There was an ongoing theme of Yates’ criticism of her own parenting and the behaviors of her children. She believed that killing her children was the right thing to do because she was trying to send them to God. She thought that her eventual punishment of prison time would kill the Satan inside of her (Michalopoulos (2003). She felt that her children had bad manners (particularly when their grandmother would come over) and said that they would “never be right” because she had “ruined them” due to her deficiencies mothering. For example, she believed that her fourth son, Luke, would become a “mute homosexual prostitute”, that her first son Noah, would “die a tragic death”, that her second son, John, would become a “serial murderer”, and that