Texas mother on trial for drowning her five children

NEW YORK - Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned all five of her children in the bath last summer, was suffering from the "cruellest and most severe" of mental illnesses, the jury was told at the start of her murder trial yesterday.

In his opening statement, defence lawyer George Parnham laid the groundwork for the contention that Mrs Yates, 37, is innocent by reason of insanity, painting a picture of a desperate woman with a long and well documented history of mental disorder.

The prosecution, however, described a woman who knew exactly what she was doing on 20 June 2001 when she took her children, aged between seven years and six months, one by one to the bathtub and drowned them face-down in five inches of water.

Whether or not Mrs Yates killed the children is not an issue at the trial. The jury will decide instead whether she understood right from wrong when she drowned her own offspring.

If jurors reject the insanity argument, Mrs Yates could face the death penalty.

For the prosecution, Joseph Ownby detailed minute by minute the events of that day. He noted that Mrs Yates was rational enough to commit the alleged crimes in a period between her husband, Russell Yates, leaving for work, and a scheduled visit one hour later to the house by her mother-in-law.

The prosecutor emphasised that Mrs Yates herself telephoned the emergency services after drowning the children and asked for police come to her home. Moreover, she admitted to killing them in interviews that day with an arresting police detective.

"She told him that she wasn't mad at the children, but that she killed them because they weren't developing properly and she was a bad mother," Mr Ownby noted.

"She told him that she had been thinking about killing the children for two years."

Jury selection in the case took almost a month and the trial is expected to last at least three weeks. The harshest moments may come when the prosecution presents jurors with photographs and a video of the scene detectives found in the Yates household.

The four younger children - John, Paul, Luke and Mary, aged 5, 3, 2 and six months respective - were laid out on a bed, while the oldest, Noah, 7, was still in the bath.

Mr Ornby described how the children's cereal bowls were still on the kitchen table when the officers arrived. He told jurors that the medical examiner would testify to "the bruises that were on the children from her holding their heads under the water".

Mr Parnham attempted to place some blame for what happened on doctors who had been treating Mrs Yates for her mental disturbances but who had taken her off prescribed medicines a short time before the murders.

"You will hear that on June 20, Andrea Yates had zero anti-psychotic medication in her system," he said.

The defence case may ultimately rest on whether or not the jury can be convinced that no mother could have done something so heinous if she were fully sane.

Dick DeGuerin, a Houston lawyer who has worked on similar cases, put it like this yesterday: "The truth is no mother in her right mind would have done this".

- INDEPENDENT