crime and criminals

Suzanne O'Malley is a huntress on the prowl, out to prove that everybody connected with the Andrea Yates case was incompetent. I found the book to be extremely disjointed and tedious. O'Malley pads the book with psychiatric interviews that go nowhere. She even resorts to jury selection to fill up pages. There is one new tidbit, specifically that Andrea Yates was bi-polar before she got married and that her pregnancies pushed her over the edge, but that would be material for a magazine article, not a 262-page book.
O'Malley maintains that Andrea Yates was misdiagnosed and that one psychiatrist especially, Mohmammed Saed, was especially delinquent. Yates tried to commit suicide twice before she drowned her children and she was at one time committed to Devereaux Texas Treatment Network, where Saed was on staff. He prescribed several anti-depressants rather than Haldol which had worked for Yates in the past and never seemed to bother to see his patient. The anti-depressants may have exacerbated her problem. There is one especially funny sequence where O'Malley plays investigative reporter, making an appointment with Saed and complaining about not being able to get right down to work as a journalist, suggesting that she may have ADHD. He prescribes Wellbutrin.
At first it appears O'Malley will focus on Michael Woroniecki, an itinerant preacher the Yates were involved with. Yates had contended that she drowned the children to save them from Satan, that because they were so young and innocent they would go to Heaven. She, Satan, would be annihilated. O'Malley infers Woroniecki was partially responsible. He told Andrea that she was a bad mother and that she was going to hell, supposedly because she let them watch cartoons and would not spank them when they were naughty. This guy is the most interesting character in the book but, alas, O'Malley couldn't get him to agree to an interview.
The huntress returns when the psychiatrist for the prosecution contends that Yates was imitating a segment from the television program, Law and Order, during which a woman drowns her children in a bathtub. O'Malley, a former scripter for the show, checks it out, learning that there was no such program. But, this being Texas, the judge refuses to declare a mistrial. O'Malley takes credit anyway, claiming that if it had not been for her sleuthing Yates would have got the death penalty.
Overall this book reads like one of those quickie exposes that come out after a headline disaster, only those are usually written in two weeks. It took O'Malley two years to write this one.

Have you noticed how it is that when you mention the name "Andrea Yates" people's jaws go slack? Wait 'til you read this book. It is SO good. Not sensationalized at all. It doesn't have to be. The facts are sensational enough. The author, Suzanne O'Malley, has used interviews with Yates by various psychiatrists,interviews with her husband, mother and dozens of others as well as the court transcripts and letters from Andrea Yates herself to the author to tell the story. Apparently, O'Malley is the only reporter to have carried on a correspondence with Yates from her cell in prison. (Would love to read the entire letters and not just the exerpts in the book - wow!) What I like, is that the writer does not intrude on the subject - it tells itself seemingly effortlessly. Just every now and then, like one of the classic tragedies - which surely this is - she will very subtly point out something that is so ironic or just plain stupid that you have to laugh out loud. Thank goodness! Anyway, It's terrific.

The killing of her children was and is, of course unspeakable" but the depth of her understanding combined with the sensitivity of Yates's portrait makes this an extraordinary book. Read it. You won't be sorry. Truth is, after all, stranger than fiction.

I stated that this was the best book written on the Yates case so far. It is, but bear in mind that is not saying a lot given the material that has been published so far. While O'Malley makes a strong case that Andrea Yates was suffering from severe mental illness and would have been better served by being sentenced to a mental hospital, I personally felt that Ms. O'Malley had become too personally attached to this case and some of the key players, esp. Rusty Yates. As a result, it is very difficult to wade through the author's bias and get a clear understanding of the events that lead up to this tragedy.

For instance, very little is said about the Yateses' decision to have a 5th child even after they had been warned by Andrea's doctor that such a decision would almost certainly "guarantee future psychotic depression." Furthermore, the author fails to point out the contradictions in Rusty (and Andrea's) philosophy to have as many children as "nature intended." (i.e, The couple lived together almost a year before they married and Andrea was on the pill during that time.) Also, Rusty claims that he is not a doctor and thought all psychiatrists were essentially the same, yet he also KNEW that Andrea's last doctor, Dr. Mohammad Saeed (who, IMO, became a scapegoat of sorts for both the Yates and the Kennedy families),should have given her the drug Haldol.

O'Malley never bothers to point these out, yet strangely enough, she takes it upon herself to inform the reader that when she met with Dr. Saeed for her first and only appointment, she noticed that his BWM "could have used a wash." It was comments like that which made me wonder just what Ms. O'Mallery was trying to accomplish in this book.

Lastly, I would have liked to hear more from the Kennedy family who since the trial, have levelled many criticism against their son-in-law and what they see as his inablity to acknowledge that his wife was as bad off as she was until it was too late.