"It was a slow death," said Harris County Chief Medical Examiner Luis Sanchez. "It was not quick."
An autopsy photograph of the pale hand of Yates' 5-year-old son, John, showed that he was still clutching a long strand of his mother's dark hair.
Yates' 7-year-old son, Noah, had been floating face down in nine inches of bathtub water when medical examiners pulled him out and laid his stiff, 50-pound body face-up on a plastic sheet on the bathroom floor.
In photographs shown to jurors, Noah's small fists were clenched, his arms were raised above his head, and his lifeless knees were bent, defying gravity.
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"The entire body was very stiff, almost like a board," Sanchez told jurors.
Noah's extreme rigidity was due to intense muscular exertion in the last minutes of life, Sanchez said. He catalogued a list of injuries on Noah's head and body: deep internal bruising, abrasions, nail scratches, round focal bruises around his joints indicating squeezing fingertip pressure.
Prosecutors say Noah, the eldest of Yates' five children, fought the hardest to stay alive, but that she chased him down and dragged him into the bathroom, where she had just finished drowning his four siblings: first Paul, 3, then Luke, 2, John, and Mary, 6 months.
She laid all except Noah on her bed.
Noah was the last to die before Yates called police to turn herself in, and then called her husband to tell him to come home.
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And yet they showed her mercy.
