The Yates Odyssey

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When Rusty visited her two days after her arrest, Andrea had gone from robotic to bizarre. The blank look on her face appeared to be strained, even skeptical as Rusty sat and told her he had done some thinking and knew she did not intentionally kill the children. He had stood in front of television cameras to defend her. "I love you and I support you," he told her. Leaning back in her chair, she interrupted. "You will be greatly rewarded," she said in a cold voice, echoing the Sermon on the Mount. When Rusty tried to introduce her lawyer, she said, "I don't need an attorney. I'm not going to plead not guilty." As he left, Andrea said, "Have a nice life."

Since then, Andrea has been put back on Haldol and other drugs. Though she has a distorted recall of June 20, other memories are coming back. "It's like a fog being lifted," she tells Rusty when he visits her on Wednesdays and Fridays. Their discussions are blunt but sincere. "If I am going to have an ongoing relationship with her," Rusty says, "I need her to be open." Andrea calls him once a week from jail. They talk while Rusty cradles the cordless phone and paces the empty house. Before Christmas, Andrea asked him to play her snippets of home videos archived in the electronic shrine that he has created at www.yateskids.org Only recently had she been allowed to see photos of her children. Rusty made sure he played her clips of all five. Listening from a pay phone, Andrea wept to hear Noah's brothers singing him the Happy Birthday song and Paul's giggles as he held newborn Mary.

The children are buried near a stream of running water at the Forest Park East cemetery. Rusty comes by often to talk out loud and to hear his own thoughts. He wishes he had let John come along to work with him that day. He misses Noah, misses the basketball games. He feels in his heart that each of the children has forgiven their mother. He feels they can hear him speak, can hear his thoughts. And so, on one December day, he whispered one plea to them. "Pray for Mommy."

--With reporting by Anne Berryman and Deborah Fowler/Houston, Hilary Hylton/Austin and Greg Fulton/Atlanta