We Thought We Knew You

by M. William Phelps

  One early thought included the possibility of an infection in Mary’s colon leaking into her bloodstream, effectively poisoning her to death from the inside.

  “We really didn’t have a good explanation for why [she died],” Chief Medical Examiner Robert Stoppacher, of the Onondaga ME’s Office, said later. Stoppacher had held the position since 2009, after spending five years as deputy chief.

  With no particular explanation of Mary’s death, a routine death investigation was opened by the ME’s office.

  Stoppacher did not need consent from the Yoder family to perform the autopsy under the circumstances of Mary’s death. All of the Yoders demanded it, however, and remained resolute that an autopsy be performed as soon as possible.

  Dr. Stoppacher assigned Dr. Kenneth Clark to conduct the autopsy. In the real world of forensic death investigation, an autopsy into cause/manner of death is not about cutting the body open, sending blood and tissues samples to the lab, sitting back and waiting for an “aha!” moment. That is television’s version of the autopsy. The actual world of autopsy investigation includes a multipronged approach: full toxicology screen, complete forensic investigation done by the medical examiner’s forensic investigators (not law enforcement), and, of course, the autopsy.

  Investigating the cause and manner of a death is a cumbersome responsibility. All of Mary’s medical records were requested for a thorough evaluation. Every report and note from her time in the hospital was subjected to scrutiny and discussion. Blood work. Each organ cut open and studied, tested, weighed. The chain of custody at the hospital would need to be looked into. Consultation with Mary’s doctors. Interviews with family members and nurses.

  If any questions arose from those inquiries, a consult with law enforcement could be in order. If the situation appeared the slightest bit questionable, law enforcement would then be asked to join the investigation.

  An otherwise healthy woman does not show up to the ER one day with a stomach bug and die. It’s possible, of course, but Mary Yoder was a health-conscious female. She respected and took care of her body. And, perhaps most important to the ME’s office, before taking that turn for the worse, Mary rebounded and seemed to be on the mend.

  The ME’s office determined immediately that over a twenty-four-hour period Mary suffered “multi-organ failure,” which the ME and pathologist considered peculiar. Mary went into the ER under the presumed parameters of the flu, before all of her organs showed signs of malfunction, including her lungs.

  That is not supposed to happen.

  “In other words,” Stoppacher said later, “a relatively quick presentation and death in the setting of someone who had abdominal pain, nausea, and vomiting.”

  None of it made practical, medical sense.

  24

  ADAM AND KATIE ENDED their relationship as the summer of 2014 wound down. So much had happened between the time Katie gave Adam the $15,000 loan and the breakup. That August, after Adam could not take any more of Katie’s obsessive need to patronize him and muddle his emotions, he explained to her that it was over. He couldn’t do it anymore. The relationship, where he forever tried to “save” Katie and heeded to her demands, had all at once become soul-sucking and emotionally exhausting. Adam had become a shell of himself, belittled by Katie, yet existing to please her.

  “We continued some sort of friendship,” Adam recalled. He made a conscious effort to meet Katie once a week for conversation at their favorite teahouse in Utica. He did not want the relationship to end on aggressive terms. They’d been best friends, and had dated since 2011. Katie still worked for his parents. Adam needed to maintain a healthy friendship with her, if possible.

  Katie’s duties as office manager at Chiropractic Family Care included billing and scheduling. She maintained the front desk. Answered phones. Checked patients in and out. Managed the secretarial and business needs arising throughout the day as Bill and Mary treated patients.

  Despite working all day, one source explained, Katie, a lifelong practicing Catholic, spent hours per week caring for “an elderly shut-in . . . cleaning, cooking, shopping, and running errands for her.” This was Katie’s way of service. She wanted to help her community and responded in the Christian way of “loving thy neighbor.” The woman she cared for, however, served another purpose for Katie.

  * * *

  ONE NIGHT, THE TWO were texting. Adam was in a bad place. Feeling down. Grappling with depression and anxiety. Life felt overwhelming: school, bills, no serious job, the drinking, the passive-aggressive relationship with Katie, in addition to her intense and overbearing emotional needs.

  As they texted, Katie sensed Adam was planning to end his life. As they conversed, and Adam shared his desire to end the relationship, Katie sent an ambiguous text. This was a frequent ploy on her part. She implied that she was also severely depressed. The text indicated to Adam that Katie was preparing to do something about her depressed state.

  “It was cryptic,” Adam recalled. “But I knew what she meant. She was clear in conveying that she was going to hurt herself.”

  Suicide. A card Katie had played before. It seemed so typical that as he opened up and talked about suicide, she stole the moment.

  For Katie, this was a setup—and Adam fell for it every time.

  “After she said several scary things to me, I texted back, trying to console her.”

  The trap.

  “But she stopped responding.”

  The bait.

  Adam rushed over to Katie’s house. Not having a vehicle at the time—this was before he purchased the Jeep Wrangler—he took his roommate’s car. The guy had told him previously if it was available, and he ever needed to borrow it, just go. No need to ask.

  Driving over to Katie’s, Adam was “screaming and panicking,” he recalled. “I was just hoping and praying she would be okay.”

  Pulling up, Adam rushed into the house. Katie’s sisters were having a little get-together. Hanging out in the basement with a few guys, playing a game of beer pong.

  “Where’s Katie?” Adam said, out of breath.

  “We have no idea,” one of her sisters responded.

  Adam rushed upstairs, looked around.

  No Katie.

  He got back into his roommate’s car and drove home. Minutes after leaving, his cell phone rang.

  “Katie! You okay?”

  “No, I am not . . .” She sounded distressed and reserved. Not herself. She wouldn’t tell Adam where she was.

  Adam calmed her down. “Listen, drive to my place. Can you do that for me?”

  Adam pulled up to his house. He waited, nervously. Pacing. Twirling the keys in his hand. Smoking cigarettes.

  Then he saw Katie, coming from the opposite direction of her house, where she had claimed to be earlier in the text exchange.

  He ran up to her vehicle.

  Katie was crying. She had a bottle of pills in her hand.

  “Katie, turn off the car and come inside. Please. Now.”

  “No . . . no!” she screamed.

  “Katie, come on. Just come inside.”

  In a flurry, she hid the bottle of pills. Jumped out of the car. Ran inside.

  After making sure she was okay, Adam went back outside and searched the car. He needed to be certain the pills were not in her possession.

  He found the pills under the front seat. Looking at the label, he realized she had stolen them from the elderly shut-in she allegedly cared for. Adam could not recall specifically if they were Valium or Vicodin.

  “It was one of those two starting with a V. I know it was a five hundred count. I saw the woman’s name on the prescription.”

  Adam took the pills inside. He found an old lunch tray his roommate had, poured the pills out on it. Counted the entire lot. He had made the decision beforehand that if one pill was missing, he was taking Katie to the ER.

  “It was the main reason why I stayed with her—to make sure she wouldn’t kill herself. That is how she made me feel. Like
if I broke up with her, she would commit suicide.”

  They were back together again.

  * * *

  KATIE RAN HER OWN painting business, according to family and friends. From an early age, she maintained a passion for free enterprise and small business. The image she projected was that of a small-town country girl making it on her own.

  “[She also] has always had a soft spot in her heart for animals,” claimed a source on a website devoted to Katie. She’d rescued “many animals and [gave] them a loving home.” Not just dogs and cats, but horses, chickens, goats, even a donkey.

  Adam Yoder agreed with this. He also added that Katie had a sheltered childhood: “Really restricted. ‘Old-fashioned’ is how I would put it.” In the house where she grew up, for example, the kids were not introduced to technology. “Katie did not have any understanding of technology when I met her. She did not grow up with that stuff. When it came to electronics, they never had it. No wireless. No Internet. An old bubble-screen television in the living room. When I started dating her, she did not even have a smart phone . . . She grew up strangely simple and low-tech.”

  “My dad said the Internet was a fad, when it came out,” Katie had told Adam one day.

  “What!”

  The fact was, Adam noted, when he met her, Katie had no idea how a smart phone or computer technology worked. She had only a vague understanding of the basics behind how information and data were stored, the mechanics of software foreign to her.

  “On the flip side, she was extremely manipulative,” Adam continued. “She was also extremely private. She did not let anyone in. We did talk. But I understood later that from a very early point in the relationship, I was being controlled. So whatever she told me, it was all bullshit and lies.”

  Looking back, Adam realized that within the first few weeks of knowing Katie, she worked at setting up a foundation for future sympathy. She laid the groundwork to apply her manipulative techniques later. This was by design, Adam insisted, so he would later run after whatever she threw at him—especially when she thought he might end the relationship.

  “I was twenty years old. Young. She was pretty. I was stupid. When things went wrong, she set out to take control and get me back.”

  The ectopic pregnancy was a good example. Adam had left her. He was seeing another woman. She came back with this supposed pregnancy she’d been medically forced to lose. And it worked. He wound up back with her.

  Within a few weeks of knowing her, Katie told Adam a story about having been raped in high school. It sounded unbelievable to him, but one does not question a woman claiming to have been raped.

  “She told me this ex-boyfriend . . . pushed her down on a bed and said, ‘Do you love me?’ When she said yes, he spun her around, bent her over the bed, and brutally raped her. Then, after it was over, he supposedly made her have dinner with his family.”

  Adam needed to keep peace, he said, describing the ebb and flow of the relationship during the summer and fall of 2014. Those teatime meetings had started out once a week whenever they first broke up. As time passed, even that became too difficult to maintain.

  “I still had feelings for her, so emotionally it was hard for me to continue that friendship.”

  Both were students at SUNYIT, so they’d run into each other on campus at times. Adam stayed away from the family business as much as possible. He felt as though he were trapped, the relationship constantly on a tightrope and emotional seesaw for three years. Then, for the sake of his own sanity, he forced himself to be done with it. The pain and anxiety of being with Katie proved too much.

  For Katie, as the summer of 2014 ended, she felt crushed by Adam once again. He was there and then gone. It was over. She knew Adam was serious this time. She sensed a finality to it.

  25

  ON AUGUST 25, 2014, a Monday, just before getting out of work, Katie took out her cell phone and opened up her Notes app. It was 4:48 p.m. She began writing, titling the note: “Hi. I don’t know about this. Haven’t told . . .” before ending the title abruptly. In the body of the note a few minutes later, she clarified her early thought, again writing out the title, concluding it with “. . . anyone and no.”

  What was Katie referring to? What hadn’t she “told anyone”? What did “no” mean as part of the title?

  The note was long. It took her fifteen minutes to write. After getting out of work, at 5:05 p.m., she went back into the app and modified the same note.

  The story she told in this note, obviously addressed to Adam, was violent. The memory she spoke of—if true—would put Adam in a precarious position. If Katie decided to press charges, law enforcement would become involved.

  Weeks went by after Katie crafted the note. They did not communicate often. A gulf had developed between them. Adam had made it clear he was finished. Katie surely understood this, for their breakup, compared to the others before it, had a serious finality. Adam wasn’t going to be rehashing the past and working things out any longer. He’d made a choice. He wasn’t going back on it.

  Weeks later, on September 15, and again on September 17, near the noon hour, someone sitting at Katie’s desk at Chiropractic Family Care created a Gmail account: Mr. Adam Yoder 1990 at Gmail.com (mradamyoder1990@gmail.com).

  Most everyone involved later agreed Katie was the only person who could have done this. She had opportunity, access, and was in the office at those times.

  Adam was not even in the area.

  A month went by. On October 18, after not hearing from Adam, Katie texted him. Within her cryptic and sarcastic first few texts, she dangled a dark secret she held and was planning to expose.

  “I’m still angry about things, as you are,” Adam texted back. “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t know?” Katie shot back.

  “I don’t know what?” Adam mentioned he was at the movies with a mutual friend and would contact her in a few hours.

  “You text me,” Katie said.

  “I will. But what do I not know?” Adam asked.

  “Don’t worry about it now . . .”

  Three hours later, Adam texted, saying he’d just gotten home. “You want to tell me what I don’t know now?”

  Katie ignored the request, instead texting that she hoped he’d had fun at the movies.

  Then a jab: “You sleeping soon or celebratory drinking?”

  Adam ignored it. Instead, he went back to the earlier topic: “Please answer my question.”

  “Not so much.”

  “Not so much”? Adam thought. “‘You don’t know.’ That was your text to me. That’s what I’m asking about,” he stressed.

  They exchanged a few more inconsequential texts. Adam inferred she was once again messing with him, trying to wield that control she knew for certain was slipping away from her.

  Frustrated, Adam played it off as if he didn’t care.

  “July 26,” Katie texted after not hearing from him. “After we went swimming, I brought you home.”

  “I know.” He gave it a beat. Then: “Katie, if you have something to say, then say it. FUCKING SAY IT OR DON’T BRING IT UP AGAIN.”

  Nothing.

  Another beat.

  “KATIE!”

  “I don’t know what you remember,” she finally responded. “You were really quite drunk.”

  “You’re either sending a massive message or you deleted what you were typing. If I don’t get something soon, I’m going to bed.”

  Katie began typing. Adam watched on his end as the three dots blinked as she typed.

  He waited.

  But no text came.

  “I saw you typing. I’ve received nothing. Did you actually send it? Are you still typing?”

  “It’s a lot,” Katie explained. “It can wait. You go to sleep. It’s pretty late. Time for sleeping really.”

  “Don’t you fucking dare!” Adam said. “This is your last chance to send it. Finish typing and send it.”

  It took Katie another ten minutes. I
t was now 1:20 a.m. on October 19, 2014. She had not been typing out a long text. She was sitting, waiting, preparing to send that long note she’d written long ago.

  After a moment of not texting anything, she copied the note, waited another moment, then pasted it into a text and sent it.

  Adam sat in bed, waiting, staring at his iPhone, as the text finally came through.

  26

  DR. KENNETH CLARK TOOK tremendous pride in his work. Clark was board certified in 2014. Forensic pathology, Clark later explained, included tissue analysis, bodily fluid analysis, toxicological analysis, microbiology, and, on occasion, genetics.

  Clark had a short conversation with Liana, who became the liaison between the ME’s office and the Yoder family. She began with her mother’s symptoms, those of which her father, brother, and others present during Mary’s short stay at the hospital had observed. In addition, Liana talked about what she noticed near the end, just before Mary was pronounced dead.

  As Dr. Clark listened, he realized just how eager the entire Yoder family was to get the autopsy results. They wanted an answer: What had killed the Yoder family matriarch? She was a woman without any apparent health problems—or enemies.

  “They thought [early on] that it was something called ascending cholangitis,” Liana explained. “It’s a condition where an infection can get from the small bowel and travel up into the liver and the bowel duct around the gallbladder.”

  Ascending cholangitis can be deadly. If the condition killed Mary, an autopsy would easily prove that was the cause and, effectually, the manner of death. It was a practical theory heading into autopsy, Clark told Liana, considering Mary Yoder’s risk factors and symptoms: female, over fifty; hypotension and low blood pressure; multi-organ failure; mental status changes; jaundice; fever; pain. Additionally, a preliminary study of Mary’s hospital reports indicated she had “acute renal failure and failed to respond to medications and treatments.”