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."
Individual responsibility in that code means accepting the fruits of your actions according to laws we as a society accept. As a society those childrens' lives were of equal merit to Andrea's, and were more worthy of society's protection because they had less ability to defend themselves. Thus she committed a greater crime than Rusty committed against her, because she took more from her victims, and those victims had less ability, wits, reason, and opportunity to defend themselves than Andrea did. Look, I don't think justice is pleasant or that living up to codes of moral behavior is easy, but I think the alternative is a society of irresponsible blame-shifting adults who are always going to make someone other than themselves play for their failings - as Andrea did. And that's when either chaos or a big daddy superstate steps in, and the idea that rights ever inhered in the individual becomes just a pleasant memory and pipe dream.
If think this opinion makes me a tyrant, well, you should hope I'm on the jury if someone ever does half as bad a thing to you or a family member as Andrea did to those innocents.
No personal offense intended, and no name-calling from my end, lonestar - just wanted a chance to explain my opinion and maybe change your.
You have given great thought to these types of issues. Your comments are right on.
First, let me say that to people who know me, it would be amusing that you are preaching about responsibility for moral behavior to me.
I'm not defending Andrea Yates in the murder of her children. My opinion is that her husband should be put under the same light and he definitely bears some of the responsibility in the tragedy.
He was to be the bread-winner; to put a roof over the heads of his family. In his infinite wisdom he moved a woman, who had been diagnosed and put on a lot of medication for depression, and four children into a converted bus. Do you consider that responsible moral behavior? I consider that one of the most stupid IRresponsible decisions I've ever heard of. I consider it emotional abuse.
Much has been made of "he took her to the doctor." Well, why didn't the jerk listen to the doctor? He was wasting his time and the doctor's, was he not? He was told that his wife should not get pregnant; he got her pregnant again.
I think Rusty Yates is one sick puppy. He won't be in a courtroom nor will he be facing a jury. But in my opinion, he was as morally responsible for drowning his five children as was his wife.
Rusty was very aware that his wife had mental problems. What did he do about it? He continued to "provide" a home with conditions that would have driven any sane woman crazy, much less one already having problems. Rusty set up the inhumane conditions that contributed the murders and is as guilty as she is. I think they are both insane.
Anybody who does not comprehend that Rusty Yates was as responsible as Andrea, should have to live on a converted bus with four little children and her schedule, with him, for 6 months.
i agree. that being said, he did NOT drive her nuts, her mental state was deplorable for whatever reason anyone is mentally ill. nor is she excused from culpability, but he shares it.
The crux of the distinction is this, Rusty's crime is not against Andrea, and the conditions that he forced her to live in, though that was unconscionable. No, the crime he perpetrated is against his defenseless children, whom he left in the care of a woman proven to be unstable. It is acknowledged that his mother came to help. He should have not left Andrea alone with those kids period. He should have had them with his mother or his mother there WITH Andrea at all times he was not able to be there.
And his mother wanted to do this or was she too, to be held hostage? When you have a mentally ill person every one gets held hostage to them because "they are not responsible for their well being - every one else is" - but then when someone (like Russell Yates ) takes charge then they are "controlling"
Dear MOM,
The kids are in danger of being killed by their own mother. I have to go earn a living because the government won't give me a paycheck to watch my wife, so could you please come and watch my kids (FULL TIME)??? Their very lives are depending on it!!!
To chase and capture her own children?
Then to place them in a bathtub full of water.
Then drown them?
Crazy?
No, just..pure evil.
When did Russell Yates ever "take charge?" He merely made all decisions and told other poeple what to do. He assumed very little of the "doing"; his expertise was in telling others what to do. Charles Manson with a following of one.
Why would anyone be so eager to protect Rusty from being held accountable - even in the form of public criticism - for his personal neglect of his children's best interests?
Please tell me we don't have even a few freepers who are as obtuse as Rusty Yates.
Anyone who believes that it is responsible parenting to leave your 5 young children to be cared for by a woman who is as obviously warped as she was, a woman who has told you she hears Satan and dreams of stabbing people (which she did tell him long before the murders), and who has only responded to anti-psychotic drugs, from which she was removed 2 weeks prior, is a fool.
Considering that the same fool unabashedly maintains the religious views Rusty does (look it up if you don't know), and continues his own agenda in spite of the obvious danger to his children, Rusty deserves whatever criticism he gets.
I can only assume that those who think Rusty acted responsibly either has a personal experience clouding his judgement, or is simply trolling for the sake of being an ass.
The only reasonable question should be whether or not there is a criminal case to be made. I doubt it, but I wish there were.
The point I am trying to make is that he was in way over his head, as would 99% of everyone else would be if confronted with these circumstances. There are no clear cut ways to deal with someone like her. If there were , the professionals would have fixed her. The conflicts are at every step of the way.
His personal beliefs did not cause this. He had constructed a religious model of how the world worked and it did not pan out as he sincerely thought it would (Is that a crime?). Where does a person draw the line between letting their own faith work things through and abandoning everything that he believes in? You demand that he reject his faith through the middle of this crisis because he should have realized that it was failing him and his family ( just because he is a little different does that make him wrong?). It takes years to think through these kind of things, and people generally cling to their faith when times are tough. I thought this was a free country, and people were free to choose their own faith. I can assure you that athiests suffer these types of things every day. Catholics, Methodists, Baptists and the Amish do too. If every person had their own lives put on trial because of the crimes that their loved ones committed we would be a sad country indeed. If there were a clear cut way to believe and live there would not be much controversy about religion would there?
And what do you feel society should do about his "bad" behavior?
The vast majority of the time these things end in suicide rather than the deaths of children like this. If she had committed suicide would you be after his scalp? There are thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of Rusty Yates out there having to deal with their loved ones suicides. Fear of reactions like yours and many people on this thread is exactly why people are ashamed about it. However, every person in the health care industry STRESSES that one should not hold themselves responsible for the death of their loved one via suicide. Most people want to blame themselves. Most people spend years going through hundreds and hundreds of what ifs. In the end, most people eventually realize, after exhausting these what ifs, that the professionals are correct and there was nothing they could do.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
