She might have been crazy up to a point, but people like these make me sick.
Thinking of having more kids?
Seriously!
She should have been put in the general population of prison, with her crime tattood on her forhead.
Lets see how far down the hall she'd make it before she gets fried by her fellow inmates.
This is the kind of person that deserves to be sterilised, just to ensure she can never, ever have kids again.
A (faguely sort of) simular thing happened in The Netherlands.
A mother had divorced her husband after having two kids, and got a new boyfriend.
She had been abusing her two daughters for years, and one night she put her under a cold shower to punish her for something small, but the girl died.
She and her boyfriend cut up the body into many pieces, and threw them in the water.
The trunk of her body was found on a beach, and after that, the other peices were found too.
The father didn't kow about any of this, and after forensic detectives made a simulation of her face as it was before she was killed, he recognized his girl (FROM TV!!), and went to the police.
The mother and boyfriend had fled to Spain with her youngest child, and were arrested.
The father tried to get custoudy for years, but because he had had trouble with the law years ago, he couldn't get it.
She was placed in foster care.
In the end he won.
The mother got sentenced to jail, the boyfriend got off easy.
The mother has had another baby, since he could visit her in jail. (they married)
So now they have a brand new kid to kill and cut up when she gets released.
Ain't the law grand?

Since she was found not guilty, she will have a clean record right? That in itself is kind of frightening.

Zoathropy makes things up. I don't know that she didn't say that, but him claiming it means nothing.

__________________
We are sorry, the mind you have reached is not a working mind.
Please hang up and die again.
Please hang up,
And die again.

if she ever gets out, she'll be too old to have more kids

but of course she might have said something like that, she's not sane, remember?

How long do you think it will take for her to get pregnant again? At the hospital she is free to have sex with any one and any thing she gets the urge. Remember she was found not guilty.

Meaning if her X decides to visit he can kick it....And any of her friends can visit her and kick it...It’s a matter of time before she gets pregnant...

Well she is probably trying to get pregnant as you sit there reading this....

And she is free to write books and do movie deal and get paid big money because is Not Guilty of murdering all her children.

Here! Here!

Can you court order a sterilization? I mean you can kill someone so can't you sterilize them too? Especially in this case. That is, if she's not by now anyways.

After reading more about this Andrea Yates, she was insane.. read about her.

http://www.crimelibrary.com/notoriou...tes/index.html

For those who dont like to read, here are the highlights

-She started having these psychotic episodes after having kids

-After becoming mentally unstable, she was hanging around a self-proclaimed profit and his wife that often preached words like 'You are evil. You are wicked. You are a daughter of Eve, who is a wicked witch. The window of opportunity for us to minister to you is closing. You have to repent now.'"

They also believed that if the woman is going to hell or is a bad mother the children would go to hell too. She clung to this person's words.

- The same preacher sold a bus to Rusty and his wife and shortly after she was pregnant with their fourth child and then in this 350 sq foot cramped bus she was starting to show her instability with suicide attempts.

It goes on....

I was actually glad to see Texas do something right for a change instead of adopting the usual "fry em" approach. Texas actually has the strictest insanity plea guidelines in the US.

I've seen some women go through the more typical type of PPD and that in and of itself is frightening. My feeling has always been that if this woman is off to prison, then her husband should be there as well for reckless endangerment of these children. He knew just how ill she was and even though he perhaps could not have seen she would have done this, she was at the very least a threat to herself. That in turn made her a danger to the children.

My understanding is that she'll be in this hospital for life pretty much. Vey unlikely she'll ever be released and I'm not certain she would function well on her own in the first place.

Yeah and any husband that purchases a bus to live in with four children, not because he's poor but to take a minimalistic approach certainly sounds like a dick to me. That is when she started to go crazy.

Certainly their faith played a role here and fed her delusions, but like it or not, her husband was more than happy to continue breeding away with a woman he knew was more than broken inside. So I ask, who is truly the insane one in this situation? To me, her husband had enough sanity to place her in hospitals for months at a time, to tell her doctors she was not getting any better, and yet, made the decision to keep having babies and leave them alone with her.

She may be insane and did a terrible thing, but to me, he's much more of a monster.

For personal reasons it's very hard for me to be objective about parents who kill their children and then claim they suffered mental illness or post~partum depression ...

I don't like using this place as a confessional TOO much, but when my father killed himself, I was five years old, alone at home with him (my parents were going through an ugly separation) and the manner of his suicide ~ gassing ~ was such that he could very easily have killed me too. But he went to painstaking lengths to ensure I came to no physical harm. It was only a couple of years ago that I found out all I could about his death and he timed it very precisely so that I was physically safe and (however else it would scar me), I would would not have to see or discover him.
Now, surely my dad's depression was just as bad as this woman's.
~Sigh~

I don't know what point I'm trying to make other than no matter how depressed or crazy she was, I think this woman must have hated and despised her children more than her mothering skills. And it would have taken brute strength and adrenaline to have killed children aged two and three in such a manner, not only the six year old. It's very difficult to believe she was in some trance~like state of apathy at the time.

Having said all this, I'm not saying the verdict is wrong (I don't know enough about the case). Verdicts of "not guilty by reason of insanity" are always universally deplored in cases as ghastly as this. Had she done a Susan Smith and tried to blame the crime on somebody else (or denied it or tried to get away), she'd never, ever have stood a chance of acquittal.

It's amazing that her husband is standing by her! You hear often of women standing by men who commit crimes like this, but almost never the reverse.

Ugh I can't believe this bitch. I remember I was still in HS was she was found guilty the first time for the post partum depression.

What husband stands by his wife who kills all 5 of his children - even chased some of them down!! No more fucking kids for her please and she deserves life in prison!

She would have a clean record like the parents of JonBenet Ramsey do. HA.

But it isn't as though the state won't have control over her...she was not found not-guilty because she did not do it.

They were both warned before their 5th child that her having another kid would trigger another psychotic episode. The husband also had purchased a bus from the guy who was brainwashing Andrea into believing that she was evil because she came from Eve and if she wasn't a perfect mom then her kids would go to hell. Imagine living on a 350 sq. feet bus with 4 children! He didn't do it because he couldn't afford a home but he wanted to take a minimalist approach. He just doesn't sound like an understanding person and was probably one of those types that thinks that because he works that he deserves breaks and time off because his job is much harder than hers.

People have mentioned in articles of how reclusive she became but I doubt it was all her doing. She was probably treated like a maid, a home schooling teacher and just someone to raise babies rather than a human being that should have a break and go do something she likes to do. She probably recieved little breaks and it was expected of her or she thought of herself as a bad mom or was scared others would think of her as a bad mom like those religious fanatics she spoke to and looked up to.

Society still gives the notion that if women aren't in complete bliss all the time whle raising their kids then they are bad mothers. If they want to have at least one day where they can have leisurely time to do a hobby they did prior to having kids then they are selfish meanwhile the working males act like their job is so hard in comparisson so they tell their wives "I'm going to be late, work around the office just piled up" but instead they are hanging out with their friends at a strip club or playing golf and taking their needed breaks leaving their wives without any time to themselves to go do the things they want to do to de-stress. It's all about the working males who pay the bills in situations regarding house wives and working males.

Conditions like that are going to create an undesirable effect and alot of those pressures especially for religious women come from society that mostly female and male religious fanatics subscribe to. So a female wants to discuss her stress to a female religious fanatic only to hear that religious fanatic say "You're evil because you are stressed out...it's satan!"

Is this only in the deep south or does this also happen in the north to this degree of fanaticism?

I have to agree with you here. Her doctor did tell them to not let her be alone with the children at all. And from the doc. that I watched, her husband felt she was doing better, so he called his mother and told her to wait an hour or so before coming over to watch her. And in that little time, that was her window of opportunity. And of course, forcing her to have more children because of the not believing in birth control.

It is probably best she get treatment in a psych hospital. But its still very disturbing she was found not guilty and that in the end those kids still suffered.

I grew up in the north and I live in the south now. The biggest difference I find between the two are people in the south are generally more religious than those of the north. This is just my opinion about where I live/lived. We had few churches to choose from in the north. In the south, you throw a rock, you'll hit a church. As far as religious fanatics, i'm sure there were a few in my old town, but i've encountered more in the south. But the small town I was from in the north, I also knew of a woman who killed all her kids...

I hate, simply HATE, to be the first to say, "If it were a man ... " but when I started a thread recently on the eight year old girl raped and killed by a total stranger in a suburban shopping mall near where I live, somebody wrote, 'See? It's always MEN who do these things' and one or two others chimed in saying, 'Here here'. Even though I brought up that this guy too was mentally ill, a few posters here would have none of it. Nobody blamed anyone or anything other than the man, for killing the child.

According to Wikipedia (which I admit doesn't always get it right), her husband announced a week before the murders that she should be allowed to be alone with the children for 'one hour' per day ~ which implies she had been getting a lot of help looking after the kids for at least some of the time, in the weeks or months before the morning she drowned them.

Sorry, but some of these posts implying that Andrea is some kind of emblem of the abused woman are beginning to set my teeth on edge. I do not want her to 'fry'. I think a mental hospital is the right place for her to be, but she was insane; clinically and legally insane, with or without a domineering husband ~ and besides, was he that domineering? He sought help for her and gave her the chance to talk to 'outsiders' all the time ~ people who were not religious fanatics but doctors and psychiatrists, who she was free to confide in. This to me doesn't sound like her husband quite fits the profile of a controlling, possessive husband who would never allow her to talk to anybody but religious fanatics or as if he was completely insensitive and unsympathetic to her state of mind.

If the crime library article is correct, she never once expressed a complaint to any of these 'outsiders' ~ doctors, psychiatrists or extended family members or friends about him either. She never said she felt she was a bad wife. If she had, you could deduce that he was always critical of her. Instead she said she thought she was a bad mother. A small but significant difference. (I don't think Andrea was quite 'forced' to have babies. She wanted to have babies too, and refused medication at one point because she was trying to get pregnant.)

Moreover the 'monster' of a husband is quite likely to be the only reason she isn't on death row now; the jury in the first trial were 'death qualified'. Had Rusty not been so willing to support Andrea and testify in her defense, his feelings as the bereaved parent here probably would very much have influenced their verdict.
Her husband sounds like a religious nut who married an even bigger religous nut. Sorry, but I just do not buy that she was THAT much of a victim.

We're trying to understand what would make her snap and seriously the husband bought a school bus from a religious fanatical preacher whom Andrea kept in contact with who fed her with a bunch of misogynist crap and her motherhood which her being not in the right mind is not a good person to speak to. Her husband did express concern about that or at least what he says however, what person in their right mind lives on a bus with his wife just to 'take it easy' and she has 4 kids to take care of while he has a job that pays 80,000 a year? You like alot of people don't get what having mental disorders plus raising alot of kids would be like and on top of that living on a bus?

We're trying to view it from all perspectives. What she did was completely wrong and how she did it is sickening!

Maybe he just lacked empathy and maybe she was psycho all along but considering it ran in her family, she probably hid that as well but when she had her kids, the pressure added along with stress ad religious fanaticism, a husband that did try to help her but at the same time lacked the common sense of using birth control because their religion forbid it and putting your family on a bus to live as though it's a house...yeah it would make it that much more easier for her to lose it. The final straw was when her father died and being the already guilt stricken mother that felt like she did nothing right she probably blamed herself for not being there enough for her father and she snapped.

Andrea was a catholic before meeting Rusty. After Rusty she was introduced to his religious nutcase mentor in which she became fascinated with him and his wife and then became critical of her own abilities as a mother because they wrote to her about sins, being evil for the sins of Eve and bad children come from bad mothers who will go to hell. All of this came after Rusty. Rusty being in a better state of mind disagreed with the preacher but that did't stop him from donating money to him and his cause.

I personally think Andrea was schizophrenic for a while but it started to get worse after having children in which she had alot in a short period of time. She probably also didn't have much of a break and felt like she had to be the best mom or over exert herself meanwhile being overly critical of herself. She also tended to just go along with things rather than express an objection because it was considered ungodly to do so.

Religious fanatics+mental disorder (alot of the times schizophrenics) ends in disaster.