Yates confessed to drowning her children. Prior to her second trial, she told Dr. Michael Welner that she waited for Rusty to leave for work that morning before filling the bathtub, because she knew he would have prevented her from harming them. After the murders, police found the family dog locked up; Rusty advised Welner that it had normally been allowed to run free, and was so when he had left the house that morning, leading the psychiatrist to allege that she locked it in a cage to prevent it from interfering with her killing the children one by one. Rusty got a family friend, George Parnham, to act as her attorney.