How many investigative reporters actually save the life of a vilified, convicted murderer facing the death penalty in a case so gruesome it defies imagination?

Suzanne O’Malley (BA 1974, Phi Beta Kappa), did just that.

O’Malley covered the high-stakes Andrea Yates trial for Oprah Magazine and NBC’s Dateline. The jury convicted Yates in only three hours– but would they also sentence her to death? No.

When O’Malley’s information came to light, the State took the death penalty off the table and sentenced Yates to life in prison. Later, Yates’ drowning of her five young children in their Houston, TX bathtub was revealed to have resulted from the postpartum psychosis disease, triggered by the birth of her fifth child.

Yates had  immediately confessed to drowning her five children. Dr. Park Deitz, a forensic psychiatrist and the State of Texas’s expert witness, alleged that Yates had watched a Law & Order episode in which a mother who drowned her children was found not guilty by reason of insanity. That alleged Law & Order episode, Dietz said, gave Yates the blueprint for her horrifying deeds.

Dr. Dietz served as a story consultant for Law & Order. O’Malley, a screenwriter for the series, had worked with Dietz and had greeted him when he arrived at court. But as she listened to his testimony, she  felt sure that no such episode existed. Deitz’s opinion that Law & Order had inspired Yates’ crimes was not correct.  She telephoned the show’s creator, Dick Wolf, who confirmed Deitz’s testimony was false.

In 2005, an appeals court reversed Yates’ conviction, finding Deitz’s false testimony denied Yates a fair trial. In her 2006 retrial, Yates was found Not Guilty. By Texas law, the trial judge remanded Yates to a Texas Mental Health facility where she still resides 20 years later.

“Andrea Yates owes her life to a writer from ‘Law & Order,’ reported in the New York Post’s popular Page Six column. Her non-fiction book about the Yates’ crime, “Are You There Alone?: The Unspeakable Crime of Andrea Yates,” (Simon & Schuster) a New York Times bestseller, was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime book in 2005. (O’Malley retains all movie and dramatic rights to the book.)

O’Malley’s reporting led to a new Texas law that requires physicians to evaluate the mental health of all new mothers. The late Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Houston) formally commended O’Malley for raising public awareness of the impact that pregnancy and delivery have on new moms.

Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, O’Malley grew up in Dallas in the Sixties. She was drawn to journalism at age 10. “It seemed to me that a majority of people and press spoke and wrote unfairly about President John F. Kennedy. My father suggested that I write a letter to the editor of The Dallas Times Herald, being sure to include my age. The Times Herald published my letter.”

At UT,  O’Malley studied psychology, organized the first Earth Day at UT, and became the second editor of Pearl Magazine, a monthly feature supplement to The Daily Texan, named for Janice Joplin. Pearl won the best magazine award and she won the best magazine story award from the Southwestern Journalism Congress in 1973. Her advisor was the beloved Dr. DeWitt Reddick, the first Dean of the College of Communications at UT. She was among Reddick’s final class of students focused on long form journalism that advanced the common good.

Three hours shy of graduation in June of 1973, she sold her Pontiac GTO coupe for $2,000.00, packed two suitcases and moved to New York City. She shared an apartment with four young women, found a job in public relations, and completed her American History course by correspondence. She waited for an entry-level position at Esquire Magazine, then a premiere literary magazine known for publishing Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Within three years, she was a Senior Editor at Esquire and regularly wrote the Esquire column “Dining Out.” She edited writers including Joan Didion, John Dunne, Barbra Tuchman, Molly Ivins and Malcolm Cowley.

In 1983, O’Malley wrote a book with her then-husband, humorist Dan Greenburg (r.i.p.), “How To Avoid Love and Marriage,” a bestselling satire on the ups-and-downs of marriage. The couple had one son together, Zack.

O’Malley became a contributing editor of New York magazine, an editor-at-large for Inside.com, wrote for The New York Times Magazine and became a freelance producer and on-air news contributor for NBC. She was in the thick of New Journalism as it evolved in New York City, where the iconic writer Tom Wolfe heralded a new era in which important stories were reported and published without regard to traditional journalistic style.

She was writer-in-residence at Rice and taught screenwriting at Yale, inspiring her students to write scripts, affording them the lessons of her own career. At Yale, she was also Associate Director of the Yale Summer Film Institute. She is a former Board Member of the Writers’ Guild of America, has produced and co-written two documentaries and is a member of the Harvard Program in Psychiatry and the Law.

In 2014, O’Malley moved to Austin, Texas to research the Affordable Housing experiment  being developed in Mueller on the site of Austin’s former airport. Last year, she unmasked the phony Golden Bachelor on the ABC television show of the same name. The story was The Hollywood Reporter’s #1 digital article in its history.

Her current project is a book about her relationship with the late Nora Ephron, a journalist, screenwriter, and director who was one of O’Malley’s colleagues at Esquire. Ephron wrote screenplays like “When Harry Met Sally,” and “Silkwood,” and began directing and writing with “Sleepless in Seattle” (co-written with Jeff Arch and David S. Ward). She wrote and directed “Heartburn,”  “You’ve  Got Mail,” and “Julie & Julia,” among others.

In Ephron’s obituary, The New York Times included a quote from a profile Ephron had written for Esquire. The quote was a humorous anecdote about Ephron’s subject—the infamous UT Dean John Silber, O’Malley’s philosophy professor, who  became a Massachusetts politician and the high-profile President of Boston University.

O’Malley sometimes longs for her former Pearl editor’s UT office [not to mention parking spot],  on the first floor of the old journalism building. She also misses the photo-journalism basement darkrooms where she spent an inordinate amount of time and ate her first bagel.

————————-

Register to attend at:

https://friendsdailytexan.wildapricot.org/event-6522425