Are You There Alone‪?‬

In the tradition of In Cold Blood, The Executioner’s Song, and A Civil Action, Suzanne O’Malley examines one of the most horrifying and polarizing crimes of the 21st century (Andrea Yates’s drowning of her five young children) and discovers that the combination of medical misjudgments, professional negligence, and misplaced legislative action that shaped the tragedy all failed, producing further, avoidable suffering.

On June 20, 2001, Andrea Yates drowned her five young children in their family home outside Houston. The crime shocked the nation—and launched one of the most closely scrutinized criminal cases involving mental illness, postpartum psychosis, religion, and the death penalty.

Investigative journalist Suzanne O’Malley followed the case from its first hours, interviewing more than 120 people, including Andrea Yates, her husband Rusty, family members, friends, physicians, and the secretive preacher Michael Woroniecki, whose teachings influenced Andrea’s religious delusions. Drawing on extensive medical and court records, O’Malley examines Andrea’s deteriorating mental health, her repeated hospitalizations, failures in her treatment, and the questions surrounding the care she received before the killings.

The book also chronicles the controversial first trial, in which Yates was convicted of three murders and sentenced to life in prison. That conviction was overturned after prosecution psychiatrist Park Dietz gave false testimony about a nonexistent Law & Order episode that allegedly inspired the killings. In 2006, at her retrial, Yates was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a state psychiatric hospital. She has remained in psychiatric care in Texas, most recently at Kerrville State Hospital.

Are You There Alone? is both a deeply reported true-crime investigation and an examination of how severe mental illness, medical misjudgment, religious extremism, media pressure, and the criminal justice system intersected in the tragedy of an American nuclear family. O’Malley’s reporting offers a complex portrait of Andrea Yates and the people whose lives were forever changed by what happened.