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Rusty Yates now believes there was something invisible and corrosive in Andrea, and trying to explicate his marriage, he weaves together two threads: "Bible and brain." God blessed them with five children in eight years of marriage. A big family, Rusty says, was going to be their "adventure in life." But, he explains, "the Bible says the devil prowls around looking for someone to devour. I look at Andrea, and I think that Andrea was weak"--not morally weak but chemically weak, her resistance to evil lowered by mental illness. "Think about a field of deer, and there's one limping around, and that's kind of the way I see it. Andrea was weak, and he attacked her. Jesus says, Resist the devil, and he will flee from you." But Andrea did not have the strength to resist.
On June 20, 2001, however, she was strong enough to realize a vision that had been in her head for two years.
SECRETS AND LIES
Andrea Kennedy had never before been so bold as on the day in 1989 when she knocked on Rusty Yates' apartment door to ask if he knew who had dinged her car. He did not, but they talked. She later confessed to him that she had simply wanted to meet him--just as he had first been interested in her after seeing her in the pool weeks earlier. She went by herself to eat at a steak restaurant by a river, and the sight of couples chatting intimately made her focus her attentions on Rusty. Back at their apartment complex, she scribbled a note on a torn piece of notebook paper and placed it beneath a wiper of his white Toyota Corolla. It said, I WAS THINKING MAYBE YOU COULD COME BY SOME TIME TONIGHT. "I doubt she ever did anything like that before that time," says Rusty. "She just got to a point that she needed companionship."
Eventually, he gave up Monday-night football to visit her apartment. They talked for more than an hour. "She was smart," recalls Rusty, who was 25 at the time, as was Andrea. "She used two or three words and I didn't know what they were." Perhaps for fear of embarrassing him, she did not tell him then that she had been high school valedictorian. He had been a popular jock in high school--and a summa cum laude graduate of Auburn University. There were secrets she would never tell him. Her boldness was rooted in desperation: she had not dated until she turned 23, and she was getting over a romantic breakup. Only after her arrest, he says, did he learn of it from her psychiatric records.