Alleged Cult Preacher May Have Influenced Andrea Yates To Kill Her 5 Kids, Others Are Still ‘Under His Spell’

When Andrea Yates drowned her five children — Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 3, Luke, 2, and 6-month-old Mary — one by one in the bathtub on June 20, 2001 to save them from going to “hell,” she told investigators, she was labeled the most hated mom in America.

The former nurse, who suffered from severe postpartum depression and mental illness, was eventually found not guilty by reason of insanity.

But at her trial, both the prosecution and the defense attorneys argued that the Houston woman’s already fragile mental state may have been exacerbated by the teachings of a fire-and-brimstone preacher named Michael Woroniecki — and a new documentary is shedding new light on the teachings of a man some former followers have called a cult leader.

“When I watch the coverage about Andrea Yates, it’s like, ‘This woman is evil. She’s insane.’ They are missing a huge part of the story,” Woroniecki’s former follower Moses Storm says in the trailer for the ID series, The Cult Behind The Killer: The Andrea Yates Story.

Woroniecki and his wife, Rachel, served as spiritual mentors for Andrea and her husband Rusty, who admits in the trailer that “her delusion about Satan being in her, that may well have come from her exposure to the Woronieckis.”

The preacher has denied any culpability in the unspeakable crime – although he did tell Andrea and Rusty they were going to hell about three years before she killed her kids, he said in an interview with Good Morning America in 2002.

“Of course, because everybody is going to hell,” Woroniecki added, noting that he blames Rusty’s inattentiveness, not mental illness, for what happened.

But his former followers, including his own nephew, allege in the three-part docuseries that he dominated their lives.

“Unless you’re in it, you don’t understand the amount of control Michael Woroniecki had over us,” Storm says, and another interviewee asks, “How many people are still under his spell?”

“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?” Jason Sarlanis, president of ID, said in a statement to the National Enquirer.

The docuseries premieres on Tuesday, January 6 on ID.

Andrea, now 61, is serving a life sentence at Texas’ Kerrville State Hospital.