(Pictured: The Yates family before Andrea Yates drowned her five children in a bathtub)
Background: Gilberta Estrada recently hung her four small daughters, three of whom died, and many are blaming her ex-boyfriend Gregorio Frayre Rodriguez, against whom she had a temporary restraining order. What many fail to realize is that domestic violence restraining orders are passed out by courts almost automatically, and they in no way represent a judicial finding of violence or wrongdoing. Estrada may or may not have been a victim of domestic violence.
To learn more about the case, see my blog entry Texas Mother Murders Her 3 Children–and It’s Ex-Boyfriend’s Fault?!
After Andrea Yates drowned her five children in the family’s Houston bathtub in 2001, her husband, Russell Yates, was widely blamed for the killings. I appeared on many Texas radio shows at the time to defend Russell, and was so vilified that I often felt as if I were defending the person who had committed the murders.
Around that time my column “In Defense of a Flawed but Decent Russell Yates” appeared in the Houston Chronicle. The column, which is reprinted below, was the only column defending Russell Yates to appear in a major American newspaper.
In Defense of a Flawed but Decent Russell Yates
By Glenn Sacks
Houston Chronicle, 3/11/02
“It’s a shame that there’s no law that can give Russell Yates his due,” writes syndicated columnist Debra Saunders. “Russell Yates ought to be locked up instead of his wife,” says writer Cindy Hasz. Creators Syndicate’s Froma Harrop sneers that he probably “misses the obedient drudge who bore and raised his five children more than the five children.” Harsh words for Russell Yates have come from many others, particularly former O. J. Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark.
What these and others forget is that it’s hard to make the right decision when you don’t have a lot of options. According to Andrea Yates’ brother, Andrew Kennedy, Russell Yates “did his best….He trusted the doctors and he did everything they said to do. He made sure she took her medication.”
Psychiatrist Mohammed Saeed took Yates off the drug Haldol on June 4. Russell Yates, worried about his wife, brought her back to Dr. Saeed on June 18. The doctor said he saw no sign of psychosis and sent her home.
Two days later, she killed their five children.
Instead of using 20-20 hindsight, let’s look at the situation as it must have appeared to Russell Yates before June 20. Mental illness is difficult for untrained people to cope with and to comprehend. Dr. Saeed had indicated that he believed that Andrea Yates was getting better, and Andrea herself has testified that she told nobody, not even her husband, about the “voices in her head.”
While Russell surely had doubts about leaving the kids with her, he didn’t have a lot of choices. He couldn’t quit his job to care for the kids–somebody had to put food on the table. Ending the home-schooling, a violation of both of their beliefs, might have been a severe blow to his fragile wife’s self-esteem, perhaps pushing her over the edge.
Instead, Russell made the one move he needed to make–he had his mother come in to watch the kids every day. He generally left for work at 9 am and his mother arrived at 10 am, and he thought he had the situation under control.
He also probably believed that the best thing to do was to try to keep their family life stable, to try to be cheerful and to make the kids happy, and to hope that the medications would work and that his wife would get better. He had seen Andrea spiral down after the birth of their fourth child, and then apparently become completely healthy again–exercising regularly and cheerfully being super-mom. He may have believed that much of what Andrea was going through early last year was simply post-pregnancy mood swings, and that she would get better if he was patient.
He also attributed much of his wife’s distress to the death of her father in March of last year. And he no doubt was in some denial, as people who are trapped in difficult situations often are. As he walked out the door to go to work on June 20, should he really have expected that his wife was waiting for him to leave so she could kill their children? (more…)
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