Woman who killed her five children ‘despondent’

A DESPONDENT Andrea Yates is receiving treatment in a Texas hospital for depression so severe that she has refused to eat any food since around the anniversary last month of the day on which she drowned her five children, her lawyer said.

Yates, 40, has lost more than 20 pounds in recent weeks and was said to be “incoherent” when she was moved on Monday from her psychiatric prison to a hospital in Galveston, in Texas, her attorney George Parnham said in an interview.

“I can just imagine the depth of despair she’s in, the depth of hurt and desperation over the deaths of her children,” Mr Parnham said.

Parnham said Yates had improved on Wednesday to the point that “there’s a little twinkle of life,” but he said she was still in bad shape.

Yates is serving a life sentence for killing her five children on June 20, 2001, in a case that has raised awareness of women’s mental health issues and has brought criticism of the Texas criminal justice system.

She drowned the children, who ranged in age from six months to seven years, in the family bath while husband Rusty Yates was at his job at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre.

She had a history of mental problems and was taking medication for severe postpartum depression at the time of the murders. The children had to be killed to save them from the devil, Yates told police.

Yates pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but a Houston jury convicted her in March 2002 of capital murder and sentenced her to life in prison.

Mr Parnham said Yates has gone in and out of depression in prison and had twice lapsed into psychosis, but never to the point of doing physical harm to herself. He said the fact that the anniversary this year was also Father’s Day may have hit her particularly hard.

It was not clear if Yates was trying to kill herself, but she recently suffered delusions that her children were in purgatory and only her death would free them, he said.

Mr Parnham said prison officials did not take her to the hospital sooner because they hoped a change in medication would bring her around.