Rusty Yates, whose ex-wife Andrea Yates drowned their five children one by one in 2001, has reportedly forgiven the notorious killer mom and even speaks with her on a monthly basis.
Yates, 59, regularly calls Kerrville State Hospital in Texas – a facility for criminals who are deemed incompetent to stand trial or found “not guilty by reason of insanity” – to speak to his 60-year-old ex-wife, who was deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial, the New York Post reported.
According to the newspaper, the former couple talks about their slain children – Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 3, Luke, 2, and Mary, 6 months. Were it not for their mother’s actions, all five would be adults now.
Rusty Yates could not be reached for comment.
This undated family photo shows four of the five children of Andrea Yates, 36, who confessed on June 20, 2001, to murdering her children by drowning them in their home in Clear Lake, a suburb of south Houston, Texas. The children shown are, from left, John, Luke, Paul and Noah. (Yates Family/Getty Images)
Rusty Yates divorced Andrea Yates in March 2005, three years after she was sentenced to life in prison on two murder convictions for drowning her children in a bathtub.
An appeals court later overturned those convictions based on mistaken testimony by a psychiatrist – she was found not guilty by reason of insanity at her 2006 retrial.
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Rusty Yates had another child, but that marriage also ended in divorce. He is still employed as a NASA engineer – the job he held when his then-wife chased their children down and drowned them systematically.
“Andrea was a wonderful mother,” he told NewsNation in an interview last year. “When someone acts so out of character like that, it’s a flag that something else is going on. As far as forgiveness goes, it’s kind of a start.”
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Rusty Yates photographed on Jan. 5, 2002 in Houston, Texas, before his divorce from Andrea Yates. (Pam Francis/Getty Images)
“If I were driving our Suburban down the street and had a heart attack and swerved into oncoming traffic and everyone in the car died but me, would they prosecute me for capital murder and rub my face in crime scene photos? Of my children?” he rhetorically asked in the interview. “I don’t think so. But to me, it’s 100% exactly the same.”
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Andrea Yates attempted suicide at least four times before taking her children’s lives. After the birth of her fourth child in June 1999, she tried to overdose on pills, then held a knife up to her neck and begged her then-husband to let her die shortly after her hospital release.
After attempting suicide two more times that summer, she was diagnosed with post-partum psychosis.
Her first psychiatrist, Dr. Eileen Starbranch, testified in court that she urged Andrea and Rusty to stop having children – regardless, they conceived their fifth and final child seven weeks after that discharge, Fox News previously reported.
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This undated family photo shows Mary, the youngest of the five children of Andrea Yates. (Phillippe Diederich/Getty Images)
Rusty Yates was also advised not to leave the children alone with his wife.
Andrea Yates’ family also previously told Fox News that Rusty didn’t do enough to help his spouse or their children. Her mother, Karin Kennedy, said her son-in-law told her after the birth of their fourth child that he had never changed a diaper.
“When they came to my house, that was the first time I told Rusty, ‘Luke needs changing,'” Kennedy said. “He says, ‘Well that’d be a first. I have never changed a diaper before.'”
After the children’s murders on June 20, 2001, Andrea Yates would tell her prison psychologist that she had considered killing her children in a delusional bid to save them from eternal damnation.
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Andrea Yates sits with her attorney, George Parnham, after the not guilty by reason of insanity verdict was read in her retrial on July 26, 2006, in Houston. (Brett Coomer-Pool/Getty Images)
“My children weren’t righteous,” she told her prison psychiatrist, according to court documents obtained by The Post. “They stumbled because I was evil. The way I was raising them, they could never be saved. They were doomed to perish in the fires of hell.”
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Last month, Yates declined a hearing that would have determined whether she was competent to be released from the mental hospital, the New York Post reported. She is eligible to undergo a review for release each year, but has repeatedly declined.
