Yates lived by rigid schedule, according to husband
Posted on 03/01/2002 1:45:51 AM PST by MeekOneGOP
Yates lived by rigid schedule, according to husband
Husband also testifies she was allowed 3 hours a week without her kids
03/01/2002
HOUSTON - Russell "Rusty" Yates told jurors Thursday about how his wife, Andrea, lived by a rigid schedule as housekeeper and teacher and was allowed three hours each week to do whatever she wanted, alone, without her children.
"Man's the breadwinner and the woman's the homemaker," Mr. Yates said Thursday during Mrs. Yates' capital murder trial. Mrs. Yates pleaded insanity after admitting that she drowned her five children in June.
While he talked proudly of the couple's decision to toe a higher ethical line based on biblical teachings and lessons gleaned from a conservative newsletter called "Perilous Times," Mr. Yates coincidentally painted a picture for jurors of a bleak life bereft of any outlet for Mrs. Yates besides her children.
AP "A scared animal" is how Debbie Holmes testified that her friend Andrea Yates behaved in the days before she killed her children. |
Mr. Yates, 37, told the jury that he and his wife agreed before their wedding in 1993 to a "traditional" marriage in which he would serve as sole breadwinner and she would be homemaker.
The pact included being a stay-at-home mother, primary caregiver and, eventually, home-school teacher. Mr. Yates said that he controlled the cash and that she stuck carefully to an allowance.
Therapist Earline Wilcott, who met with Mrs. Yates after her suicide attempts, testified that her client felt overwhelmed and trapped.
Ms. Wilcott said Mrs. Yates felt criticized for the way she ran the household. Ms. Wilcott said Mrs. Yates told her that her husband bought her a book on how to get organized.
When pressure from raising their children appeared to be getting to Mrs. Yates, she could always look forward to Thursdays. Mr. Yates testified that for three hours once each week from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Mrs. Yates could do whatever she wanted, alone, without the children.
The free time was to provide some relief for his wife, Mr. Yates said. "I guess that's what we decided," he said.
Mrs. Yates is a diagnosed schizophrenic predisposed to pitch-black depressions that followed the births of her last two children. Testimony has shown that the 37-year-old registered nurse with perfectionist tendencies and a solid Christian faith went along with the home management plan she and Mr. Yates hammered out before marriage.
During a second day of testimony, this time during questioning by Harris County prosecutor Joe Owmby, Mr. Yates, a NASA engineer, said he and Mrs. Yates agreed before marrying that she would give up her job at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center at Houston.
"We thought it best that Andrea be home," Mr. Yates testified.
Prosecutors say Mrs. Yates was fully aware of what she was doing when she drowned Noah, 7; John, 5; Paul, 3; Luke, 2; and 6-month-old Mary in the family bathtub.
Mrs. Yates' trial, which began Feb. 18, is expected to go through next week. She faces life in prison or lethal injection if convicted.
During questioning, Mr. Yates said his wife was quiet and remarkably modest. After they were married, Mrs. Yates wouldn't undress in front of her husband. "That's a pretty personal question, but generally that's true. She's shy," he testified.
While Mr. Yates found time for interests such as biking to work, joining a gym and working in the garage, Mrs. Yates had the children and home-schooling to keep up with.
Their life also included some unusual experiments and choices.
Almost as soon as their first home was built, they rented it out, trading it for a 38-foot trailer to live a "simpler life."
"I think a lot of it was that Andrea was generally happy in the house, I probably wasn't as happy in the house," he said.
After being married 41/2 years, with three young children and another on the way, they sold the trailer for a $37,000 converted Greyhound bus.
"I didn't view it as a hardship," Mr. Yates said. "We like it better than a house."
After the 1999 birth of their fourth child, Luke, the close quarters appeared to get to her. She summoned her husband home one day. He found her sobbing and shaking in the back of the bus.
The next day, she took an overdose. Less than a month later, she held a knife to her throat.
Mr. Yates told jurors how he faithfully drove his wife to therapy after her two suicide attempts.
He also told jurors that his wife opted for natural childbirth.
Although he conceded that the newsletter he and his wife read advocated natural childbirth for a "humbling experience for a woman," Mr. Yates said it was his wife's idea to go without local anesthetic.
"It was her choice," he said. "Sometimes Andrea liked to take the hard road instead of an easy road."
Despite warnings from at least one psychiatrist who said having more children would bring Mrs. Yates a harsher version of the depression that sent her to try to kill herself, they had a fifth child on Nov. 30, 2000.
They knew that Haldol pulled her out of the depths in 1999, after the birth of Luke. When Mrs. Yates faltered again, particularly after her father died in March 2001, they asked for the drug again.
"I knew she was sick," Mr. Yates said. "She wouldn't have tried to commit suicide if she hadn't been sick."
Four days before she drowned her children, Mrs. Yates awoke screaming that she was trapped. As her husband comforted her, she told him about her nightmare. "Something about in her dream she was trapped in her bed," Mr. Yates said.
"A scared animal" is how Debbie Holmes later testified that Mrs. Yates behaved in the days before she killed her children. The women met about 16 years ago at M.D. Anderson.
Mrs. Holmes said Mrs. Yates spoke only three complete sentences to her in the four months before the children died. Her hair greasy and matted, her body reeking, Mrs. Yates was a walking zombie then, Mrs. Holmes said.
"I was appalled," said Mrs. Holmes. "She looked like a cancer patient." When she heard that the children were drowned, a teary Mrs. Holmes said she collapsed.
"I fell on the floor, and I just cried," Mrs. Holmes said. "I was screaming. It can't be my Andrea."
1. Is Mr. Yates a Christian, and what do his restrictions and lifestyle choices have to do with Christianity?
I would say that for Yates, he (and perhaps Andrea) deliberately picked their own interpretation of Christianity, and surrounded themselves with people who supported it. They were involved in a very conservative church's homeschool group, but didn't go to church and "home-churched" instead. (This is not that unusual among a lot of ultra-conservative homeschoolers.) They followed this Worniecki guy, who sounds like a complete nut. It's not a form of Christianity many people subscribe to, but if you read their stuff, they think they are the only Christians on earth & everyone else has got a one-way ticket on the hell-bound train.
2. Did the continued lifestyle choices of Mr. Yates exacerbate the diagnosed mental illness of Andrea?
Absolutely.
3. Did he have the ability and resources to make different lifestyle choices that would have made life easier?
He was earning reasonable money as an engineer, and they could have afforded to live in a house. It sounds like all this "simple life" nonsense was his idea, linked to the ultra-pietistic "cult" mentality they'd both developed. Money wasn't their problem. He didn't *want* to make her life easier.
I have known a *lot* of homeschoolers like this. The difference is, while the wives went along with it (canning the tomatoes, sewing the prairie dresses, not even spending any money for homeschooling materials but thinking they could get buy with some yellow pads and pencils), the difference was that these wives were fundamentally stable. They were able to cope - Andrea Yates was not. Again, this doesn't mean Yates wasn't legally culpable (she could have left and divorced him), but that some people cannot handle this extreme kind of life. Since the viewpoint is that if you *can't* handle it, it's because you're in the Devil's clutches, it's just going to spiral and get worse.
Don't for a minute think that this is an isolated, exceptional lifestyle. It's OUT THERE and fairly common in the pietistic Christian homeschooling world.
She willingly married and stayed with a control freak. Having dated a control freak, I can say that part of it is self-inflicted. Not all of it but some. She could have walked at any time.
I don't think she had any business raising those kids but I don't think it could have been stopped given current laws. Blaming the husband as being equally responsible is like saying she didn't really kill them, the water did.
Have you noticed that so many insane people have some form of religious hangup. I don't think it has anything to do with which religion, I just think that something in them latches on to that area of life because it is a spiritual part of life. Other parts of life are based in day to day facts. Religion and faith are based on our internal faith, beliefs and our hope for life after death. This is where distortions would most easily be cultivated in their disturbed minds.
The woman was nuts. Plain and simple. The husband was an idiot who was fine with his wife putting a knife to her throat as long as dinner was on-time.
Getting a little cynical aren't we? LOL
HA! From what I have seen lately of mental health, they could care less. I suspect that they get funding, much the same way as schools, via headcount.
I spend Saturdays with mentally challenged people, taking them out shopping, for dinner, visits to zoo's or other activities. I know of a case where one person at a foster home tried to kill himself by slitting his wrists. The foster people didn't want him around, felt he was a danger to the others. So, the guy gets placed in a foster home where the people let the clients drink till they are drunk, no curfews, no supervusion at all. Makes no sense.
One of my friends and I took him along with the others we take on Saturdays and after he got home, he called my friend telling her that he was having 'bad thoughts' about her and myself. He had told her before that he thinks of raping and killing all the time. He only lives a couple of blocks from where she lives. Scared her bad enough that she called mental health. They suggested we not take him with us anymore.
No kidding! Doh!
We've reported foster people for not giving adequate care to their clients. I took one of them get medical attention because they had an ear infection for several months and the ear had pus draining out of it. One client was bitten by twice by a dog owned by the foster people. The wound needed stitches but the foster people slapped a band aid on it and sent him off to the day center. My friend called and told mental health, so they were aware on the injury. This type of crap has gone on for YEARS, but these people just keep taking on more clients. They don't care and are in it for the money. And unfortuantely, it looks like mental health is too.
I could go on and on, about the mental health clinics in that county, but why bother.
I don't invite that onto the thread, but I'm curious about the name of the "church" or sect, or trailer off some dirt road, back in the woods that preaches this garbage.
I haven't read all the reports, if it was named before, someone point me to articles about it. Are they in Harris (Houston) or Galveston County?
Do also agree then, that people don't kill, guns do?
You are missing the point! Expecting a woman with her past mental history to do these things is a "punishing regime". It certainly ended up being punishment for the innocent children involved.
There may have been times in my life when I was swamped with four children, and homeschooling, too, but I can assure you that my husband did not control my life to the extent that I had three hours off, once a week, between the hours of six and nine. GEESH! Don't you find that CONTROLLING????
And yet, you keep saying she could have walked out at any time? "She could have gotten help?"
At some point, very early on, she probably was capable of doing these things. I think she was trying to get help, attempting suicide shouts louder than anything I've heard. EVERYONE failed her. EVERYONE!
Lock her up forever. The rest is up to God.
I am not looking at this from Dads perspective.I wish they were frying his ass, and it severly irks me that they aren't. But I wish all the Culpable parties exposed.
Including the Gottdanged State, who, If the kids showed up at school with a bruise that even looked questionable, would be on the doorstep with a protective custody order.
Russell sound like the guy in "Sleeping with the Enemy" for Pete's sake.
It makes me wonder just how much time he "alloted" for the two of them alone together each week. My guess is not much meaningful time.
Evidently she was drooling and babbling. Repeating an earlier comment...the next event will be to sue the psychiatrist.
Note to anyone who keeps piping up with the "she could have left, she chose the wrong path...." Mental illness is CHEMICAL, not moral etc. Diabetics don't choose their bodies' response to sugar. People this mentally ill, by definition, are incapable of rational action.
Since we are acting as the jury here: my vote is too commit the women forever. What would that be, murder with no parole? Not the death penalty.
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