This report includes information from the Associated Press. He divorced Andrea Yates in March 2005 and remarried a year later. Yates’ ex-husband, Rusty, was in the courtroom. Stumpo said he asked her if she realized what she had done. On cross-examination, Knapp agreed with Parnham’s description of Yates as unemotional when she told him, “I just killed my kids.”Īfter finding Yates’ four other children dead under a sheet on a bed, Officer Frank Stumpo said, he returned to the living room where Yates sat quietly. She added that autopsies showed that all the children - Noah John, 5 Paul, 3 Luke, 2 and Mary, 6 months - struggled. Williford said the footprints suggested that Noah had tried to run away. There, Yates’ 7-year-old son, Noah was found floating face-down in the tub. A trail of watery footprints that appeared to be from an adult and a child led from the bathroom to the kitchen and back to the bathroom, he said. Officer David Knapp said Yates came to the door “wide-eyed” and dripping wet. On Monday, as two Houston police officers testified about the crime scene, Yates kept her eyes on the defense table. Prosecutors might introduce evidence of conversations with inmates in which Yates reportedly talked about how to feign mental illness. Parnham might offer new evidence of the mental breakdowns he says Yates has endured since her first trial. Lawyers for both sides plan to present much of the same evidence as in 2002. Her lawyer has said she is taking a lighter dosage. It was a marked contrast to Yates’ first trial, when she appeared detached and heavily medicated. She occasionally conferred with one of her lawyers, looking her in the eye and nodding. Yates, sitting at the defense table, appeared pensive and attentive throughout the day. When officers arrived, they found that Andrea had killed all five of her young children by drowning them in the family bathtub. “I do not see that in this case based on the evidence.” Andrea Yates On June 20, 2001, a woman named Andrea Yates called her local police dispatch and requested the presence of officers to her home, refusing to give any specific reason for the request. “I believe in the insanity defense,” prosecutor Kaylynn Williford said. Prosecutors said Yates was sane enough to know that drowning her children was wrong, because she called police to her home and confessed. The only way to keep Satan from getting her children, the lawyer said Yates believed, was to kill them. Yates, 41, was convicted of capital murder in 2002, but an appeals court threw out the case, ruling that the erroneous testimony of a prosecution witness might have prejudiced the jury.ĭuring opening statements Monday in her retrial, defense attorney George Parnham told the new jury that Yates was seriously mentally ill and thought Satan was living inside her. Five years after Andrea Yates drowned her five children in the bathtub of her suburban home, a jury is hearing evidence for the second time on her criminal responsibility for the deaths.
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