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The lawyer who wouldn’t let go of the Andrea Yates case

George Parnham spent 25 years defending and advocating for Andrea Yates. Their unlikely bond reshaped the conversation around postpartum psychosis.

CNNBrittany Shammas查看原文 ↗
那位始终不肯放弃安德里亚·耶茨案的律师

Every Sunday, George Parnham settles into the easy chair tucked in a corner of his ranch-style home, armed with a clunky flip-phone and a notepad scrawled with names.

The calls have gotten shorter as he’s gotten older.

“How are you?” the 85-year-old asks from his perch, surrounded by family photographs and reminders of a long law career. “How’s your weather?”

He crosses them off as he goes:

Tucked alongside them in George’s messy script, she’s there, too:

For a quarter of a century, the onetime suburban Texas stay-at-home mom has served as shorthand for the perils of postpartum psychosis. Plagued by delusions that her immoral mothering had doomed her five biblically named children to eternal damnation, she drowned them in the bathtub to send them to heaven instead.

But to the attorney who defended her – who stood by her side as the state fought to execute her, as one jury delivered a guilty verdict and a second found her not guilty by reason of insanity – she has become something else.

To him, she’s family.

“I love her like a daughter,” said George, a reluctant retiree who still sports the distinctive white beard of his courtroom days.

Brett Coomer/AFP/Getty Images

The Yates family tragedy has been on America’s mind in recent weeks, as another mother stood trial for killing the children she adored in the grip of what her defense team has portrayed as postpartum psychosis. The Lindsay Clancy case, which ended in a mistrial this month after a Massachusetts jury spent a grueling seven days deadlocked , has drawn continuous comparisons to the Yates case.

George has gotten countless calls from reporters wanting his take. Each time, he offers a version of the same thought: “We all have our own identity; we all have mothers. It’s just unlike any other type of offense. This is not a barroom brawl gone bad. This is the very nature of who we are.”

Both cases feature high achievers who threw themselves into motherhood, Andrea doling out homemade valentines with coupons for hugs, Lindsay constructing monthly milestone collages she hung around the family’s home. Both sought help for escalating mental issues in the months after giving birth. Both believed their unfathomable acts would secure their children’s safety.

But this time, something has shifted. Though some have decried Clancy as a monster, much of the public has reacted not with raw condemnation of the mother on trial for murder but with guarded interest and even a swell of sympathy . If that’s because of heightened awareness of postpartum mental health issues , as some observers believe, it may be due in part to the unlikely bond between the defendant and defense attorney in the nation’s landmark postpartum psychosis case.

For George, a onetime aspiring priest with a quiet personal connection to maternal mental health, the case of Andrea Yates has become a personal cause shared with his wife, Mary, a former paralegal at his firm who forged her own close relationship with her husband’s best-known client.

Together, the couple started a nonprofit in the name of Andrea’s children, advocated for a Texas bill mandating new mothers receive mental health information and created guides for attorneys defending women in similar crimes. George got involved with the cases of 11 other women accused of killing their children and co-edited a book on infanticide and filicide . Mary served nine years on Postpartum Support International’s board.

The couple still visits Andrea, now 62. She lives in relative seclusion in a Texas Hill Country psychiatric hospital, waiving her yearly opportunity to be evaluated for release and declining interview requests from the media. The Parnhams take flowers to her children’s gravesite, marked by a shared headstone etched with each of their faces in a cemetery not far from the house where they were supposed to grow up.

Noah, John, Paul, Luke, Mary: Thinking about them, even now, can bring George to the verge of tears.

The first time George Parnham heard the name Andrea Yates, he was driving to the courthouse, radio on, pondering his strategy for the day’s felony client. The breaking news bulletin that cut into the easy listening lineup on June 20, 2001, made his stomach turn: a mother, five children between 6 months and 7 years old, the family bathtub. The defense attorney of 30-some years reached over and switched the station. He had defended people accused of all manner of unthinkable acts, but this one, he wrote in the 2021 book he co-edited, shook him.

“How in the world,” he thought, “does a mother do something like this?”

At the courthouse that Wednesday, in a summer already marked by destructive flooding, the crime in Clear Lake was all anyone could talk about. George found himself wondering, in spare moments, which of Houston’s top-notch defense attorneys would get the case. When he got home, a message waited on his answering machine. It was from a lawyer he knew, one who handled noncriminal matters, and it sounded pressing.

Somehow, George knew the call was about the Yates case. He waited before returning it, first conferring with his wife and taking a moment to appreciate the challenge of representing this particular defendant. The gruesome killings had stoked immediate public outrage; in Harris County, known as the death penalty capital of the Western world, people were dialing into local radio shows offering to drown her themselves.

“I never thought about not taking the case,” he said. “I just knew it was going to be an uphill battle.”

Mary soon watched as George announced on TV his firm had taken the case. She got chills.

George is what his wife calls “a true defense attorney.” He never worked for the prosecution, certain he wanted to represent the accused – or, as he likes to put it, “the underdog.” He was drawn to Houston in part by the legacy of its defense giants: Percy Foreman, who represented 1,500 accused killers, sparing all but one from execution. And Richard “Racehorse” Haynes, a Foreman prodigy who was famed for his courtroom theatrics and notched acquittals in a series of seemingly unwinnable cases.

At the courthouse in downtown Houston, George was known as straightforward and fair. Joe Owmby, the Harris County Assistant District Attorney who brought charges in the Yates children’s deaths, described him as “a statesman among the defense group.”

Decades earlier, George had dreamed of a different lectern. Born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to a couple who’d met at a local restaurant called Brown’s – his dad a dishwasher, his mom a waitress – he spent his childhood wanting to be a Catholic priest like the one at his parochial school. On Sundays, he recalls in his book, “I would pretend to be a priest, setting up an altar in my room and, with a prayer book in hand, saying Mass.”

Soon, George was the oldest of three kids. His Pop was working as a traveling salesman while his Mama stayed home, her moods and behavior increasingly confounding to her firstborn. He was all of 12 when he convinced them to let him leave home for a seminary in rural Alabama.

There, he and other boys built schools for the children of sharecroppers, kept mornings silent for reflection and prayed daily in the chapel. But after six years, George said, one of the priests told him he would “do better in the outside world.”

The issue, according to George, was his then-extreme scrupulousness. As a teenager, he went to confession as many as three times a week, once trying to change his voice to evade detection.

“Parnham, is that you?” the priest asked before kicking him out of the confessional booth.

His mentors, as he told it in the book, “saw my rigidity to the church and believed that my fear of doing wrong in the eyes of God would thwart me from becoming the man I could be.”

Over the next few years, George cut a winding path, earning his bachelor’s degree from a Catholic university, selling women’s shoes, joining the Army, teaching high school. In 1970, he got his law degree from the University of Texas. It wasn’t long before George, who opposed the death penalty, took his first capital case.

“I had been denied the priesthood due to my overzealous adherence to rules,” he wrote in the book, “but my calling to attend to those who might feel lost and in pain remained strong.”

Defending them, he said, “was – and is – my priesthood.”

Days after Andrea Yates called her children to the bathtub, George sat across from her inside the Harris County Jail. Through a plexiglass pane, he saw the former valedictorian and nurse’s long, dark hair was matted. Her eyes were dark – a symptom, George would later learn, that can be associated with psychosis. Atop her head was a bald spot from where she’d been picking at the “666” or “mark of the beast” she believed was imprinted on her scalp, a jail doctor later would describe. She was on suicide watch in a solitary cell on the jail’s third-floor psych ward, her bedsheets and eyeglasses confiscated.

Already, Parnham & Associates was getting nasty calls from people questioning how anyone could defend a mother who drowned her children, one by one. But George believed there was “good in everybody.” His job was to find it in this new client and lay it out to the jurors who would decide her fate.

Nervous, he introduced himself. He handed over paperwork, asking her to sign so he could get her medical records. She told him she didn’t need an attorney, he remembers – she didn’t even want a trial. What she wanted was to be executed by the governor of Texas. That way, Satan would die with her.

George sensed it wasn’t the time to argue. He said they would work everything out, then stood to leave. Andrea pressed her forehead against the plexiglass.

“Please don’t leave me alone in here,” she whispered.

The Yates case “touched all his buttons,” says George’s longtime law partner and close friend Wendell Odom. All trial attorneys love a stage, and none at the time was greater. But Odom decades later says there was more to it for George: “He and Mary both have this soft heart.” Odom, a prominent Texas judge’s son with a black-humor streak (“Enron was good to me,” he quips) who mostly defended white-collar criminals, was taught not to get too close to clients, and he tried to stick to that advice.

Still, the two lawyers agreed: Andrea must have been legally insane when she drowned her children. A forensic psychiatrist introduced them to postpartum psychosis, a condition believed to be first documented in the time of Hippocrates but nevertheless poorly understood and as yet unacknowledged in the mental health community’s official manual.

To the defense attorneys, it was a revelation. Postpartum psychosis became the backbone of their defense of Andrea, whose years-long psychiatric history included two suicide attempts and four hospitalizations.

A psychiatrist had diagnosed her with the disorder after the birth of her fourth child, using a powerful antipsychotic drug to finally pull her out of it. When the couple told her they planned to have as many children as nature would allow, the doctor issued a grave warning: If Andrea had another baby, the psychosis would likely come back.

“The cruelest and most severe of mental illnesses.”

Standing before the eight women and four men in the jury box of Courtroom 5A, George used those words in February 2002 to describe the disorder that turned a once-loving mother’s instincts inside out. “It takes the very nature and essence of motherhood to nurture, protect and love,” he said, “and changes the reality.”

On the stand for the defense, a jail psychiatrist recalled Andrea describing the children she drowned as “precious.” The doctor, who sat with the accused murderer for an evaluation a day after the drownings, said she spoke of having ruined them with her bad mothering and paraphrased a line of scripture: Anyone who causes a little one to stumble should have a millstone hung around their neck and be thrown into the sea.

By the doctor’s telling, the woman who arrived at the psych ward on June 21, 2001, was mostly emotionless while responding to questions. But at one query – “Mrs. Yates, how could this have happened?” – she began hitting herself in the head. “I was so stupid! Couldn’t I have killed just one to fulfill the prophecy?” she screamed before considering her infant. “Couldn’t I have offered Mary?”

Crying, she asked the psychiatrist, “Are they in heaven?”

The prosecution didn’t dispute that Andrea was mentally ill. But Texas has a high bar for a not guilty by reason of insanity claim: A defendant must prove they were not only mentally ill but also did not know right from wrong.

Owmby, the prosecutor who considered the case the most horrific of his career to that point, argued Andrea knew drowning her children was wrong in the eyes of God and society as she held them underwater.

He tapped Dr. Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist who often was prosecutors’ go-to and also consulted for TV’s “Law & Order,” as a star witness. Dietz told jurors Andrea’s claim of being influenced by Satan was “the first indication that she knows this is wrong.”

There were other signs, too, he said : She had concealed her plan, covered the children’s bodies with bedsheets and, when it was all over, called 911. But his most consequential claim would come under cross-examination by the defense. Challenging Dietz’s credentials, George asked whether postpartum depression featured in any of the “Law & Order” episodes to which he’d lent his expertise. The psychiatrist responded with a bombshell.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “there was a show of a woman with postpartum depression who drowned her children in the bathtub and was found insane, and it was aired shortly before this crime occurred.”

Prosecutors returned to that explosive point in the final moments of their closing argument. A once-perfect daughter who wanted to be a perfect mother, Andrea came to feel trapped by the demands of marriage and motherhood, Owmby claimed . She was at home all day with five young children, tasked with homeschooling and housekeeping, fearful her often-critical husband would walk out if she didn’t do everything just right.

Then, she caught the “Law & Order” episode about a mother getting away with murder and thought: “There is a way out.” But the children were not hers to take, Owmby continued, reaching the pinnacle of his argument.

“They belong to us,” he said. “Every time you see a child laugh, it will stab your heart. Because you’ll remember this trial.”

The jury deliberated for just three hours and 40 minutes. George wrapped an arm around Andrea as the judge read the verdict to the hushed courtroom:

Guilty of capital murder.

With Andrea now facing the real prospect of death row, George got Dick Wolf’s phone number from a reporter covering the trial. The police procedural’s creator was unequivocal : He had great respect for Dietz, but “Law & Order” had never done an episode like the one the expert – and the prosecutor – described. Dietz himself soon called it “an honest mistake.”

The judge denied the defense’s request for a mistrial, so there was nothing they could do but fight the chance of death by lethal injection. After a prosecutor gripped a photograph of the Yates children and accused their mother of the “ultimate betrayal,” George rose to make his case.

Turning to a 17th-century devotion, he paraphrased the English cleric John Donne: “The death of any man diminishes me, for I am a part of mankind.” He asked the eight women and four men to take those words with them to the jury room.

In closing, he said simply, “I want her to live.”

In the end, the jury chose life in prison. It was a victory for her defense, but it could only cushion the blow of the murder conviction. George and his partner appealed the verdict almost immediately.

For weeks, George avoided the courthouse, not wanting to talk to anyone about the verdict that had arrived with the world watching. He withdrew from his wife.

One night before a dinner outing with friends, Mary slid off her wedding ring, not as a rejection of their vows but as a sort of experiment aimed at sparking something – anything – in the lawyer she’d known from the start was right for this job.

“What’s going to shock this man into acting?” she wondered.

At dinner that night, her friend picked up on the missing ring and asked what was wrong. George looked at Mary, shocked. It was the start of a thawing between the couple, who decided there must be something they could do – some change they could push – to make meaning out of tragedy.

In June 2002, they launched the Yates Children’s Memorial Fund in partnership with the Houston chapter of a leading mental health nonprofit. Chairing the nonprofit’s advisory committee was psychiatrist Dr. Lucy Puryear, an expert on women’s reproductive mental health who had testified for Yates’ defense.

The fund created brochures about postpartum depression distributed at hospitals, clinics and doctor’s offices, held policy events, advocated for the Andrea Yates bill aimed at informing new moms about postpartum mental health conditions, threw fundraising luncheons and put together training modules for healthcare workers.

Separately, George embarked on a speaking tour across law schools, determined to tell a new generation of lawyers about postpartum mental health and call for changes in how the justice system treats women affected by it. “We’ve got a poster child in this case for a change in our insanity law,” Parnham said in 2002 at Texas Southern University.

“We tried to channel, I guess, all the sadness into something positive,” Mary says. “You know, it’s all you can do.”

That Christmas, George gave her two new rings to stack on her finger.

During prison visits with Andrea, now inmate No. 1087566 , he shared the fund’s work. He knew she took comfort in her children being remembered. Treatment had made her better, but the anniversary of the drownings tended to trigger breakdowns. One summer, she landed in the emergency room after shedding 30 pounds over weeks of refusing food. Disheveled and trembling, she told doctors she had visions of “babies yelling for help,” according to hospital paperwork included in court records.

Phillippe Diederich/Getty Images

She was three years into her sentence when George walked into the prison in the winter of 2005 with big news. Mary accompanied him for the first time, and she held Andrea’s hand while he explained: Because the false testimony about “Law & Order” may have influenced the jury’s decision, a Texas appeals court had thrown out the conviction .

They would have a second chance.

Driving along a dirt road in the piney woods of East Texas, George slowed to a stop, and Andrea stepped out of the passenger seat. A cow ambled over to the fence that marked the end of the attorney’s Apple Springs property. Andrea reached out to pet it.

A little bit of humanity, George thought, for a woman who had been behind bars for nearly five years.

It was February 2006, and a judge had just allowed Andrea to post $200,000 bond and depart the penitentiary for a psychiatric hospital while awaiting retrial. She walked out of the correctional facility in jeans and a blue striped, button-up shirt, silently making her way past the gathered reporters.

George and a private investigator were her ride. Along the way, the group ducked into a Subway, and Andrea, to everyone’s surprise, downed a footlong turkey sub. After the short stop, George told Andrea, “We’ve got to go,” and continued on to Rusk State Hospital.

She was scared to go back to trial, George knew. Because her mental illness was under control, she now fully grasped what she had done. Reliving what unfolded in that bathroom over an hour of madness five summers earlier, her legal team knew, would be harder now. She wasn’t sure she could do it.

“Andrea, trust me,” Mary remembers her husband telling his client. “It’ll be worth it. Trust me.”

The lawyers, whose work on the case by then was largely unpaid, hoped postpartum psychosis would be less of a foreign concept to the jury this time. Andrea’s initial conviction had thrust the issue into the mainstream. More mothers, doctors and advocates were speaking up about it, and its handling by the criminal justice system was getting another look. Defendants whose crimes stemmed from their mental illness “should be sent to a hospital and treated – not cast into a prison,” the American Psychiatric Association said in a statement issued at the time of the first trial.

And the Yates Children’s Memorial Fund had been at work for four years.

Soon after court was called to order in June 2006, the difference was clear to the defense. As the lawyers made their case that Andrea was insane at the time of the crime, the jury seemed more sympathetic. Prosecutors again argued she knew right from wrong, even bringing back the expert whose “Law & Order” testimony caused the do-over. The facts were almost entirely unchanged, but now the jury came back with the opposite verdict:

Not guilty by reason of insanity.

What would give George goosebumps for years to come was the way the jury spent the last moments in the deliberation room. They had asked for family photographs of the Yates kids, and after the trial, they explained their unusual request to the defense attorneys:

The jurors had gone one by one, putting a photo of each slain child – Noah, John, Paul, Luke and Mary – at the center of the table for a moment of silence.

Only after they were through did they ring the bell to let the judge know they’d made their decision.

Dr. Nicole Cirino breezes through the halls of a gleaming hospital in her white coat, showing off the light-filled rooms where she and other psychiatrists meet with patients in one of the largest maternal mental health clinics in the United States.

If the Andrea Yates story left a mark on Houston, the surest sign might be this complex south of downtown – a monument to maternal mental health called the Pavilion for Women . Pitched in 2005 and opened in 2012, the facility embedded within Texas Children’s Hospital takes the novel approach of wrapping mental health into pre- and postnatal care. Its staff provides psychiatric treatment including individual and group therapy and runs a hotline that physicians across the Lone Star State can call for advice. The facility is also a research and training ground, digging into the science behind postpartum mental health disorders and teaching current and future doctors about the signs.

“When we see something so different from what a typical maternal behavior is, and it involves harm, I think all of society feels it,” Cirino says from her desk, the sun setting behind her. “You know, what went wrong? What could we have done to protect her? What could we have done to protect the children? What is this condition? How do we treat it? Because this does not feel normal to us.”

After the Yates case, some of the same forces behind the Yates Children’s Memorial Fund decided the city’s new OB/GYN hospital would need a major mental health piece. A philanthropist who raised the fund’s seed money donated $2 million to create an endowed chair for reproductive psychiatry and recruited Puryear, the memorial fund’s chair and Yates case defense witness, to take the job.

Cirino, who succeeded her in 2022, was in residency to become a pediatric psychiatrist when she learned about the Yates case. It made her change paths.

“I remember just being so devastated by it, but also so interested in how this could happen to the maternal brain,” says the doctor, a reproductive psychiatrist with Texas Children’s and a professor at Baylor College of Medicine.

The world of people involved in reproductive psychiatry remains small, and Cirino, board chair of Postpartum Support International, has been close with the Parnhams for years. Everybody knows them, she said: George, the “powerful lawyer who just has, like, a heart of gold,” and Mary, who helped turn Postpartum Support International into a powerhouse with more than a thousand volunteers.

Cirino has presented each of them with awards and is amazed at how they took empathy for a client and turned it into their lives’ work. That they still have a relationship with Andrea 25 years later, she says, is “beautiful.”

The plaque occupies prime hallway real estate in the comfortable suburban home George and Mary bought to downsize when he finally decided, at 83, to retire. It commemorates an article that ran on the front page of the Houston Chronicle on July 28, 2006 – two days after jurors delivered the not guilty verdict he’d fought so long to win.

Above a photo of the attorney looking pensive is the headline: “He couldn’t walk away.”

Now, George sits on his couch next to Mary on another sweltering summer day in Houston, trying to explain why. Why he couldn’t let go of this case, and why it changed the course of his life.

“Talk about Mama?” he asks his wife. She sounds surprised. “Oh, OK! Go on.”

So, George reaches back to his childhood. He was 9, 10, 11 years old when his dad was on the road a lot for work. As the oldest son, he saw it as his duty to take care of his siblings – and his mom.

The memory unfurls slowly.

“I’d come home as a grade-school kid,” the now nearly 86-year-old says, stopping frequently to collect himself. “And I would find my mother – would be passed out on the side of the bed – on the side of the floor. And I would wipe her face off. And struggle to put her back in bed.”

The room is quiet for a moment. Doctors would eventually discover the tumor secretly rewiring his mom’s brain, George eventually says. She died when he was in his late teens.

But he would never forget how it felt to be that little boy, confounded by the mood swings, sudden outbursts and other inexplicable behavior he sometimes glimpsed. And maybe that was what put him on this road, he decides: “Just remembering my mother. And I, you know, would do everything I could to understand.”

With all he’s learned over the years about maternal mental health, George believes he does understand what happened to Andrea. His mission has been to make sure other people – defense attorneys, prosecutors, the wider public – get it, too. And although she doesn’t speak publicly, he knows Andrea appreciates the effort.

The mom who once handmade costumes for her kids now sews elaborate aprons she gives the Parnhams to auction off in support of the memorial fund that bears their name. This year, for the first time, she wrote a note addressing supporters of Postpartum Support International, now the umbrella organization for the Yates Children’s Memorial Fund. In careful print on a sheet of pink floral paper, she said: “Thank you for paying tribute to my precious children through your efforts.” Mary cried as she read it during the group’s conference this summer.

Owmby, the prosecutor, still believes Andrea knew what she did was wrong as she did it. But of George, he said: “I always believed he was sincere in what he was advocating.”

The Parnhams still worry about Andrea. For 20 years, they’ve been making the four-hour drive to see her at Kerrville State Hospital. The residential facility, which in some ways resembles a college campus, is home to people acquitted of crimes but committed by a court for inpatient mental health services. Before Andrea’s mother died, they all carpooled. Mary has stayed nights in a cabin on the hospital grounds with Andrea’s longtime best friend, and a photo on her iPhone shows her next to the woman she considers a dear friend: Andrea’s once-straight hair now in tight curls, both of them smiling. On those visits, Andrea often wants to talk about her kids.

When her case came up for review in July, setting off the flurry of motions that plays out each year, George’s name wasn’t on the court documents for the first time in 25 years. The Parnhams have passed the torch on to an attorney named Staci Biggar, whom they’ve known for years and who specializes in mental health cases.

Biggar, who would like to one day win small freedoms for Andrea, like supervised outings off campus, says the couple remains important to her client.

“A lifeline,” is how she puts it.

George is back in his familiar chair, eyes fixed on the television, when the morning news show cuts in early September to a view of a packed Massachusetts courtroom. He watches as the judge in the Clancy case sighs from the bench and tells the waiting attorneys and the defendant he feels he doesn’t have “any choice” but to declare a mistrial.

“BREAKING NEWS,” screams the chyron at the bottom of the screen, but George isn’t surprised. After six-plus days of jury deliberations, he thought it was pretty much inevitable. Now, he says over the phone, he hopes the prosecution and defense can finally sit down and figure something out .

The old defense attorney thinks, for the umpteenth time, about how hard it is to come to grips with a mother taking the life of a child she brought into the world – a child she loved. “Madonna and Child, smashed into a million pieces,” he’d once put it. How could it be anything but mental illness?

“We all have our own personal experiences, you know, of being raised, and being able to look back and remember being raised by a mom,” George says. “And uh – just give me a second.”

He’s thinking of his own mother, of his childhood self. He can see now how much it shaped the way he looked at Andrea and the way he defended her. An attorney’s whole life comes with them into the courtroom, he says, and plays in the background of how they represent their client.

The TV shows Lindsay. George looks at the dark-haired, unreadable woman and sees Andrea. He’s going over everything in his mind again: the five children laid out on the bed, looking like they were merely asleep. Their small faces chiseled on the headstone.

“How in the world,” he asks, “does that not impact you?”

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