Getty Images
Rusty Yates, the ex-husband of notorious killer mom Andrea Yates, has forgiven her for drowning their five young children in 2001 — and even talks to her in the mental hospital at least once a month.
The Post has learned that Rusty, 59, calls Kerrville State Hospital regularly to speak to his 60-year-old ex-wife. The former couple talks about their slain children, who would all be adults now.
Rusty has even visited his ex-wife in the facility, which is intended for people who are deemed incompetent to stand trial or found “not guilty by reason of insanity.”
Rusty Yates divorced his infamous wife in 2002. He remarried and had another child but that union also ended in divorce.
Rusty still works as a NASA engineer — the job he was at when Yates chased down and killed the couple’s kids one-by-one. He maintains a website intended to keep his children’s memory alive.
“Andrea was a wonderful mother,” Rusty told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo 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 the start.”
“The next step of forgiveness, I’d say, is understanding it’s a sickness,” he continued. “But for her sickness, she never, ever, ever would have harmed our children.”
Yates was 37 on June 20, 2001, when she drowned her five young children in the bathtub of their suburban Houston home.
According to court testimony, she waited for Rusty, to go to work. After she left, she began to kill her children — Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 3, Luke, 2, and Mary, 6 months — one by one.
Yates was charged with five counts of capital murder. The prosecution called the crime “heinous” and advocated for the death penalty. But the defense argued that Yates suffered from severe depression and psychosis as a result of her recent delivery — and that caused her to kill her children.
Yates was initially convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life. Even behind bars, she expressed delusional thoughts, telling authorities that she had considered killing the kids for two years to save them from eternal damnation.
“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.”
Based on her mental state, Yates’ lawyers appealed the case and were granted a retrial. She was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 2006. A judge sent her to Kerrville, where she has remained ever since — and refused to petition the court to be released.
In 2001, Rusty was infamously skeptical of Andrea’s postpartum depression and psychosis defense, even saying that depressed people “just need a swift kick in the pants.”
Now, his beliefs have evolved, and Yates likens Andrea’s mental illness to a physical ailment.
“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 Cuomo.
“I don’t think so. But to me, it’s 100% exactly the same.”