Rusty Yates Hopes Andrea Yates Will One Day Get Out of Mental Hospital, Where She’s Been Since Drowning Their 5 Children (Exclusive)  By Christine Pelisek 50

Rusty Yates, the ex-husband of Andrea Yates, hopes one day that she will be released from the Texas mental health facility where she resides.

Andrea admitted she drowned her five children — Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 3, Luke, 2, and 6-month-old Mary — in the bathtub of their home in the Houston suburb of Clear Lake in June 2001.

She was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison, but the verdict was later reversed, and in July 2006, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Her attorneys argued that she was suffering from postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis and had been taken off a powerful antipsychotic weeks before the deaths. The jury agreed with the defense, per The Texas Tribune.

Since 2007, Andrea has been residing at a Kerrville, Texas, mental health facility.  

Rusty, who calls his ex-wife once a month and visits her once a year, says he has “encouraged” her to seek release over the years.

“And I think for most of those 20 years, she has resisted the idea,” he tells PEOPLE. “She’s a pretty grateful person and counts her blessings.”

He says, however, that within the last year, he has noticed “a slight shift.”

“She seems a little more open to the idea of being free one day, but I don’t think she’s aggressively pursuing that,” he says. “I’m not sure Andrea will, but I’m hopeful, personally, that she will,” says Rusty, who participated in The Cult Behind The Killer: The Andrea Yates Story, which premiered on HBO Max on Jan. 6.

According to previous reporting by PEOPLE, Andrea can undergo a review every year to see if she is competent to leave the facility, but has repeatedly waived her right to it, opting to continue treatment instead as recently as 2022.

“I’ve heard people tell me that, ‘no judge in Texas is ever going to sign off on her release,’” says Rusty, a computer engineer with NASA. “There’s a political element to it that it’s going to be hard to overcome.”

Andrea, says Rusty, is a “kind, caring person” who “deserves to be the wonderful person she is, not saddled by her bad actions of the past.”

On June 20, 2001, police were dispatched to the family’s home. When officers arrived, they found Andrea standing outside the house wearing a wet shirt.

She reportedly confessed: “I just killed my children.”

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Andrea later told police she drowned her children one by one. She reportedly put the four youngest on her bed and covered them with a sheet before she repeatedly called 911. Andrea reportedly told doctors after her arrest that she believed the only way to save her children from Satan was to kill them, according to the Tribune.

“It was the seventh deadly sin,” she reportedly told Melissa Ferguson, a jail psychiatrist who testified at Andrea’s trial. “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.”

If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health challenges, emotional distress, substance use problems, or just needs to talk, call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org 24/7.