Ex-Husband Of Andrea Yates – Mother Who Murdered Her Own Children – Pleads Forgiveness

Daily Report July 31,2024

Every three months, Rusty Yates, 59, telephones the Kerrville State Hospital to talk with his ex-wife Andrea Yates.

Rusty even visited Andrea at the state mental health hospital, where people who have been found incompetent to stand trial or not guilty by reason of insanity are treated.

In 2002, Rusty Yates divorced his wife, Andrea, and married again-and had another child-but ended up in divorce court yet a second time.

Rusty remains employed as a NASA engineer, the title he held when Andrea murdered their kids. He has a website dedicated to the memory of them all.

“Andrea was a wonderful mother,” Rusty told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo last year. “When someone acts so out of character like that it’s a flag that something else is going on. As far as forgiveness goes, it’s kind of the start.”

/div>

“The next step of forgiveness, I’d say, is understanding it’s a sickness,” he continued. “But for her sickness, she never, ever, ever would have harmed our children.”

Andrea, 37 at the time, committed mass murder by drowning her five small children in a bathtub filled with three or more inches of water. The children were Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 3, Luke, 2, and Mary, 6 months.

Andrea told the court she acted only after Rusty had gone to work.

After the murder, police made the arrest and charged Andrea with five counts of capital murder. The prosecution said it was a “heinous” crime and sought the death penalty.

Her defense contended that following the recent birth of Andrea had become psychotic and depressed, which set her stage to kill.

“My children weren’t righteous,” she told her prison psychiatrist, according to court documents obtained by the Post. “They stumbled because I was evil. The way I was raising them, they could never be saved. They were doomed to perish in the fires of hell.”

Based on Andrea’s mental state, her lawyers appealed the case and were granted a retrial. She was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 2006. A judge sent her to Kerrville, where she has remained ever since.

With so much time to reflect, Rusty has become much more empathetic to his ex-wife’s mental illness.

“If I were driving our Suburban down the street and had a heart attack and swerved into oncoming traffic and everyone in the car died but me, would they prosecute me for capital murder and rub my face in crime scene photos? Of my children?” he rhetorically asked Cuomo.

“I don’t think so. But to me, it’s 100% exactly the same.”