Andrea Yates  Andrea Pia Yates (née Kennedy; born July 2, 1964) is a former resident of Houston, Texas, who confessed to drowning her five children in their bathtub on June 20, 2001. She had been suffering for some time from very severe postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis and schizophrenia. During her trial, she was represented by Houston criminal defense attorney George Parnham. Chuck Rosenthal, the district attorney in Harris County, asked for the death penalty in her 2002 trial. Her case placed the M'Naghten rules, along with the irresistible impulse test, a legal test for sanity, under close public scrutiny in the United States. She was convicted of capital murder, but the jury refused the death penalty option. She was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years. The verdict was overturned on appeal, in light of false testimony by one of the expert psychiatric witnesses. On July 26, 2006, a Texas jury in her retrial found that Yates was not guilty by reason of insanity. She was consequently committed by the court to the North Texas State Hospital, Vernon Campus, a high-security mental health facility in Vernon, where she received medical treatment and was a roommate of Dena Schlosser, another woman who committed infanticide by killing her infant daughter. In January 2007, she was moved to a low-security state mental hospital in Kerrville, Kerrville State Hospital. Yates was born in Hallsville, Texas, the youngest of the five children of Jutta Karin Koehler, a German immigrant, and Andrew Emmett Kennedy, whose parents were Irish immigrants. She suffered from bulimia during her teenage years. She also suffered from depression, and at 17 she spoke to a friend about suicide. She graduated from Milby High School in 1982. She was the class valedictorian, captain of the swim team, and an officer in the National Honor Society. Yates completed a two-year pre-nursing program at the University of Houston and graduated from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. From 1986 until 1994 she worked as a registered nurse at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. In summer 1989 she met Russell "Rusty" Yates at the Sunscape Apartments in Houston. They soon moved in together and were married on April 17, 1993. They announced that they "would seek to have as many babies as nature allowed", and bought a four-bedroom house in Friendswood, Texas.