Hello everyone and welcome to the Psych Legal Pop podcast.

This is a podcast where we talk about popular culture through the lens of an attorney and a therapist.

I'm Brooke Brigham, I'm the attorney.

And I'm Tess Brigham, I'm the therapist.

And today we are going to be talking about a documentary that just came out.

It's on HBO.

It's called The Cult Behind the Killer, the Andrea Yates story.

And so it's kind of a combination of the Andrea Yates story, which we'll get into the, we'll intro what that is. And if, you know,

it was quite a while ago. So you may have never heard of it. You may have just, you know,

remember it from many years ago. But also it talks about this cult that Andrea Yates was heavily,

heavily influenced by and contributed to the killings. But, you know, this didn't

happen in a vacuum. One thing that the documentary doesn't do a really great job of, I don't

think, is really highlighting Andrea's psychiatric history. And so I wanted to read something about that that's kind of part,

you know, set up of what actually happened and then also, like I said, a kind of a summary of

her history. So here we go. On June 20th, 2021, Andrea Yates drowned each of her five children in her bathtub.

The nation struggled to understand how a loving mother could systematically kill her children in apparent cold blood.

No crime evokes more intense feelings than a mother killing her own children.

There was extraordinary media

coverage of her trial in Houston, Texas in 2002. Her defense attorneys, George Parham,

and Wendell Odom entered a defense of not guilty by reason of insanity to multiple counts of

first-degree murder with death penalty specifications.

The 2002 trial jury verdict of guilty was overturned on appeal.

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