Nearly 21years after she drowned her five children in a bathtub, Andrea Yates has remained confined to a Texas mental health facility, now 57, Yates is competent to leave the facility but opts each year to waive her right to be reviewed and instead to continue treatment.

Yates, who was 37 years old at the time, suffered from severe postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis and schizophrenia. According to court testimony, she waited for her husband, Rusty, to go to work. When he was gone, she began to drown her children one by one.

After she drowned the children, she called 911 repeatedly and then called her husband and told him to come home from work.

Yates was charged with five counts of capital murder in what was a a high-profile national news trial. 

Yates was eventually found not guilty by reason of insanity in 2006 and sent to a Kerrville hospital. Each year she is offered a hearing to determine if she can be deemed competent for release; each year she declines the review. “She’s where she wants to be. Where she needs to be,” her defense lawyer told the media last June. “And I mean, hypothetically, where would she go? What would she do?”

Her husband, Rusty, initially stood by her. “She loved those kids,” Rusty said to the crowd of media in 2001. He later divorced Yates and remarried.

She also spends her time making aprons, cards and gifts in the craft room and anonymously selling them. The money goes to the Yates Children Memorial Fund, which was founded by Parnham and his wife Mary and dedicated to women’s mental health, particularly postpartum mental health.