Posted on 07/07/2006 6:26:30 PM PDT by Extremely Extreme Extremist
(AP) HOUSTON A psychiatrist testified Friday that she warned Andrea Yates not to have any more children after she tried to commit suicide twice within months of having her fourth child in 1999.
"I could pretty much predict that Mrs. Yates would have another episode of psychosis," Dr. Eileen Starbranch told jurors in Yates' second murder retrial.
Starbranch said Yates suffered from postpartum psychosis, which she said causes a mother to have delusions and lose touch with reality, making it much more severe than postpartum depression.
Yates drowned her five young children in a bathtub in June 2001, 6 months after the birth of her fifth child, Mary. She is being tried again because an appeals court overturned her 2002 murder conviction based on erroneous testimony that might have influenced the jury. She has again pleaded innocent by reason of insanity.
Yates' attorneys have never disputed she killed the youngsters but say she didn't know that the drownings were wrong.
Prosecutors say Yates may be mentally ill but does not meet the state's definition of insanity.
They say Yates planned to drown the children when she was alone with them, after her husband went to work and before her mother-in-law arrived. Then Yates called 911 and later told a detective she killed them because she was a bad mother and wanted to be punished, according to witnesses.
Along with Mary, Yates drowned 2-year-old Luke, 3-year-old Paul, 5-year-old John and 7-year-old Noah.
Starbranch said she treated Yates after she tried to kill herself by overdosing on sleeping pills in June 1999.
About a month later, Starbranch said, Yates' then-husband, Rusty, told her that Yates had held a knife to her own throat the previous day.
Starbranch said Yates had a bald spot on her head from scratching it, had not been taking her antipsychotic medication, had filthy hair and could not function. Starbranch said she sent the couple immediately to a mental hospital so Andrea Yates could be admitted.
Under cross-examination, Starbranch acknowledged that the words "filthy" and "catatonic" were not in her notes and said that Yates' nervousness and anxiety may have been a sign that she simply did not want to be at a psychiatrist's office. But Starbranch maintained that Yates was psychotic and not lethargic or exhausted from caring for four young children.
Over the next two weeks or so while hospitalized, Yates steadily improved while on antipsychotic drugs, Starbranch said.
But then in March 2001, Rusty Yates called Starbranch's office trying to make an appointment, saying his wife was getting worse since having the couple's fifth child in November, Starbranch testified.
"I knew that was a very ominous sign ... that lives were at stake, so I asked that she be brought in immediately," Starbranch said.
The couple never showed up, but Starbranch later learned that Yates was admitted to another mental hospital, the psychiatrist testified.
Yates, being tried in only three of the children's deaths, will be sentenced to life in prison if convicted. After the first jury rejected execution, prosecutors could not seek the death penalty again because they found no new evidence.
{sarcasm on} Ah right, the guy did it.
He must have been telepathically controlling his wife's thoughts from work. Ah right, the preacher did it.
{sarcasm off}
As for the other case, the lady had a brain tumor. It had nothing to do with the preacher.
Many people feel that way about many things-- a rotten boss, getting off drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes, talking to liberals. Actually killing is a different thing altogether.
I had the urge to kill (from parenting teenagers) and asked my husband to take me to a shoot-em-up war movie. By the end of it all of my anger had dissipated.
Oh really - and when in this world have women ever suffered in silence?
Many people have brain tumors and don't cut the arms off their children.
Are you sticking up for goofy preachers now? Mentally ill people are affected by other mentally ill people, and that includes mentally ill preachers.
Pregnancy hormones are not usually experienced as negative. Many if not most women enjoy that nesting feeling.
Boy, you sure are fixated on that line of thinking.
This is about that woman murdering her kids; in cold blood; in a planned and premediated manner.
It has nothing to do with her having sex.
Sorry. OT another thread.
Russell Yates did. I believe both him and Andrea worshipped at a local Church of Christ.
No, I am sticking up for people being responsible for and held accountable for their own actions !
I don't subscribe to your liberal theories;
that the 'twinkie' made me do it; the preacher made me do it; the husband made me do it; the crying kids made me do it; That is all rubbish.
Actually a woman submitting to her husband as head of the church as christ is head is a very conservative belief.
It has a lot to do with a supposedly sane man leaving 5 small children in the care of a woman he knew was psychotic, however.
Oh, Yates will be held accountable for her actions and should be. But for her husband to not recognize that she was a fruitcake and to spare her further pregnancies is just selfishness on his part and disregard for her well-being.
Andrea Yates should spend the rest of her life in prison or in a nut house, and Rusty should spend the rest of his doing penance for his lack of concern for his wife and children.
You forgot the second part of Paul's admonition: husbands should love their wives as Christ loves the Church.
There is no love in sexual selfishness, especially when the life of a wife and children may be at stake.
She was clearly slipping down a long hole, she had past history of PPD at the very least....does a loving spouse ignore those warning signs? Was he away from home so much, or so distant that he couldn't see her pain?
She murdered er children, she deserves to be punished for her actions -- but doesn't he share some of the responsibility, as well?
Will she now.
There are sure a lot of people on here trying to get her off and excuse her behavior.
One doesn't leave the Catholic Church and convert to a Church of Christ.
Hear Hear! I agree with you wholeheartedly.
I don't see that. What I see are people who recognize that she may have been insane or severely mentally deficient when she killed those kids.
It really doesn't matter whether she's put in prison for the rest of her life or in Rusk. She's in a mental prison and will likely be there as long as she's alive.
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