January 8, 2026
by Carla Hay
“The Cult Behind the Killer: The Andrea Yates Story”
Directed by Elli Hakami and Julian P. Hobbs
Culture Representation: The three-episode docuseries “The Cult Behind the Killer: The” features a predominantly white group of people (with one Hispanic people) talking about the connection between confessed child killer Andrea Yates (who drowned all five of her children their Houston home in 2001) and a controversial cult whose leader who denied any wrongdoing.
Culture Clash: Several people interviewed in the documentary believe that cult leader/traveling preacher Michael Woroniecki pushed Yates over the edge of sanity and motivated her to murder her children.
Culture Audience: “The Cult Behind the Killer: The Andrea Yates Story” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in watching documentaries about how extremist cults control people’s lives and could brainwash people to commit violent acts.
“The Cult Behind the Killer: The Andrea Yates Story” has a conspiracy theory agenda that might be considered plausible, but this docuseries leaves room for doubt because not enough is explored or explained about the killer’s individual responsibility in causing a horrific murder spree of her five children. The documentary does not include information that the killer had a troubled history of mental health issues long before she became a mother. This uneven docuseries rehashes the decades-old theory that child killer Andrea Yates was brainwashed by cult leader Michael Woroniecki. The interviews (including with Andrea’s ex-husband Rusty Yates) are better than the film editing.
This documentary should not have been subtitled “The Andrea Yates Story” because the documentary tells more about Woroniecki (a traveling American preacher who declined to be interviewed for the documentary) than it does about Andrea Yates. Woroniecki claims to be a non-denominational Christian. There is no official name for his cult, and he denies that he is a cult leader. Woroniecki has not been arrested for any crimes related to the Andrea Yates case.
Directed by Elli Hakami and Julian P. Hobbs, “The Cult Behind the Killer: The Andrea Yates Story” has three episodes but spends way too much time in the first episode focusing on interviews with the same three people: Rusty Yates and former Woroniecki cult members Moses Storm and David De La Isla. There should’ve been a better variety of interviews in the first episode. The documentary improves when it brings in other perspectives of people who were connected in some way to Andrea’s trials, instead of just being a compilation of interviews with former Woroniecki cult members who have bad things to say about him.
Andrea Yates (a former nurse who became a homemaker after becoming a mother) is considered one of the world’s most notorious killers because of what she did at her Houston home on June 21, 2001. While her husband Rusty was at work at his NASA job, Andrea (who was 36 years old at the time) drowned all five of the couple’s children in the house’s bathtub. Andrea called 911 and immediately confessed to murdering son Noah (born in 1994), son John (born in 1995), son Paul (born in 1997), son Luke (born in 1999) and daughter Mary (born in 2000). Andrea was later diagnosed with schizophrenia.
The only reason she gave for these heinous murders was she heard voices in her head telling her that she was a bad mother and the children were possessed by the devil. Andrea pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. In her 2002 trial, Andrea was found guilty of first-degree murder and then sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole in 40 years. However, in 2006, Andrea got a second trial on appeal, after forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz’s testimony in the 2002 trial was discredited. In her 2006 trial, Andrea was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was sentenced to a live in a psychiatric facility. She has been living in these types of facilities in Texas since this sentencing.
Over the years, Rusty (who married Andrea in 1993 and divorced her in 2005) has said in several interviews (including in this documentary) that Andrea had post-partum depression after the birth of their son Luke. According to Rusty, Andrea was taking prescribed medication for this depression, but she had stopped taking the medication before the birth of their daughter Mary. Rusty says that Andrea’s post-partum depression got much worse after the birth of Mary, to the point where Andrea was “catatonic” and he didn’t know what Andrea was thinking.
In the documentary, Rusty repeats what he has said in other interviews about how he felt and what he experienced after this horrific tragedy that destroyed his family. He says if he had any idea that Andrea would murder their children, he would’ve handled things much differently. Rusty has since remarried and had a son with his second wife. This information is mentioned briefly in the documentary’s captioned epilogue. Rusty doesn’t talk about his second wife and their son in this documentary.
Episode 1, titled “Indoctrination,” gives a quick summary of the relationship between Rusty and Andrea and then details how Woroniecki became a cult leader who preached separatism and taught that children should be physically abused in the name of discipline. Episode 2, titled “The Terror Within,” continues stories from former Woroniecki followers about how his cult nearly ruined their lives. Episode 3, titled “Revelation,” has discussions of Andrea’s trials and why her second trial resulted in a not guilty verdict.
In the documentary, Rusty gives a very rosy description of his courtship and the early years of his marriage to Andrea. What the documentary doesn’t mention is Andrea had a long history of mental illness, going back to her teenage years, when she had clinical depression and expressed suicidal thoughts. The documentary misleadingly makes it look like Andrea’s mental health issues started when she had post-partum depression as an adult. It’s fair to point out that millions of women have had post-partum depression and don’t end up killing their children.
The documentary presents the theory that something—namely, Woroniecki’s brainwashing—was the trigger that pushed Andrea over the edge into becoming a murderer of children. It’s a theory that first surfaced in the aftermath of Andrea’s arrest in 2001, when it became public that Andrea had been communicating with Woroniecki for years. By the time Andrea was arrested, Woroniecki had a horrible reputation of leading a cult that preached that children deserved to be physically abused.
Woroniecki (who was raised in the Catholic religion) was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on February 4, 1954. He was a star football player at the Central Michigan University, where he graduated in 1976, with a bachelor of science degree in behavioral science. After graduating from Central Michigan University, Woroniecki became immersed in religious teachings, by enrolling in various theology schools and seminaries. He tried to become a Catholic priest and was rejected.
In 1979, he married Leslie Jean Ochalek, who later changed her name to Rachel Rebekah Woroniecki. The couple had six children who would be in family videos that were sent to the cult’s followers. The documentary includes archival clips of some of this footage, which shows Michael doing most of the talking, while his wife and children agree with everything he says.
It should come as no surprise that Michael’s preaching demanded that women and children always had to be subservient to men. Michael’s wife Rachel also preached this backwards way of thinking. She declined to be interviewed for this documentary. Michael was eventually banned from his hometown of Grand Rapids for physically attacking a woman during one of his street-preaching appearances in Grand Rapids.
According to the former cult members interviewed in the documentary, Michael has a fixation on butterflies and preaches that only he, his wife and their six kids are the chosen eight butterflies who will be allowed to enter heaven. Michael would hint that other people could be given this elite status too if they followed what he said. Otherwise, they would be comdemened to spend the afterlife in purgatory or in hell.
Unlike many religion-based cults that have an image of cult members living in a communal environment, the members of Michael’s cult have always been spread out all over the world and don’t have a central place that can be considered the cult’s headquarters. By the 1980s, when Michael’s cult began, he had already established himself as a traveling preacher who would communicate with his followers by newsletters and by sending audio tapes. That communication extended to the Internet and email when the Internet and email became a part of everyday lives.
Rusty and Andrea were among these followers who communicated with Michael remotely. In the documentary, Rusty says he was briefly interested in Michael’s teachings after he saw Michael preach at Auburn University in Alabama when Rusty was a student there. Rusty says lost interest in Michael’s preachings and stopped communicating with Michael. By contrast, Andrea still communicated with Michael for years. At the time, Rusty didn’t see the harm, and he didn’t want to control any of Andrea’s religious interests.
Michael and his family had a nomadic lifestyle. They lived on a bus for many years. His children were homeschooled. And if Michael’s followers had children, his followers were ordered to have those children homeschooled too. Michael taught his followers that outside influences, such as traditional schools, traditional churches and the government, were evil and should be avoided, according to Storm, who says he grew up in the cult because his parents were cult members.
In his documentary interview, Storm (who works as a stand-up comedian in Los Angeles) often gets emotional and tearful as he shares painful childhood memories of the physical and emotional abuse that he and his siblings suffered because of the cult’s teachings. Storm says his mother was more fanatical about the cult than his father, but his parents both participated in the abuse of their children. In the documentary, Storm says he has to choose his words carefully because a part of him is still afraid of Michael.
Storm tells a story about how one of his sisters, who was 12 at the time, was severely beaten by Storm’s parents because she made a friend (a girl who was about the same age) outside of the family. Storm also remembers it was not unusual for him to get spanked and assaulted by his parents for something as a small as his parents thinking he was acting “haughty.” He thought this type of punishment was normal until he found out in his childhood that the abuse was wrong, and other families did not abuse their kids.
According to Storm, the cult encourages its members to isolate themselves to lessen the chances that the members would be in contact with others who could tell them that the cult’s teachings are wrong. In the documentary, Storm says that his family could’ve easily ended up like the Yates family because of the way his mother (under Michael’s preaching) began to believe that her children were evil. Storm does not give details about what his parents (who are now divorced) currently think of the cult, but he says when he found out about Andrea Yates and the heinous murders she committed, he felt weirdly “jealous” that the children would no longer have to live with this abusive mother.
Former cult member De La Isla (who is now a retired pharmaceutical executive living in Houston) says he got lured into the cult when he saw Michael preach at Texas A&M University, where De La Isla was a student in the 1980s. He remembers that Michael’s motto at the time was “Crazy War.” De La Isla says that he was attracted to Michael’s philosophy of not becoming a slave to materialism.
De La Isla says that he wrote to Michael to hear more about Michael’s teachings. In hindsight, De La Isla says, “It was the biggest mistake of my life.” De La Isla was in Michael’s cult for 12 years.
After graduating from Texas A&M, De La Isla says he had a good-paying sales job at a Fortune 500 company and was rising through the ranks of the company. However, De La Isla says that Michael pressured De La Isla to quit this job to focus on Michael’s version of spirituality and not worry about money. De La Isla believed Michael’s preaching that his followers should drop out of society and not worry about paying bills.
For someone who preached about not being concerned about money, Michael hypocritically pressured his followers to give him monetary donations. De La Isla says in the documentary that he gave a little under $20,000 to Michael over a 10-year period. The documentary doesn’t include any information about any donations that Andrea Yates might have given to this cult leader.
De La Isla also blames cult brainwashing for why he broke up with a fiancée because she questioned the cult’s teaching. He gets choked up with emotion when he expresses his regret about this breakup. At the time, De La Isla says he believed Michael’s preaching that women are witches, and men have to control women. (In an archival clip, Michael is seen saying, “In the heart of women is Satan.”)
Other people interviewed in the documentary are Wendell Odom Jr., Andrea’s most recent defense attorney; Dr. Phillip Resnick, a forensic psychiatrist who testified in Andrea’s second trial that Andrea was heavily influenced by Michael Woroniecki; former Woroniecki cult member Douglas Roberts, who started an anti-Michael Woroniecki website; Todd Frank, who was the jury foreman in Andrea’s second trial; Suzy Spencer, author of “Breaking Point,” a 2002 non-fiction book about Andrea Yates; cult intervention expert Ashlen Hillierd; and Steve Grinczel, who knew Michael Woroniecki from when they were friends in high school and describes Michael as being an arrogant jock when they were students.
In the beginning of the documentary, Rusty is skeptical about how much influence Woroniecki could have had in the murders of the Yates children. However, Rusty changes his mind when he has a face-to-face meeting with Storm, who believes Storm’s mother could’ve easily been brainwashed by Woroniecki to kill her own kids. Regardless if viewers believe this theory or not, it’s an emotionally powerful moment that shows how victims can have some healing when speaking with each other. And even though “The Cult Behind the Killer: The Andrea Yates Story” has some typical characteristics of a sensationalistic true crime documentary (including somewhat cheesy re-enactments), it succeeds in its purpose in showing the damage caused by cult mind control and how the Yates family tragedy did not happen without warning signs.
Investigation Discovery premiered “The Cult Behind the Killer: The Andrea Yates Story” on January 6, 2026.
