489: Andrea Yates: The Cult Behind the Killer Part 2

Summary

True Crime Obsessed: "Andrea Yates: The Cult Behind the Killer, Part 2" (Ep. 489)

Air Date: March 17, 2026
Hosts: Jillian Beckavalee & Patrick Hines
Main Theme:
This episode continues the True Crime Obsessed podcast’s deep-dive into the tragic case of Andrea Yates, focusing on the overlooked influence of a controlling religious cult on her deteriorating mental health and eventual crime. The hosts use their signature mix of empathy, humor, and outrage to unpack the true story behind the headlines, tackling the roles of religious manipulation, mental illness, and systemic failure.

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Episode Overview

• The episode picks up from Part 1, covering the second half of the documentary "Andrea Yates: The Cult Behind the Killer." Hosts Jillian and Patrick recap the events leading to the murders, focusing on the toxic intersection of Andrea's postpartum psychosis and the influence of a fringe religious cult.
• They reveal key details left out by mainstream coverage, question media narratives, and hold specific individuals—like cult leader Michael and Andrea’s husband Rusty Yates—accountable for their roles.

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Key Points and Insights

1. The Cult’s Manipulation and Mail-Based Isolation

[01:37 – 07:36]

• Rusty Yates (Andrea’s husband), David "the yuppie" (ex-cult member), and Moses (former child cult member) narrate how the cult’s teachings destroyed families and fostered isolation.
• The cult operated largely by mail (tapes, letters), leveraging distance to psychologically imprison followers.
• Doctors had warned Andrea not to have more children; yet, under her husband’s influence and Michael’s teachings, she had a fifth child, exacerbating her mental illness.
• “She was just staring blankly ahead... I didn't know what to do. I'm like, who do you call?" – Rusty Yates [03:22]
• Rachel, Michael’s wife, sent Andrea letters signed “Michael’s servant,” and wrote, “Fix your children. Your children must be saved... you’re going to burn in hell.” [02:44; 03:48]
• The cult taught salvation had to occur before age 12 (“age of accountability”).

2. The Spiral of Cult Victims

[04:20 – 06:54]

• David, after giving up his job and fiancée on Michael’s advice, isolates himself and descends into suicidal depression.
• “I would just pray... please give me light, God... but there was no divine encounter. At that point, I started shutting down.” – David the Yuppie [05:17]
• Michael responds not with compassion, but with a bizarre “Satan” video berating David, further deepening his crisis.
• Hosts connect the 1980s mail-based isolation to modern online radicalization.

3. Cult Teachings Directly Connected to Violence

[10:53 – 15:06]

• Michael’s abusive “spiritual guidance” is shown (in person for the first time at a McDonald’s after years of letters/cassettes), leaving both David and his friend Richard suicidal. David manages to save Richard’s life.
• “He scared me... it took everything I had to convince him to not do it now. And he’s my friend. I loved him. I know what he’s under.” – David the Yuppie [14:00]
• The podcast emphasizes the real-world consequences of cult emotional abuse and indoctrination—directly foreshadowing Andrea’s tragedy.

4. Andrea’s Decline and Systemic Failures

[15:58 – 17:55]

• Andrea, after another breakdown, is hospitalized but sent home after insurance runs out.
• Rusty describes her as “the sickest patient in that building... had visual and auditory hallucinations. It led to the delusion she had of having the devil in her.” [16:10]
• Hosts reflect on the small coffins at the funeral, the visual impact, and the compassion necessary to understand Andrea’s mental state at the time.

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Documentary Revelations & Trial Developments

5. Author & Media Misconceptions

[20:15 – 22:23]

• Journalist Susie Spencer (author of Breaking Point) provides a different view from the media’s “evil mother” narrative, describing Andrea as a “caregiver and people-pleaser.”
• Andrea's anguish—and the cult’s manipulative letters—surface, showing the cult encouraged her fatal actions.

6. Cult Leader Goes Public and Gaslights

[23:00 – 26:38]

• After Andrea’s arrest, cult leader Michael attempts to rehabilitate his image—reaching out to old connections, actively downplaying his influence in the media, and pressuring followers to protect him.
• “Michael reached out to my mom... it became pretty clear Michael was afraid this would be pinned on him.” – Moses [25:39]

7. The First Trial: Systemic Misogyny & Surface Explanations

[27:03 – 35:21]

• Defense attorney Wendell Odom Jr. immediately saw the depth of Andrea’s psychosis and built an insanity defense.
• The first trial leaned only on postpartum depression, downplaying cult influence. Andrea was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life (not death).

8. Exposing the Cult’s History & Influence

[37:25 – 43:49]

• Steve, the cult leader’s childhood friend, paints Michael as a rejected seminarian turned aggressive street preacher.
• The cult’s methods and abusive behavior are confirmed by several survivors, including Douglas Roberts, who now runs a support website for ex-members.

9. Justice and a Second Trial

[46:13 – 51:01]

• Andrea’s conviction is overturned due to misinformation from a state’s expert (about a non-existent Law & Order episode).
• On retrial, the defense finally introduces cult evidence, pamphlets, and tapes, showing the direct connection between Michael’s teachings and Andrea’s actions.
• Jury is moved by the cult’s “Perilous Times” pamphlet: “If they're not saved before the age of 12... you're going to hell.” – Documentary reading [50:26]
• Andrea is found not guilty by reason of insanity. She remains in a state hospital, forgoing annual release reviews—choosing continued, voluntary treatment.

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Emotional and Societal Reflections

10. Rusty Yates’ Role and Accountability

[58:54 – 65:35]

• Patrick presents exhaustive documentation showing Rusty’s pattern of controlling, minimizing Andrea’s illness, and overriding medical advice (including pushing for more children against physician warnings).
• “Why were you—how can you use the word catatonic and in the same breath be like ‘and then off I went to work’?” – Patrick [59:39]
• Court records and therapy notes contradict Rusty’s on-camera claims, exposing deep issues of consent, control, and neglect.
• “It is my opinion that Rusty is a liar. That he used religion to control and manipulate... I think he was complicit.” – Patrick [64:35]

11. The Aftermath and Personal Outcomes

[53:11 – 58:15]

• Andrea spends her time in the hospital making crafts for the Yates Children Memorial Fund to support women’s mental health.
• Rusty, remarries a year later, continues at NASA, but remains emotionally opaque.
• Cult leader Michael and his wife face no criminal charges and continue their ministry.
• Moses becomes an acclaimed comedian; David "the yuppie" lives in Houston with his daughter.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I was shaken by how small the caskets were, how few people it took to carry them.” – Jillian [17:11]
• “She may have known what she was doing was illegal, but she did not know it was wrong. She thought she was saving her kids.” – Jillian, paraphrasing defense [31:23]
• “Being raised in this world is inherently abusive.” – Patrick [31:51]
• “I don’t think every pregnancy was consensual...there is a major consent issue here that is not being discussed.” – Patrick [64:25]
• “This is not what any God wants. That’s fucking crazy.” – Patrick, on cult doctrine [51:01]
• “She spends her time making aprons, cards...money goes to the Yates Children’s Memorial Fund.” – Patrick [53:11]
• “To date, no criminal charges have been filed against the cult leader and his wife...they continue to travel and preach.” – Patrick [58:41]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:37] – Show picks up with the aftermath of Andrea’s breakdown.
• [03:09] – Birth of the fifth Yates child against medical advice; cult’s increasing influence.
• [05:17] – David describes his suicidal spiral.
• [10:53] – Michael appears as “Satan” on video; psychological torment.
• [12:26] – David’s only in-person meeting with cult leader at McDonald’s, resulting trauma.
• [16:10] – Rusty details Andrea’s catatonia post-hospitalization.
• [20:15] – Author Susie Spencer debunks "evil mother" myth.
• [27:03] – Andrea’s first trial and She’s found guilty of capital murder.
• [35:33] – Media failures and cult leader’s public spin.
• [37:25] – The making of a cult leader; Michael’s transformation and early abuses.
• [46:13] – Conviction overturned after expert’s Law & Order error.
• [51:30] – Second trial jury review cult’s Perilous Times pamphlet.
• [53:11] – Andrea’s life in the hospital and her charitable work.
• [58:54] – Patrick’s extensive rundown of court-documented failures by Rusty.
• [65:05] – Final host reflections: “Why did we make this documentary the way we did?”

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Final Thoughts and Tone

• Hosts emphasize empathy for Andrea Yates, frustration at simplistic media narratives, and outrage at the systems and people who failed her and her children.
• Patrick’s closing “receipts” segment is passionate yet well-sourced, shining a necessary light on overlooked complicity.
• Jillian’s empathy and ability to hold space for grief, rage, and laughter keeps heavy topics human.
• The episode ends with a look forward: a lighter art heist episode to provide relief after this weighty discussion.

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For Listeners Who Haven’t Heard It:

This episode is an unflinching, thorough, and deeply personal exploration of how mental illness, religious extremism, and negligence combined in one of America’s most heartbreaking crimes. You will come away with a new understanding of Andrea Yates, compassion for victims of cults and postpartum psychosis, and skepticism toward those who benefit from surface narratives.

Resources for Further Reading:

• Yates Children Memorial Fund (for women’s mental health)
• Fordham & Cleveland State Law Reviews (for legal documentation)
• Support organizations for cult survivors and postpartum mental health

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Summary by True Crime Obsessed Podcast Summarizer

Transcript

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Are you watching these tiktoks where people are trying to. Like, people in office buildings are trying to outrun their co worker as Michael Myers? No, it is the scariest thing because it's like a guy in a suit. It's like. It's like walking.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And then from Halloween. Yeah. Yes. And they've got the track. They have to unlock the door and then get in and then lock the door. And, like, 90% of them don't make it. And it is terrifying. Every single single.

[Patrick Hines]

Really?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

There's no. Not even a fake knife in their hand because the guy's just walking slowly and these people are running for their.

[Patrick Hines]

So they set up Michael Myers, set up the maze.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah, I guess.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes. And it's. So I shared it to my story and I've gotten so many DM people being like, this is so scary.

[Patrick Hines]

Really?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah, it's. I'll send it to you.

[Patrick Hines]

It's terrifying what happens when he catches.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

But, like, the people always scream because it's like you feel like you're being murdered by Michael Myers.

[Patrick Hines]

Oh, my God.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

That's terrifying.

[Patrick Hines]

You don't have time for that.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

No. Hi, Jillian Beckavalee here.

[Patrick Hines]

Hello. Patrick Hines.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

So, fam. Once again, this is episode two of our coverage of Andrea Yates, the cult behind the killer. This was on the Patreon last week. This is our regular episode this week.

[Patrick Hines]

Yes.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Is there anything we need to tell them about before we start?

[Patrick Hines]

Just the same old, same old. It's a party over on the Patreon. We have a YouTube. We have a Discord.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

YouTube has 230 subscribers. Go watch us. Go watch this episode on YouTube.

[Patrick Hines]

So we're gonna dive in. We're like, halfway through the second episode of the series. So we're gonna do the second half of episode two and then all of episode three in this episode.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

And reminder, if you were screaming at us last episode, we're going to do, like, a recap of what they left out at the end of this.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes. You want to bring the fam up to speed.

[Patrick Hines]

Well, everything's a mess. Honestly, like, there's really no other way to slice it. Like, we're with Rusty Yates, who's Andrea's husband, and David the yuppie, who's a former cult member, and Moses, who was born into it, and he's a former cult member. He's an adult now, but he was a kid. And so everything. Everyone's families are falling apart. Andrea was told, do not have any more kids. Your postpartum is going to come Back worse and, like, stronger, for lack of a better term.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah. And they had one more after that.

[Patrick Hines]

And also, like, I don't know shit about shit. Like, I have. Obviously, I'm not, like, making a joke. Like, no experience with postpartum depression. I never will. Like, I know that it looks different for so many people. Like, I'm not an expert here, but, like, I'm just repeating what the doctors are saying. And it's like her. Andrew's postpartum depression was exacerbated by so many other factors in her life.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

Including this fudgeing cult.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah. So we're. We're back with Rusty, and Rusty is being very clear to us that he's had no communication with Michael. Andrea has. Now we also learned that Rachel, Michael, the cult leader's wife, is writing letters to Andrea.

[Patrick Hines]

Did you see how she signs it?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

She signs it, oh, Michael's servant.

[Patrick Hines]

Michael's servant.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

How insane.

[Patrick Hines]

So it's.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I'm going to start signing my letters, Steve Servant.

[Patrick Hines]

I'm like, Jesus Christ, please don't.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

That's so barfing. I won.

[Patrick Hines]

What happened to satanically infested?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I know. That's for sure.

[Patrick Hines]

Satanically yours.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Exactly, exactly.

[Patrick Hines]

So November. It's November 2000. Mary Yates is born. So this is Andrea Yates, fifth child. And again, she was told not to have another child for her safety and the safety of the children.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

So Andrea is communicating with the cult leader and Rachel. And, like, she's also not taking the medication.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

No. And like, as predicted by the doctor, her symptoms have come back and they're worse.

[Patrick Hines]

They're worse.

[Rusty Yates]

She was just staring blankly ahead. Had to scissor leg, picking at her hair, not saying anything. So I called around to try to see a psychiatrist. Oh, yeah, we got an opening. Six weeks. I'm like, we don't have six weeks. You know, I didn't know what to do. I'm like, who do you call?

[Patrick Hines]

She's suffering and no one's helping her, and the cult is just telling her to, quote, look to Jesus. And I'm like, well, I heard an audio cassette an hour ago that said that there was no Jesus.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Right. So, like, and also, like, we get sprinkled in in the second half of this series that, like, Rachel is writing these letters to her and not only, like, pretty much blaming her for her own, like, depression that she's in, but this is where we start to get the nuggets of, like, fix your children. Your children must be saved. They're going to burn in hell. And you're going to burn in hell.

[Patrick Hines]

And it has to happen before they're 12.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes. What do they call it? The age of what? I don't know. Age of accountability.

[Patrick Hines]

Jesus Christ, they're kids.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Age of accountability. These is going to be 12 in two weeks. She's not accountable girl.

[Patrick Hines]

I was going to say accountability. Accountability, exactly. So David, the yuppie, he dumped his fiance. He's still heartbroken over it. He quit his cushy job that he worked really hard, hard for and he was proud to have. And now he is living in the woods, obsessing over Michael and his quote teachings.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Now, this is what David has decided to do with his life because Michael told him, the reason you can't get married, the reason you can't, you have not had a divine intervention from God. And so that's why he goes into the mountains to, like, obsess over Michael's tapes, to obsess over all the pamphlets.

[Patrick Hines]

And he's now terrified of the world around him.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

Again, just a reminder. See, we do this all in one sitting.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

So it feels like I'm repeating myself, which I am. But in case you are, like. Like, it's been a week since you've heard us talk about this. This all happened through the mail. Yes. They were not in person. They were in different states. So these are all, like, cassettes and letters. And David is spiraling and is so terrified of the world around him that he has isolated himself into the woods.

[David the Yuppie]

I would just pray and ask God, you know, please give me light, God, you know I want you. Every night I'd be begging, pleading, please open my eyes. But there was no divine encounter. At that point, I started shutting down.

[Patrick Hines]

He is now suicidal and he literally

[Jillian Beckavalee]

says, I would just pray and beg and plead to God for a divine encounter. He's alone in a cabin in the woods, begging God for a divine encounter. Like, can't you just fake a divine

[Patrick Hines]

encounter and imagine what would happen if. Like, this should scare you because it was happening in the 80s over the mail.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

Like, there was time to decompress. Kind of like, this should scare you, especially in the age of the Internet, like, what is possible and how vulnerable people are.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Oh, God.

[Patrick Hines]

You know what I mean?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

So David, thankfully, obviously does not do this.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

But afterwards things are pretty dark because he describes it. He goes, I had clinical depression. I had spiritual depression. Like, can you imagine?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

No, but that's the thing. Like, he sat there in a chair with a gun in his mouth, and by the grace of God, that's your divine intervention, David. The fact that you did not pull the trigger.

[Patrick Hines]

Right.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Is your. Is your message from God.

[Patrick Hines]

And then he says something chilling. He goes, like, what would happen? Like, can you imagine if something crazy like that happened? He goes, oh, wait, there was someone who had both of those things. Her name was Andrea Yates. That's right. And he kind of says it in this really biting tone of like, this was happening clearly.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

This is what was happening to her.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

It's the marriage of the clinical depression and the spiritual depression. That's what he's talking about. That's what Andrea Yates suffered from.

[Patrick Hines]

Right. And postpartum and in my opinion, an abusive home life.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Isn't it so wild that, like, at the time that this all happened, nobody, Oprah, anybody. Because Oprah did a whole show on this. Nobody asked why. Nobody took a minute. We'll meet the one person who did in a minute, the writer who wrote the book on this case. But, like, everyone just accepted that she was nuts, that she was crazy, that she was evil.

[Patrick Hines]

It was easier.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Nobody's scratched below the surface.

[Patrick Hines]

It's easier to discount someone like that as crazy because you can't imagine.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

I mean, anything like it.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I feel better knowing. I'm glad to know the reason.

[Patrick Hines]

And there were re. To me, you can clearly see point A to B to C. We didn't just, like, wake up here. No way. No way.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

But like. But the public didn't, of course, for years. Yeah. Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

That's what I was saying, like, when we were teasing this. These episodes in the last last week or two weeks ago now or whatever.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Fifteen minutes. Five minutes ago.

[Patrick Hines]

Time.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

Construct. But, like, it was like, very much like the hot coffee case in this. In the sense where everyone was like, what a fudgeing idiot. Of course that liquid's going to be hot. But it's like. No, no, no. Can you wait a second?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah, yeah, hold on. I keep thinking about Tonya Harding and

[Patrick Hines]

all of you know so much. There's, like, just so much here. And this is one of those big cases where if you just again, like, you're saying, ask a fricking question.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah, girl. Rocket Money is back. Look, you all know this fam. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps you find and cancel your unwant wanted subscriptions, monitors your spendings, and helps you lower your bills so you can grow your savings.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah. What I love about Rocket Money is that it can be, like, a really great first step. I know this can feel overwhelming to, like, getting your finances in order but figuring out what subscriptions are working for you and which ones aren't and which ones you actually have is a really easy first step.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes. And look, the app consolidates checking, savings, loans, and investments into a single dashboard to give users a clear view of their financial picture. So you're not like, swapping between screens. You're not going, like, everything is right there for you in one place. You can see it all.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah, and, like, you can set budgets, you can set goals. They have personalized insights, regular reports. They also have real time alerts. So if there's a large transaction, whether you did it or not, they're like, hey, is this cool? Because we know what your goal is.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Every month, when I pay my credit card bill, I get a note from Rocket Money. There's been a large transaction from your account.

[Patrick Hines]

And even if it's not a large transaction, they'll let you know, like, hey, girl, low balance here. Might want to just check it out. That might be all part of the plan, but if it's not, we just want to give you a heads up.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

So, fam, let Rocket Money help you reach your financial goals faster.

[Patrick Hines]

[e-mail] obsessed.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

That's RocketMoney.com obsessed.

[Patrick Hines]

RocketMoney.com obsessed.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Hey, girl, low balance here.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah, just, like, just checking in. Excuse me. So we learn that Andrea's brother and Rusty have to carry Andrea Yates to a mental hospital. And then they drop that in there. And we will get back with that because now we have to see this video of Michael the cult leader as Satan, wearing some spirit Halloween cape and red horns and a stupid mask and a wig.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Because what's happened is David isolated a cabin five minutes ago. He was sitting in a chair with a gun in his mouth. Literally. I'm not making a joke about it. He reached out to David to let him know how spiritually low he was for help. Ask for help to his spiritual daddy, literally. And instead of calling him, going to see him, like, letting him know that everything's going to be okay, he sends him a video dressed as Satan, doing that Satan voice like that.

[Patrick Hines]

But it's like a deep tough guy

[Jillian Beckavalee]

voice because he's telling him that you're

[Michael (Cult Leader)]

wrong as you must stop and change what you're doing.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

No reason for you.

[Michael (Cult Leader)]

You have just some awkward, uncomfortable feelings of change.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

No, no. You're just not man enough. Like, you're just not man enough to be able to handle all of this. You're just not man enough to get a divine message from the Lord. And so David starts to see the devil in his everyday life.

[Patrick Hines]

Can you imagine this fucking cult leader on set?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Oh, my God. Well, it was also like a Halloween town, you know, it was spirit Halloween. It was so awful.

[Patrick Hines]

But I mean, how insufferable he'd be like, Rachel. Oh, yes, the lighting is a good. First of all, the lighting sucks. It's just so. It's like, you want to laugh at it because you're like, how are we here? But that should be like, oh, we're. We're here. We're in this part of the program.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I just can't imagine the isolation of David in the middle of nowhere, having quit his job. And, like, the part that gets sort of glossed over. They talk about it for a second. He loved that woman, and she was

[Patrick Hines]

there for him, saying, you have to snap out of this. Yeah, he's crazy. You're not. I'm not. Like, we can't just stop listening to

[Jillian Beckavalee]

the tapes, you know?

[Patrick Hines]

Right. Like, let's do this. Let's do this life for real. The life that, like, David pretty much had in a lot of ways.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And it's funny because I keep thinking about how, like, cult leaders want to isolate their. Their victims or whatever. And, like, Michael wasn't there to isolate him, but he was able to isolate him anyway. I know he was able to get him to, like, self isolate.

[Patrick Hines]

So after David's like, I really need help. Michael wants to meet with David the uppie to talk shit about Satan and all of this, like, impending violence and destruction.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

So we learned that David has a friend, this guy Richard, who he grew up with together. And they. They got into this cult together or whatever.

[Patrick Hines]

Their frat brothers.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Their frat brothers. So, like, they, like. David doesn't tell anybody except for Richard about this meeting with Michael. And Richard is going to go with Michael to this meeting now.

[David the Yuppie]

David says, I thought because I wasn't progressing, he was coming to my aid, you know, much like a spiritual doctor. And I envisioned spending hours with him at a park or someplace quiet. But what I found peculiar was a place he chose to meet. A McDonald's restaurant.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

He wants to meet in a McDonald's and then berate these two over a couple of McGriddles.

[Patrick Hines]

Scream. Scream.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

It's like, sir, this is a Wendy's, only it's a McDonald's.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes, exactly.

[Patrick Hines]

Screaming. And this is the first time they've seen each other since 1986. This shit has been going on through the mail for, like, 13 years.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And for the record, when they saw each other in 1987. They didn't meet. Like, David saw him, like, quote, preaching on campus at his school. They never talked.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

This is the first, like, face to face conversation they've ever had.

[Patrick Hines]

David's like, I thought we were going to shit Talk, Satan. Not, like, have you scream at me about how I'm worthless.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And, like, how dare you start to talk about the wizard of Oz? I mean, Michael is comparing what David is going through to the opening scene of the wizard of Oz. He says, you're caught up in the winds of delusion. Now, the good news for David is that according to Michael, there's some hope for him. Richard, not so much. Michael is berating this guy over a crispy Diet Coke about how worthless he is.

[Patrick Hines]

Full fat Coke if you're me.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah, Full fat coke. He'll never be saved. This guy's going to burn in hell no matter what he does.

[Patrick Hines]

Richard walks out of that McDonald's suicidal.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

He wasn't. I don't think before, but now he. Maybe he was like, my God, David. Like, cult leader. I need your help.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

But he walks out of that meeting suicidal.

[David the Yuppie]

He scared me, and I was emotionally exhausted because it took everything I had to convince him to not do it now. And he's my friend. I loved him. He was my childhood friend. And I know he's going to do it because I know how he feels. I know. I know what he's under.

[Patrick Hines]

After. After hours and hours of breaking down with David, the yuppie. David talks him out of it because he was like, I was there a week ago. Please don't do this.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

He literally, like, David describes the scene. He's like, richard showed up at my house in the middle of the night to tell me that he was gonna go kill himself. This was not a question. This was not to be discussed. He was just letting him know the end is here and I'm gonna go do it.

[Patrick Hines]

Because he's too worthless to live.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

Because he can't do all of the things that he's supposed to do. The reason he's so upset and depressed is his own fault. Like, that's what this guy is screaming at them.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

That you're worthless and you deserve to. And Richard's like, well, fuck it.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And like, all of this is a precursor to the Yates kids being murdered. This is what this man is doing. He's teaching you that if you. If you can't get saved or whatever, you're going to burn in hell. But there's also no way to get Saved.

[Patrick Hines]

And David, thankfully saves his friend's life. Richard does not go through with it.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes, we talked to Moses for a second. His parents have gotten divorced. The mom got the kids, the dad got the bus. And Moses has to sneak onto the bus to get, like, to steal the tapes. And so he tells us about this trip where they, like, go back down wherever Michael's family lives.

[Patrick Hines]

Florida.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Florida. And they're now out on this street preaching again. And Moses is saying, like, this was the first time I was old enough to be embarrassed. This was the first time I was old enough to see the looks on people's faces as we were doing this,

[Patrick Hines]

to be perceived as they say, you know, that people are like, oh, my God, look at that crazy family.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And I, like, he doesn't say this here, but, like, this is where it's, like, starting to crack for Moses a little tiny bit. But, like, as far as we know, he's the only member of his family who ever had any thought that, like, what's going on here is all up.

[Patrick Hines]

I hope his sister's okay.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I hope so. I hope she's still friends with that girl from camp. I know.

[Patrick Hines]

So back with Andrea Yates, she has now spent two weeks in the hospital, and her insurance has run out, apparently. And so she is now home.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Can I just say, too Rusty says,

[Rusty Yates]

Andrea was the sickest patient in that building. I mean, you could just tell. She was, like, not hardly moving, not responsive, not communicative. When she came home, she was completely out of it. I didn't know it at the time, but Andrew was having visual hallucinations, auditory hallucinations. And it led to the delusion she had of having the devil in her.

[Patrick Hines]

And it gets to the point where she thinks that the devil is inside her, in her mind, in her body, in her soul. And it ends this episode, the second episode ends with Moses saying, look, I know it sounds crazy, but I totally get it. And I totally get what she was feeling, what she was hearing. And I completely understand how she got to a point where she did what she did.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And I want to say we see videos of the funeral. And, like, the thing that the. Where I started crying for, like, the fifth time today is we see the caskets.

[Patrick Hines]

I know.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And the caskets are so small, you can't believe it. I was shaken by the visual of the coffins.

[Patrick Hines]

I know.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I was shaken by how small they were, how few people it took to carry them.

[Patrick Hines]

I know. But how many?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I know. I know. 5. And, like, Rusty, I know that. I know. I know. We hate him. But, like, he had to give five eulogies in one day.

[Patrick Hines]

And like. Like, what Moses is saying is, in Andrea's mind, she did what she was supposed to do. She was saving her children. She was making the ultimate sacrifice. She didn't want to do this. She had to do this.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Because once again, and we'll get more into this in episode three of this, which is what we're about to get to now. Like, the religious teachings taught her that if she could not make her children saved by the age of 12, they were all going to burn in hell.

[Patrick Hines]

And the reason she was feeling like Satan was inside of her is because they weren't saved yet.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Right. And the other thing, too, to add in most Moses gets into this a lot is it's not just about not burning in hell. It's about how amazing heaven is, I guess.

[Patrick Hines]

But it's weird. I haven't heard anything about that in any of these cassettes. It's that there is no salvation. Or maybe he's saying there is no salvation if. Yeah, you don't get your shit together. But, like, nothing seems nice or lovey about anything of these teachings.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

It also can't go unstated that only eight people were getting into heaven. And, like, the. The Michaels family was eight. So, like, that, the urgency for her kids to get to heaven first was also weighing on.

[Moses]

Yeah,

[Patrick Hines]

fam.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

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[Patrick Hines]

Yeah. We had no idea.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

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[Patrick Hines]

Right. So Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US can you believe?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah. From household names like True Crime Obsessed to brands that are just getting started.

[Patrick Hines]

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[Jillian Beckavalee]

You are now, girl.

[Patrick Hines]

What's great is that you can get the word out. Like, you have a marketing team behind you. Everyone's like, oh, my God, marketing's the thing. So you can easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Now listen to this, too. Getting started is like the hardest part of anything. They've got hundreds of ready to use templates. Shopify will help you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand style. Like, they take the thought out of it. So you can just do the creative.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah. And don't worry about getting stuck or Having a problem or anything. Because Shopify is always around to share advice with their award winning 24. 7 customer support.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

So good. Also, they've got that shop pay button that's used by millions of businesses around the world. Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. You want to sell your stuff, use Shopify.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah, everyone knows that iconic purple button, of course. It's everywhere.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

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[Patrick Hines]

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[Jillian Beckavalee]

Go to shopify.com obsessed.

[Patrick Hines]

That's shopify.com obsessed obsessed. Okay, so episode three is called Revelation. And this is where we just very quickly learn exactly what Andrea Yates did. She drowned her children one by one in the bathtub.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

And so this is when we meet Susie Spencer. I think it's important that we learn that before we meet Susie.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah, Susie Spencer's also a name you, like, you change your name to, like, that's a great name.

[Patrick Hines]

That's like a comic book character, but she's a superhero, Spencer.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

She works for, like the Kay Bugle or whatever. Yeah, yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

So she's the author of a book called Breaking Point. And she, before she knew anything about this case, she was like, I'm gonna write the book on this. Cause this seems crazy. When I was researching my book Breaking Point, I was starting to get hints that, no, she wasn't this horrible, evil person that was on the news. Her neighbors were saying she was a people pleaser and she was a caretaker. And everyone said, what a great moment. I was getting a totally different picture of Andrea. The news has her photo everywhere, and it's like this evil, calculating, conniving, evil woman. And the neighbors are like, no, no, she was a great mom and she was really nice.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

What is the next sentence in that article? You know what I mean?

[Moses]

Like, what?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

What's the reason? Like, she was just crazy.

[Patrick Hines]

She was like a bloodthirsty, insane woman.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

That's just crazy.

[Patrick Hines]

Who out of the blue did this.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Her own husband is out there to the press, to every camera he can see. Like, this wasn't her fault. That's not who that was. Like, she's not that woman.

[Patrick Hines]

Well, that' sells more papers. It gets more viewers, it gets more.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And it's legitimately all I knew about this case.

[Patrick Hines]

You know, and it's easier, I think, to like, oh, she snapped and went crazy. That can't be me.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

But I mean, Susie's getting the scoop. You know what I Mean, like, because I, like, outside of, like, humanizing Andrea and coming to an understanding about, like, how dangerous these kinds of cults are, it's a much more interesting story to learn the nuance of all this.

[Patrick Hines]

Right. And so. But someone sends Susie letters.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

Someone sends her the letters from the cult, Michael and Rachel, to Andrea.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And I get the sense that Susie still doesn't know to this day who it is.

[Patrick Hines]

And now Andrea was pouring everything out to these people, like, her anguish, her loneliness. And there were so much.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

To Michael and Rachel.

[Patrick Hines]

To Michael and Rachel in the cult, and they were not helpful at all. No, it was fear. It was manipulation. It was everything Andrea was doing wrong. And, like, she's possessed by the devil and there's no hope for her. They were encouraging her to do this horrible thing.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And that's exactly right because they're also talking about the killer kids, that if you don't manage to save your kids, Andrea, you know, you're going to burn in hell and they're going to burn in hell with you. Like this. This idea was put in her mind by these people.

[Patrick Hines]

And it's like, how bad do you want this to be, Andrea? Get ahead of this now, by the

[Jillian Beckavalee]

way, the only way to get ahead of it is to just keep beating your kids. I mean, you know, like, that. That. That's literally the only avenue she has to make her kids saved or whatever.

[Patrick Hines]

And we are told that there is no evidence of that. There are Pete. Witnesses that come that, like, Susie meets or whatever that say, like, she wasn't abusing them in that way.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

No.

[Patrick Hines]

That people weren't witnessing that.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

So Michael, the cult leader is all over the news. And so, like, once he's on the news, all the, like, cult followers are just like, wait a second. They send the video of Michael doing that Satan cosplay thing to be like, no, no, no. This is. This is who this guy really is. Like, dig deeper. Keep looking into him.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Which is wild because this is where we get David. David is watching a talk show with Susie the writer.

[David the Yuppie]

Here's the thing I can do. You know what happened to me? You know? You know what he did to my life. But it just. When it hit me, like, oh, no, this Andrea Yates was so pressurized with that struggle for salvation that she had

[Jillian Beckavalee]

to kill her kids. And I was like, oh, my God,

[David the Yuppie]

how far can this go?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

She wasn't evil. This is what happened to her. So we are now jumping to David out of the cult.

[Patrick Hines]

Yes.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And we don't get the story. Like, all like, the last we saw David, he was convincing his friend not to kill himself. But we didn't get. We don't know how David broke away.

[Patrick Hines]

I think it's sort of a little bit implied that he saw this on the news and went, oh, fuck. Like, I think he recognized himself in Andrea and though in the. The only way he could as, like,

[Jillian Beckavalee]

oh, well, also because David would not have known. So David would have known the Andrea Yates story, but he would not have known that Andrea was in the cult because, like, Michael didn't share that kind of information with people.

[Patrick Hines]

I. Yeah, I guess. And I think probably talking his friend out of it. Like, when you. Like, that's why people say, like, talk to yourself the way you talk to your best friend. Be nice to yourself. Say, you know, like, you can talk around someone else's anxiety when you're not in it.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

So I wonder if David having to talk his friend off a ledge sort of made him wake up and be like, no, we can do this. Like, we deserve to live.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I agree with that 100%. But I also think he also, just because he was a person in the world, knew about this woman who drowned her kids.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Was watching a talk show about it and realized, like, had a big moment of revelation that, like, my God, she's been suffering the same abuse that I've been like. And David, probably in that instant, like, Moses understood why she did what she did because. And now realizes he's got to tell people.

[Patrick Hines]

Right. Because then Michael, the cult leader, is all over the news defending the cult. And that's when David's like, no.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

Absolutely not.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

Because this David guy can't wait to go on the news. And that was a really stupid move because other people around the country, like, David doesn't know how many people are in the cult.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Right.

[Patrick Hines]

So now people are like, oh, I know that guy. And, like, my dad or, you know, my mom or my sister in my. Whatever, and ratting him out.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And by the way, Moses is telling us that there, remember, Moses is related to Michael. Moses's mother is the niece of Michael. Like, they're in the family.

[Patrick Hines]

The cult leader is his great uncle.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Exactly. And Moses is saying, like, we watched

[Michael (Cult Leader)]

the news coverage like a hawk. It was all through the frame of, these people are going to try to bring Michael down. Michael reached out to my mom initially, was like, hey, how are you? And it was, like, oddly nice. It became pretty clear that Michael was afraid that this would be pinned on him.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

So Michael is now in damage control. Michael is now trying to, like, do pr because Michael, who's been horrible to Moses's mother, they've been not in communication for two years, contacts the mother and is nice to her. For the first time ever.

[Patrick Hines]

He needs a favor.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Because he needs a favor. He's saying, like, they're gonna try to pin this on me and, like, needs her to be the mouthpiece that, like, he's a good guy. This isn't on him.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah. Can you help me out? Maybe don't mention the fact that we were all beating the children. But, like, I'm a good guy. Right?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And don't let.

[Patrick Hines]

I'm a good guy.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Right, Exactly.

[Patrick Hines]

Like begging someone.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

But also he's saying to her, don't let. Don't let on to the world that I was running around telling people that the only way that. That these kids were going to burn in hell.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

If. If. If they weren't corrected. Like. Like Michael is connecting the dots and understanding that other people have the information that, of course she killed her kids because it was the only way to save them and that that teaching came directly from Michael.

[Patrick Hines]

And the cat's out of the bag because Susie's got the letters.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Exactly.

[Patrick Hines]

February 18, 2002, the trial. Wendell Odom Jr. Is the defense attorney. No relation to Leslie Odom Jr. I know. We're all thinking it. No relation.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Although we are about to be in the room where it happens, if you know what I mean.

[Patrick Hines]

Well, he's here.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah, Wendell's here.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

So he is her defense attorney, and he says Andrea Yates on site was, quote, shocking.

[Moses]

He says she had pupils that were giant and dark. She. She would jerk her head around and be looking at something behind her. I've never seen anyone that mentally ill before in my life. It was clear we need to start building an insanity defense.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

It was clear to me that we needed to start building an insanity defense. And in parentheses, he doesn't say. And it's not bullshit. For the first time in history.

[Patrick Hines]

I know. I'm like. I agree.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

In a rare twist, I'm like, fuck, yeah. Insanity, please.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

Like, we gotta help this woman.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And I wanna, like. I want a different word than insanity. You know what I mean? Like, I want, like, a woman who desperately needed help and did something absolutely did not want to do because she was trying to save her kids, because this crazy guy made her do it,

[Patrick Hines]

and she was driven to it, and her husband didn't listen to her and no one was helping her, and they kicked her out of the hospital for insurance. And Blah. And, and, and, and, and I don't

[Jillian Beckavalee]

think that's too long to say. You know what I mean?

[Patrick Hines]

It's a little wordy, so it's off the top.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I will take it over.

[Patrick Hines]

Insanity, like, satanically infested.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Exactly.

[Patrick Hines]

For the win.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

For the win,

[Patrick Hines]

Girl.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Earn in his back. Look, Earn in is the original earned wage access app that lets you access your pay as you work instead waiting days or weeks for a paycheck. So when I was, like, in my 20s or 30s, I could have really used this, like, living paycheck to paycheck.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Starving artist, Right? I needed my money when I needed. There were times I, like, literally didn't have money for groceries.

[Patrick Hines]

You could have gotten up to $150 a day.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

With a max of $1,000 between paydays. And I know what you're thinking. No, this is not a payday loan.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

That's right. This is not a payday loan. This is access to your money when you want it.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah. That's why there's no interest, there's no credit checks, there's no mandatory fees. It's your money.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes, it's your money. You should have it when you want it, fam. So download Earn in on the app store or Google Play. It's spelled like earn ing money without the G. Like your name.

[Patrick Hines]

Right? Exactly. Type in true crime obsessed under podcast when you sign up. It'll really help the show.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

So, fam. Earn in is a financial technology company, not a bank.

[Patrick Hines]

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[Jillian Beckavalee]

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[Patrick Hines]

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[Jillian Beckavalee]

Girl, Haya is back. Look, these are the kids vitamins that are actually really good for you. And like, if you've got a kid like Daisy that they will actually love.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah. So they taste like candy, but they don't have the, like, 7 grams of sugar per serving like other vitamins.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

We have literally three bags of it in our pantry because we cannot run out.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah. They have so many vitamins and minerals. They have vitamin D, B12, vitamin C, Z, zinc, folate.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah. And here's another thing that Haya does now. If you are like me and you cannot get your kid to eat their vegetables, Haya's got this thing called Kids Daily Greens plus superfoods. It's a total game changer. It has honestly gotten tasty to eat her greens. It's basically chocolate milk stuffed with veggies. Hear me out. It's a greens powder that is packed with 55 plus whole food sourced ingredients. All you do is you mix one scoop of it with milk or any milk alternative and watch them actually enjoy something that's secretly fueling their growing bodies. I gotta tell you, it makes me feel like a good parent. Tricking her drinking this like vegetable chocolate milk.

[Patrick Hines]

And you're just sneaking in the good stuff. It tastes delicious.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Sometimes it's okay to be a little sneaky as a parent.

[Patrick Hines]

Come on. The kids need the vegetables.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And she knows about it now and she gets it. And she's like proud of herself for like, she thinks she's eating broccoli.

[Patrick Hines]

They also, by the way, you can decorate. They like come in a reusable bottle and then they send you stickers and the kids can decorate.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

That's literally her favorite thing.

[Patrick Hines]

It's the thing I'm the most jealous of.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

It's true. So we worked out a special deal with Hiya for their best selling children's

[Patrick Hines]

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[Jillian Beckavalee]

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[Patrick Hines]

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[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yep. Go to H I Y A H E a L T h dot com TCO and get your kids the full body nourishment they need to grow into healthy adults. And I'm telling you, they're going to love the vegetable chocolate milk as they're

[Patrick Hines]

playing with the stickers.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Exactly.

[Patrick Hines]

Every single person around says that Andrea is a great mother. So when this defense attorney sees the Andrea in front of him and is hearing, hearing from her mother, her sister, her co workers, all of these people, what she was really like, he's like, okay, how did we get here? We gotta figure out how we got here.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes. And I wanna also say, and I think this is an important point, Wendell, we see him talking to the jury. He's saying, she may have known what she was doing was illegal, but she did not know that it was wrong. Like, it cannot be said firmly enough. She thought she was saving her kids.

[Patrick Hines]

Right.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Because to Andrea, this earthly plane is only for now and heaven is the answer. She wasn't happy about the reward, she wasn't happy about it, but she was, was like, she wasn't hurting them, she was helping them in her mind.

[Patrick Hines]

And I do want to say that I personally think being raised in this world is inherently abusive. Like, I. No question, I agree.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

So I don't think anyone disagrees.

[Patrick Hines]

Right. So, like, because we hear like, she wasn't abusive to them. I'm just saying I think being raised in this world is inherently abusive. It also sounds a little bit like Andrea was kind of in the world of the cult all by herself.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes. I've got questions about that, actually, though, because Rusty now is saying that he had nothing to do with it. It was all Andrea. And I don't know how much that is Rusty trying to distance himself from Copa Garrett.

[Patrick Hines]

I think it's super convenient for him to say, especially when what I've learned about Rusty in these three episodes so far is his, like, total disregard for his wife and for women, expectation about children, isolation of his family. Like, it seems like he's kind of a true believer.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

So it's interesting that he's kind of like, well, I didn't know anything about that. But it's like, okay, well. Well, you also, if the love of your life was writing to this thing that you were, are distancing yourself from, maybe have that conversation too. I'm worried about you.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah. It definitely seems like even before the postpartum depression kicked in with her, they were living separate lives in their marriage. Like, Rusty was getting up every morning and going to NASA. Probably working very late, coming on, leaving

[Patrick Hines]

very early at NASA.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

An engineer at NASA.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

That's a very hard job to get.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah. And to me, it proves that he was in it for all the wrong reasons. That he was in the culture for the control, is what I think.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

Because if you're surrounded by logic and

[Jillian Beckavalee]

science, I will say I find Rusty, at the very least, to be an unreliable narrator.

[Patrick Hines]

Yes.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

You know, and I want. I wanna reiterate what I said in the last episode, which was that, like, when I look at him, I can't not see a man who lost five kids.

[Patrick Hines]

I hear that.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And we are. You're gonna tell us some really hard, gross, disgusting truths about him. And by the way, these are not opinions that Jillian found. These are, like, hardened facts.

[Patrick Hines]

It's from, like, the Fordham Law Review. And, like, actual, like, court documents.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah. Yeah. And. And I will also say, you know, we could talk in circles about this for hours, but, like, he does not hold his wife accountable for what she did. He does not want to believe that. That what she did had anything to do with her religious, spiritual depression. He needs it all to be something in her brain that he couldn't do anything about.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah. He doesn't just want it to be both ways. He wants it to be A lot of different ways, and that is not gonna work for me. So. So during this trial, they don't really mention the cult that much. Like, they don't talk about that. Because we get the verdict.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Because I think in the insanity plea here, I think Wendell, the defense attorney, Andrew's attorney, is really leaning into the postpartum depression and trying to glean, like, trying to make the jury understand how really sick she was and she really was. But even Wendell at this point doesn't fully understand that it's the. It's the clinical depression and the spiritual depression.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

So it doesn't work.

[Patrick Hines]

And I think there's still a lot of stigma or a little too sciency or whatever. People aren't really grasping how dire the situation was.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

The inherent misogyny in that, by the way, that it doesn't matter how. How sick she really was. It will never be sick enough.

[Patrick Hines]

She's just being emotional. Suck it up. Yeah, the thought.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And I know you're joking, but I really do think that, like, even though it should be enough for them to describe her symptoms and get her doctors on the stand and how, like, how really, truly sick she. That should be enough. Going to take magic of the evil religion to really drive this home. And Wendell didn't do that in the first trial.

[Patrick Hines]

So the verdict. Yeah. Spoiler. There are two trials. So this verdict, it takes 35 minutes.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

When you find out why there's a second trial, you're gonna lose your mind.

[Patrick Hines]

She's guilty of capital murder and she gets life but not the death penalty.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

And so David, we. We go back to David the yuppie,

[David the Yuppie]

and he's like, after the trial, I was thinking that Michael Warinecki, it's not being held accountable. He got, what little bad press and all that, but he just marched on and no one knows the real story. He's getting away with it. So I called a local news studio and told them that I have some information on this preacher.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

He got a little bit of bad press, but he wasn't really talked about that much. He's back on his fucking freak bus and going around the world with his little kids, like, yelling at people at shopping malls.

[Patrick Hines]

And now he's doing the talk show circuit with his wife slash servant Rachel, which is how she signs the letters, everybody.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And he's lying about everybody.

[Patrick Hines]

He's on ABC with Charlie Gibson defending himself.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And he's saying, because Charlie Gibson brings up David, because David is, you know, he's saying, there's another man who said that you was Driven crazy by you, too. And. And Michael is like, what, that guy? I met him one time in a McDonald's. And Charlie Gibson is like, no. He said there were stacks of letters, but he doesn't have the proof. And it cuts to David, who's at a table with a thousand tape recordings and, like, 5,000 letters. Like, Michael is just lying on national television and getting away with it.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah, yeah. And he is blaming Rusty because Rusty, quote, didn't shepherd his wife. To which I say, number one, barf.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

And two, I am of the belief that Rusty is very much to blame, but not for that reason, you psycho.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Right? Yes. Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

So let's talk about Steve, the cult leader's friend. Steve, I'm gonna tell you right now, we don't really have a lot of time for bullshit, so I'm gonna beg you please to fucking tread lightly and not pull any bullshit right now. I don't need the friend of the cult leader.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I'm with you, too.

[Patrick Hines]

When I first saw that, I was like, you've got to be kidding me.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

This is the prime opportunity to say former friend, ex friend. What? The acquaintance of.

[Patrick Hines]

I literally, like, shifted. I was like, steve, I'm telling you, I know. We do not have time for this.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

You know, Steve is pretty good here. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

So Steve says they grew up together, they went to school together. He makes it sound like they have the exact same birthday down to the year and day. I thought, too. It's kind of unclear. The cult leader was a football player, a jock. And then he shifts gears to being this fanatical preacher, like, again, like, I've been seeing. Saying from the beginning, he was screaming and violent and awful.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And let me say, too, Steve is the one who tells us he tried

[Moses]

to get into different seminaries, but he was rejected for being too fanatical, too earnest, too over the top. And so he was gonna make his own way. And he did wear that rejection as a badge of honor.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

He was too evangelical for the seminaries.

[Patrick Hines]

Too fanatical. So this is not, again, like, let's talk about limiting beliefs and, like, trade scarves. And now suddenly, we're a sex cult when branding and abusing people. Like, no, he was this from day one.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And Steve is saying that it was when he was rejected by the seminaries that he had to decide that he wasn't the problem. Satan was the problem.

[Patrick Hines]

Well, they broke up. He broke up with them.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Exactly.

[Patrick Hines]

Not they breaking.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

This becomes the basis of whatever religious bullshit he's spouting. Is that Satan? Like, oh, the seminaries are run by Satan. That's why I didn't get in. The companies are run by Satan. That's why you can't work for General Mill.

[Patrick Hines]

It's a badge of honor now.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes. And now he alone is on a mission to go out and warn the world about how to be saved from Satan.

[Patrick Hines]

And he's scream at strangers, churchgoers, people at football games, people going to the movies. Like, anyone and everyone.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And he's starting it in his hometown. And Steve is here to be like. This guy went from being like the cool football jock to being like that fucking weirdo at the mall with the sign.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah, he says, aggressive and obnoxious. And things got real awkward when Steve started working as a police reporter.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I love it.

[Patrick Hines]

And had to write about the cult leader getting arrested. I took a screenshot of one of these signs. It's one. It's. I mean, it's huge. It's like 10ft by 10ft and all in different colors. It's like Westboro Baptist. That's like the visual I have.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Does it say.

[Patrick Hines]

It says, your sin nature is driving you to hell. Come and repent to the living person of Jesus Christ. Not Christianity, not church.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I mean, too much information. Do we not know how signs work?

[Patrick Hines]

I mean, he doesn't know how anything works.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

You got a bumper sticker. Everything warnick you like, this is.

[Patrick Hines]

I mean, too long, but, like, here's the straw that broke Steve's back or whatever. The camel's back, but Steve is the camel.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Oh, the shrine circus event.

[Patrick Hines]

This woman tells Steve that Michael basically. Basically, like, got physical with her and, quote, roughed her up pretty good. We don't get any details about that.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I will say it says accosted her verbally, but whatever. Like, this guy's a piece of shit.

[Patrick Hines]

Well, he said, we get this screenshot of this woman saying that, like, Michael was telling everyone to sell their TVs and that everyone's a sinner and that this woman's going to hell and to lay down my monetary possessions. And she goes. It got to the point where she was in tears. And then we get this, like, they do that, like pants, like that. Zoom over the text. The text. He said he was going to vomit me out of his mouth. To which I say, did he threaten to eat her?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

What?

[Patrick Hines]

And then my crazy brain. I have to tell you about this funny line from the Sopranos that just made me think of.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Give it to me.

[Patrick Hines]

So, Carm, is. This is in the late 90s, right? Aida was on Broadway. Oh, so please. I cannot talk about Aida. I cannot talk about it. Which never could be made today. Everyone's super white and blonde in Egypt, apparently, according to Elton John. Anyway, the music is so good.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

It's always been my strong Jeremy Scott

[Patrick Hines]

and Heather Headley and Adam Pascal. Whatever. Point is. So that was like, big at the time. So Tony comes home and he's like, where's Meadow? And she's like, oh, she went out with Jackie Jr. She's seeing Aida. And Tony goes, I eat her. Like he mishears Aida as I eat her. And she's like, aida, it's the Ellen John musical. But that when I said at the

[Jillian Beckavalee]

end of that show, they put them in a pyramid to starve to death and.

[Patrick Hines]

And they're happy to do it because they get to be in love.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

It's a Disney musical.

[Patrick Hines]

It's like, my God. Unbelievable. But he said he was gonna vomit. This is how my brain works, everyone. In case you're wondering, like, what's it like to be Jillian? For five seconds I read the words. He said he was gonna vomit me out of his mouth. And then I go, did he threaten to eat her? And I can't say eat her without hearing Tony go, I eat her. Oh my God, that's so fucking good. But I told Mike about it. He was like, please tell the listeners that story from the Sopranos. If they don't already know, that is.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Of course, Tony's never been to the fucking.

[Patrick Hines]

No. I needed a chuckle. It's been three hours of this thing and I was like, finally. James Gandolfini and Edie Falco.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

That's my drag name.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I needed to chuckle. Did I tell you about the drag name Steve came up with on vacation?

[Patrick Hines]

What?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Raft of Oreos. Pretty good, right?

[Patrick Hines]

Because you love Oreos.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah. Rafta Vorios.

[Patrick Hines]

Rafta Vorios.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

I like it.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

That's like, kitty's got claws.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

It was also sleeveless saltines.

[Patrick Hines]

I thought you were gonna say Sleepless in Seattle.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Sleeveless in Seattle. It's a good one, but I'll do it.

[Patrick Hines]

So this woman wants to press charges. Obviously he wants to eat her and spit her out or whatever.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Oh, my go.

[Patrick Hines]

I'm sure that's some like, biblical thing that he's co opting. I just like, I'm not here for this. So she's like, I want a full trial. She's like, I want to fucking throw the book at this guy.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I love it. I love it too, Susan.

[Moses]

The city's like the city cut a deal with him that he would leave town and that was the start of his worldwide tour.

[Patrick Hines]

Steve's like, the problem with that is that that's what, like, forced him on this worldwide tour, as he calls it.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

That's what he bought the fucking bus.

[Patrick Hines]

Right. So we also meet Douglas Roberts, who I love.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

Another cult survivor. He met Michael on campus. Again. Why is he allowed to do this on campus? Here we are.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

This guy was an avid follower for a year and a half and was like, fuck that. What?

[Patrick Hines]

One day he woke up and he was like, oh, God, that was weird.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I feel like the first time I get a cassette tape in the mail, I'm like, I'm not listening to this. I'm ready. Indigo Girls to get ready too. I'm not doing this.

[Patrick Hines]

You know what you could do? You can just go and you can just stop it.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah. Throw it away.

[Patrick Hines]

Or you can like, like, not read it. But a year later. So he was in the cult, like right at the close to the Andrea Yates thing. So he's out of the cult. And then a year after, Andrea Yates is on the news for doing this horrible thing.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

And so, Douglas, let me tell you something. I love this shit so much. He starts a website.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

About the cult. Trying to find others and rescue others and help others about this false prophet. He goes, the website says, suicidal, homicidal divorce, depressed or psychotic. Like, I'm here for you.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

This shit is exhausting. I love when people do this. You know how much work this is? Thankless work this is?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Well, he says they had thousands of views or contacted by at least 40 other people. Like, this guy is seeing the evil that is being done out there in the world.

[Patrick Hines]

And he's saying this is what happened to Andrea Yates.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

Don't like he's using this, for lack of a better term, using this story to help people and do some good. Rusty, take notes.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

And so he's doing the good work here, girl.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Our place is back. Look, I've got some hard news.

[Patrick Hines]

What's up?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Most nonstick cookware still contains harmful chemicals like teflon and other PFAs, which can leach into food, the environment and the home. But our place is changing that.

[Patrick Hines]

This is what I love about our place. The love is like fourfold, non toxic, beautiful.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

High performance and multifunctional. We get all of these things exactly at our place.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And let me tell you about this four piece cookware set. It's the best way to overhaul your kitchen with multifunctional. Hydro performance space saving pots and pans. We use all four of them on the reg.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah. Space saving and cost saving.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

Because when you buy the full set as opposed to individual pieces, the four piece cookware set saves you 150 bucks.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes. Plus they come in all their different our places. Famous colors.

[Patrick Hines]

Famous. You used to think that you needed like a 12 piece cookware set. You do not know. You can do so much with just these four pieces.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And when I go to my friends houses and they don't have our place, I look at their pots and pans and I think, why are you trying to kill me?

[Patrick Hines]

You're like, oh, what's with the toxins?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

What's with the toxic? I guess you love toxins with your fish.

[Moses]

Okay, cool.

[Patrick Hines]

Well, I don't.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Not me.

[Patrick Hines]

Bye.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

That's why I have our place. So fam. Stop cooking with toxic cookware and upgrade to our place. Today.

[Patrick Hines]

Visit fromourplace.com TCO and use code TCO for 10% off site wide.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

With 100 day risk free trial free shipping and returns. You can experience this game changing cookware with zero risk.

[Patrick Hines]

And it's pretty.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And it's pretty.

[Patrick Hines]

Not like that 100% matters, but it kind of matters.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Kind of like Daisy says it's great, but it's not that important.

[Patrick Hines]

You know what I mean?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah. So speaking of the good work, we meet Ashlyn Hilliard. She's a cult intervention specialist. There's enough fucking cult in the world that we need intervention specialists.

[Patrick Hines]

I know. And we need a lot more of them.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

We need a lot of them.

[Patrick Hines]

And she's like, yeah, this is a cult. Like you don't need to be in person to be a cult. This is a psychological prison. Because David the yuppie finds the website and is like, oh my God, that's me. Can I work with you? I want to team up.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Like, yes.

[Patrick Hines]

Can we be lab partners?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes. And like Astrid is saying that like this guy puts people in psychological prison. That is where Andrea Yates was.

[Patrick Hines]

Because. And she's also. Also in prison for the rest of her life because there was a verdict and it's over and the trial is done and she's in prison. So all of these people are coming together to say like, there's more to this. Well, the good news is January 6th, 2005. Oh man, I can't see 2000, January

[Jillian Beckavalee]

6th, going like, oh, God, oh God, oh my God.

[Patrick Hines]

January 6, 2005. I'm like, they don't even know what's happening.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I know.

[Patrick Hines]

In years, 15 years from now, I can't.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Whenever I would think I would see the data is, like, 2018, I'm like, oh, my God, like, two years from now, like, the whole world's going to shut down. And they don't even know that yet.

[Patrick Hines]

But on this job, January 6, the conviction was overturned due to false testimony from an expert witness. So it all comes down to Law and Order because someone testified, a state

[Michael (Cult Leader)]

expert claimed Andrea Yates watched Law and Order and may have copied a plot where a mother used postpartum depression as a defense for drowning her children. However, it was later proven that no

[Patrick Hines]

such episode ever existed, that Andrea Yates stole this idea. There was an episode of Law and Order where this mother drowned her kids in the bathtub. Andrew Yates saw it, got inspired, and decided to do that. So that sort of negated this, like, postpartum thing. And people were like, oh, she's just crazy.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Some law clerk had to watch every single episode of Law and Order to make sure that that episode did not exist.

[Patrick Hines]

So the expert witness.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

Was the one who, three years later, was like, I was wrong. There actually wasn't an episode.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

She did.

[Patrick Hines]

They came back.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I'm assuming it's a woman, because she's the one who would, like, admit her mistake and get Andrea Yates out of jail.

[Patrick Hines]

But it took three years for them to realize, like, actually there wasn't.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

You know what I mean? That's a really fucked up thing to, like, to. To testify to.

[Patrick Hines]

So, yeah. So. But thankfully, this person came back and was like, I. Oh, my God, I can't believe I'm saying this.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

That's crazy.

[Patrick Hines]

There's actually no. And this was, like, pre, you know, 2000. This trial was in 2001 or whatever. So, like, there wasn't really a full. On the Internet, you can find anything. You can find the script for that episode in two seconds.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Oh, sure, yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

But, like, so it took three years. So four years or whatever. So now we're in the second TR

[Jillian Beckavalee]

and we meet Todd. Todd is the jury foreman. He goes, I got the call to be on the Andrea Yates trial. And I gasped. I was like, me too. I. Like, I can't imagine.

[Patrick Hines]

But this trial is really, really different because the defense knows. We got to talk about the calls. We really have to explain.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

That's the thing. Like, even though it's the postpartum, I can't remember the word they use. Like, she was out of her mind. Even though that should be enough, it was not. And Wendell's like, bring in the tapes. Bring in the pamphlets, we got to show them what this man was doing to her, what this man got her to believe.

[Patrick Hines]

And Andrea's extended mental health history.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

Of which there is much more than what has been brought up here.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

Then we meet Dr. Philip Bresnik. He's a forensic psychiatrist. He interviewed Andrea Yates then, and he's here with us now.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

She was paranoid. She was hallucinating.

[Moses]

She claims that she and the children would watch cartoon tunes, the characters would speak directly to her, telling her she was a bad mother. Mrs. Yates believed that she was marked as evil. She believed she had 666 tattooed on her head.

[Patrick Hines]

She felt she was marked by the devil. She thought 666 was tattooed on her head, that Satan was inside her.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

It's crazy to see her in this because we're seeing the interview that he did with her after she was arrested. You can tell that she's sad, but she felt like she saved her kids.

[Patrick Hines]

Can you imagine how lonely and terrifying that must be? I cannot say. I feel like Satan is in me right now, in every fiber of my being. And then reaching out to someone about it and either having your husband not believe you or having a cult leader. Right. Like. Well, you fudgeing deserve it.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

You know what you have to do, like, how lonely and scary and terrifying that must be.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I'll be interested to talk more about her extended mental health history.

[Moses]

Yeah.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Because she was in. So.

[Patrick Hines]

She was in a lot.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

She was in so deep.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah. And so now we have to talk about one of the cult pamphlets called the Perilous Times. Get it?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Oh, my God.

[Patrick Hines]

Get it.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

But wait, I don't get it.

[Patrick Hines]

Where it's like, these are perilous times. Instead of like, the New York Times, the Seattle Times. It's like the Perilous Times. Oh, God, they're trying to have jokes.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I know, I know.

[Patrick Hines]

Not. Not on this witch's watch.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Not on this witch's watch. So they present one section of the Perilous, and like Todd, the jury foreman is like, it's all right there.

[Patrick Hines]

It's right here.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Every single thing that she believed that made her kill her kids is right here in this text that was, like, sworn to her by her spiritual master was, like, came directly from God. They present the part of the pamphlet

[Michael (Cult Leader)]

that says, a child becomes no longer a child, they become no longer innocent. If they're not saved before the age of. Of 12, which is age of accountability, you're going to hell.

[Moses]

And if you had not taken their lives, what did you think?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Would happen to them if they were to continue stumbling.

[Moses]

And where would they end up?

[Patrick Hines]

All the kids that I need you, that all the men in the room need you to have one after the other after the other, whether you want it or not. Now you have to kill them.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah. Because you only got 12 years to save them. You couldn't do it.

[Patrick Hines]

That is fucking insane.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

That's not what any God wants. That's fucking crazy.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

So Todd says these trials go by fast in this documentary. So Todd says, we go to the jury room. Eight of us believe that she was not guilty by reason of insanity. Four believe that she was guilty. So to get into her mind and try to understand if she knew what she was doing was wrong, they request two things. They request pictures of the kids and a copy of the perilous Times that they knew was in the house on the day that she killed the kids. Because, remember, at trial, they only got to see that one panel of it.

[Patrick Hines]

It's like an instruction manual.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

It's an Instruct.

[Patrick Hines]

So it's July 26, 2006, and we get the verdict of the second trial. She is not guilty by reason of insanity.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And you can see the look on her face. She. She's stunned by this verdict.

[Patrick Hines]

And I think she's been stunned. Like she hasn't gotten any help yet.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

You know, and, like, now she's dealing with this horrible thing, and for some shitty reason, the documentary doesn't tell us what happened after that.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

So I will.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Okay.

[Patrick Hines]

At the time of the murder, she was suffering on paper, like, clinically from severe postpartum depression. Depression, postpartum psychosis, and schizophrenia. Those are her diagnoses at the time.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And this was her going into the trial.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah. Like, when this happened. So that's why the not. Not guilty by reason of insanity holds up.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

She's been at Kerrville State Hospital since 2007, which is a mental facility.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I would be curious to know what the conditions are like. Is it like a prison or is it more like a hospital?

[Patrick Hines]

I read the term, like, low security.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Okay.

[Patrick Hines]

It's more like a hospital. She is granted a yearly review every. Annually to see if she can leave, and every single year, she refuses it.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I won. The reception for her would be if she was released, Especially after this documentary.

[Patrick Hines]

She has never once had a review. She always chooses to continue. Treatment is the. Is the word they said.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Oh, so she can opt out of the review.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah, she. But, like, every year, she can be reviewed and it can be decided if she is like, Quote, well enough to leave. And she doesn't even want the conversation.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

She wants to be in there, probably to punish herself in her mind, but also, like, she continues the treatment. Her defense lawyer says that she talks about her grieves for her children every single. She, like, watches a lot of home videos. Like, she has access to all of that. So she is, like, sitting with. What happened?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I can't even imagine.

[Patrick Hines]

She spends her time making aprons, cards, and gifts in the craft room, and she anonymously sells them, and the money goes to the Yates Children Memorial Fund.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Wow.

[Patrick Hines]

Which is something that was founded by her lawyer and his wife and dedicated to women's mental health and particularly, like, postpartum mental health. I donated to it. You should, too. It's the Yates Children Memorial. But, like, people are don't. Like, I don't know where she's selling it.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I'm dumbfounded.

[Patrick Hines]

I know. I don't know where she's selling this stuff. But, like, there are people in the world who have purchased things.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

Because it's not like, oh, the Andrea Yates. Like, she's not doing it for that.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Right.

[Patrick Hines]

She's, like, working as her way of healing or whatever. She's making something and, like, raising money for this fund to help women. Hopefully, like, not like her. You know what I'm trying to say?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah. Yes. Yes. Sorry. I'm just, like, my head is spinning.

[Patrick Hines]

I know. So it's very odd to me that they didn't say. They just said, like, not guilty by reason of insanity. Yeah, but what does that mean? Where is she? Like, what happens? So that's what's out there. We'll get more about Rusty later. But I thought it was important to say now, like, where she is.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

Instead of just, like, going right by it and back with Rusty, who won't even admit that it was a cult.

[David the Yuppie]

Rusty would say things like Mike had influenced, but it was. You know, Andrea was psychotic because of her depression. I think. I think that he wasn't aware that other people went through some abuse from Michael.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And he won't acknowledge that the cult had anything to do with the murder of the children. He needs it to be the clinical

[Patrick Hines]

depression, and they hand him this perilous times thing. Like. But see, what. Like, don't you see the connection here? And he sort of pushes it away and goes, hmm, interesting.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah. I'm curious about the emotional motivation here with him.

[Patrick Hines]

Like, why he's here for the doc.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

No. Why he reacts to these things the way that he did. Why he needs it to not have anything to do with the cult. And I just. I think that part of it is culpability for him. But I. But at the same time, like, I and I. We don't have to go over this again, but I just get stuck on the fact that, like, in order to get out of bed every day when your five kids are dead, part of you has to just be dead. Part of you just has to, like, get. Just be stoned. Like, we're going to see this really awkward moment between him and Moses at the end of this thing right now. Well, because Moses really wants to connect with Rusty. He wants to say to him and, like, Moses, like, I love Moses and I want to go to a comedy show. He seems great to me, but he really wants to say to Rusty, I

[Michael (Cult Leader)]

found out what happened with. With your family. I was. I was jealous of your kids because they didn't they. In my definition of heaven, they. Yeah.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Oh, well, I hate to say it, but I was jealous when your kids died because I knew they were going to heaven. I knew where they were going. I knew why she did it, and I didn't get to go there.

[Patrick Hines]

He says. I mean, Moses says that to us.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

That verbatim to Rusty. Rusty does not have the response that Moses wants. Rusty is shut down. He is, like. He is emotionally unavailable. He's not rude to Moses, but he's just not willing to, like, take it in.

[Patrick Hines]

Well, I don't think Rusty knew because at the beginning, we, like, see them meet. This is all at Moses request. And, like, Moses thinks, imagine being Moses, and you're like, oh, my God, finally someone else who gets it. No one else can get it unless you were in it. I don't know if he's met David the yuppie or whatever, but, like, he thinks that he and Rusty are gonna have this, like, oh, my God.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

He's like, Rusty does not want that.

[Patrick Hines]

He cannot relate.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

And, like, it's. He's very clearly shocked that Moses is, like, so affected by what happened.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

And this is not what Rusty signed up for. And so Moses wants to be like. So like, tell me more about that. And really, like, have this give and take. And Rusty is like, any. Any agreement or any, like, quote, bonding is so disingenuous from Rusty because I think he's doing what he, like, trying to get, like, yes. You know, give Moses kind of what he wants, but it's not real.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And we'll never really know what's going on in Rusty's head. But I have to allow for the possibility that Rusty has just been through. I know we're gonna. You're gonna tell us some awful things about this guy. But at the same time, he sat down to talk to a documentary for God only knows how long about the mur. Like, five kids. Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

I'm confused about that, too.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And so my, my. Well, but what I'm saying is I think that, like, he must be emotionally shut down in this moment. And I think, because I like it. It's a weird way to end the documentary because it's kind of like it's. There's no emotional payoff here. Nobody really knows what Rusty is thinking or feeling. Moses is not getting the emotional response that he wants for his own healing. And then it's over. And then we get like, on screen text.

[Patrick Hines]

Right. Rusty Yates continues to work for NASA.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

Which should scare you. He has a son from a second marriage. He got married a year after the arrest. David the yuppie is a retired pharmaceutical representative. He lived that yuppie life.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Good for him.

[Patrick Hines]

He enjoys his time writing and he has a daughter and is living in Houston, Texas.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

And your favorite.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And then this is where we learn that Moses is an acclaimed comedian living in Los Angeles. When I saw that, when I watched this for the first time yesterday, I saw screams.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I was like, what? It's great because Moses is, like, so serious, obviously, like, like through. He's a great storyteller in this documentary. But then I watch his comedy clips and he's fucking funny.

[Patrick Hines]

Well, you know, I appreciate this about Moses and David. They showed up to this thing.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

You know, they showed up. This is what we're here for.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

So to date, no criminal charges have been filed against the cult leader and his wife. And the cult leader and his wife continue to travel and preach around the world. They have a website that I'm not going to talk about here.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

It's absolutely insane.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah. Let's talk more about Rusty.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Okay.

[Patrick Hines]

It is my opinion that I think he should have been charged with something. I think he's culpable here. Here are some things the doc left out. These sources include papers from the Cleveland State Law Review and Fordham Law School and, like, quotes from. I showed them all to you today. Like actual documents.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

So this isn't me, like, just ranting and raving.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

No, no, no, no.

[Patrick Hines]

The timeline of what happened isn't really fully explained in this documentary. Like, Andrea had a very well documented history of mental health struggles that Rusty knew about. And I think the fordham Law School 1. It' actual timeline, month to month of, like, what she said, what she was feeling, the medications. When she came back, like, not only were they told not to have more children, like, very clearly, but Rusty was told not to leave Andrea alone specifically because it would lead to tragedy.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

So to show, like, they were like, no. Like, in the trial, the doctor's like. The doctor is asked, like. And you said that because of the circumstance, like, and he was like, yes. So Rusty's bullshit is hard for me to hear when it's like, why were you. How can you use the word catatonic and in the same breath be like. And then off I went to work.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah, I agree 100%.

[Patrick Hines]

But he was told very clearly many times by many doctors. Rusty said earlier that they only talked about children after they got married, which was weird because I was like, that's a conversation you have before you get married.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

For sure. Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

No. From court documents, the couple confidently announced to wedding guests that they would not use birth control. They wanted as many children as nature would provide. Within three months, Andrea was pregnant with the first five children. That's a quote. He also claims earlier that Andrea was afraid of the negative influence of school, so that she was pushing for the homeschool. And Rusty was like, what am I to do? I was overruled. No, the truth is that she homeschooled her children because, quote, her husband was concerned that the children might pick up bad habits. So he's, like, now quoting himself, but attributing it to Andrea today in this documentary. And it's like, why can't you just say that's what we believe?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

It's odd to me that he. Everything is her fault. Everything is her idea. Just say, this is what we believed. You can still believe it. It's odd. Like, that's why everything is now suspicious. Cause why are we lying about things like this? Right? And the thing that's really sad is that she was. Andrea was thriving before Rusty. Like, she was lively and social when she was growing up. She was the captain of the swim team. She was the president of the National Honor Society. She was the valedictorian.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Why wasn't any of this in the documentary?

[Patrick Hines]

She was, like, a highly regarded nurse. Like, she had a captain of the swim team, president of the National Honor Society, and valedictorian.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah. That's. Why didn't we know any of this?

[Patrick Hines]

And she. Because, like. And I think it's important to show, like, what a bright light she really was. Because after Rusty, she personally. Andrea never personally said anything like, Critical of her husband. But her best friend, Debbie Holmes and her mother have described Rusty as controlling, Critical and demanding. Andrea let her husband make decisions for the family. Her mother and Debbie Holmes said that Andrea lost her out identity. Andrew's mother says, describes Rusty as manipulative and controlling and is on the record saying that Rusty pushed her to have the baby, especially the fifth baby, especially knowing that tragedy could strike. Yeah, There are, like, a lot of notes from her. I'm sorry. Thanks for bearing with me. I just think this is really important with you.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

This is important information.

[Patrick Hines]

And like, notes from her group therapy sessions in August of 1999. She says, well, Rusty. Rusty permits her to have a few hours per week to spend a show. It says the group encourages her to assert herself. Andrea expresses a desire to learn how to enjoy herself again. She's feeling stifled, and Rusty's like, fine, you can do whatever you want for like, an hour.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

And then the next day, August 17, 1999, she says that she wants to be more communicative, but that Russell usually turns on the TV when he's at home. So he's not just not hearing her, he's shutting her out. He doesn't want to hear it, you know, and, like, it just.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

It just sounds so lonely.

[Patrick Hines]

She's struggling and trying to talk about it, and, like, she's in these group therapy sessions, and then, like, wants to tell her husband about it, and he's turning on the. She's in group. This is 1999.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

The murders happened in 2000. And so, like, the quote, there's another quote that says Mrs. Yates agreed to Rusty's plan to have a large family and was determined to be a super mom. And she told her prison psychiatrist that after Mary, the last, their youngest child, was born, she told Rusty that she didn't want to have sex because the other doctor was warning her about how dangerous it could be to her and her children. Rusty, she said, simply asserted his procreative religious beliefs, complimented her as a good mother, and persuaded her that she could handle more children.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And that came from who?

[Patrick Hines]

That came from the notes from her prison psychiatrist. Wow. And the thing that really, like, I want to hit home because I would just talk around in circles and not say it coherently. From the notes, it says, I think this is the Fordham Law Review. It may never be known to what extent Andrea's pregnancies were based on a mutual decision with a Rusty or primarily a product of Rusty's desire for a large family. A number of people, including Andrea's Mother and her friend Debbie Holmes suggested Rusty was a dominating force in the Yates family, including the decision to have babies. So there is a major consent issue here that is not being discussed. It is my opinion that Rusty is a liar. That he used religion to control and manipulate and dominate her. I don't think every pregnancy was consensual. I don't think everybody sexual experience was consensual. I think he ignored and diminished her mental health. He, like, on the record, diminished, ignored. I don't even know if it's a plea, a directive from the doctor. I don't know if a doctor could say, like, you're not allowed to have any more children. But it was pretty clear what was going on. And the timeline is written out over years. So this whole, like only after the fourth child did she kind of become a little quiet. That's a lie. That is a proven lie in court documents. And like, I think he was complicit. Like, I do. I think he was complicit in this and I think that he should have been charged. And I resent the fact that he's here not doing any good work for so many other women who suffer on a regular basis. And he just like wanted to get married and have more kids as soon as possible. And that's what he did.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

And he got married like less than a year after, like a year after

[Patrick Hines]

and had a kid and they're divorced now. You know, thank God for her. But like, it's all right there for you.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

It's the kind of thing that makes you be like, then why did we make this documentary?

[Patrick Hines]

I know.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Or why did we make it the way that we did?

[Patrick Hines]

And there's a lot more that I didn't mention. But this is a starting off point. If you wanna do your research, it is all there for you. These are all public things I didn't pay for. This is not behind a paywall. This is all public, like hundred page essays. Like things that are written because this case has been studied. Just like the hot coffee case.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah, of course.

[Patrick Hines]

Law books now of like, this is something that really happens. Cause there are people that don't believe in postpartum depression. There are people who don't believe in the power of cults. You know, like, there's a lot of work to be done about this. So hopefully we did our part a little bit today.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Well, you sure did.

[Patrick Hines]

Oh, thanks, girl.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Oh, girl. We did. Andrea Yates to cult behind the Killer. I was not like, please don't misinterpret my silence. As disagreement. I just.

[Patrick Hines]

I don't.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I'm. My mind is. My mind is blown. We're dealing with a bunch of dead kids. That's a hard trigger for me.

[Patrick Hines]

I and the YouTube viewers have the privilege of seeing you, so I knew that you weren't checking out in any way.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

You're so good at that. You really are so good at, like, getting the receipts and citing your sources and.

[Patrick Hines]

And.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

But also, like, managing your thoughts in a way that are, like, coherent and, like, makes sense.

[Patrick Hines]

I tried. I was, like, in it a lot today. I was like. Letters were flying off my keyboard. I was feeling. You know, I had to say it in a way that was, like, not getting. I don't know, maybe this is the misogyny, but, like, not shading it and me just, like, being angry and screaming.

[David the Yuppie]

Yeah.

[Patrick Hines]

I tried to present it in a way that was like, you guys should listen to this.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

You nailed it. If you're at home, you absolutely nailed it. All right, tell them what we're doing next.

[Patrick Hines]

We're to going. Going back to smug shot, because, God damn it, we need a break. So this is the. The Dali heist. This is about the Salvador Dali painting.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yes.

[Patrick Hines]

She loves an art heist, so. God damn it, we needed it.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

We need it.

[Patrick Hines]

Yeah. I don't know. It's the second episode. It's the second season. It's the Dolly heist.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

All right, we'll put it on the Facebook group. We'll make sure you get it. It's on Netflix, right?

[Patrick Hines]

It's on. It's on, like, the Sundance channel. It's somewhere. It's on Amazon Prime. It's, like, in a few different places.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah, I'm exhausted.

[Patrick Hines]

Wait, this is like a palette. This is, like, a weak palette cleanser for everyone. Next week.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Okay.

[Patrick Hines]

You know what I mean?

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Yeah, yeah. Let's do. Let's steal something.

[Patrick Hines]

Can you imagine if I was like. And for my next trick, I'm gonna torture even more. No. We're doing a art heist, everybody.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

All right.

[Patrick Hines]

You're welcome.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Can I go home now?

[Patrick Hines]

Yes. Everyone take good care of yourselves and the people you love. Please have. You know, do something. Go to bed nice and early. Watch some shit's creek a little bit. Alexis.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

Watch some Schitt's Creek athletes. Absolutely. Oh, my God.

[Patrick Hines]

I love you guys.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

We love you, fam.

[Patrick Hines]

Bye. Stay safe. Bye.

[Jillian Beckavalee]

I'm sitting there with my wife and the baby, and the news is on tv. I'm saying, you know, I'm happy. I'm so proud of my son. I said, friend, the baby's beautiful. And all that. And all of a sudden, of course, the TV goes, welcome back. From Rikers Island, New York City's famous or infamous jail, of all places, comes word of an art heist as surreal as the art itself. Oh, shit. I looked at my wife and said, well, I'm happy we have a baby, but I'll see you in about 18 years. Cause I think I'm going to jail.