HOUSTON (KRT) — A leading expert on parents who kill their children fended off the prosecution Tuesday, maintaining that Andrea Yates thought drowning her five children was the right thing to do even though she knew it was illegal.
“In spite of knowing it was legally wrong … what she perceived as right was to take her children’s life on earth to preserve them from eternal damnation,” said Dr. Phillip Resnick, who held fast to his assertion that Yates was insane despite an intense grilling by prosecution attorneys.
Resnick and the defense say Andrea Yates could not tell the difference between right and wrong at the time of the killings — the legal standard that must be met for a successful insanity defense.
“I think she qualifies for the Texas insanity defense,” Resnick said.
Lead prosecutor Joe Owmby tried in vain to get Resnick to abandon or at least back off his conclusion that Yates meets the requirements for legal insanity.
Dr. Resnick testified that Yates, 37, believed she was faced with the choice of seeing her children go to hell or going in their place by killing them herself and sending them to heaven.
Voices began penetrating Yates’ world after the birth of her first child, Noah, in 1994. The voices urged her only to “get a knife, get a knife” according to psychiatrist reports in 1999.
The hallucinations became stronger after the birth of her fourth child, Luke, in 1999. And they returned after the birth of her fifth child, the couple’s only girl, Mary, born on Nov. 30, 2000.
Four months after each of these births, Andrea Yates had to be hospitalized. Before she killed her children, doctors were convinced she was suffering from major depression, possibly a psychosis brought on by post-partum depression.
She called police June 20 and told them to come to her Clear Lake, Texas, home. When they arrived, she told them she had drowned Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 3, Luke, 2, and 6-month-old Mary.
“I’m saying, considering her dilemma, she chose the conduct she thought was right,” said Resnick, a psychiatrist who has examined Yates’ case. He has studied filicide, or parents who kill their children, since 1965.
Resnick agreed with the prosecution in saying that Yates knew that she was committing an illegal act when she drowned her children.
But he said she was so entrenched in her strange belief system populated by Satan and other hellish voices that told her that her children weren’t developing correctly, both academically and spiritually, that she felt she had no other choice but to kill them.
After she was jailed, government and private psychiatrists concluded that she is schizophrenic and that the mental illness did not manifest itself until after the births of her children. The prosecution agrees that she is mentally ill but says she knows right from wrong.
In an attempt to thwart Satan’s wish to torture her children, Yates decided to act as a decoy for Satan. If she killed the children, they would go to heaven. That would leave an angry Satan to pursue Yates, according to Resnick.
But in her mind, it was the perfect plan for mankind, because she would be punished by “Governor Bush” and executed by the state of Texas. When that happened, mankind would be rid of Satan forever.