Josh

It's hard to even understand.

Yeah.

It's just crazy.

It's just such a huge thing that impacts somebody to their very core and can completely change who they are and the person that you knew before.

Be very dark.

It can be very, very dark and very, very scary and a danger to all involved.

So

To understand where this goes to and, you know, obviously the horrible crime that happens, we have to go back to the very beginning to really understand who Andrea and Rusty Yates were sort of before all of these horrible events unfolded.

So if we go back to the beginning, Andrea Yates was born Andrea Pia Kennedy in Hallsville, Texas on July 2nd, 1964, and she grew up in Houston.

She was the youngest of five children, and her parents were Jutta Karen, who was a German immigrant, and Andrew Kennedy, who was a mechanic.

As a teen, Andrea reportedly struggled with various mental health illnesses.

Bulimia and depression were some of them in her teen years, and when she was 17, she mentioned suicide to a friend of hers.

And despite her struggles, she was an excellent student, excellent athlete.

She graduated valedictorian in 1982 from Milby High School, which is super impressive.

She was also an officer in the National Honor Society and the captain of her swim team.

So just...

I mean, for any parent, that's like best case scenario for like your, you know, your child to achieve all these awesome things by the time they graduate.

She then went on to go into a two-year nursing program at the University of Houston and then later graduated from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

And starting in 1986, she worked as a registered nurse at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

And in the summer of 1989, she met her future husband, Russell Yates.