A Texas mother has admitted killing her five children at a court appearance yesterday. She was visited in jail for the first time since she reportedly drowned them in a bath.
Ms Andrea Yates, 36, started her day giving short, barely audible answers as she stood with crossed arms before State District Judge Belinda Hill. The judge granted her indigent status and a court-appointed attorney to defend her against a charge of capital murder.
By day's end, the former registered nurse who admitted killing her children had a private attorney and a jailhouse visit from the victims' father - her husband Russell - and her relatives.
Mr Russell Yates, who was not in court during his wife's appearance, arrived along with several relatives and attorney Mr George Parnham after planning for the burial of his children next Wednesday.
"The family standing behind me is very supportive of Andrea, and this includes the father of these children and the husband of their mother," Mr Parnham said after the visit, gesturing to Russell Yates and the other relatives. "They are unified in seeing her through this."
She faces a single capital murder charge that could bring her the death penalty. Prosecutors have not yet said whether they would seek that punishment.
A computer engineer with NASA's space shuttle program, Mr Yates said on Thursday that he loved his wife and would continue to support her because it was the "psychotic side effects with her depression that led her to do this."
Ms Andrea Yates had been taking drugs including the anti-psychotic Haldol to combat postpartum depression, a 1999 bout of which led her to attempt suicide, Russell Yates said. Postpartum depression in its most severe form can include violent psychosis, doctors said.
"This is the most horrendous thing I have ever seen," Harris County Assistant District Attorney Joe Owmby said after the morning hearing, which the judge postponed to July 24 so Yates could consult her lawyer. He would not discuss details of the killings.
A report in yesterday's Houston Chroniclesaid Yates drowned her youngest children one by one in a bathtub, then chased her oldest son, 7-year-old Noah, through the house and dragged him to the bathroom.
A later report in The Dallas Morning Newsonline edition quoted an unidentified police official as saying Ms Yates had thought about killing the children for several months.
"She essentially said she had realized that she was a 'bad mother' and she felt that the children were disabled - that they were not developing normally," the official told the newspaper. "She told us that she had thought about doing this for several months."
The Chronicle report, citing a police official who listened to Yates' taped statement to investigators, said the mother and former registered nurse recounted the events in a "zombie-like fashion."
"What's wrong with Mary?" Noah reportedly asked his mother when he saw her placing 6-month-old Mary in the tub.
Yates said her son ran from her, but she chased him through the house, dragged him back to the bathroom and drowned him alongside his infant sister, the report said.
Before that, Yates said she killed, in order, Luke (2), Paul (3), and John (5). After drowning them, she carried the bodies onto a bed and covered them with a sheet, where police said all but one body, Noah's, was found, according to the paper.
She reportedly left Noah in the bath before calling police and her husband, who was at his job at the nearby Johnson Space Center.