That comment drew a long pause from Katie. She shifted in her seat. Then became irate: “I’m trying to help you!”
“Did you ever log into this?”
“It was on my phone.”
Katie said she knew it had been logged into on other devices.
VanNamee wanted to know how she would know such an important piece of information.
“I’ve seen Adam on it.”
He would come into the office during business hours and log on to the account, she added.
Katie rubbed her palms on her thighs, trying to get comfortable in her chair. “I’m trying,” she said “How do I know you believe me?”
“I need your help proving it was Adam.”
This shook Katie up. “But what if you can’t prove it’s Adam?”
“Who do you think he made it look like this is?”
“I’m afraid he put it back on me.”
That one comment shifted the interview into a new direction. VanNamee asked Katie if she felt Adam was going to make sure she was responsible for the homicide.
“At the office [that day], he said if anyone was going to get in trouble, it was going to be me.”
“For what?”
“That I’m ‘connected to everything,’ he said.”
They discussed Adam for the next several minutes. Katie admitted she had been trying to get Adam to talk about what he did, but he stopped giving her information in September and refused to discuss details after that.
“Let me ask you this,” VanNamee said. “The package comes to the office. You said he picked it up. Did you open it? Did you touch it?”
“No,” Katie said.
“So, when I say that your DNA will not be on the bottle because you didn’t open it, is that accurate?”
“Unless it’s the one that I saw on the back counter.”
“Okay, who did you give that bottle to?”
“I didn’t give it to anyone. It was sitting there . . . It was spilled over.”
Katie said she cleaned it up, put the bottle back in its cardboard container, and then placed it back in the box it had arrived in.
Katie was referring to a bottle of Cholacol, not colchicine. The Cholacol bottle found at the office during a search was twice the size of the colchicine bottle found in Adam’s Jeep. Cholacol contains concentrated bovine bile salts and collinsonia root to aid in dietary fat metabolism and absorption. It’s not a powder, like colchicine. The Cholacol bottle contained ninety tablets.
Two different substances in different-size bottles.
Katie was saying she never touched the bottle of colchicine. This was exactly what VanNamee wanted to know—because the bottle of colchicine found in Adam’s Jeep contained traces of female DNA. The OCSO was now certain the DNA found on the colchicine bottle under the seat in Adam’s Jeep would trace back to Katie Conley.
51
GETTING INTO KATIE’S PHONE proved to be the most productive discovery of the investigation, to date, for the OCSO. Studying the iPhone’s contents closely, the OCSO learned Katie had been lying about certain facts during those first few interviews VanNamee had conducted with her. For example, on December 21, when VanNamee walked into the interview where Katie was nervous and crying and unsure of her answers, he was armed with so many inconsistencies in her story, he could have taken the interview in any direction. Yet, he allowed Katie to talk. Got her version of the events down.
The most competent interrogators don’t come out of the gate poking a finger into a suspect’s chest. They gradually work contradictions into the conversation and see where the conversation goes. Katie had no reason to be evasive or to avoid the truth—that is, unless she was hiding something.
“There was nothing she needed to lie about,” VanNamee explained. “If you knew Adam had that Gmail account, then tell us Adam had that account. Why lie and say you don’t know about it? Why be ambiguous and elusive?”
Two computer forensic specialists from Utica College figured out the Mr. Adam Yoder 1990 Gmail account’s password: Adamisgay.
When VanNamee received this information, his first thought became: What guy would make that his password? In that respect, it felt fitting a female looking to frame her ex-boyfriend would create the account. In getting to know Adam, VanNamee believed he would never try to throw them off with the password.
Another interesting fact VanNamee found out was that this particular Gmail account had been created in September 2014, ten months before Mary was poisoned. Would Adam have planned his mother’s homicide that far in advance? “Policework 101” told VanNamee that if a son was going to kill his mother, based on the relationship Mary and Adam had, it would have been a crime of passion and opportunity. Furthermore, when VanNamee looked into Adam’s life during September 2014, the guy was in no shape, mentally, to plan such an elaborate crime.
Continuing with Katie on December 21, VanNamee stayed on the topic of honesty and the Gmail account. He wanted to know why, when they looked inside Katie’s iPhone, this Gmail account had turned up.
Katie squirmed. Her face pale as dough. She played with the tissue in her hand. “I . . . um . . . I got rid of it,” she said. Meaning, she’d deleted any connection to the Gmail account from her phone, once she realized it was there. She was scared Adam had put all of the information in her cell phone so the homicide would come back on her.
“I understand, but I cannot have your phone showing up at all on the IP address,” VanNamee said.
Logging into that e-mail account once or twice, VanNamee continued, he could buy. You log in and check it out, realize maybe Adam had gotten into your phone. So you delete it. But the OCSO had subpoenaed a year back on Katie’s phone.
“I cannot have you logging in more than once,” VanNamee reiterated. “Like you’ve been logging into it all along—you follow what I’m saying?”
Katie titled her head to the right, played with the tissue, mumbled, “Yeah . . . yes . . .”
“Have you logged into it before? I just need an honest answer. It’s okay.”
She picked at a fingernail. Had a hard time staring VanNamee in the eyes. “I’m just scared . . .”
“Why?”
Katie evaded giving a direct answer. She would not commit. “I’m not sure. I don’t know.”
VanNamee took it a step further. He wondered, when she said in an earlier interview she didn’t know about the account, had she lied, or was she being truthful?
“I thought I recognized it.”
VanNamee changed courses, as he often did during the interview. He focused on May 2015, bringing up how sick Adam was at the beginning of the month. As he talked about Adam’s illness, he worked the idea of the FBI being able to test hair. Like, for example, if you used marijuana, a test could be performed to see how long you’d used it.
“They’re going to test Adam’s,” the detective explained. Then he gave Katie an out: “Do you think it’s possible that he attempted to poison himself with colchicine then?”
“I would say yes, only because he specifically said there were some similarities between him and his mom . . .”
“So you think he researched colchicine in order to come up with this plan to use it on his mom? Right? He must have looked it up somewhere, right?”
“Right,” Katie said, nodding her head. This suggestion made her feel more at ease. She perked up a little. Seemed more interested in talking.
VanNamee asked about Adam using such a dramatic, painful means to commit suicide, if that had been part of his plan.
Katie said it made sense in one respect. In another, however, she said, “I don’t know why he would try to poison himself.”
“He got a bottle of supplements from you?” VanNamee asked, changing subjects.
“Yeah . . . he got a bottle of supplements, like a drink mix.”
“Did he ever tell you how many of the supplements he took?”
“No.”
“Did you ever tell him how many to take? Five at a ti
me? One at a time?”
“No, it’s on the bottle. I think it’s like one to two maybe?”
Mark VanNamee had a knack for interrogation. Not every detective does. He knew when to let go of a subject and when to latch on to another. He understood how to project empathy and sympathy in order to make an interviewee feel comfortable. The trick was to gain Katie’s trust and to allow her to back herself into a corner of her own lies. Interrogation is an art. You paint that corner with facts and steer your subject into a position of being surrounded by it. VanNamee projected the aura of a cop who knew more than he was sharing, on top of having the answers to the questions he asked. He was willing to go from one topic to another for as long as it took to land on the truth. Katie liked him. It was obvious in her body language and the questions she asked. She felt more relaxed as the interrogation continued, due to the fact that VanNamee, smartly, always gave her an out: Adam did it.
They discussed whether Adam had shared with Katie how he administered the toxin to Mary. By a bottle of water? Or by something else . . . ?
“Um, ah, I . . . vitamins, or something he put it in,” Katie said.
“When his mom passed away, did you know where Adam was?”
“I think he was going down to his sister’s, or he was planning on it.”
“But he hadn’t gone down?”
“I do not know.”
“Do you think it’s possible someone other than Adam did this?”
“Like Doctor Bill?”
VanNamee nodded his head.
“I guess Adam would have known . . .”
“Would have known what? That Bill did it?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because Adam knew what [the toxin] was.”
The question of why Adam placed the colchicine under the seat inside his Jeep and held on to it came up next. This didn’t make any rational sense to VanNamee. Adam could have discarded the bottle anywhere. Tossed it in a river or a lake, into a Dumpster. Why keep it underneath the seat inside his Jeep?
Katie said he was likely planning to kill someone else.
VanNamee countered: There wasn’t enough colchicine left in the bottle to kill another person. Then: “Let me ask you this. Is it possible someone planted that in his Jeep?”
“I guess it’s possible.”
“I can tell you right now, in the FBI’s studies we went back on, guys don’t hang on to the murder weapon, because that’s how they get caught.”
This sparked an intense reaction from Katie. She lit up. Sat straighter. Shoulders propped up and square. “Right,” she said defensively. Then an odd statement: “But guys also don’t use poison.”
That response got VanNamee’s attention.
Katie paused. Stared at the detective. Laughed. Twisted her head in a snooty gesture—and finished what she’d set out to say: “They say it’s a lady’s weapon.”
“‘They say it’s a lady’s weapon’?” VanNamee repeated, shocked Katie would say such a thing under the circumstances.
“Yeah,” Katie reiterated. She stared at the detective without flinching, a brazen and confrontational glare. Her mood changed. Katie wasn’t the shy, soft-spoken country girl anymore. She blinked her eyes slowly, repeatedly, purposefully. She placed an elbow on the table, crossed her legs, clasped her hands together.
With all of these movements and a renewed energy in the room, in addition to her body language, Katie Conley had altered her consciousness. Locked it into place. She was glib. Her self-serving nature was obvious. Clearly, the interview had stimulated her. She’d gone from the cowering victim of an overly aggressive cop to a woman now taunting that same investigator.
VanNamee stared at Katie. “That [lady’s weapon] comment,” VanNamee said later, “changed everything for us.”
VanNamee believed that Katie had admitted to murdering Mary Yoder with that one callous comment. It showed Katie had a grandiose sense of herself—not to mention a lack of empathy for Mary Yoder and her family.
52
DURING THEIR TEXT EXCHANGE in May 2015, Adam joked about Katie possibly poisoning him. He pointed out how he had taken the Alpha BRAIN supplement the night before his illness. As he thought about it, that teasing comment became sobering. In the context of what was happening within the investigation, Adam began to see it as a potential revelation.
“You’re doing really well and I’m happy for you,” Katie had texted, after Adam brought up her giving him the supplement and the timing of his illness. “I think of you often and hope you’re happy.”
“Thank you. I hope you’re happy, too.”
“Okay,” Katie shot back, “but seriously, do you think it was food poisoning?”
“No. Not food poisoning. A nasty virus . . . it has completely destroyed me from the inside. Then, after emptying my entire system excessively, shut it right down.”
“You could have been on some medical show. You could’ve been on House.”
“Seriously . . . this virus was a mean . . . motherfucker.”
“On the plus side, since you beat it, you now have the antibodies for it.”
On May 11, 2015, Katie texted to say she was ill herself: “My own stubborn little bug.” She included a list of symptoms, which were similar to what Adam had been describing in the four weeks leading up to this day.
By June, Katie was feeling like herself again. In her Notes app, she created a list of miscellaneous items she needed to buy, along with several Internet sites she wanted to visit. Within that, quite randomly, she wrote: “I like my men like I like my tea. Thrown into the Boston Harbor.” She followed that statement up with: “particularly interested in the evidence of systematic patterns.”
A few days later, after not hearing from Adam, Katie sent an unsolicited text: “Thru June: $22,839.99 ASAP.”
“Are you telling me to come up with 23K this month?”
“No, I’m letting you know the current balance.”
“Are you leaving? You said you were leaving this summer. ASAP is not a date. That figure and current balance is comically high.” He wondered how many additional “things” Katie had added to the total—items she’d specifically told him she didn’t want to be paid back for. “You’re amazing! Wow.”
“Compounding interest,” she snapped back, before demanding the money by the end of the month.
Adam called the deal “disgusting.” On June 6, he asked Katie if she wanted to meet after work. He needed to sort the loan out, once and for all, concluding, “It will be the last time you ever get to see and talk with me in person after this. So take it or leave it.”
“That sounds like an ultimatum. Unfortunately, I am not available today.”
They stopped speaking. Throughout the remainder of June, neither initiated any sort of lengthy, meaningful exchange. If there had been a slight chance of Adam rekindling what they’d once had, starting out as friends, it was never going to happen. He was unwavering about his desire to sever the relationship forever.
Katie realized this. She understood it was over. Her texts give the impression she was trying to punish Adam in some way for not wanting to grant her another chance. He had flatly rejected her. He could not have been any clearer.
On July 6, 2015, two weeks before Mary Yoder was poisoned, Adam texted Katie, reiterating his feelings: “We spent a final miserable year together. You pushed hard to be with me from around December to August, if I remember correctly.”
“It didn’t work out,” Katie later observed. “So we changed. Nothing would have changed the outcome of this. Nothing.”
“I’m not saying it definitely would have, but we will never know now.”
“No, we won’t.”
On July 15, Adam left for Long Island to spend time with Liana, his brother-in-law, nieces, and nephew. He did not tell Katie he was leaving or where he was going.
Five days later, on July 20, 2015, at 7:57 p.m. (the day that Mary walked into her house sick, dashing for the toilet), Kat
ie texted her. Oddly, Katie asked Mary if she could take Friday, August 14, off, never saying why.
“I really do like this job and appreciate all you do (and Dr. Bill). Hope it’s just a passing bug and you feel 100% tomorrow.”
Mary never responded.
In under forty-eight hours, Mary would be dead.
53
DETECTIVE MARK VANNAMEE HAD a suspect for Mary Yoder’s murder sitting in front of him. She had just told him how ladies preferred poison as a means to kill.
Katie’s snide facial gestures told the seasoned detective she was now engaged in a game of cat and mouse. Waiting. Watching. Planning her next move. It had taken VanNamee just thirty-three minutes, fifty-seven seconds into the interview to get here. His instincts had told him when they started, it would happen; he didn’t think it would occur so soon.
“Katie was a tough interview because unless you had her painted into a corner, she would give you nothing she could not try to explain away,” VanNamee later said. “As taught in many interview schools, a suspect’s lie is the most important statement if you can prove it’s a lie, due to the fact that the lie shows the criminal trying to cover up portions of involvement in a crime.”
The relevant question for the OCSO now became: Why lie at all? VanNamee knew Katie was not telling the truth regarding certain facts. What would a lie get her? The only reason a suspect lies, VanNamee knew, was because she felt the truth would not serve her purpose.
The corner Katie talked herself into, perhaps without realizing it, was full of factual evidence VanNamee had at his disposal. Katie did not know this. Most investigators never ask a question they do not know the answer to. In VanNamee’s opinion, Katie was displaying signs of antisocial personality disorder and extreme narcissism. Those who display a pattern of disregard for right and wrong, persistent lying, arrogance, impulsiveness, lack of empathy and remorse, along with other symptoms, fall within the antisocial/sociopath spectrum.
VanNamee was beginning to develop a true sense of who Katie Conley was. After all, she could have stood up, said she’d had enough, and walked out. Or demanded an attorney. Yet, Katie continued trying to convince the detective that Bill and/or Adam Yoder had murdered Mary.
We Thought We Knew You Page 19