Stranger than Fiction

Account of Yates Crime by Writer-in-Residence Nominated for Edgar Award

Suzanne O’Malley is no stranger to writing about crime. She is an investigative journalist who also has penned several episodes of television crime shows. But in her first book, O’Malley, a writer-in-residence at Rice, took on one of the biggest crimes in recent history.

For two years, she was immersed in covering and researching the trial of Andrea Yates, the Houston-area mother who drowned her five children in the bathtub of their home in 2001. The resulting book, “Are You There Alone?”: The Unspeakable Crime of Andrea Yates (Simon & Schuster, 2004), recently was nominated for the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe Award.

The Edgars are given by the Mystery Writers of America and recognize the year’s best mystery fiction, nonfiction, television scripts, and films. O’Malley’s book was nominated in the category of best fact-crime book.

The book, the title of which refers to a question asked by the 911 operator Yates called immediately after the murders, was developed from investigative pieces O’Malley wrote for the New York Times Magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, and Salon.com as well as from dispatches she produced for Dateline NBC.

While she was covering the trial, O’Malley conducted more than 100 interviews, including talking with Andrea Yates’s husband, Rusty, 30 times, and examined more than 2,000 pages of Yates’s medical records to better understand the crime. After the jury convicted Yates for three of the drownings and sentenced her to life in prison, O’Malley spent 14 months corresponding with Yates and continues to exchange letters with her today.

In her book, O’Malley stresses that Yates’s mental illnesses were misdiagnosed from the outset. She also argues that under less extraordinary circumstances, a mentally ill woman would have been quietly offered a plea bargain and sent to an institution under court supervision.

“What the Yates case showed,” O’Malley says, “was that it could happen to anybody. Andrea Yates is that rare person of good character who becomes so profoundly mentally ill that she commits unspeakable crimes.” O’Malley wrote the book in part to educate the public about mental health issues and the misinformation surrounding them. “The Yates case received unprecedented media coverage,” she notes, “yet I don’t feel the true story was told until “Are You There Alone?”

At Rice, O’Malley teaches a creative writing class that instructs students how to write a full-length script. She uses the Emmy-winning show Law & Order as “a method of teaching students to use their liberal arts education and life experience in their work.” The structure of the show suits the purpose of a screenwriting class, O’Malley says, because the program’s format easily can be broken down into acts and has characters that already are defined, yet it still requires imaginative writing. Students also learn to apply industry-standard screenwriting software to their work.

Currently, O’Malley is working on a nonfiction book about “a perfect trial” and writing an update for the June 2005 paperback publication of “Are You There Alone?” She is a freelance producer and an on-air news consultant for NBC and MSNBC. She was a former editor-at-large at Inside.com, a contributing editor for New York Magazine, and a senior editor of Esquire Magazine. Her reporting and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, People, Harper’s Bazaar, and many other publications. She sits on the board of the Writers’ Guild of America and is a member of Harvard Medical School’s think tank on psychiatry and the law.