PREACHER ‘PREYED' ON YATES

New York Post, March 11, 2002

By MEGAN TURNER

March 11, 2002 -- Andrea Yates' "spiritual leader" once sent her a newsletter that called modern mothers "Jezebels" and expressed concern for their "disobedient" children.

Evangelist Michael Woroniecki's influence over the mother accused of murdering her five children has become an issue as testimony in her trial comes to a close, Newsweek reports.

Houston psychiatrist Lucy Puryear told the jury that Yates' delusions "are built around" the contents of Woroniecki's newsletter, "The Perilous Times,"

which he sent to Yates and her husband, Rusty.

The newsletter, put into evidence by Yates' lawyer, George Parnham, contains a poem lamenting the disobedient kids of the "Modern Mother Worldly" and ends with the question, "What becomes of the children of such a Jezebel?"

On June 21, one day after Yates - who has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity - drowned her children in a bathtub, she told a jail psychiatrist that her bad mothering had made the kids "not righteous" and that they would "perish in the fires of hell."

She believed that if she killed them while they were young, God would show mercy on their souls.

Woroniecki, 48, denied negatively influencing Yates and pointed the finger of blame at her husband.

"I warned him over and over again that his life was headed for tragedy,"

Woroniecki wrote in a letter to Newsweek, adding that he thought Yates and the children were in desperate need of Rusty's love.

Rusty, who declined to comment, first met Woroniecki preaching at Auburn University in Alabama, where he was a student. Rusty later introduced the preacher to Andrea.

During a 1994 protest at Brigham Young University in Utah, Woroniecki branded the school's women "contemporary witches," telling them sarcastically, "Go and be a 20th-century career woman and forget about your families," Newsweek reports.

And one of his pamphlets declared, "As man was created to dominate, God reveals that woman was created to be his helpmeet."

Woroniecki denied he had anything to do with Andrea's decision to quit her job and stay at home with the children. "Although she was an excellent nurse, she never wanted to pursue a career," he said.

In 1998, the Yateses bought a Greyhound bus from Woroniecki, who had toured the nation in it with his wife and their six children, Newsweek reports.

Rusty told the jury that he agreed with the preacher's support for home-schooling and living the "simple life" in a bus, but psychiatrist Puryear says adopting such practices had caused Andrea significant stress.

Forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz went further, saying these factors led to Andrea's two suicide attempts.

Woroniecki insisted to Newsweek that he and his wife were "a very compassionate and caring couple who did all we could to love [the Yates family]."

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