Doomed to Fail - Ep 16 - Part 1: The Saddest Thing That Happened - Andrea Yates

Episode Date: February 24, 2024

Today, we are re-releasing the sad sad story of Andrea Yates, a mother who needed a lot of medical and psychological care. She was going through a lot, and ended up killing her children. It's alarmingly sad. So if you're not up for it, we totally understand.Let us know if you have any suggestions for future episodes! Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

Hi, friends, Taylor from Doom to Fail. Today, we are re-releasing episode 16, part one on Andrea Yates in the murder of her children. This one is, I don't know, I feel like it might be a smidge controversial. Farrs was definitely arguing that, you know, she was a stay-at-home mother and had had a lot of promise when she was younger, and maybe that transition to just staying at home kind of made her mental health decline. And I think that's part of it. But I also think that, like, you have to be already predisposed to some sort of violence. And, like, there's something else there.

It's not just the loss of potential. But let us know what you think. It happened a long time ago, but it's still just freaking heartbreaking and awful. So trigger warning, violence against children. So, yeah, keep us posted. Doomeda fell pod at gmail.com. Please tell your friends. And we will see you.

The matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortthall James Simpson, case number B.A. and so my fellow americans ask not what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your and i guess we can go ahead and kick things off are you good taylor yeah i'm good ready welcome to doom to fail the podcast where we i don't know just travel i can't i'm so bad what are you you can talk about we don't travel we travel but not for the podcast we'd like to someday have us in your city yes talk to the local venue if a local library has like a spare conference room yes no okay so no we're the podcast where we're constantly traveling as individuals

you were in san diego i was in denver we're probably the most jet-setting podcast of any podcast hosts in the world, right? We are. No, absolutely. Absolutely. Then you'll be in Palm Springs and then I have to go to L.A. right after that. Jet setters. Jet setters. Breaking down barriers. Absolutely.

So obviously this voice being heard is Taylor, our co-host. How are you doing today, Taylor? Good. Very, we just got back from San Diego and then, or last night, and then, so I just to come home from a vacation like on Saturday. So you have like Sunday to calm. down you know so today we're just been like cleaning up we went to a birthday party it's very springy out here it's beautiful finally we my neighbor came over i didn't see her she kind of she just

snuck by but left us a big beautiful like bouquet of lilacs um that i brought in the house and it smells amazing but i feel like i might dive allergies any day what's sweet neighbor i know it's really nice really pretty i don't even know my neighbors i like barely i barely have neighbors and i could do a much better job so i need to go down hurt and say thank you and all that yeah uh so let's go ahead and segue into our stories and if i am correct on this i go first this time you do thank you so i'll tell you what i'm drinking yes i'm drinking the pacifico i rl um but i am drinking rum by the teaspoon okay which is the only way i drink rum yeah dear teetotlor that's how you do it when you're

teetotal. Teaspoon at a time. Yeah, well, that's why you never get drunk. That's why we call you sober Taylor. Everybody calls me that. Everybody calls you that. Weird. Yeah. So I should be drinking Coors. Like I said, I just got back from Denver and we talked about Coors in the episode where we discussed Chris Watts. And now I'm drinking real Coors, which is Coors Banquet, which is the tan, the colored can. And they're great. They're really good. Are they okay? I was going to ask if it was delicious or not. But I think it's a nostalgia of it. It's like, I kind of miss being in Colorado and like, it's kind of cool to like, yeah, have a taste of the Rockies. But what I actually-

You were in Colorado like last week, like yesterday, right? It has a place of my heart. Oh, my gosh. All right, continue. I adopt the personality of any place I go. But so realistically for today's ring, I chose Lone Star. Are you familiar with Lone Star? No, what is that?

So it's a Texas-specific. specific beer, but it's probably the shittiest one. It's what you get when you can't afford Shiner or Ziegenbach. I don't know if Ziegenbach is still considered a good beer. It was when I was in high school or college. I'm in college. Whatever. Whatever. But it's basically it's kind of like a course light. Like it's just like a run of the mill. It's not as bad as Keystone, but it's not as good as, you know, this banquet version of course. That banquet course. Yeah, exactly. And the reason we're doing that. is because we are going to be in Texas, which is where you need to be when you drink Lone Star.

Makes sense. And the reason we're in Texas is because we're going to be discussing an angel of a woman. Ooh, a lady. Andrea Yates. Oh. Ooh, yeah. See, I set you up. I say you up for failure.

She's not an angel. I have conflicting opinions about Andrea Yates and we'll be discussing it at length here. All right. Let me know. usual taylor i'm going to try not to make excuses for people who do messed up things but this story intertwines two things that for me obviously makes sense devout religiosity mixed with mental illness equals bad yeah yeah how familiar are you with Andrea gates i can't remember the details but i know that she she killed a bunch of kids her heads she drowned them in the bathtub is she

the bathtub around her she's the bathtub one oh and the oldest one was like I'll be good. Please don't do it. It was funny. It's like, yeah, you're right. And I always mix this one up with the one who like buckled her kids in the seat of the back car and then said like a bunch of black guys. Yeah. Yeah. Sure, I shouldn't talk more about that because maybe that'll be the next one I do.

So yeah, you know that that's Andrew Rieates. And that's what everybody knows about her. She drowned her kids in the bathtub. And I went pretty deep down the rabbit hole. trying to figure out like what was going on with this woman and how this all came about and I literally just hit on devout religiosity and mental illness later on I'm going to describe why I'm prejudiced and I came up with that because Andrea Yates has a unique distinction where any pet issue you have you can attach to it it's spousal abuse it's loneliness

it's a women's place in society today it's mental it's like every every could attach an issue to it and mine are religiosity and mental illness so on one episode of last podcast on the left um you might remember henry said something that i'm going to paraphrase and probably semi-butcher here he says something to the effect of religion turns dumb naive people into dumb violent people yeah you remember that one no but i get it but i agree to agree and that's and that's kind of like what i kept thinking about as i was reading this and um you know what taylor just look up the yates family okay i don't want to i'm sad i know they kids make me sad to look at but Andrea and the husband his name's rusty we're going to get into are it's interesting when I look at them because they just look so average just painfully painfully average absolutely I have like no desire I mean I guess I should like I know a lot of people like my brother-in-law and his wife they always get like family portraits done like nice ones and I would just like never done that I just like that I just like that's like I just like that's like I just like that.

I'd be weird if I like dressed up and like went to Sears. It was way too cool. You're way too fucking cool for that. That's like what lame people do. Look at the picture of Andrea Yates and Rusty and tell me that you belong in a similar photo lineup as they do. No, I don't. Oh, beautiful boys. Yeah.

Okay. Go ahead. So in the case of Andrew Yates, I think it took a repressed and depressed person and turned her into a violent and numb person. That's what I get when I look at those pictures of Andy at Yates is like, there's just nothing there like she's smiling sure but like in the eyes which i know you don't agree i just don't see a lot of life behind those eyes like there's something like the guy the guys he's loving it like he's he's scored like he's doing great i don't see that yeah is she like she doesn't have a job right she just looks at home yeah yeah so some people like that but yeah also

it can be very lonely and horrifying yeah yeah i'm actually going to lean on you a lot for this one, Taylor, because I don't know what it's like to be a mother or a woman, which I guess are kind of synonymous with one another. Or, that's hard. Yeah. I should have said woman and then mother, whatever, it doesn't matter. And it also be like our age range because I, it's got to be kind of, in her case, awful. I know that there's a lot of happy mothers out there, but they also didn't have five children

with the goal of having a lot more than that. So like, at 36. Thanks. That's too many children. No, I mean, it's different for everybody. It's not, I don't think it's not super easy for anybody, you know, but you just like have to figure it out. Like, I have a great husband. So we split everything, you know, but other people don't.

And like, that could make it a lot harder. I also like, I don't know if I told you this, but someone that I'm connected to on LinkedIn, like started a group for like dads. It's like, it's hard to be a dad and have a career. And I was like, this is fucking cultural appropriation. Like, go fuck yourself. It is not hard for a dad to have a career. You know, like, when you have kids. like women's value goes in the workplace like they get paid less you know like if

you tell people you have kids you get paid less a dad gets paid more because they assume that he can like work harder and we'll have more time so like the more kids you have the less you get paid if you're looking for a new job because the assumption is that you're not going to have time to do it like that still exists in the workplace today I mean yeah that's not this is not surprised me like this feels like it's been since time the memorial has been the case if it's hard it's hard but it's also wonderful I don't know my kids are a fucking delight so no I want I want you to talk about this when we get

I'll explain why I think the way I do about her being a mother and why it all came out in the way that it did but my main takeaway from this like I just mentioned was like repressed and depressed that is exactly what I see when I see her pictures so yeah let's get into her background a little bit so Andrea is from Houston Texas originally her father there's so many things that intertwined from other stories here. Her father was first generation American. His parents were Irish immigrants. Andrea's mom is actually from Germany. So I bring that up because immigrant parents tend to put a lot on their kids with their expectations and based on how Andrea turned down in high school, I think it's safe to assume that they were kind of traditional

immigrant parents. They just like helicopter parents essentially. Yeah. She was valedictorian of her class, captain of her swim team. She was a leader in some way, shape, or form in the national honor society at her school and was just generally seen as an all-around great student kid student athlete class paint you name it i would i would say that she's the girl that if you met her in high school you'd say oh she's she's gonna go places like she's she's gonna be someone you know so we all know that over achieving so we all know that overachieving high school students are all kind of like harboring their inner demons like there's something going on when you care so much about your studies, I think. I don't know. Maybe I'm prejudiced about this. I graduate

with a 2.1 GPA from high school. Like I was, I was like pretty close to like, I think it was like me and this kid who like would start fires with the last two people that graduated in our class. So like I'm not of the ilk that like understands why someone would be a high achiever in high school. Oh my God. You're so funny. I mean, I wasn't I wasn't sporty, obviously. But I was, you know, the secretary of student council i was on the national honor society i was junior u.n right you did junior u.n i didn't i wish i did though we didn't have that i wish i had um and then i had a extremely high grade point average seriously yeah like what was your GPA i don't know like 3.9 or something were you like top of your class like ballaraturian no i think i was like 12th out of like 400 or something

I'm very smart farmers I think so I may be making that up but I'm going to say that for the record because no one's ever going to be able to check that but I'm pretty sure I was so smart though that's so smart because you could be lying and literally nobody will ever know

and they'll be like Taylor is a genius you guys it also proves how smart I am so no matter what path we take I'm super smart so I know that in any episode that we start talking about stuff you're going to start yelling me about things and now I know that this is the thing you're going to yell at me about okay so okay well I'm saying I'm saying that like I'm fine

but it also like when when we do our homework with the kids like one has to do it because florist and i both get so stressed out and she starts to cry because i remember being eight and crying over my homework because it wasn't perfect you know like it was such different children we were like vastly different but this so this is the part where you're going to start being upset at me okay andrea went on from high school to become an RN and look i love nurses Taylor, you know I love nurses, like you met my exes before. And there's no shade to nurses at all. But why the fuck would you work so hard in high school to become an RN? Like it's a hard job, but it's not like being a, becoming a neurosurgeon. Like, why would you work that hard? Like,

go fucking hang out with the kids. So the girl I'm dating now, I hope she's not here. But the girl I'm dating now, like, she's an RN. And like, the story she tells me of her high school days, like she was like jumping fences running away from cops. Like, that's what she did. It's just, It's not like, it's not like my high school grades mattered in my life, you know, but if you're the type of person that thinks that they matter, because people tell you they matter, like I was, I just, like, worked really hard. I would have been, like, super disappointed if I hadn't, you know, it wasn't like to an end. Interesting. Interesting. It's just for the sake of learning and knowledge.

Okay. So I do have a rant that I'm not going to do around how to raise children because I feel imminent. qualified to discuss this topic, especially in front of you. That could be a side, a side show. But I do think there's something to rule followers versus rule breakers in how that manifests in adulthood. I mean, I also, like, when we were 15, we told this dude we met who was a college dude that we were 16 and I used to stay at the end of his house like every weekend and

we would just drink with college guys. Well, that's rebellious. But I got a lot of good grades. That's rebellious, yeah. Yeah, I was cool, because I was very cool. No, no, I totally believe that you were cool. I mean, you're so cool. That's what we're going to have dinner on Thursday, Palm Springs.

Oh, Lord, okay. Okay, so I'm going to keep going. Please, I'm sorry. No, no, this is great. You asked for banter. We're doing banter. So in 1989, Andrew met a guy named Russell Yates, who went by Rusty. And, like, he couldn't have been that old, right?

like a rusty needs to be like an old grizzled vietnam bet right whatever doesn't matter rusty was a NASA engineer he was on the engineering computer side of things and he was fairly accomplished his biggest downfall is that he is or was an evangelical Christian so out of all the versions of Christianity that I look down on evangelicalism is pretty much at the very top of that list and what's interesting about this is that most of America Americans agree with me. So I read this article that included a poll in a publication called Christianity Today. The incredibly awesome and sassy title of this article is, quote, evangelicals are the most beloved U.S. faith groups among evangelicals.

At first, I was like, I'm not going to read this article. And I read the title. I was like, oh, I got to go through this. This is fantastic. So across the board, Evangelicals in this poll are the worst faith group in the U.S. And the only reason why this article speculates the percentage isn't higher of people who hate evangelical Christian or the faith, not the people, is because a quarter of the Christians now in the United States identify as evangelical. So that skews the results because they're not doing double blinds. It's weird because I wrote down here because I think about Catholics and I actually like kind of love Catholicism because of how dark and morbid it is. There's just, like, it's just vastly different than, I don't know, like, it, it'd be fun if it wasn't for all of the kid raping, you know?

I'm not going to disagree with you. I'm not going to record. But I understand. I do like the, I like the ceremony of the pomp, the drinking of the blood. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, it's like really macabre kind of cool. Yeah.

Yeah. Like, and Jesus is ripped, right? Like, he's jacked and ripped. And it's like, none of that makes any sense, but it's so cool. Yeah. By contrast, evangelical, to me, like, it is, I know this is another thing you disagree with me about. So I look at evangelical Christians the same way I look at like woke progressives in that their belief system doesn't actually seem to be rooted in like reality so much is rooted in performance art. That's truly how I feel about woke progressives as I do with like these folks.

Most of the beliefs in evangelical Christianity are why Republicans today are the way that they are. i mean they are so i should have my research on this i didn't there was an amazing podcast it had to have been for economics or this american life but they did this amazing podcast on evangelicals is a voting block and how that was literally the thing that saved the republican party when ragan was coming up it is a massive component of why conservatives are the way that they're they currently are being rooted in in the face structure it's also rooted in the infallibility of the bible and it and also it's a very u.s. centric religion as well so i thought about like manifest destiny and how like we're the best because we're americans that type of thing long story short is

like rusty was evangelical which is horrible because they are shitheads and their belief system is a joke. Yeah. And most of Americans who are not evangelicals agree with me on that sentiment, as Christianity today cited in their hilariously titled article. That's funny, that's Christianity today. It's like, fuck those guys. Yeah. So, so, so part of it is because actual Christians, actual people of faith don't think that religion and politics are one, they, you shouldn't politicize your religion and turn it into into what evangelicals did they made a mockery in some ways of all these other Christian beliefs so anyways totally moving on so going back to Andrea and Rusty one thing I read when after they were married because they you'll you'll learn later on that

they've been through a ton of psychological discussions with therapists and stuff like real therapists or like the race no real therapist be real yeah yeah so One thing that came over and over again was them sitting together and saying that they really truly believe that they need to have as many babies as possible. Like, that is like what God wants for them. They're supposed to do this. That's a big piece of this. And it all strikes me as Rusty's. It doesn't strike me as Andrea's.

It strikes me as Rusty's belief system. So they did a good job. So they ultimately had five children. There was Noah, who's seven. John five. was three. Luke was two and Mary was six months old. That is fucking bananas. So like this week we were at

Legoland, I didn't go. I had to work from the hotel but my father-in-law went with Juan and our kids and they met up with a family that we know. So it was five kids. My father-in-law was like, get me the fuck out of here. This is two kids. Like, I'm from a family of five. It's too many kids.

Yeah. Yeah. Especially that many under seven? That's crazy. Like that's like, I mean, like it's I know people do it and they do it, but that just seems near impossible they're at most two years away from each other but there's also two that are less than a year from each other you just have to it just sounds it just sounds it sounds almost impossible to me yeah in this again like this is the part where like your take on this is going to become really really nifty and handy is i don't know what it's like to go through this but um i think that

the pregnancies and everybody agrees that the pregnancies had a lot to do with what ended up happening so it's worth noting that science of Andrea being depressed were kind of a constant theme. So it started out in high school. After everything happened with Andrea happened, friends came out saying that they remember her talking about suicide.

After Luke was born, so Luke, the two-year-old, Andrea tried to commit suicide by overdosing on prescription pills. Yeah, she'd be hospitalized for this and put on antidepressants. The suicidal ideations would keep coming on, though.

She'd eventually be put on a cocktail of medications, which did seem to stabilize her to some extent but the problem was they kept getting pregnant and she couldn't be on meds when she was pregnant because it would come out in the milk or something i don't i don't know so like how this works but you you have to be careful with what you you know obviously when you're pregnant you're like you have a baby in there so you shouldn't like binge drink you know you can have like a glass of wine every once in a while that's not going to kill the baby and after you have the baby like you can have a glass of wine and that's not going to kill the baby in the milk either but um i have

been taking zoloft for like 12 years and they said that like it's okay to to keep it to use it when you're pregnant and i tried to get off of it when i was considering getting pregnant for the first time and i like i was like no like fuck this i'm being i'm depressed like it was too much i need to be on it so i just stayed on up both through both my pregnancies so there are safe things that you can be on they might they might look they might have had different opinions on that 15 years ago it was the 80s yeah totally like the 90s or whatever yeah So, no, this was 2001. So, I mean, it was still a long time ago, but, like, you know, how people perceive medication for pregnant mothers changes, I'm sure.

Oh, yeah, totally. So I will say this. This is very counter to my normal personality type. Normally, I would be talking shit on Rusty constantly. You saw his picture, super generic dude, evangelical Christian. I don't really want to do that because. I don't know subjectively what he was experiencing as part of this like I think that he looked at things as like my wife's crazy pumperful meds hopefully that'll work and but I look at it I'm like what it what else do you do like I mean back then how does a husband treat their wife in this situation you know like I don't I look at it within the constant of the time that we're in and I'm like today obviously have access to people you could talk to people and like research things like oh I need to do this

with my wife I should do that like back then it's like yet you had nothing like he's just like a generic dude like I'm working every day my wife is nuts I'm just gonna pumperful of meds and that's basically and he seems to be like advocating for mental health now it is and he did back then but not but in like a like a weird traditional 35 year old husband in the early 2000s kind of way like it was just like not like he wasn't like an empath by nature and in a lot of this I look at this and like dude like you turn this woman into like a baby factory because of your religious beliefs yeah it just it takes it takes it's like so many women are depressed after they have one a baby you know anything that must with your hormones like

that you know being on birth control in general like all those things like they make you can make crazy. So, so that Taylor, that Taylor's actually, that only affects one in 10 women. That's postpartum. What she had is called postpartum psychosis, which affects a very, very, very small subset of women. And Rusty was just ill-equipped to understand, like, yeah, my wife's crazy. It's like, no, no, dude, like, she's like, she's like dangerous. Like, it's not just crazy. She's, like, dangerous at this point my thing was all like dude stop like being this guy and just hire a babysitter for a week take your wife to hawaii like let her experience a different lifestyle different like do you imagine this surely this is the part where i don't understand where like wake up every day

every day the same there's five screaming babies i got a nurse three or four of them constantly like how horrible is that is that a good life i don't know there's no there's people who love it i think legitimately my mom did it my mom we were like 12 years stretched out through 12 years but she stayed home with us and she loved it um so you know a lot of people that's that's what they want that's their dream it's not for me like i have no desire to homeschool i've no desire to stay home with them um i think they should be out i think we should be separate during the day you know but um but i think there people who genuinely do like it and that's like why i thought about like Andrea's inner childhood of like i did all the right things i made the best grades i did this and then i'm i married a man

who has a great job and he's going to take care of us and he wants me to make kids so i'm going to make it it's like she just did everything everybody else wanted her to do and then like she wakes up and like this is her life like how fucking sad with that i mean i'm not i'm making excuses for again but whatever it is what is yeah so this crime what we're talking about here happened 22 years ago so she was 36 years old you're 36 you got five kids that's your and in coincidentally there was plans to have more both before and after the murders happened. I'll get to that in a minute. I know, I know. I'll get that in a minute. It's absolutely insane. So in mid-1999, Andrea had more mental breakdowns, more suicide attempts. I have heard, I have heard that doctors and researchers don't know

why certain antidepressants work and why others don't. You know, the brain chemistry is a complicated thing. They put it on some complicated mix of cocktails that seem to work, but occasionally it would stop working. They would change her cocktails and put her on something new. It seems to be a consistent thing with like mental illness and all that stuff. That's a, that's what you get with a 2.1 GPA when you're describing neuroscience. It's complicated shit. It is. So she had another suicide attempt in mid-1999. Rusty apparently walked in on her trying to slice open her wrists. Oh, Jesus. Yeah, she was again hospitalized. And while being treated for this attempt, Andrea is quoted as saying,

Taylor, this stuff is so scary to me because, like, it's like you're hearing someone's, like, demons come to the fourth. It's so fucking scary. And then you look at the pictures of them smiling. It's like, I'm going to talk more about that. I'm going to compare it to a movie that you know, and then we both love. She was quoted as saying during while being hospitalized here, I had a fear I would hurt somebody. I thought it better to end my own life and prevent it from happening. There was a voice.

Then an image of a knife. I had a vision of my mind. Get a knife. Get a knife. Oh, my God. Oh, God. So, yeah. So like I said earlier, Andrea was diagnosed with a much, much more severe version of postpartum depression called postpartum psychosis.

I wish I remember the numbers on this. One in 10 women get postpartum depression. It was something crazy. It was like one in like 10,000 or 100,000 get postpartum psychosis. It's like a exceptionally rare diagnosis. It's also referred to as PPP, and the symptoms include delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, abnormal motor functions, confusion. They called it severe difficulty sleeping, mood swing in a whole host of other thing.

It almost sounds like a schizophrenic. Like it sounds like you're going through. It will learn later that she was actually having auditory and hallucinatory visions going on at the same time. Yeah, none of those things, it's someone who should be. be around children. Yeah. Yeah. But it's the interesting that they had her hospitalized, but then she went back.

I guess she had me, what are you going to do? Well, so here's, so I actually didn't write this in the outline, but it was an interesting point that I probably should have, which is like towards the end when things really hit a crescendo, because you're going to see she's been hospitalized many, many times. One of those times, the doctors tried to involuntarily commit her. they're like she's dangerous like you need to like we got to do this yeah the husband was really adamant saying no we'll commit her but it has to be voluntary i want we want to have control over it and when it ends and all that stuff and so they're like fine we'll acquiesce as long as you're

going to do it he did it the problem was if you do it in a involuntary commitment there's no insurance limit on the maximum number of days that you can stay but if you do a voluntary commitment the insurance limit in texas that time for blue cross brew shield was 10 days so we got 10 days of insurance coverage on the 10th day rusty's like we're not paying out a pocket for this shit and they checked her out wow didn't mean she was good they mean she was well he was like what am i going to do am i going to spend $7,000 a day here no we got to check you out right good job America. You're kidding, right? Yeah. So her psychiatrist during this time told Rusty to not have any more children. So yeah, she went to a psychiatrist and this is severe diagnosis. Like,

this is not a joke diagnosis. The psychiatrist is like, guys, you'll really, really need to not have any more kids. Every time she has a kid, you are only going to exacerbate the PPP. Seven weeks later, she conceived the fifth child, Mary. Oh, my God. Yeah. Say away from her. I wrote down here, like, this makes Rusty sound awful. But when she was hospitalized, it's also worth noting that, like, nurses talked a lot about how diligent and supportive it was.

He apparently went to work with, like, binders of her medical, medical diagnoses with him. So you get, like, research things on the side. He was always by her side whenever he wasn't at work. It would regularly raise a fuss if she wasn't getting what he thought was adequate care. So she definitely wasn't well equipped to understand the dramatic ramifications for this, but he tried. So how could you imagine? Yeah, like, these are stories that you, Stephen King makes up. Like, you can't imagine this happening to your own life, right?

Anyways, going back to Mary, so she gave birth to Mary in November of 2020 and in March of 2021, shortly, thereafter, Andrea's father died after an incredibly long extent with Alzheimer's. It was apparently very debilitating. Wait, that's 20, not 2020. I wrote 2020. I meant to write 2000 in 2000. Okay, great. I was like that feels like it feels longer ago.

Yes, definitely. So yeah, March of 20, I was going to say it again, March of 2001 is when Andrea's father died. And that seemed to be a jumping off point for this. at that time she stopped taking her medication she started regularly cutting herself she stopped taking care of the kids or herself yeah where she had to be hospitalized again i keep picturing like what was this house like if you're rusty who presumably is normal what is this house like yeah horrifying like it sounds like a vision from a nightmare there's a there's i'll never find this again and you know what i'm probably probably

going to go post on Reddit to figure out what this was. There was a video I watched like forever ago where it was like it was a show or TV show or movie. It was a clip of some sort. But there's a man in this like room watching TV and ignoring his wife. And the wife is trying to get him to him to pay attention to her. He doesn't. So she goes in the bathroom and breaks the glass window or the mirror and then starts cutting her

face with the shards of glass and goes out and says, pay attention to me now. Like, do you know what I'm talking about? Oh, no. That's horrifying. I need to figure, I need to find this because I saw it forever ago and it's been extra my memories. I probably saw it like 25 years ago and I still can remember this to this totally. That's a horrifying scene. Oh my God. Yeah, it was. It was. But I kept picturing it when I was doing research for this. So anyways, she, so again, Mary's born, father dies. She goes back into like this state that she's in. After being hospitalized got released again. In a after that release experienced another episode where she became catatonic like she's

starting to she's starting to almost come across like she's possessed she later would tell police that on this day she filled the bathtub with water and just stood there staring at it we just stood there staring not saying anything probably not even blinking and she did also mention later on that she thought that What she was thinking about while she was staying there was killing her kids that day. That was all she did. Again, she got, Rusty came in, found her doing this. She got hospitalized again.

And then, you know, she goes over to the psychiatrist ward. By this time, it was pretty clear that Andrea was for sure suicidal and for sure incapable of caring for herself for the kids. Rusty was actually told by her doctors to never leave her alone and definitely never leave her alone with the kids. oh my god most of the time russie didn't most of the time he didn't his theory on it after a while was like well look she's a grown woman eventually she's gonna have to be alone maybe i can like kind of wean her on to being alone with like right that makes sense i mean who knows and he would do this in like very controlled it was like a controlled experiment again like i'm giving him credit

for this i don't know if i show but i am on june 20th of 2001 for one hour he left her alone Rusty went to work and Rusty's mom, Dora, was supposed to come over an hour after. So I don't even know if it was like forced schedule like that or anything. I think that Rusty planned it because he was like, yeah, give her one hour alone and then you show up, mom, and then take care of things, right? Right. Let her try it for an hour. Exactly. Exactly.

So like out of the end, I don't know how much to blame him for that. But I can say that during that hour, she filled the bathtub up again. and then systematically drowned all five of her children. Oh my God. She started with the eldest. She started with the, not the eldest, so two went under that.

It was Luke who went first, then Paul, then John. She would then take their bodies and put them in her bed, wrap them up in the sheets. She drowned Mary, the six-month-old, left the body in the bathtub

and just kind of sat there with it. And then Noah comes in, the oldest boy, seven and sees it and asks what's wrong with mary he apparently understood enough i don't know how a two and seven-year-olds are to things but he understood enough to like know that oh something's really wrong and try to run away from his mom which is like a crazy thought like i would never run like she mentioned seven running away from your mom like that's like your whole world oh my god she eventually grabbed him and then drowned noah as well she then called the police and really

didn't specify what was wrong she would say i'm andrea yates you know i need the police yada yada yada what she said was like she basically she just said it's time like it was it's all very biblical and cryptic sounding you know like it was yeah what does it mean she then called rusty and said quote you'd better come home to which rusty replied quote is anyone heard andrea responded quote yes the children all of them oh my god I read out here Taylor Like the movie I was referencing earlier was event horizon And the reason I thought of event horizon

Was because there's this scene where The guy, our favorite character Sam Neal, what's his name? Sam Neal Sam Neal, yeah Yeah, whatever's character name was He just like once his eyes were removed That he became fully possessed Like he just like talked in a deadpan voice

You're coming with us forever It's just like Yeah You got in this woman it's fucking real and it's like in the 2000 so everything everything was covered in carpet in beige it's just all just grossest it's so terrifying yeah it did to me i wrote down it just felt like her soul was completely gone like i don't know why the direction of her mind went it went the way it did but whatever so Andrea confessed the murders obviously she's insane

right she claimed insanity and that was actually rejected so totally the way it works is that insanity is a defense it's like a different trial like you just say this person wasn't insane that's how you do it most of the time insanity defenses don't work because the way that you prove insanity is you have to prove that that person couldn't tell right from wrong

at the time of the crime due to mental defect that's the legal definition of it there's a ton of cases out there where somebody does something absolutely horrible and then tries to cover it up and the fact that they try to cover it up validates that they were not insane

Because if you try to cover it up, then you know they did something wrong. So if you ever kill someone, just walk around with their skin draped around you, like, you're normal. Like, go to the coffee shop and then, like, you will get off because it's like, obviously, nobody would do that. I'm not going to get off. Or you're going to go to a mental institution. I will discuss that as well, because there's actually no timelines on mental, on involuntary commitments, which is very interesting. The jury found, so the mental defense failed.

They found her guilty and they sentenced her to life imprisonment. The prosecution wanted the death penalty. They were like, no, this woman is going to get life. Three years later, so she's on in a maximum security jail, three years later, an appellate court reversed the conviction. This is insane. They reversed the conviction because they found that a prosecution's expert witness lied on the stand. The guy's name was Dr. Park Dietz.

He had testified that weeks before the murder, a law and order episode, aired of a woman who drowned her kids in a tub and then claimed insanity defense to get off. There's, so there's, um, this woman that I'm going to reference a little bit later on. She wrote phenomenal articles about the case, the murders, her life. Like, she, her articles are mostly what I referenced for this. She wrote a book about it as well. And I'm going to talk, I'm going to quote her here later on. She was also the, uh, a writer for,

and order during this time when this happened and she came out saying no i'm actually i'm a journalist now who is covering the and reyates trial you referenced this time period of law and order that i was working as a writer on we never did that episode huh but he was just totally making shut up weird yeah and so because of that the appellate court was like no like that testimony could have been enough to have swayed the jury into thinking that she was literally just trying to fake being insane so So we're going to reverse a conviction. She was retried. She was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

And then like I mentioned before, like this is an interesting part of the insanity defense. You don't actually get time for being insane. You're just held until you were evaluated to be determined to be sane again. So that could be a month, a year, never. It's totally. Yeah. And so that's where she ends up. She ends up in a mental facility in Texas.

it's a minimum security facility and every year she gets to come up for review to see if she's healthy mentally enough to be released in every single year since this would have been 2005 she's refused to go undergo her review she doesn't want to do it yeah apparently she's happy like she can do like get a job like apparently so as far as i understood it like she's just like numbed right like she's just on medication completely zonked out and it's just like just sits there and like it's like it's like the the chief and one clue one flew over the cookies nest there's another answer i pieces which is like the blame component of it like i said i talked a little bit about rusty but everybody kind of blamed everybody else so the doctors blame rusty because they're like we

told you don't leave her alone we told you to involuntarily commit her like but i will say this the doctors never actually said that they thought that she was a danger to the kids so they had an option to choose these like multiple checkboxes is this person a danger to herself is she a danger to her kids is she like so on and so forth and they didn't check the danger to the kids part and so they could have escalated this outside of rusty's control if they had done that and they just didn't because i guess they didn't think it was that serious most people though blame rusty almost all of them they blame his desire for kids how quickly he wanted to have them how quickly in succession you wanted to have them the religiosity of everything that was involved gave this

like dark component to this most of most reports come out and say that if it wasn't for the kids this well obviously this wouldn't have happened well yeah I mean obviously yeah but but like my point being like if it was like you're a nuclear family you have two kids yeah probably not going to happen right on the on the religiosity so also the other part of this the media also blamed religion everybody blamed whatever everybody blamed everybody it's worth knowing that andrea noted that she didn't think that she was a good mother and then part of what they think was like in her head of this was like my kids are going to be like wicked sinners and they're not their immortal souls won't go to heaven if they grow up because they're going to be terrible because i'm a

terrible person. I'm a terrible mother. Killing them will save them from damnation. That's another piece of this. Damn, there was a really really important piece of this that I forgot to put in here. What I didn't put in here that was really, really interesting and this was part of the article

I read in the woman's name, the one that I mentioned earlier, her name is Susan O'Malley. She wrote that Rusty thought Andrea's going to get off. He was at the trial every day. He thought Andrew was going to get off. and was already starting to plan having more kids with her.

What? Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. Like she's what? It's going to go home and be fine. But I don't get it. That's really weird.

Yeah. Did he get remarried? He did. So he filed for divorce. Once she came out of that maximum security prison and went into the psych board, he filed for divorce and was granted that divorce over in 2005. He remarried a woman, or he married a woman named Laura Arnold, and then she filed for divorced women in 2015.

They have one kid together. So he stopped, yeah, I mean she had six kids. He had six kids in total. That's nuts. Wow. So like I said, I'll shut this woman out because I actually think that her work was like incredible. It was incredibly easy reading.

It was incredibly thorough. It was awesome. So the article that she wrote is called A Cry in the Dark. Her name is Susan O'Malley. And one thing that she points out about this case, which is I think one of the reasons why it's so persistent in terms of like being top of mind for people, she wrote down that each of us sees in the Yates case our own issues, the death penalty, children's rights, women's rights, men's rights, rights, the mentally ill, religious rights, or just plain righteousness. And that's like a really, really good point because like a lot of, I hate to say, like a lot of people kill. kids it's not like that wherever an occurrence like it happens but this one was really really unique because it a the number of children was crazy and then there's so many other things

were going on there so much just emptiness and sadness and like just I don't know yeah and it's still persist and I think it's going to be one of those cases that we like think about forever like it's just totally like it brings up to such a terrible feeling you know like i just i was think of that poor last kid who was like it was old enough to know what was going on and like i saw his sister dead in the tub and like ran away you know poor baby that's so scary so they probably i mean their life is probably so scary anyway yeah yeah had to be had to be awful like i so on the on the on the on the on the point of the podcast like the whole dune or fell red flag part of it again because of how

Susan O'Malley references this later on. Like, I don't actually know what to hone in on other than live your, live your truth. Like, I know that sounds really hokey, especially coming from a guy like me, but like, like, like, if you don't want to be the valedictorian and you don't want to have like the perfect life with the perfect white bread husband who works at NASA and like instead you want to run away with like a, fucking Harley Davidson writing guy to Vegas and get a bunch of like flame tattoos, like do that. Like, like don't live a life that you don't want to live because you'll resent it. And it's okay to change her mind. Like it's okay. So maybe she like, you know, doesn't feel bad as bad as she did as you do against smart people in high school. But like maybe she just like, maybe she'll manage to do that. And at some point, things were super out of her control bad because of her diseases. No. Well, so, okay, so this is the rant that I didn't do earlier that I'll do now is like if you, if you don't have the muscle in you.

you that is like i'm gonna do what i want and fuck what everybody else wants me to do i'm gonna rebel if you just don't have that muscle in you you can't expect someone just like pick that up and learn it at some point right that's why like like i'm gonna be the you know i gotta be the best you know i got to be the valentorian i got to do this it's like you just didn't have it she didn't have that muscle in her of like i'm just going to do what i want to do instead and I think part of like the post part of depression and that stuff is like you you have in your head you're like I'm supposed to want this why do I feel this way you know and you feel like a failure maybe that my take away from it is like yeah just like what does she say about it does she say anything Andrea yeah no that I'm pretty sure she just stares at a corner of a wall forever until she dies no I got my my take on it was more like be cool with your kids like rebelling and like that's healthy it should be a good thing and like they're more like you know you're okay yeah yeah yeah that's like you know listen

i'm gonna write a child i'm gonna not a child's but i'm gonna write a child rearing book a guide on how raise children um and it'll be available in every swamp and sewer that has books probably that's what that's what the world is asking for more far's um this child 30-something-year-old man have to say about losing kids and how hard it is you know what I know Taylor's like this chair is like super squeaky today uh-oh can imagine what's coming I didn't hear it so we are we are so that's my story wow so sad yeah it is it's it's sad it's fascinating it's fucking scary it's so scary to me it's it's like every horror possession movie I watch like this is it like this is yeah except it happened

like yeah anyways um but on to your side of the equation i'm going to pull out my teaspoon do you have teaspoon do you have measuring cups no i'm definitely not just curious i'll i'll grow up eventually and get spoons that measure things but not not quite yet yeah you don't need to yeah 42 42 is the age when you start having to invest in like measuring cups Okay, you do you. Let me get an example, yeah. Yeah. Cool.

Well, awesome. Thank you for sharing that terrible story. Let's flip over to talk about historical failure and a crazy story.