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The stresses seemed to converge in 1999 after the family took the bus to the Grand Canyon. Andrea seemed tired and preoccupied on the drive home to Texas, recalls Rusty, who assumed she was suffering from aftereffects of the flu, which they all had had. But then she slipped into a deep funk. On June 16, 1999, crying and nearly hysterical, she called Rusty at work and asked him to come home. He found her in the back room of the bus. She was slumped in a chair, biting her fingers, her legs shaking even more uncontrollably than her hands. Rusty packed her and the kids into his Chevy Suburban and drove south to Galveston and the bay. There he walked his wife along the seawall in an attempt to calm her. But she remained shaken. He then drove her to her parents' home.
The next day, after Rusty had left to run errands, Andrea told her mother Jutta that she was going to nap. Andrea then took at least 40 pills of her mother's trazodone, an antidepressant prescribed to help Jutta sleep. Andrea was lying unconscious in her mother's bed when Jutta walked in, saw the empty bottle and called 911. An ambulance arrived, with Rusty following behind. As paramedics carried Andrea away on a stretcher, her sons sobbed uncontrollably.
THE BREAKDOWN
She had taken the pills to "sleep forever," Andrea told staff at the Methodist Hospital, according to medical records released by defense lawyers. But afterward she felt guilty for attempting suicide. "I have my family to live for," she told registered nurse Bridget Fenton. Andrea told a psychiatrist she was worried the overdose had done permanent damage to her body.
Recovery was not as immediate as repentance. On June 20, 1999, Andrea retreated from group therapy to her hospital room, where with the lights out, she pulled the sheets over her head. According to his notes, psychiatrist James Flack found her to be purposefully vague. "I guess there has been some turmoil," she told him without elaborating. Her "extreme guardedness" frustrated Norma Tauriac, a social worker at the hospital. Yates would discuss her childhood, but she deflected the social worker's questions about her children or her breakdown. All she would say was "I guess I was overwhelmed and depressed." When Tauriac asked about her strengths, Andrea paused, then said, "I can't think of any right now."
Rusty had his own assessment. In a phone call with Tauriac, he said Andrea had "lost her identity." She relied on him for decisions, he said, noting that she focused only on the children. Tauriac asked about the marriage. "Maybe I could treat her with more respect," Rusty said, adding that Andrea "may be struggling with the concept of salvation... She puts a burden on herself." He thought Andrea had "some guilt about showing anger." Tauriac scribbled notes in the file: "The patient's husband might be a little bit controlling."
Tauriac was wary of Rusty. He had insisted that his wife's problems were simply signs of temporary postpartum depression, not a graver mental illness. He also told her that he was teaching the kids to be quieter for long periods and that he was instructing them in woodworking. His 3 1/2-year-old, he said, could use a power drill.