Where Andrea Yates is now 25 years after she drowned her 5 children as HBO doc is released

The story of the woman who shocked the nation by killing all of her children is being explored in a newly released HBO documentary, which examines a new theory about what caused the vulnerable mom to drown her five children in the bathtub.

It has now been 25 years since Andrea Yates carried out the heinous murders of Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 3, Luke, 2, and Mary, a six-month-old baby, at her home in Houston, Texas, which she shared with her religious husband Rusty, who wanted her to have 'as many babies as nature will allow'.

When Yates called police to their residence on June 20, 2001, she confessed to killing her five little ones, with officers finding four of the children arranged on her bed and Noah floating in the bath. This awful crime led to her being called 'America's most hated mother' and sparked nationwide debate.

In the new HBO Max show The Cult Behind The Killer: The Andrea Yates Story, documentarians explore the religious dynamic of the killings and the possibility that influential preacher Michael Woroniecki partly led the mentally ill mom towards the tragedy.

The Texas mom had a history of postpartum depression and psychosis. In 2022, she was sentenced to life in prison, without the prospect of parole for 40 years. But after successfully appealing her conviction in 2006, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity and released on bail.

Andrea Yates in 2001 after her arrest (CNN via Getty Images)

That ruling required that Yates be released into the care of a mental health treatment center, eventually ending up at Kerrville State Hospital, a low security facility in Texas.

She has continued to live at the facility in the decades since her conviction was overturned, waiving her right to an annual release hearing in order to continue treatment for the mental illnesses that led to her drowning her five children when she was 37.

Yates had been struggling with her mental health for years before the killings, People reports. Despite friends describing her as 'happy' and 'strong' after delivering her firstborn, by the time of her fourth just five years later, she was suicidal.

But despite Yates' psychiatrist telling the couple to stop having kids, as it would 'guarantee future psychotic depression', she stopped taking medication and conceived their fifth child.

The couple were further counselled against procreating but, a few weeks before the murders took place, she discontinued her antipsychotic medication.

Yates was released from prison five years after the killings and sent to a mental health facility (Brett Coomer-Pool/Getty Images)

At the same time, husband Rusty went against medical advice and started leaving his wife alone with the children for an hour in the morning and evening.

It was during this hour window in the morning, before her mother came over to help, that Yates drowned all five of them. She told a prison psychologist: "My children weren't righteous. They stumbled because I was evil. The way I was raising them, they could never be saved. They were doomed to perish in the fires of hell.

"I was so stupid! Couldn't I have killed just one to fulfill the prophecy? Couldn't I have offered Mary?"

But regardless of the motivation, her defense attorney has stated that Yates is staying institutionalized in Kerrville.

"She's where she wants to be. Where she needs to be," he told ABC News in 2021. "And I mean, hypothetically, where would she go? What would she do?"

Separately, he shared that the now 61-year-old killer still 'grieves' for her children.

“There’s not a day that goes by where she doesn’t care for, talk about, is happy about her children’s lives before June 20 and grieves for her children," he said.