Causal Argument
“Andrea Yates: A Fallen Angel?”
Introduction
The tragic and shocking case grabbed the attention of millions of people—Andrea Yates was found guilty of drowning her five children in June 20, 2001. She was sentenced to life in prison on March 12, 2002. Yates' conviction was later overturned on appeal by a Texas jury on July 26, 2006. The jury ruled Yates to be not guilty by reason of insanity. She was consequently committed by the court to the North Texas State Hospital, a high-security mental health facility in Vernon, Texas (Wikipedia). What drove Andrea to commit such atrocities? Why would a mother kill her own children? How can someone be so cold and calculated? Was she possessed by evil spirits, or was she legitimately sick? I will attempt to sort through these and many other questions and arguments posed by many.
The Faithful Morning Around 10:00 a.m. on June 20, 2001, Rusty Yates received a shocking phone call from his wife, Andrea, whom he had left only an hour before…"You need to come home," she said. “It's time. I did it.” He dropped everything he was doing at the time and left his job as a NASA engineer at the Johnson Space Center. When he arrived fifteen minutes later, the police and ambulances were already at their Houston, Texas home. Rusty was told he could not go into the house, so he put his forehead against a brick wall, trying to process the horrifying news, and waited (Ramsland). Restless for information, he went to a window and on to the back door where he screamed, "How could you do this?" According to an article in Time, at one point Rusty Yates collapsed into a fetal position on the lawn, pounding the ground as he watched his wife being led away in handcuffs. John Cannon, the police spokesperson, described for the media what the team had found. On a double bed in a back master bedroom, four children were laid out beneath a sheet, clothed and soaking wet. In the bathtub, a young boy was submerged amid feces and vomit floating on the surface. In less than an hour that morning, five children had all been drowned (Ramsland).
The Confession The Yates children ranged in age from six months to seven years, and all of them had been named after figures from the Bible: Noah, John, Luke, Paul, and Mary. Four were boys and the six month old infant a girl. According to a statement Andrea gave police, she drowned her children one after the other in the family’s bathtub. She told the authorities that she had first drowned the younger sons—John, 5, Paul, 3, Luke 2. While she was attempting to do the same to her six-month-old daughter, seven-year-old Noah walked in and asked, “What’s wrong with Mary?” Yates confessed to chasing Noah through the house and dragging him back to the bathroom (Walsh).
What Went Wrong…Illness, Faith? Andrea had been under psychiatric care for major depressive disorder since the birth of her fourth child in July of 1999, up until she became pregnant with the fifth child in early 2000. While postpartum depression occurs in up to twenty percent of women who have children, psychotic manifestations are much more rare, and thus much less understood. Only one in five hundred births result in the mother's postpartum psychosis, says forensic psychiatrist Michael Welner. Unlike in Britain, where the mental health system watches mothers for months afterward for signs of depression and mood swings, people in America have a difficult time understanding how hormonal shifts can actually cause violent hallucinations and thoughts. Such women can become incoherent, paranoid, irrational, and delusional. They may have outright hallucinations, and are at risk of committing suicide or harming their child—particularly "for the child's own good." The woman herself will not recognize it as an illness, so those countries that have programs for it generally advise immediate hospitalization (Ramsland). Much of Andrea’s psychosis had religious imagery. She was obsessed with images of Satan. About the murders, she told her doctor, "It was the seventh deadly sin. My children weren't righteous. They stumbled because I was evil. The way I was raising them they could never be saved... Better for someone else to tie a millstone around their neck and cast them into a river than to stumble. They were going to perish [in Hell]." During her detention, she was concerned about whether the mark of the beast (666) was on her head. She said that, "Governor [George W.] Bush would have to destroy Satan" (Baker). Yates’s history apparently made her someone prepared to submit to her husband’s wishes on every critical question. It is in this fashion that the fate of the family seems to have become bound up with the fundamentalist Christian ideology of “family values” (Walsh).
Conclusion
There is plenty of information on the web about Andrea Yates and the crime she committed. While researching the subject, I could not help feeling angry and sad at the unfortunate events surrounding the Yates. It makes me wonder if this could have been prevented. It seems to me that everything was in order for this horrible event to happen—the postpartum depression, the psychosis, the medications, the religious beliefs; her mental oppression exerted by her husband, the list is endless. In my opinion however, none of these explain or excuse her egotistical actions. And to be honest, I really don’t care what her motives were, or what her sick mind was thinking at the time she picked up each of her babies to hold them under water, while they were kicking and screaming, pushing on her, and possibly asking why she was doing this to them…She committed murder. I can’t possibly comprehend even in one instance, where five young children can be put through such a horrifying and agonizing death. There is plenty of blame to go around on the World-Wide-Web; the righteous and religious “fanatics” want to forgive her, the medical society wants to formulate excuses for her conditions, even her husband supports the court decision to treat her mental condition as opposed to punish her for her cowardice actions. Rusty has conveniently re-married and has new children! He conveniently found someone that can follow his religious beliefs, and his demand for more children…He is not absolved of his part in ex-wife’s murder rampage. Rusty blamed his HMO and his wife's doctors, and said that this tragedy happened because no one recognized the severity of his wife's illness. "She never told me that she had any thoughts of harming the children before," said Yates. "If she had said anything about that, we may have decided not to have any more children" (Chastain). What did Andrea Yates say when she called her husband immediately after drowning the kids in the family bathtub? She told him that she had hurt all five kids and that she finally did it." No one may know what really went on between this couple, but the fact that she told him "I finally did it" would indicate that there had been previous conversations to that effect (Chastain). His convenient belief system created a fertile environment for this crime to happen. No one should be shocked, and he doesn't seem to be, that it did happen. In my opinion, she was truly a Fallen Angel! Week Three: Essay Two – Causal Argument
“Andrea Yates: A Fallen Angel?”
Works Cited
Baker, Don. Christianitymem.org. “The Andrea Yates Case: The Christian God 0, vs. Christianity Meme 3”. Created March 10, 2002. Modified February 19, 2005. < http://www.christianitymeme.org/yates.shtml>
Ramsland, Katherine. TruTV, Crime Library. Notorious Murderers. Women Who Kill. “Andrea Yates: Ill or Evil?” May 24, 2008.
Walsh, David, World Socialist Web Site. “Texas Mother Drowns Children: Andrea Yates and “Family Values”. July 2, 2001,
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. “Andrea Yates”. May 24, 2008.
Chastain, Jane, WorldNetDaily, Political Direct “Russell Yates Belongs Behind Bars Too!”. March 21, 2002.
Annotated Bibliography
Baker, Don. Christianitymem.org. “The Andrea Yates Case: The Christian God 0, vs. Christianity Meme 3”. Created March 10, 2002. Modified February 19, 2005. < http://www.christianitymeme.org/yates.shtml> Christianity Meme is an organization of people who wish to expose Christianity for what it really is—a mind virus that controls human behavior to facilitate its own survival. As such, it is a living, but unconscious player in human affairs.
Ramsland, Katherine. TruTV, Crime Library. Notorious Murderers. Women Who Kill. “Andrea Yates: Ill or Evil?” May 24, 2008. The Crime Library is a collection of more than 1000 nonfiction feature stories and photo galleries relating to crimes, criminals, trials, forensics and criminal profiling by prominent writers. The stories focus mostly on recent crimes, but also include historically notorious characters dating back to the 1400s and spanning the globe.
Walsh, David, World Socialist Web Site. “Texas Mother Drowns Children: Andrea Yates and “Family Values”. July 2, 2001, The World Socialist Web Site is the Internet center of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). It provides analysis of major world events, comments on political, cultural, historical and philosophical issues, and valuable documents and studies from the heritage of the socialist movement.
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. “Andrea Yates”. May 24, 2008. Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based, free content encyclopedia project. The Wikipedia is written by collaboratively volunteers from all around the world.
Chastain, Jane, WorldNetDaily, Political Direct “Russell Yates Belongs Behind Bars Too!”. March 21, 2002. WorldNetDaily.com Inc. is an independent news company dedicated to uncompromising journalism, seeking truth and justice and revitalizing the role of the free press as a guardian of liberty. We remain faithful to the traditional and central role of a free press in a free society – as a light exposing wrongdoing, corruption and abuse of power.