative, which took execution off the table, and she was sentenced to life with parole eligibility after forty years.
The First Court of Appeals in Houston reversed on January 6, 2005. Justice Sam Nuchia wrote the opinion, sitting with Chief Justice Sherry Radack and Justice Tim Taft. Yates had raised nineteen points of error; the court sustained one and said it therefore did not need to reach the rest.
The one was the false testimony, and what made it fatal was Dietz's isolation. He was the only expert who had addressed the single question the case turned on. The court held the evidence was material and could have affected the verdict. It did not matter that the prosecution had not known it was false.
Rehearing was overruled that April, and on November 9, 2005 the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refused the state's petition for discretionary review. The reversal was final.
Before the retrial her lawyers turned down an offer of thirty-five years for non-capital murder, and on February 1, 2006 she was released on bail on condition that she be admitted to a mental health facility. The retrial ran in July 2006 before the same judge. A jury of six men and six women deliberated about thirteen hours across three days and found her not guilty by reason of insanity on July 26. The foreman, Todd Frank, said afterward that it had been very clear to all of them that she was psychotic before, during and after, and that he thought she would need treatment for the rest of her life.
She went first to the high-security state hospital at Vernon, where her roommate for a time was Dena Schlosser, another Texas woman found not guilty by reason of insanity of killing her own child. In January 2007 she was moved to Kerrville State Hospital in the Hill Country: low security, no armed guards, no razor wire, around two hundred patients, every one of them sent there by a court. She is still there.
Her lawyer, George Parnham, has represented her at every annual review for nearly twenty years, and has waived every one of them on her instructions. The most recent waiver reported was in 2025. His explanation has never changed: she would rather stay where she is being treated.
A woman lawfully entitled to ask to go home has declined to ask, every year, for two decades.
There was one year when it looked like it might happen. In 2011 Parnham said he was highly optimistic and expected her doctors to recommend community-based outpatient therapy. It did not come. At another point she was the only patient at Kerrville not permitted supervised trips off the campus, and a petition went to the court asking that she be allowed occasional two-hour escorted outings.
She makes things, aprons and cards and crafts, which are sold anonymously through a shop in Kerrville to customers who have no idea who made them. The money goes to Parnham's office and into a fund that pays for mental health screening for low-income women.
Rusty Yates divorced her in 2005 and has spent the years since arguing publicly for research into postpartum psychosis, saying that but for her illness she would never have harmed their children. The Yates Children Memorial Fund was established in 2002 in the five children's names.
The case changed one law outright: Illinois became the first state to allow postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis to be considered in mitigation at sentencing. Beyond that it became the American reference point wherever law and psychiatry meet on this subject, and it is cited every time another mother is tried.
Five children died in that bathroom. Three deaths were charged. No conviction stands. All three of those statements are true at the same time.