Decades after Andrea Yates killed her 5 children, places lawyers flowers on grave (exclusively)

At the beginning of one of the country’s most profiled murder attempts in 2002, prosecutor Joseph Owmby told lawyers that Andrea Yates had spent two years killing his five small children.

On June 20, 2001, it called home mom, then 37, 911 to say that she had drowned her children, one by one, in the bathtub in their home in the Houston suburb of Clear Lake, Texas.

After drowning sons Luke, 2, Paul, 3, John, 5 and her 6 -month -old daughter Mary, Yates puts them in bed and covered them with a blanket, as if they were asleep.

Her oldest son, Noah, 7, tried to escape, but Yates wrestled him in the bathtub and also drowned him.

Arrested and accused of capital murder, invoked Yates did not guilty because of madness.

“The breath was taken out of their bodies by their mother,” Owmby told lawyers in the trial’s opening argument.

In their introductory arguments, defense lawyer George Parnham told lawyers about Yate’s history of postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis.

“Postpartum depression with psychotic traits,” he said, “is the cruel and most serious of mental illness. It is necessary for the nature and essence of motherhood to care for, protect, love and change reality.”

Unless the mother is treated properly, she and the child have a great risk of injury, “he said.

Yates not only suffered from these diseases, her doctor took her from the powerful antipsychotic drug Haldol just weeks before the murder.

Spiraling into the psychosis and belief that she did something good for her children, “on June 20, the inevitable,” Parnham said.

In March 2002, Yates was found guilty of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years.

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Parnham appealed and the verdict was turned. The case resumed in 2006, when Yates was found not guilty because of mental illness. In 2007, she was arrested to Kerrville State Hospital, a mental facility in Texas.

In a new interview, Parnham tells people that he still keeps in touch with Yates, who has chose to stay in the hospital to continue treatment rather than being released.

He also said that he is still driving to clear the lake to leave flowers on the children’s grave.

“There is a large tombstone, with pictures of the children engraved on it,” he says.

Yates, he says, is grateful for the gesture of kindness. “She’s glad someone puts flowers on the grave,” he says.

“She only loved these children,” he says. “And she believed in her psychotic state that she saved their lives and saved her souls.”

This case remains important, he says, as there is a light on women’s mental health in the criminal system.

“I want the public to be aware of the reality of women’s mental health in the criminal system and to be able to understand how Parnham through the eyes of a mother (experiences Postpartum -Psychosis), she believes she is doing right from her children,” says Parnham.

The prosecutor had claimed that the murders were overpowered.

“Just because a person who is psychotic plans (something) does not mean that they do not meet the mind standard,” says Parnham.