Andrea Yates
Uploaded by 197724 on Apr 26, 2002
Charged with five horrific murders, Andrea Yates faced the death penalty. Believed Satan controlled her, Mrs. Yates was convinced her children were not developing correctly and they needed to die to be saved. Andrea Yates admitted to drowning her children one by one after two years of contemplating this psychotic act. People cannot imagine the horror of what Yates did to her children, drowning them in the bathtub, one by one. Even chasing down the oldest one in order to do it. I believe that the enormity of her crime caused a cynical nation to shudder.
These articles lend themselves to children who are murdered by their mothers, in light of the trial of Andrea Yates. Andrea Yates admits to the drowning of her five children. Mental illness is often the reasoning behind this uncontrollable violence. Statistic shows that these deadly acts go back in time and are extremely common today. “In 1999, 485 children under the age of five were murdered. Their parents committed Fifty-six percent of the killings. Sadly, a mother kills one of more of her children at least once every three days in America”. (Mothers and Murder)
There are many motives that a severely depressed mother may endure. Women will sometimes kill their children through abuse and/or neglect that have gotten out of hand. Sometimes mothers murder in order to seek revenge on a spouse or lover, while others will kill a newborn after an unwanted pregnancy. A very high percent of these women are found to be mentally ill. In other cases, postpartum depression, which affects a minimal percent of new mothers, has been known to attribute to many ill-fated actions.
In the Yates’s case, according to testimony, Yates believed she needed to murder her children because they were “tainted”. These thoughts or beliefs reflect profound mental illness. Some mothers suffering from this type of psychosis may also believe they are marked by the devil or believe death free the children’s souls from other evils. No one has doubted that Mrs. Yates is insane; the psychiatrist who interviewed her the day after the killings called her “one of the most severely mentally ill people she had ever examined.” (A dark State of Mind)
Andrea Yates knew her actions were wrong when she called for help to the operator. A jury may convict her on this action alone, Yates was considered to have been both suicidal and...