But there was a price to pay for her sanity: the healthier she became, the more she grieved for her five children, whom she drowned in her Houston home two years ago. Two weeks ago Yates suffered a major psychotic setback–her second relapse since being sentenced to life in prison in March 2002. Delusional, Yates is apparently trying to kill herself by refusing to eat, says Houston attorney George Parnham, who visited Yates on Sept. 30. He says she believes her death might help her children make it to heaven. Her doctors have placed her on suicide watch–she’s no longer allowed visitors, and even her potentially lethal eyeglasses have been taken away.
Yates’s mother, Karin Kennedy, said she was called by prison officials to make an emergency visit to her daughter recently because she wasn’t talking or eating. “I always had mixed feelings about her getting better,” says Kennedy, who had been visiting Yates every other week. “When she gets better she realizes what she’s done.” Her daughter is again “seeing things,” she adds, saying only that her delusions are similar to the ones she had before killing the children.
