New doc claims ‘cult leader’ preacher drove Andrea Yates to drown her five children
For more than two decades, Andrea Yates was framed as a monster who drowned her five children to “save them from hell.” But a new doc, The Cult Behind the Killer: The Andrea Yates Story shows a woman grappling with severe postpartum psychosis, who was driven to tragic extremes by the psychological manipulation of others – including a rogue preacher who reached Yates at her most vulnerable. Andrea Cavallier explores the case
When Andrea Yates drowned her five children in the bathtub of her Houston home on June 20, 2001, she told investigators she was trying to save them from going to “hell.”
The tragedy quickly became headline news across the country and Yates was branded the most hated mother in America. Yates was a former nurse who had suffered for years from severe postpartum depression and psychosis. She was later found not guilty by reason of insanity in the deaths of Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 3, Luke, 2, and 6-month-old Mary. The case became a grim touchstone in conversations about motherhood, mental illness, and the limits of criminal responsibility.
But a new documentary argues that the story most Americans think they know leaves out a critical and disturbing chapter.
At both of Yates’ trials, prosecutors and defense attorneys acknowledged that her already fragile mental state may have been exacerbated by the teachings of a fire-and-brimstone preacher named Michael Woroniecki.
Now, The Cult Behind the Killer: The Andrea Yates Story, a new three-part docuseries, revisits that influence – casting Woroniecki as a shadowy figure whose apocalyptic theology, former followers say, did not function like a typical ministry.
Woroniecki and his current followers have been described as having a cult-like influence throughout the media over the years.
“When I watch the coverage about Andrea Yates, it’s like, ‘This woman is evil. She’s insane,’” said Woroniecki’s own nephew and former follower Moses Storm in the series. “But they are missing a huge part of the story.”
Woroniecki and his wife, Rachel, served as spiritual mentors to Andrea and her husband, Rusty Yates. In the docuseries, Rusty reflects on his wife’s delusions, admitting that “her delusion about Satan being in her, that may well have come from her exposure to the Woronieckis.”
Woroniecki, who has long denied any culpability in the killings, and his wife Rachel declined to be interviewed for the doc, but in a 2002 interview with Good Morning America, he acknowledged telling Andrea and Rusty they were going to hell several years before the murders, but insisted that the message was universal. As of 2026, no charges have been brought against him or his wife. They continued to travel the world, preaching about God.
“Of course, because everybody is going to hell,” Woroniecki said in the 2002 interview, adding that he blamed Rusty’s inattentiveness, not mental illness, for what happened.
“I hold him responsible [for the drownings] but I also hold Andrea responsible. God knows what we shared with those people," Woroniecki said, adding that he “shared Jesus with them” and that he had warned Rusty Yates that Andrea and the children were in great need of his love.
Former followers of Woroniecki interviewed in the docuseries paint a starkly different picture. Several, including Woroniecki’s own nephew, describe a system of belief rooted in fear, isolation and absolute spiritual authority.
“Unless you’re in it, you don’t understand the amount of control Michael Woroniecki had over us,” Storm said. Another interviewee asks, “How many people are still under his spell?”
The series explores how Woroniecki’s teachings, distributed largely through letters, pamphlets, cassette tapes, and VHS recordings, warned that children could be damned by unrighteous parents, a belief Andrea Yates echoed in the aftermath of the killings.
Despite suffering postpartum depression after the births of her last two children, she and her husband were allegedly strongly encouraged to keep having children by Woroniecki’s teachings.
“This is one of the most notorious cases of the last 25 years, yet a critical part of the story has gone largely underreported,” President of ID Jason Sarlanis said about the doc. “Andrea Yates wasn’t the only person influenced by this group, and that raises an urgent question: what other families could still be at risk?”
Rusty Yates, who worked for NASA and was away at work when Andrea drowned their five children in five inches of water in the bathtub at their Texas home in 2001. She immediately called both her husband and the police to tell them what she had done.
Police said Yates described the horrifying events in “a zombie-like fashion” in a videotaped confession, admitting she had drowned her children to save them from eternal punishment, an idea her defense team and psychiatrist said she absorbed from Woroniecki.
In the confession, Yates said she first drowned her two-year-old son Luke, then three-year-old Paul and five-year-old John. She then laid them out on a bed and wrapped them in a sheet.
But when she was putting down her six-month-old lifeless baby girl, her eldest son Noah entered the bedroom and asked, “What’s wrong with Mary?” He ran before his mother could answer, but Yates dragged him back to the bathroom and held him underwater until he died too.
She called the police and her husband and asked him to come home. When he asked Yates if anyone was hurt, her husband said she told him: “Yes... the children. All of them.”
Yates was first convicted of capital murder in 2002 for drowning her five children, but it was later overturned. In a 2006 retrial, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a mental hospital.
Yates, now 61, has been confined to Texas’ Kerrville State Hospital since 2007.
The Cult Behind the Killer: The Andrea Yates Story premieres January 6, on Investigation Discovery and HBO Max.
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