It’s a far cry from the near-catatonic demeanor she showed on the morning of June 20 when she was led in handcuffs away from the family’s Clear Lake home, where police found her dead children, ages 6 months to 7 years. With the help of Haldol, an antipsychotic drug, and psychiatric treatment at the Harris County Jail, Yates’s health has improved over the last several months, relatives say. “She still has a lot of confusion,” her brother, Andrew Kennedy, tells NEWSWEEK. “But she has a good sense of humor.” He says she recently joked, “Does Rusty ever keep his mouth shut?” referring to a series of media interviews conducted by her husband.
Yates faces two counts of capital murder in connection with the deaths of three of the children. She has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and faces the death penalty if convicted. Testimony is set to begin Feb. 18.
Trial watchers say the prosecution will lead off that day with its most wrenching testimony: details from the two officers who first arrived at the scene following Yates’s 911 call. Jurors will also be shown crime-scene photographs of the dead Yates children, four of them lined up on a bed as if tucked in for the night and the fifth, the oldest, still floating face down in the bathtub.
“You will be exposed to a difficult tale, a difficult presentation of evidence,” Yates’s attorney, George Parnham, told one juror this week during jury selection. “It will be difficult for everyone in this room. You may be exposed to autopsy photographs, video at the scene, pictures of bodies. It would be odd if nobody did get upset.”
Parnham is particularly concerned about his client. In September, he argued that a February trial would be too much for a slowly recovering Yates, who could be sent spiraling down into an even deeper psychosis listening to testimony and seeing the photographs of her dead children. A jury, however, rejected that and determined that she was competent to stand trial.
According to statements made to prospective jurors and court records, the state’s initial round of evidence will go quickly, perhaps lasting just a few days. After crime-scene testimony, jurors will learn about the official cause of death from the local medical examiner, and they likely will hear Yates’s taped confession in which she reportedly told police she drowned her children because she was a bad mother and possessed by the devil.
Prosecutors Joe Ownby and Kaylynn Williford will likely emphasize that Yates, who said she had been thinking about killing her children for months, seemed to know what she was doing when she methodically drowned each child, when she called 911 and when she answered police officer’s questions at her home and at the police station.
Yates’s attorneys then will launch their “affirmative defense of insanity,” during which they must prove that Yates, suffering from a “mental disease or defect” did not know right from wrong that day and should be acquitted.
Court records show that jurors will hear of the former nurse’s long history of mental illness, which became severe in 1999 after the birth of her fourth child, Luke. Yates was hospitalized then after the first of two suicide attempts, and three more times in the following two years. Though she was originally diagnosed with postpartum depression, her doctors came to believe over time that she suffered from major depression with psychotic features.
Yates seemed to improve with Haldol and other medication, but degenerated last spring after the birth of Mary, her fifth child, and the death of her father, her medical records show. She was taken off Haldol within a month before the killings.
While much of the defense is expected to focus on Yates’s medical records, jurors also are likely to hear concerns about Yates’s restrictive lifestyle. Not only was she a stay-at-home mother of five young children, but she homeschooled the two oldest and reportedly had little free time. Even after her doctors warned that she should have no more children and that she should find some leisure time, the couple had another child and she seemed more stressed than ever. That testimony is expected to cast a scrutinizing eye on Rusty Yates, who has been publicly vilified by some as being overly controlling and a contributor to his wife’s mental illness.
Yates’s only close friend, Deborah Ann Holmes of Houston, also is expected to break a longstanding silence and testify. Holmes has told NEWSWEEK that she is supportive of her friend. Andrew Kennedy says Holmes “is real mad at Rusty” and, like other members of the Kennedy family, questions whether he did enough to help his wife in the months before the killings.
More than a half dozen expert witnesses have been subpoenaed to testify on Yates’s behalf. But Gerald Treece, associate dean of the South Texas College of Law in Houston, says that Yates’s lawyers have a difficult job trying to convince jurors in the death penalty capital of America to buy the insanity defense. “Texas is a very tough state on the insanity defense,” Treece says. “The defense has to show that the individual suffered from a mental disease or defect that rendered it impossible for him to know the difference between right and wrong. We are in the minority of states that have such a high standard for insanity … If that is your defense in Texas, that is not good news.”
Courthouse regulars can scarcely remember any case in which a defendant successfully used the insanity defense. But there was at least one in the past decade: Calvin Charles Bell was acquitted in 1992 of shooting two police officers during a rampage at his son’s elementary school. Bell, who had a history of mental illness, had not been taking his antipsychotic medication. He was sent to a mental hospital by the judge in the case, but was released in 1994 after his doctors said he had recovered. Yates and Bell have one important link: both are represented by attorney George Parnham.
