Examining a Spiritual Leader's Influence Andrea Yates
Newsweek/March 18, 2002
Was Andrea Yates's "spiritual leader" partly responsible for her delusional thinking? As testimony comes to a close in her trial, evangelist Michael Woroniecki's influence over the mother accused of murdering her five children has become an issue. A day after Yates, who has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, drowned the children in the family bathtub, she told a jail psychiatrist that her bad mothering had made the kids "not righteous," and, as a result, they would "perish in the fires of hell." If she killed them while they were young, God would show mercy on their souls.
Where did these thoughts stem from? Yates's attorney, George Parnham, has put into evidence a copy of Woroniecki's newsletter The Perilous Times, sent to Yates and her husband, Rusty. In it a poem laments the disobedient kids of the "Modern Mother Worldly" and ends with the question, "What becomes of the children of such a Jezebel?" Houston psychiatrist Lucy Puryear told the jury that literature is "what her delusions are built around."
In a letter to NEWSWEEK, Woroniecki, 48, denies negatively influencing Yates, and points at Rusty. "Knock, knock ... Hello ... earth to Rusty ... your wife and children are in desperate need of your love," he writes. "I warned him over and over again that his life was headed for tragedy." Rusty, who declined to comment, first met Woroniecki while he was a student at Auburn University. Woroniecki was preaching on campus. Rusty introduced the preacher to Andrea, and in 1998 the Yateses bought a Greyhound bus from Woroniecki, who had lived in it with his wife and their six children as they toured the nation.
During a 1994 protest at Brigham Young University, Woroniecki called the school's women "contemporary witches." He told them sarcastically, "Go and be a 20th-century career woman and forget about your families." One of his pamphlets proclaimed, "As man was created to dominate, God reveals that woman was created to be his helpmeet." Though Andrea quit her job to stay home with the kids, Woroniecki says he never urged her to do this. "Although she was an excellent nurse, she never wanted to pursue a career," he wrote NEWSWEEK.
Rusty told the jury that he agreed with Woroniecki's support for home-schooling and living the "simple life" in a bus - two decisions the Yateses copied but which Puryear says caused significant stress for the passive Andrea. Forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz agreed, and said these factors led to her two previous suicide attempts. "She couldn't say to people, "'I can't stand this'."
For his part, Woroniecki writes that he and his wife were a very compassionate and caring couple who did all we could to love them ... After all we did for this family, it is preposterous for us to be cast into such a terrible image."
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