(4 of 14)
Even as a teenager, she kept her confidences. "Andrea would not let people get close enough," says Marlene Wark, her only good friend through Milby High School in southeast Houston. "She was prickly that way. She minded her own business and expected you to mind your own business." She was the youngest of five. Her parents, determined to vary the children's interests, would rouse them from bed at 5:30 a.m. to swim in the cold pool at the YMCA. The family had one of the largest paper routes in Houston, making deliveries in their mother Jutta's aqua station wagon, which their father Andrew had souped up. As soon as she was old enough, Andrea got a job at a Jack in the Box restaurant. "Her parents expected her to make good grades, and she made good grades," recalls Wark. "She was always interested in pleasing her parents, particularly her father. He was a teacher and very demanding. She did not want him to disapprove of her." She took a calculus test from which she was exempt to prove her capability. "I think her dad really wanted her to do it," says Kyle Weygandt, another classmate.
Andrea worked as a post-op nurse at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center while dating Rusty, who designed computer systems for NASA. They spent two years getting to know each other, living together, reading the Bible and praying. Their wedding in 1993 was not extravagant, but Andrea and Rusty had very set ideas about the future. The couple talked openly to wedding guests about planning not to use birth control and wanting as many children as might come along. Within three months, Andrea was pregnant.
She kept her job until Noah's birth in February 1994. One morning soon after, however, she had a startling vision: the image of a knife crossed her mind, flickering into a scene of somebody being stabbed, which vanished as quickly as it had appeared. She dismissed it and never told Rusty, who says he learned of it only after she was arrested.
With Noah still in diapers, Andrea was pregnant again in 1995. She gave up swimming and jogging. She saw less of her friends. "That was her choice," says her friend Marlene Wark, who lost touch with her old chum after Noah's birth. "Andrea is not a cream puff. She never struck me as the type who rolled over." Wark had seen her friendship lapse with Andrea before. In college they stopped talking for a year until Andrea warmed up again, without ever explaining what had miffed her. Andrea later told another friend that, at the time, she might have been bulimic and depressed.
Rusty learned to accept some of Andrea's secretiveness. "I know a few things about her," he says, "but I don't know a lot. I don't probe. I don't want to be nosy." He even respected her obsession about undressing and changing in a closet, out of his sight. She did not like confrontation and argument. He says he wanted her to speak up, but she didn't. She avoided conflicts with stints of silence that lasted days or weeks until he confronted her. "Throw a frying pan at me. Do anything!" Rusty says he told her. Nothing.
"I wanted her to thrive as a person," he says. "I wanted her to read challenging works. I didn't want her to get isolated and overwhelmed and all these things you get with children." He recalls buying her books on home management and offering to cut back on his work so she could return to nursing. She refused, he says, telling him, "I'm a mother now."