I wonder if Emily post deals with the proximity of a second wedding to the murder trial of your first spouse -- especially when the victims were your children.

Russell "Rusty" Yates will remarry this weekend, two days before his ex-wife, Andrea Yates, is retried for the 2001 murders of the couple's children.

On Saturday, Yates will marry Laura Arnold, a woman he met while attending Clear Lake Church of Christ, according to the Rev. Fairy Caroland, Yates' aunt.

"He's happy, and the family's happy," said Caroland, who added that the wedding date was set long before state District Judge Belinda Hill scheduled Andrea Yates' retrial.

Arnold has two sons, 21 and 9.

On June 20, 2001, Andrea Yates called police to her home, where they found the bodies of the five Yates children, Noah, 7; John, 5; Paul, 3; Luke, 2; and Mary, 6 months. All had been drowned in the family's bathtub. She was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Last year, the 1st Texas Court of Appeals overturned her capital murder conviction because of erroneous testimony from a forensic psychiatrist who was the state's expert witness. Two months later, on March 17, 2005, Andrea and Russell Yates' divorce was finalized, ending nearly 12 years of marriage.

Yates, 41, declined to discuss the wedding.

"It's not something I want to talk about," he said. "Just trying to keep my private life, private."

Yates and Arnold are to be married at Clear Lake Church of Christ on Saturday afternoon. Caroland said her nephew met Arnold after getting to know her 21-year-old son.

"He's simply trying to enjoy this without getting into a lot of stuff about it," Caroland said.

Yates told the Associated Press that he had informed his ex-wife of his plans to remarry.

"Andrea has been aware of it for a couple of months, and she wishes me the best, just as I wish her the best," Yates told the AP on Tuesday via e-mail.

Andrea Yates' attorney, George Parnham, said he was not certain how his client is handling the information.

"We all have to get on with our lives," he said. "This doesn't discount the things that happened on June 20th, but it saddens me that Andrea might be in any way negatively or emotionally affected by this."

A lot of folks around here still put a lot of the blame for the murders on Rusty -- this will just bring the debate forward again.

And it reminds me of why I'm so glad we didn't buy one of the houses we looked at in May of 2001 -- just a few doors down from the one where we saw the Dad playing with his four boys, and the odd looking mother holding a baby.

Posted by: Greg at 11:34 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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