ARE YOU THERE ALONE?

A blow-by-blow—and many times the blows feel physical—account of Andrea Yates’s murder of her five children and the trial that followed.

O’Malley, who reported on the case for several magazines and for NBC’s Dateline, starts with the murders and includes a long interview between Yates and a homicide detective that describes the crime in detail. It is stunning and very difficult to get beyond, as she details the drowning one after another of five children, who did not go gently. But then O’Malley prods the reader onward to consider the fundamentalist religious beliefs of Yates and her husband and how they were processed in Yates’s deeply disturbed brain. She was a suicidal depressive who had previously taken an overdose of pills and tried to slit her throat, who had been hospitalized four times before the murders, who believed she was possessed by Satan, and who was operating on unmonitored, on-again, off-again doses of Effexor, Wellbutrin, Cogentin, Haldol, and Restoril. Through interviews with doctors and Yates’s husband Rusty, O’Malley tries to assemble a portrait of her subject’s mental makeup. Whether Yates suffered from postpartum psychosis or schizophrenia or bipolar illness, “she fit the definition of legal insanity—even in Texas,” noted one neurologist, though she was found mentally competent to stand trial. Before the crime, she was not given the level of treatment necessary, nor did her doctor spend enough time with someone who was obviously very sick. This consideration of the psychological issues is set against the backdrop of the trial, during which O’Malley herself played a role in disrupting the prosecution's attempt to prove premeditation. It ended with a life sentence for Yates, and in case anyone feels she got off lightly, the author reminds us that “a majority of women who kill their children kill themselves within five years.”

Well-turned portrait of a ghastly situation in which everyone lost, and of the complex questions that arise when the law must deal with mental illness.