The Yates Odyssey

The family had Bible study three nights a week in the living room because Rusty had not found a church he liked. He had learned the faults of organized religion from Michael Woroniecki, the traveling preacher who had sold him the bus. Rusty did not agree completely with the extreme views of his old spiritual mentor. But Andrea, moved by the repent-or-burn zeal, wound up exchanging letters with the preacher and his wife for years after they bought the bus. Woroniecki wrote that "the role of woman is derived...from the sin of Eve" and that bad children come from bad mothers. Sometimes her family life seemed to parallel his: raising kids on the road, home schooling, God fearing. At one point, she asked Woroniecki to write a letter to help convert her Catholic parents. The influence worried the Kennedys. What had Rusty got her into? But even Rusty grew concerned with her obsession with Scripture. Still, he says, "a guy cannot really complain that his wife is reading the Bible too much."

Andrea was continuing her Haldol injections and driving twice a month to see a social worker for counseling. At that time, neither Rusty nor Andrea chose to find out more about the complexities of depression that had threatened their family. He once asked what her illness had been like. "Very dark," she told him. She would not discuss it further, and Rusty admits that he asked nothing else. "I didn't want to pry," he says. He still knew nothing of the knives she saw or the bloody visions, he says, and believed she was fully recovered.

Rusty had used birth control while Andrea was on psychotropics. But toward the end of 1999, when she was happily baking cookies and exercising again, she stopped taking her meds and they stopped using contraception. By the spring of 2000, she was pregnant again. "We weren't trying to have a baby," Rusty says, "but we weren't trying not to, either."

Dr. Starbranch had warned that if Andrea's illness returned, it could be more severe. But Rusty and Andrea both believed, Rusty says, that if the depression were to return, Rusty could easily recognize the symptoms and seek early intervention. The birth of Luke may have triggered her illness, but he was a blessing too. "To us," says Rusty, "the trade was simple."

Not everyone thought so. Andrea's mother was already concerned that Rusty had contributed to his wife's first breakdown. Andrea's former nursing colleague Debbie Holmes tried to talk to Andrea about the burdens of motherhood. Andrea already had four kids. Did she really need another? But Andrea told her friend that Rusty wanted the baby. "Rusty only cares about Rusty," Holmes told TIME. Through the years, she heard Andrea describe her husband as controlling and manipulative. Holmes told police she was "the only friend allowed to visit" Andrea, and Holmes wrote down her friend's stories about Rusty in her diary. When Andrea trimmed Rusty's hair, Holmes claimed, her hands supposedly trembled because he belittled her for every goof.

Andrea hoped for a girl. "Let's get enough boys for a basketball team, and then we can talk about girls," Rusty joked. By Thanksgiving 2000, she got her wish: a daughter named Mary Deborah.

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