return to, you know, disassociate from materialism. return to the basics. so there s no question that she was stressed. andrea yates life had begun to unravel. she seemed perfectly fine up until after we had luke, which was our fourth. after her fourth child was born, she actually struggled with the thought of killing her child and she made a suicide attempt rather than risk harming her child. and there was one psychiatrist who saw her who told her and rusty don t have any more children. you need to stop. here we are on our way home. what does that say, boys? congratulations, rusty and andrea. it s boy. giving us a little welcome home. yeah. just a year later, the yates were expecting their fifth child. this magic moment it is the story of where every great idea begins. and of those who believed they had the power to do more.
who s at fault? and if you believe that andrea yates was mentally ill, then you say, okay, well it wasn t her fault, she was sick. it must be rusty s fault. i think what turns people off is that he smiled a lot. he didn t show the kind of emotion that was expected. and once he was kind of typecast as not showing enough emotion no matter how much he showed after that, that s how he was viewed. rusty s demeanor so incensed the houston community that some people believed he was complicit in the murders. the harris county district attorney s office received inquiries of whether he was liable for the deaths of children and people on the street will express that idea to you. did i do everything that i could and knew to do to help andrea and protect our children
the circumstances that brought andrea yates to that point? she was a perfectionist. she did very well in high school. i think she was valedictorian of her high school class. grades were very important to her. being a good daughter was very important to her. she went to nursing school and went to a very prestigious nursing school in texas. did very well in nursing school. and then married and started having children and her goal was to be a wonderful mother. they met in 1989. they were both 25. four years later, they married. almost immediately, andrea was pregnant. i think the thing that surprised us was how fast that happened. she used to joke. she wouldn t want me to call her this. she called herself fertile myrtle. seemed like every yeah. it wasn t hard. they would give each child a biblical name. i know that rusty knew and believed that, you know, we ll
think you re going to heaven, then that proves you re going to hell because that s prideful and only god knows who s going to heaven. you are sort of pinned in to a corner in that way of thinking. by 1996, the yates had two children, noah and john. and a short-term job opportunity in florida, rusty opted not to be burdened by owning another house. going in to an rv was kind of more of an experiment for us. and so what we did was we rented our house that we had here and bought a 38-foot travel trailer and pulled it to florida and lived at a campground in florida during the course of that assignment. at the time, andrea was again pregnant. she miscarried just after the move. in 1997, the yates returned to houston, where their third son is born. in 1998, they trade in the rv for a renovated 350-square-foot bus, a bus they bought from
to the time of the trial, she improved. i mean, to the point where she wasn t having hallucinations. on september 22nd, 2001, just three months and two days after the murders, yates was deemed competent to stand trial. the prosecution planned to argue that andrea s motive was to get back at her husband for perceived wrongs, like living in a bus, home schooling, and the inconveniences of a simpler life style. the defense knew better than to bring rusty in to the equation. had i gone after rusty, as people wanted me to do, then the jury could be told by the prosecutor in summation or at the end, she, in effect, by killing the kids, she was getting back at rusty for the various things that he had done and would give her an ulterior motive. the trial began in february 2002.