“I can confirm,” Adam said later, “that Katie did not have any bruises and no injuries on her.”
True, they had a tumultuous, sometimes confrontational, relationship. However, there was not a chance he’d turned into some kind of violent predator who’d brutally raped and beat her.
Was it even possible to recall roughing Katie up and choking her, then raping her orally and vaginally, as she’d claimed, if Adam was in a blackout? Could he have committed such a crime without having any recollection of it?
“Look, if she was raped, she would not have had sex with me in the morning. If what she says [is true], that I attempted to murder her, actively kill her, she would not have woken up next to me. She would not have spent the day with me.”
Furthermore, why had she waited three months to mention anything about the alleged incident? Why had she left and driven back to the house where Adam lived and had sex with him the next morning? Why had she continued to see him after July 26? It was not until Adam ended the relationship—and Katie found a new boyfriend—that she made the allegations.
On that November 1 afternoon, while Katie was at the sheriff’s office reporting the rape, the investigator made a suggestion.
“Controlled call.”
“What’s that?” Katie asked.
The deputy explained that Katie would call Adam from the sheriff’s office. They’d record it. She would try to lure Adam into talking about the incident to see if he’d admit anything.
What Katie didn’t know as she placed the controlled call was that Adam had discovered something on his laptop. He had gone over the night in question several times. The house where the supposed rape had occurred was filled with people. Adam lived in the basement. Just beyond the walls of his room was a large group of people hanging out. Any roughhousing or screams, or Katie darting in and out of Adam’s room, would have startled the group. They would have heard it. One guy in particular was a staunch defender of women. He was also a mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter.
“And if he felt, or heard, anything like this going on, he would have checked in on us and beat my ass,” Adam said later. “On top of that, anybody who knows me can tell you that when I would get really drunk, every time, I always retreated off by myself quietly and went to sleep.”
Once Katie had made the allegations, Adam tried to find anything he could to prove or disprove what had happened. No one had ever before alleged that Adam had ever been violent in any way. He needed to know.
“The thing about this type of allegation is that once you’re accused, you’re a rapist. It will follow you around the rest of your life. How much damage could that have done to my entire life. You’re looking at jail time, a record, employment problems. That [screws] up my whole life when someone lies about it, whether I’m convicted or not. I was so scared. I could not see myself doing this.”
That fear had sent Adam in search of anything he could find relating to the incident. Between the time she’d sent the long text about the incident and this controlled call, Adam had discovered the backup of Katie’s iPhone on his laptop.
“Which worked out really well for me in terms of protecting myself.”
Searching through it, he’d uncovered a number of revealing items. The narrative of the rape was the biggest find at the time, along with various drafts of the long text she’d sent, and other information proving to Adam she had fabricated the entire rape story.
“And here is what I learned about Katie then. Whenever she sends a long text, you can bet that it is all bullshit lies. That’s her giveaway.”
During the search through her backup, Adam found (and confirmed) that she had cheated on him with his workout partner. And the affair wasn’t the way Katie had been trying to sell it to him: that Katie and this guy had innocently met at the gym one day and starting talking. She’d spent a year convincing Adam through manipulation that the affair was all in his head. Nothing had happened.
“I spent that year inside my head, thinking, ‘Am I trashing a good relationship and giving up happiness because I’m a paranoid idiot?’”
The truth was found in her iPhone backup.
“She fucked my friend, all right. That long text I got from her about meeting him at the gym, going over to his place for dinner, and nothing happened, it was a lie. They wanted to hook up. They planned it. They met at hotels. Yes, I looked in her phone and violated that space of hers, but it was all there inside her phone, the texts prove it.”
She had saved the guy’s name as a contact inside her phone as “Jen,” a close friend of hers at the time.
“So, if I ever saw her texting, she would be texting ‘Jen,’ not my friend.”
As that controlled call came in and Katie started talking, a thought struck Adam. Every time he had received a long text message from Katie, so detailed and pointed, like the rape allegation, “It’s a fucking lie. There was a pattern. I saw the pattern on her phone. Only she did not know I knew this, or had her iPhone backup, when the controlled call came in.”
Katie began her spiel as the sheriff’s office listened and recorded. She went right into that night.
“Katie, I have a reason to believe you are fabricating this,” Adam said.
Because Adam had the contents of her iPhone, he began asking her questions about his gym partner friend, being vague, trying to get her to give him details.
“I wanted to check her honesty before moving on to the rape story.”
Katie wasn’t having it. She kept bringing up the rape.
“Look, Katie, I have reason to believe you’re lying about this!” Adam said that a number of times.
Katie, frustrated and caught up in the middle of her own storytelling, hung up on him.
* * *
BY NOVEMBER 18, 2014, after not hearing from Adam, Katie turned to desperation.
“Can I call you quick? I’m in a bad spot. I need this. Rather talk to you about July than the police.”
“Would have called you right away, but I didn’t feel the text,” Adam said. “You can always call me. I just tried to call you again. It made a beep like you were on the other line.” Further, Adam explained in his text, the call went straight to voice mail. He believed Katie had turned off her phone.
Puzzled by the circumstance, Adam asked, “Are you trying to call me at the same time?”
“I’ll call you in a few minutes,” Katie texted back nine minutes later.
By the end of that phone call between them, Katie had made a decision. Shortly thereafter, she called the sheriff’s office and retracted her rape allegation report.
She’d decided not to press charges.
34
BILL MET UP FOR lunch with a friend and colleague, Stephen Wechsler, near the end of September 2015. Stephen had been friends with Mary and Bill for thirty years. Bill had called him back in June. “Can you cover our practice in the fall? We’re taking, like, a second honeymoon to Europe, a long holiday.”
“I hope Steve can cover,” Mary said aloud as Bill held the phone in the air.
Steve agreed.
When Mary died, Stephen Wechsler stepped in to cover. He worked one day a week at the Yoders’ Whitesboro office. By late September, he later recalled, patients were asking questions, wondering what was going on. Was he taking over the practice? Did Bill plan on ever coming back?
They didn’t chat long over lunch, as Steve had to get back to the office. But he wanted to know how long it was going to be before Bill was back at work.
Bill said he was going to transition into his daily office routine beginning in October.
“Colchicine,” Bill told him as the short lunch came to an end. “That’s what killed her.”
Bill was still as mystified as anyone else close to the family regarding how his wife had died. Colchicine wasn’t a substance one went down to the local pharmacy or farm store (it is also used for plant growth) and purchased. It required a medical license or a medical practice routinely ordering the toxin, proving with
documents you were an authorized buyer.
This was the first that Stephen Wechsler had heard the cause of Mary’s death. When he returned to Chiropractic Family Care after his lunch with Bill, Katie was sitting at the front desk. He stopped and faced her, his elbows on the counter. He googled colchicine because, like most everyone else who had heard, he was curious about how Mary might have ingested it. He told Katie what he was looking up.
She seemed interested.
Standing, he read aloud from the Wikipedia page he landed on. After the first paragraph, which spoke of colchicine’s connection to gout and Mediterranean fever, “‘It is a toxic alkaloid and secondary metabolite, originally extracted from plants of the genus Colchicum (autumn crocus . . . also known as meadow saffron).’”
Katie didn’t say much, as patients were trekking in for afternoon appointments.
For a number of days afterward, the autumn crocus/meadow saffron connection gnawed at Stephen. He knew Mary was such an avid gardener, and the possible plant link was on everyone’s mind. Mary had a green thumb all her life. So it was hard to conceive that she could make such a deadly mistake, overlook this, and kill herself—on top of endangering her family—without realizing it.
To add to the anxiety surrounding the connection to the autumn crocus, the ME’s office was calling Mary’s death a possible “accidental contamination.” A forensic investigator working for the ME’s office called those family members closest to Mary and asked questions of them.
Bill and additional family had collected all of Mary’s supplements, personal food, and drink items from the office and home, and turned them over to the ME’s office.
Then Bill got an idea. He texted Katie: “Do you remember if any patient brought Mary anything to eat or drink on her last day of work? If there is any old food in fridge . . . just leave it. Trying to track down how Mary might have ingested the toxin they found in her system. I know all of this is hard to keep revisiting. It is for me, too.”
Katie responded: “I don’t remember anyone bringing something in. I know she went to Grammy’s on lunch break to eat . . . came back here, and had her shake fresh and brought the vitamins from home. Nothing different/new for lunch and she didn’t eat at Grammy’s.”
By “Grammy’s” Katie meant Mary’s ninety-three-year-old mother.
Later that day, Katie texted back, adding, “I didn’t know there was a toxin. Before Mary started feeling unwell, it was a normal happy Monday . . .”
35
IF THERE WAS A routine that Mary Yoder appreciated, it had to be the simple pleasure of pulling into her driveway during warmer months and passing her plants as she made her way into the house. She adored this gift of taking in the beauty of what she had created.
As Mary slipped away while hospitalized, the garden at home was bursting into life. It was the last week of July, arguably the pinnacle of summer in New York and the Northeast. Temps in the eighties. The sun low, bright, hot. The air warm and comforting, with August’s heavy humidity not quite moved in yet. Beaches and campgrounds were packed with vacationers. People were home on vacation from work. Local produce was showing up at farm stands and farmers’ markets.
Bill Yoder had trouble recalling most of that day Mary passed. Liana had told her father they sat and talked. But Bill could not recollect much, other than sitting on the edge of his bed upstairs. He remembered weeping, wondering how his life could have changed so drastically overnight.
Mary left behind five sisters, two brothers. She had been closest to her oldest sibling, Kathleen Richmond, with whom Bill was now talking to and seeing regularly. Kathleen’s husband had died unexpectedly in 2014. According to Bill (and Kathleen later on), he and Mary had not seen Kathleen much during those immediate days after she’d lost her husband.
“We knew she was in a lot of pain and grief.”
It was back on Mother’s Day, May 10, 2015, while Bill and Mary were visiting Mary’s mother, that they ran into her. Kathleen happened to be at her mother’s house. Mary and Kathleen got to talking. Mary mentioned a barbeque in the backyard with Adam later that day and Kathleen asked if she was welcome.
“We were delighted to have her,” Bill said.
During the barbeque, Mary, Bill, and Adam talked about their latest obsession with board games. Kathleen sat and listened, interested. They agreed that they’d plan a board game night at Kathleen’s house soon. On June 20, Bill and Mary went over and had a nice night out. Kathleen was emerging from her fog of grief by then. She even laughed that night. Life seemed to have a purpose once again—however small—for the widow. Bill and Mary could not have been happier for her.
A week after board game night, Bill and Mary saw Kathleen at a pottery workshop in Cazenovia, about an hour’s drive west of Utica. It turned out to be a beautiful day of art and sunshine, friends and family.
As Mary slipped away a month later, Kathleen and Mary’s sister Greta (pseudonym), whom Bill later described as having “some psychological problems,” showed up at the hospital to console everyone clustered outside Mary’s room. Greta was not there long “before she started wailing,” Bill recalled.
“Excuse me,” a nurse said to Kathleen, pulling her aside, “can you please take your sister somewhere else? She is kind of distracting.”
Kathleen agreed.
Bill looked on. He had his own grief to contend with. Later, he said, “Liana was on one side of me, crying and crying, and Adam was just kind of huddled up in the corner, kneeling beside the wall and crying. Tammy was sitting next to me, her entire body shaking. I wanted to help them, but I was falling apart, too.”
As Bill sat, he watched Kathleen walk out of Mary’s room, go to each family member, put her arm around them, and say, “It’ll be okay.”
“I was just very grateful,” Bill said of that moment, “because I couldn’t do anything.”
Adam was as devastated as his father and the rest of the family, later recalling a moment during the same afternoon while standing by his mother’s side: “She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t write anything down. She wanted to communicate. Her hands were swollen. Her arms were swollen.”
It was dreadful to see this woman they all loved so much, a bastion of health, dying in such an awful way, and nobody could do anything. Even worse, nobody knew why.
As Adam rushed to the hospital earlier that day after hearing from his father, he hesitated, but decided to text Katie. He realized in the days after, however, contacting Katie—knowing they were broken up—was a “panic” move on his part. He didn’t know where to turn. The person he would have gone to first was in the hospital, fighting for her life.
“Katie knew my mother and was one of the only females, I would say, I was close to, somewhat, at the time. I just reached out for somebody, anybody,” Adam said later.
“I need you right now. I’m sorry to put pressure on you. You don’t owe me anything. But I need you.” It was 7:45 a.m. on July 23, 2015. Adam had just gotten back into town after driving through the night from Long island. “I want my mom to hold me like she does when I’m sick.”
Katie texted back two minutes later: “Okay. Give me five minutes and I’ll leave the office. I’ll be right there.”
At 8:12 a.m., Adam texted Katie again. He was going to wait outside the hospital for her.
“I’m in the lobby. It’ll be a while. It’s up to you if you want to stay. She coded. She’s back now but we all fell apart.”
“They have no idea what brought this whole thing on?” Katie asked. “I was with her Monday. She was her happy self. She only started to feel poorly at the end of the day. She’s important to me, too, you know.”
“I’m not telling you to go. Stay. You can come up even. I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be insensitive. I can’t think straight.”
Katie arrived. She and Adam met downstairs in the lobby. Then they walked together up to the ICU to be with the others and Mary.
As they sat, consoled, and comforted one another, Adam as
ked Katie, “Would you take me to the Barnes and Noble?” He wanted to get his mother a few gardening magazines. “I don’t know what to do.”
That long history between Katie and Adam as they drove toward Barnes & Noble was like a rotten smell in the car. It was a negative energy they could not ignore. Adam had poured out his heart and soul to this same woman who was now someone he felt he did not know anymore. With his mother fighting for her life, the only other person he’d confided in, he didn’t know what to say or how to deal with it all. He’d trusted Katie with his deepest feelings before, only to be struck down by her insensitivity.
“I will never be with anyone else,” Adam had once written to Katie.
Admittedly, in the same letter, Adam talked about battling self-esteem issues. He said how sorry he was for “not loving” himself, knowing it had an effect on their relationship.
In another letter, in a large font, Adam wrote: “I love you. I want kids.”
At the time, Adam kept a list of “morning reminders.” For one, he believed he needed to do more for Katie. Treat her better. He talked about how he would begin to buy “one present for Katie every day” and “take notes” of those places Katie wanted to visit and things she wanted to do. Near the end of the list, Adam promised “never [to] raise his voice,” because Katie didn’t “deserve that.” He added bullet points, two of which included: “No breaking things” and “No hitting things.” At the end of the page, he wrote a final reminder: “Do what Katie says—always . . .” On the next page, Adam wrote, “I love Katie”—eighty-eight times.
Adam had Katie take him to Michael’s after leaving Barnes & Noble. “My mother had her sixtieth birthday that March,” Adam explained. “I had planned to do an art project . . . So again, in a panic, not thinking clearly, I tried to do it for her back there at the hospital.”
Adam and Katie also stopped at his place to pick up a painting he’d made for his mother. “I just want to heal my mother,” he said.
We Thought We Knew You Page 13