5 Disturbing Details The Cult Behind The Killer: The Andrea Yates Story Left Out
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The Cult Behind the Killer: The Andrea Yates Story examines Andrea Yates’ story from the perspective that she was allegedly influenced by preacher Michael Woroniecki to drown her five children, which he has denied.
On June 20, 2001, Andrea called 911 and confessed to killing her and her husband, Rusty Yates’, five children while she was watching them alone at their home in Clear Lake, Texas. She was later convicted of killing Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 3, Luke, 2, and 6-month-old Mary in 2002 before her conviction was overturned and she was granted a retrial where the verdict was not guilty by reason of insanity.
At the time of the killings, Andrea had been suffering from severe postpartum depression and psychosis and prosecutors alleged that she had also been following Woroniecki’s teachings.
The ID docuseries, which became available to stream on HBO Max on Jan. 6, includes several people involved in Andrea’s personal life — including Rusty — and former followers of Woroniecki.
“I think looking back, I miscalculated the effect on Andrea,” Rusty claimed of the religious leader’s teachings. “Now, I believe her delusions could well have been influenced by her exposure to the Woronieckis. If I had to do it all over, I would not have introduced her to them.”
Here are five details The Cult Behind the Killer: The Andrea Yates Story left out.
While there were several mentions and stories relating to Andrea’s mental health in the docuseries, there was little information about her years-long struggle to treat it.
In Suzanne O’Malley’s 2005 book, Are You There Alone?: The Unspeakable Crime of Andrea Yates, she wrote that Andrea had been suffering from depression as young as her early teenage years. One of her classmates claimed that Andrea had contemplated suicide when she was 17 years old.
Fordham Law School author and criminologist Deborah W. Denno wrote in her own 2003 paper that years before Andrea had ever met Rusty, she was suffering from “intense loneliness and, perhaps, depression,” while working as a young nurse.
Andrea’s mental health reportedly further deteriorated after she and Rusty, who married in 1993, welcomed their first four children together. Rusty specifically mentioned that after the 1999 birth of their fourth child, Luke, Andrea suffered a “nervous breakdown.”
“We were still at Andrea’s mother’s house and Andrea walked off,” he recalled in the doc. Rusty then claimed, “I open the bathroom door and she is standing, looking at herself in the mirror, with a knife up to her neck. She just stood there, catatonic.”
Andrea was subsequently hospitalized and sought treatment for her postpartum depression. While the docuseries highlights her brief stay at the hospital in early 2001, it did not mention the variety of medications she was taking to treat her diagnosis.
Over the course of her mental illness, Andrea was prescribed antidepressants such as Effexor, Remeron, Wellbutrin and Zoloft, as well as the antipsychotic drug, Haldol, per Denno’s paper. Two weeks before Andrea killed her children, she stopped taking Haldol.
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