by Suruthi Bala
Although the lie detector results that made the police doubt Susan’s story were pretty pointless, the police were in fact right to be suspicious. Whenever investigators would question Susan and hint at the possibility that she might have been involved in her children’s disappearance, she would totally fucking lose it and become incredibly belligerent. They didn’t believe her version of events anymore, but without anything else to go on, they had to continue the search for the missing children.
On the ninth day of the search, after giving yet another emotional appeal on television, Susan Smith finally broke down in a police interrogation. She fell to the floor crying and confessed that her kids were at the bottom of John D. Long Lake. Within hours police divers found her black Mazda 18 feet underwater, 122 feet from shore. Alex and Michael were still inside.
Susan Smith claimed that she had been feeling suicidal and had gone out to the lake to kill herself and the boys, but only because she didn’t want them to live without a mother. According to Susan, that night had been a culmination of weeks of depression. She put the kids in the car and drove around for hours before finally stopping at the lake, where she decided to end it all. However, Susan said then “something happened”: she got out of the car, took the hand brake off, and let the car roll down the ramp and into the lake, taking her little boys with it.
As you can see, there are some similarities to Susan Smith and Andrea Yates’s stories, such as the fact that both women seemed to know that what they had done was legally wrong, seeing as how Andrea Yates called the police to confess and Susan Smith tried a cover-up. But there are also many differences between the women, such as in their behaviors in the immediate aftermath of the killings.
Let’s consider their backgrounds. What had happened in the years leading up to the point that Andrea Yates and Susan Smith each did what they did? And are they actually “insane,” or just “crazy”?
Backgrounds
ANDREA YATES
Andrea had been brought up in Houston and was a fantastic overachiever. She excelled in academics, sports, everything. She was captain of the swim team, a historian of the National Honor Society, and even class valedictorian her senior year.
After high school, Andrea went to the University of Texas to study nursing and went on to land her dream job. In 1989, at age 25, Andrea met her future husband Rusty Yates. Rusty was also 25, had a bloody cool name, and had a great job working as a computer systems designer for NASA. As far as Andrea was concerned, he was a catch. After three years of dating the pair got married. From the outside they seemed like the perfect couple, but behind closed doors, things weren’t going great. As Suzy Spencer explains in her book on the case, Breaking Point, according to Rusty, Andrea hated sex. He had hoped that things would get better after they got married, but they didn’t.
For a couple seemingly struggling with intimacy, they got pregnant pretty fast, and on February 26, 1994, their first child, Noah, was born. Almost immediately after Noah’s birth, Andrea began to experience some weird symptoms. She started having violent thoughts and hearing voices that she believed to be the devil. Andrea was terrified, so she didn’t tell anyone what was going on. Meanwhile, Rusty, not noticing that there was an issue, wanted to try for another baby. He jokingly called Andrea “Fertile Myrtle.” The very next year Andrea got pregnant again, and on December 15, 1995, the couple had another son, John.
With a second baby now in the picture, Andrea’s stress levels went through the roof and so did her violent fantasies. But again, Andrea suppressed it all—and things were about to get a whole lot worse. In 1996, Rusty got a job in Florida. He then made a terrible decision that further eroded Andrea’s mental health. (Again, Andrea hadn’t told anyone yet what was happening to her, but Rusty hadn’t noticed, either.) Rusty moved his fragile wife—who by this point was regularly hearing voices and having visions of violence—and his two young sons into a 38-foot trailer.
Now there’s nothing wrong with living in a trailer, and as we’ll see this isn’t the main reason why Andrea spiraled, but it certainly didn’t help. The move into the trailer wasn’t an economic decision; Rusty worked for NASA and had the money to move them into a house. But the thing is, Andrea wasn’t the only one worried about the devil. Back in college, Rusty had started following the teachings of Michael Woroniecki—a very fire-and-brimstone street preacher—who even dabbled in a bit of Christ-centric EDM on the side. Woroniecki describes himself as an independent, nondenominational Christian missionary, and back in the nineties he and his wife Rachel left Michigan with their six kids and hit the road in a bus-shaped church on wheels for some Jesus-themed Wild Thornberrys fun!
They traveled all over the US (and a bunch of other countries, too) preaching on street corners, spreading their particular brand of Christianity—one of austerity, biblical back to basics, and the idea that only a very few, very select group of people can ascend to heaven. (In a bit of a bummer, everyone else goes to hell.) This austerity teaching was key to their whole deal; and it was perhaps this idea that convinced the Yates family to leave their nice house in the suburbs and move into that trailer.
The year they made the trailer their home, Andrea got pregnant again and miscarried. But it wasn’t long before she was pregnant once more. In 1997 the Yateses had their third son, Paul. After this, Andrea’s visions got worse and the voices intensified: they started telling Andrea to kill her children. But still, Rusty didn’t notice anything wrong with his wife.
The following year, with the boys getting bigger by the day, Rusty traded in the trailer for an old 350-square-foot Greyhound bus. And if three boys and two adults living on a bus wasn’t enough, just a few months later baby number four, Luke, arrived. The conditions on the bus were dire, but Rusty was at work all the time and it was Andrea who was left at home on the bus every day, alone with four boys under the age of four. She wouldn’t even use disposable diapers or a washing machine, again to maintain a simple and austere life. Andrea felt like she was drowning. The voices were now screaming at her.
The 2002 Mugshots episode “A Mother’s Madness” makes clear how Andrea’s life was unraveling; she was homeschooling her three eldest boys and nursing a newborn, all while living on a bus. Andrea was also now pen-paling the Woronieckis—although it had been Rusty who had brought the preacher into their lives, Andrea Yates was now the one following his teachings with the zeal of a convert.
Slowly but surely over that summer, Andrea’s delusions began to deepen and merge with the biblical mumbo jumbo she was regularly consuming. And boy was there a lot of mumbo jumbo. According to Dr. Lucy Puryear, an expert witness hired by Yates’s defense team, Woroniecki’s key message to his followers was, “If you think you’re a good person and a Christian and that you’re going to heaven, you aren’t, because that’s prideful and only God knows and chooses who goes to heaven.” He also believed that all women are evil; he even wrote to Andrea telling her that she was the daughter of Eve and a wicked witch. This guy had absolutely zero fucking chill, and as you can imagine, these sorts of messages just made things worse.
By now, people had started to notice that something was wrong with Andrea, but still she didn’t get the help that she needed. Andrea was becoming more and more isolated, and she was still regularly communicating with Woroniecki.
It was the perfect storm: Michael Woroniecki was delivering messages of good, evil, God, and the devil, and to Andrea’s fracturing mind it all made perfect sense. As mentioned above, from Dr. Puryear’s statements in court, Woroniecki had a specific problem with how modern women raised their children and it was this particular belief that Andrea latched on to. According to Woroniecki, it’s the woman’s job to stay at home and raise the kids, but women today are just too lazy to bring up their kids right. He even wrote a whimsical little poem about it, which he published in his terribly named newsletter The Perilous Times. This poem, which ends with the harrowing lines, “Modern mother worldly cast in hell! Now what becomes of the children
of such a Jezebel?” had been sent to Andrea in the days leading up to the murders and it was used as evidence at trial by both the prosecution and the defense.
Thanks to this kind of rhetoric, Andrea started to see herself as the “Jezebel” and her kids as the ones who would pay the price for her failures. She became convinced that her kids would go to hell because she was a terrible mother, even though everyone who knew her thought she was a loving, warm, and natural mom. But this is how psychosis works; things that a psychotic person may have been exposed to—like religion—become key manifestations of their delusions. In Andrea’s case, as her psychosis was taking hold, she was simultaneously being bombarded with extreme messages—of good, evil, God, and the devil—and so the two became enmeshed.
Four months after Luke was born, Rusty got a call from Andrea who said simply, “Come home, I need help.” When Rusty got home (to the bus), Andrea was sitting there chewing her fingers—not her fingernails, her fingers—and she was shaking. By this point Andrea had been having vivid, intrusive thoughts about killing the kids for months. It was consuming her.
Rusty took Andrea and the kids to Andrea’s parents’ house—he was at a loss about what to do. And while being off that bus was a good start, Andrea still needed medical help. The next day, Andrea intentionally overdosed on her father’s sleeping pills. She was in freefall, but she survived.
Following the suicide attempt, Andrea was taken to a psychiatric hospital, diagnosed with major depressive disorder, and prescribed the antidepressant Zoloft. Andrea was then referred to psychiatrist Dr. Eileen Starbranch, who recommended changing Andrea’s medication to the antipsychotic Zyprexa. Andrea needed all the help she could get, but she was still trapped in the Woroniecki bubble—and according to him, all doctors were bad and medication was even worse. So Andrea, who was in a deeply paranoid state of psychosis, secretly stopped taking her medication. She began regressing: She started pulling out her own hair, scratching at her skin relentlessly, and tearing at the sores and scabs on her body. Andrea’s visual and auditory hallucinations also began to intensify. She would hear the words “get a knife, get a knife, get a knife” screaming over and over in her head.
After weeks of this, one day Andrea did get a knife. But, terrified that she was going to kill her children, she tried to stab herself in the neck. This time, Rusty saw her, and he managed to wrestle the knife away and take Andrea back to the hospital. She admitted to doctors that she had had the knife hallucination more than 10 times in the previous few days. Finally, Andrea was diagnosed with postpartum psychosis and given an emergency dose of the powerful antipsychotic drug Haldol. (What is postpartum psychosis? We explain in the sidebar below.)
WHAT IS POSTPARTUM PSYCHOSIS?
Postpartum psychosis is not the same as postpartum depression. Postpartum depression is a serious disorder, but it is quite common; up to one in seven women can experience the feelings of persistent sadness, anxiety, and a lack of energy that comes with postpartum depression. But according to the NHS (the UK’s National Health Service), postpartum psychosis only occurs in one out of every one thousand births. In these cases, women will suffer from delusions, hallucinations, and a manic mood; essentially the symptoms we’d see in someone who is psychotic. Over half of women diagnosed with postpartum psychosis go on to be diagnosed with bipolar disorder or manic depression, but most women with postpartum psychosis do make a full recovery as long as they receive the right treatment. The right treatment being medication, therapy, and in some very severe cases, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which involves small electric currents being passed through the brain to induce seizures and alter brain chemistry.
Andrea’s psychiatrist recommended that she have ECT, but she and Rusty decided against it, so after three weeks in the hospital Andrea was released with prescriptions for the necessary medications and with a plan for her to have monthly check-ins with her doctor. She and Rusty were also told in no uncertain terms to not have any more children, something Dr. Starbranch, Andrea’s psychiatrist, has confirmed and reiterated in every interview she has given over the years. This is because when a woman has already had an episode of postpartum psychosis, she has a 50 to 80 percent chance of having another episode if she has another baby. And not only does the risk of a psychotic episode increase, but the symptoms are likely to be even worse and much harder to treat.
Back on her medication and now living with her family in a nice new house, Andrea started to improve. By September 1999, her condition had improved considerably and she was getting back to her old self. Two months later, Andrea and Rusty made a fateful decision. Against her doctor’s advice Andrea stopped taking her birth control and her antipsychotic medication. The following year, the couple’s fifth child and first daughter, Mary, was born.
On May 31, 2001, Andrea was taken back to the hospital, diagnosed with major depressive disorder, and—no surprise—postpartum psychosis. This time, however, Andrea didn’t improve. But not knowing what to do, Rusty took Andrea home with yet more prescriptions for antipsychotics and antidepressants. Within months, all five of the Yates children would be dead and Andrea would be in jail.
SUSAN SMITH
Now that we understand a little more about Andrea’s background, what about Susan Smith’s? What led up to the point that she killed her two sons?
Susan was born on September 26, 1971 in Union, South Carolina. Right from the start, her life was anything but stable. When she was seven her mother and father separated, and just a few weeks later, her mom married another man named Beverly Russell.
Shortly thereafter, Susan’s father took his own life; and Susan—who had always been a bubbly child—became sullen, withdrawn, and quiet. She struggled with depression and even made a suicide attempt at age 13. But as a teenager Susan became good at hiding her pain. She was a popular and outgoing student, even voted “Friendliest Female” (whatever the hell that means) in her senior year of high school.
At the time, from the outside it looked like Susan had it all—a loving middle-class family; doing well at school; she seemed happy. But Susan wasn’t happy. When she had turned 16, allegations were made that her stepfather Beverly Russell had started sexually abusing her. Susan actually reported the abuse to Child Protective Services and Russell was removed from the house. But after just a few family counseling sessions he was allowed to return home, because Susan refused to press charges. The question that needs to be screamed in the faces of the people who made this decision is why on earth, even if a teenage girl doesn’t want to press charges, would no action be taken against a man who is suspected of abusing her? In fact, Susan’s mother stayed with Russell. So nothing changed, life returned to “normal,” and Russell continued to sexually abuse his stepdaughter.
As a teenager, Susan worked at a supermarket; her outwardly upbeat personality made her a hit with the customers. During this time she had affairs with a much older married man and with another co-worker. At 18, Susan got pregnant and had an abortion, but this scared the married man and he called off their relationship. Susan couldn’t cope and she tried to kill herself again by overdosing on painkillers. Susan was not OK, but no one in her life seems to have cared.
In March 1991, when Susan discovered that she was pregnant again, she decided to marry the baby’s father, her co-worker and high school friend David Smith. David actually wrote a book in 1995, Beyond All Reason, in which he details how the next few years of his and Susan’s life unfolded. According to him their relationship was a volatile and unstable one.
On October 10, 1991, their first son, Michael, was born. But things were not smooth sailing; by the following March, David and Susan had separated. Still, they kept sleeping together, and by the end of the year Susan was pregnant once again. At this point she and David decided to get back together, and Susan insisted that buying their own place would solve a lot of their problems. They borrowed money from Susan’s mom and bought a house, but in what would become an ongoing problem in their marriage, Susan al
ways wanted a lot more (materialistically speaking) than her or David’s income could provide. This put a huge amount of pressure on their relationship, so despite the new house and a second baby on the way, Susan and David started to drift apart.
Over the course of the next few months, they split up and got back together again twice. It was during this turbulent time that their son Alexander was born, on August 5, 1993. Unfortunately, within a few weeks, the Smiths decided to call it quits on their marriage for good. During their entire relationship Susan and David had carried on working together at the supermarket where they had first met. You have to wonder, with all the arguments these two had how the hell they managed it, but they did. But perhaps Susan had finally had enough because it was at this point that she took a new job at Conso Products, where she rapidly climbed the ranks to personal assistant to the CEO.
Finally, many of Susan’s desires started to come true: she was now rubbing shoulders with the elites of South Carolina. She saw how the other half lived and she liked it. Susan was thrilled when she started a casual relationship with her boss’ son, Tom Findlay. But with this cast of characters, things are about as simple as the plot of Lost (and spoiler: the ending is just as shit) and by spring 1994, Susan was once again also seeing David.
We’d imagine it was a nightmare keeping up this new weird love triangle, and after a few months of giving it a go, Susan suddenly asked David for a divorce and tried to step things up with Tom. However, if Susan thought that this would keep Tom by her side, she was mistaken. As Susan was finalizing her divorce, he was backing out, and on October 17, 1994, Tom Findlay wrote Susan a letter ending their relationship. He told her that they were just too different—he didn’t want to have children, and he certainly didn’t want to raise hers. The letter finished with a bit of advice that is just the most cringe shit you’ll ever read: “If you want to catch a nice guy like me one day you have to act like a nice girl. And you know, nice girls don’t sleep with married men.” (Here, Tom is referring to Susan’s sexual relationships with other men in town, but he doesn’t seem too hard on himself for sleeping with a very married Susan… funny that. But don’t worry, we have already forwarded this to @beam_me_up_softboi.)
