Taped Interview Shows A Suicidal Yates

HOUSTON -- A videotaped interview played in court Wednesday in Houston indicated that Andrea Yates thought about killing herself along with her five children.

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Yates also told a psychiatrist during the July interview that she first thought about killing her children the night before she did it. The interview took place in the psychiatric ward of the county jail seven days after the drownings.

Psychiatrist Lucy Puryear, the final defense witness of the captial-murder trial, testified for the defense in Yates' capital murder trial, saying Yates was psychotic, not rational, on the day of the drownings. Yates has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity in the drowning deaths of her children last June.

Yates talks on tape about how she tried to block thoughts she had of harming her first child after his birth. She also described feeling overwhelmed in 1999 when she had four young children and the family was living in a converted bus.

"I just think it's evidence of her physical and mental state as close as possible to June the 20th, " Yates' attorney George Parnham said.