What Will Happen After Lindsay Clancy’s Trial? I Looked at a Terrible Case From 20 Years Ago. I Fear History Is Doomed to Repeat Itself.
Slate · L · trust 51/100
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On June 20, 2001, Russell Yates left for his job at NASA in Houston, Texas, and his wife Andrea Pia Yates fed her five kids breakfast. Then, after filling the bathtub, she drowned them one by one. The oldest was 7, the youngest just 6 months. Prior to the killings, Yates had been hospitalized multiple times for mental illness, and had attempted suicide twice. Images of the Texas mother, with her dark hair and long bangs, in orange prison garb with her arms folded across her stomach, were everywhere in 2001 and 2002, as her trial proceeded.
Texas, being a death-penalty state, asked for Yates to be sentenced to execution. A jury instead sentenced Yates to life in prison, a conviction that was overturned on appeal. In 2006, she was acquitted on grounds of insanity, and today remains institutionalized in Texas . She consistently waives her right to be annually reviewed for competency, which, if proven, would lead to her release.
The trial of Lindsay Clancy for the murder of her three kids, ages 8 months to 5 years old, with exercise bands has reminded many commentators of the Yates case. Clancy too has struggled deeply with her mental health, and has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. And both cases provoked fervent discussions about the burden placed on women in raising young children. In its curtain raiser for the Clancy trial, the New York Times even notes that the Yates case “was seen as a breakthrough in public understanding of postpartum psychosis.”
I think we can take a different, less positive lesson from looking back at the public conversation the Yates case inspired, and comparing it to what’s emerged around the Clancy story. There was no social media at the time of the Yates trial—but there were think pieces, blog posts, letters to the editor, and polling. The “visibility” that emerged during the Yates trial around postpartum mental health issues and domestic division of labor seems to have helped many women feel less alone—but also inspired new antifeminist backlash among conservatives shocked at public sympathy for Yates’ situation. We’re at risk of ending up in a similar spot as these discussions recur around the Lindsay Clancy case: with women clamoring for a broader change that will not come.
Like Lindsay Clancy, Andrea Yates worked as a nurse. Unlike Clancy, she quit after the birth of her first child, at which point she became a full-time homemaker. She also homeschooled her kids, and took care of her father, who had Alzheimer’s. During the trial, the world found out that Rusty Yates would not help with the kids, or hire anyone else to help with them. According to one witness, when Andrea Yates had trouble with her caregiving workload, Rusty Yates was unkind about it. At her trial, Andrea’s best friend testified that Rusty had mused to her about his wife’s insufficiency, pointing to another woman in the neighborhood: “She’s got nine kids … and does just fine. I don’t know why Andrea’s having so much trouble.” The best friend testified that she called Yates’ husband three times during the worst of her friend’s illness to try to get him to take his wife to a doctor. She remembered him saying, “She’s just sad over her dad … I’ll look into it.”
There was an angle to the Andrea Yates case we don’t have with Lindsay Clancy, and one that influenced the strong reactions that both feminists and conservatives had to Yates’ story: the Yates family were fundamentalists, and both their family life and the particular shape of Yates’ psychosis were shaped by their religious beliefs. In the course of her defense, Yates’ lawyers brought a witness, a psychiatrist, who had warned the Yateses against having more children , after Andrea had her fourth. As the psychiatrist testified, “Rusty Yates and Andrea wanted as many children as nature would allow.” Three weeks after the drownings, Yates told an interviewer that Satan told her to kill her children, because she was such a bad mother, and her children were “retarded and tainted and not developing correctly,” and would go to hell if they weren’t killed. Yates also asked her jailers to shave her head to reveal the 666 she believed was on her skull. (This religious aspect of the Yates case was the subject of a new documentary that streamed on HBO Max this year.)
In a Washington Post piece published in August of 2001 , just when the state announced it would seek the death penalty for Yates, writer Abigail Trafford said that the Yates conversation, two months in, had “gone in cycles.” First there was “unspeakable horror at the killings”; then, “a kind of empathy” when more information came out about Yates’ life. People began having more public conversations about postpartum depression. But, next, Trafford saw a “backlash setting in,” and noted that things were “getting nasty.” Trafford cited an unnamed call-in radio host asking his listeners if Yates should “fry,” and receiving a 70 percent affirmative vote from respondents.
What did those conversations about postpartum depression and psychosis surrounding the Yates trial look like? Some of it, from our 2026 vantage, seems condescending and dated. A service-y June 2001 Houston Chronicle article on the “baby blues,” pegged to the crimes, began with this embarrassing lede: “She might cry when she realizes her midsection more closely resembles her bed pillow than her once-svelte figure. She might wail when her husband speaks to her with an edge in his voice. She might scream when she changes a third diaper in five minutes or realizes the baby can’t go anywhere, which means she can’t either.”
But many feminists did publicly defend Yates. In September 2001, Kim Gandy, then president of the National…
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