Murderer Andrea Yates regularly talks to ex-husband about murdered children: report

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Rusty Yates, whose ex-wife Andrea Yates drowned their five children one by one in 2001, has reportedly forgiven the notorious murderous mother and even talks to her once a month.

Yates, 59, regularly calls Kerrville State Hospital in Texas — a facility for offenders deemed incompetent to stand trial or found “not guilty by reason of insanity” — to talk to his 60-year-old ex-wife, who has been deemed incompetent to stand trial because of her mental state, the New York Post reported.

According to the newspaper, the former couple spoke about their slain children – Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 3, Luke, 2, and Mary, 6 months. If not for their mother’s actions, all five would now be adults.

Rusty Yates could not be reached for comment.

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This undated family photo shows four of the five children of Andrea Yates, 36, who confessed on June 20, 2001, to murdering her children by drowning them in their home in Clear Lake, a suburb south of Houston, Texas. The children are, from left, John, Luke, Paul and Noah. (The Yates Family/Getty Images)

Rusty Yates divorced Andrea Yates in March 2005, three years after she was sentenced to life in prison for two murders and drowning her children in a bathtub.

An appeals court later overturned those convictions based on flawed testimony from a psychiatrist – she was found not guilty by reason of insanity at a retrial in 2006.

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Rusty Yates had another child, but that marriage also ended in divorce. He continues to work as a NASA engineer, a position he held while his then-wife hunted down their children and systematically drowned them.

“Andrea was a wonderful mother,” he told NewsNation in an interview last year. “When someone is acting out of character, that’s a sign that something else is going on. As far as forgiveness, that’s a start.”

ANDREA YATES: A DISTURBING STORY

Rusty Yates photographed on January 5, 2002 in Houston, Texas, prior to his divorce from Andrea Yates. (Pam Francis/Getty Images)

“If I was driving down the street in our Suburban and had a heart attack, swerved into the opposite lane, and everyone in the car died except me, would they charge me with aggravated murder and rub my face into crime scene photos? Of my kids?” he asked rhetorically in an interview. “I don’t think so. But to me, it’s 100 percent the same thing.”

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Andrea Yates attempted suicide at least four times before taking the lives of her children. After giving birth to her fourth child in June 1999, she attempted an overdose of pills, then put a knife to her neck and begged her then-husband to let her die shortly after being released from hospital.

She made two more suicide attempts that summer and was later diagnosed with postpartum psychosis.

Her primary psychiatrist, Dr. Eileen Starbranch, testified in court that she encouraged Andrea and Rusty to stop having children — yet they conceived their fifth and final child seven weeks after being discharged from the hospital, Fox News previously reported.

ANDREA YATES CRYS IN COURT AFTER SEEING VIDEO OF DEAD CHILDREN

This undated family photo shows Mary, the youngest of Andrea Yates’ five children. (Phillippe Diederich/Getty Images)

Rusty Yates was also advised not to leave the children alone with his wife.

Andrea Yates’ family also previously told Fox News that Rusty didn’t do enough to help his wife or their children. Her mother, Karin Kennedy, said her son-in-law told her after the birth of their fourth child that he never changed a diaper.

“When they came to my house, that was the first time I told Rusty, ‘Luke needs a diaper change,’” Kennedy said. “He said, ‘Well, that would be a first. I’ve never changed a diaper before.’”

After murdering her children on June 20, 2001, Andrea Yates told her prison psychologist that she had thought about killing her children out of delusions and wanting to save them from eternal damnation.

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Andrea Yates sits with her attorney, George Parnham, after the reading of the not guilty verdict by reason of insanity during her retrial July 26, 2006, in Houston. (Brett Coomer-Pool/Getty Images)

“My children were wicked,” she told her prison psychiatrist, according to court documents obtained by The Post. “They stumbled because I was evil. The way I raised them made sure they could never be saved. They were doomed to die in the fires of hell.”

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Last month, Yates declined a hearing to determine whether she is fit to leave a psychiatric hospital, the New York Post reported. She is entitled to a pre-release review each year, but has repeatedly refused.