We Thought We Knew You

by M. William Phelps

  The conversation shifted back to Adam. VanNamee asked Katie’s opinion regarding what punishment Adam should receive if, in fact, he’d murdered his mother.

  Katie had no response, falling back into the passive, soft-spoken victim role.

  VanNamee showed her facsimiles of the envelopes each anonymous letter had been posted in. Then asked a question: “Did you type them on the typewriter at your office desk?”

  “Yeah.”

  He showed her the anonymous letters. Asked the same question.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know where you typed this?”

  “No.”

  “This is kind of a big deal, Katie.”

  She looked down at her hands.

  VanNamee wondered if Katie had typed both letters at home, on her laptop, or perhaps the office computer, adding, “Katie, I know you know where [the letters were] typed.”

  It had only been a month.

  “Um . . . I . . . um . . .” Katie was stumbling, before blurting out: “At school.”

  “Are you sure?”

  After a lengthy back-and-forth about those IP addresses showing Mr. Adam Yoder 1990 had been logged into from Katie’s parents’ house and Chiropractic Family Care, Katie insisted Adam had done it remotely. He knew how to hack into computers, she insisted.

  VanNamee hit her with a few facts. If it had been done remotely, computer forensics would have uncovered evidence of hacking. They had not. So VanNamee gave Katie the opportunity to admit she had logged in as far back as November and December 2014, when the colchicine was ordered through Rosa Vargas and ArtChemicals.

  “It could have been,” she admitted.

  Katie was unwilling to completely admit she knew about the Mr. Adam Yoder 1990 Gmail account and had logged into it. VanNamee wasn’t having it. He knew how many times she had logged in, when, and where. The IP addresses were connected to her iPhone; the times and dates connected to IPs at the office and her home. In addition, VanNamee knew Adam was nowhere in the area. If he had logged in, computer forensics would have found out where and when. The OCSO had gone through Adam’s electronics, including his iPhone and laptop. The guy was an open book. He had not lied about anything.

  VanNamee changed tactics: “How did you know about colchicine? When was the first time you heard about it?”

  “Adam . . .”

  “When?”

  “A while ago. A long time ago. I don’t know . . . Maybe like . . . um . . . a year ago? I really don’t remember.”

  “What did he tell you about it?”

  “He asked if I ever heard about it.”

  VanNamee would not accept the suggestion that Adam Yoder had randomly brought up colchicine during teatime one afternoon. How was it Adam had taken a sudden interest in colchicine? Where had he discovered the toxin?

  “He asked me . . . how he could get some.”

  “He asked you?”

  “Yeah . . . but . . . um, I had never heard of it.”

  Katie had already told the OCSO she’d heard of colchicine. VanNamee knew she was lying.

  The more she talked, the deeper the hole Katie dug. She mentioned how, at the hospital, when Mary was fighting for her life, “Adam seemed concerned, but Dr. Bill didn’t seem concerned at all.”

  The latter part of the statement, VanNamee knew, contradicted what five witnesses at the hospital had already told the OCSO. Katie was trying to change the narrative. She now wanted to focus the investigation on Bill.

  The money Adam owed Katie came up. VanNamee wondered if maybe that’s why Adam murdered Mary—to get a payout and pay off Katie. It was another crumb VanNamee offered. When suspects lie, they generally don’t lie about larger facts. Instead, they inadvertently get caught in the smaller, overlooked facts difficult (or impossible) to remember. Like Katie saying Adam was going to pay her back by the end of summer and didn’t care how he was going to get the money. Text exchanges between Katie and Adam, which VanNamee had access to, proved a different version of that statement.

  About seventy minutes into the interview, VanNamee took a short pause. It felt as though he had reached an impasse. So he excused himself. He left Katie alone for ten minutes.

  She picked at her fingernails, checked her phone, sat comfortably with her legs crossed. By now, it was 4:06 p.m. She’d been at the OCSO for several hours. The door opened. Katie turned.

  It was VanNamee’s boss, Lieutenant Robert Nelson. He wore a dark blue suit, white-striped shirt, and blue tie. Nelson sat down directly across from Katie. She followed him with her eyes as he sat.

  Nelson was more direct. A different interview style from VanNamee. He did not mince words. He placed his elbows on his knees. Leaned in toward Katie.

  “You’re our letter writer, right?”

  “Um . . . yeah, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “I’m just trying to help . . .”

  Nelson broke it down. The OCSO had a problem. Using his fingers to count off each, Nelson said: “We’re looking at one of three people here. The husband, Adam, or you!”

  Katie needed to help the OCSO rule herself out, Nelson reaffirmed, same as they were offering Adam and Bill. It was a process that, Nelson suggested, Katie was slowing down and obstructing.

  The Gmail account came up. “That is a problem,” Nelson said, “because that comes back to you.”

  Katie put her hands under her butt cheeks, moved her body toward Nelson. As he spoke, she kept repeating the same word.

  “Right. Right. Right.”

  Nelson explained the OCSO believed Katie set up the account, used it, and was now trying to distance herself from it. But why? “We need to know.”

  Katie sat. Staring. Silent.

  Nelson outlined a few facts: Katie had pointed at Adam, then Bill; knew about the colchicine in the Jeep, and the colchicine had been delivered to the office; she had written the anonymous letters. These were important pieces of evidence, Nelson explained, which Katie was doing her best to step away from.

  “Why are you distancing yourself?” Nelson asked in his short, harsh style of interrogation. He wasn’t Katie’s friend. He wasn’t willing to provide her with an out of any kind.

  Katie remained quiet.

  Nelson then offered Katie the opportunity to take a CVSA, Computer Voice Stress Analysis test, adding, “To see if people are being truthful with us. Two of the questions we’d like to ask you—One, did you order this colchicine? Two, did you put this colchicine under Adam’s car seat?” He paused. “How are you going to do on those two questions?”

  “Well.”

  “‘Well’? Okay.”

  Nelson went through each question again. Asked Katie what her answers would be.

  Katie said “no” and “no.”

  Nelson was convinced Katie had committed both crimes: poisoning Adam and killing Mary. “I mean, you had a grudge against Adam for what he did to you.”

  “I don’t have a grudge.”

  They got into the alleged rape, and Nelson mentioned how angry it must have made Katie. How her rage could have been a possible motive for her to make Adam ill and to then kill Mary. He tossed in the word “accidental,” to perhaps give her some way of justifying it all.

  Katie didn’t bite. “I’m not angry about it.”

  Nelson wanted to know why Adam would tell her he killed his mother and where he put the murder weapon. The investigators were struggling to make sense out of this allegation. Why would Adam trust Katie with sensitive information that could put him in prison for life—particularly at a time when they were so at odds with each other and broken up? Their texts were contentious and heated at times.

  From their correspondence, it was clear Adam was scared of sharing anything personal with Katie. She had accused him of rape and assault. So the OCSO was now expected to believe Adam would, during this combative period, go to her and admit to killing his mother? And show her where he’d hidden the murder weapon? Using common sense alone, Nels
on implied, the allegation was baseless.

  “I think it’s a control thing, a power thing . . . ,” Katie started to say. But as she spoke, perhaps without meaning to, she moved the focus back on herself.

  Every time she tried to bury Adam, Nelson countered with “certain facts” the OCSO had, which “come right back to you.” He pointed at Katie’s iPhone sitting on the table in front of them. “That is you! Adam cannot control that. That phone is connected to you.”

  Katie said, “Right . . . right . . . it is connected to me, and I’m afraid that it is never going to be connected to Adam at all . . . I can tell you and it’s never going to be enough.”

  “Well, we have to corroborate things.”

  “I know, but I am afraid it is never going to be enough.”

  Nelson wanted to know when Katie had spoken to Adam last.

  She grabbed her iPhone and scrolled. “December sixth . . . he was talking about his dog. And then he said, he wasn’t going to talk about what happened.”

  54

  ON DECEMBER 17, 2015, the week before Katie sat down for her first lengthy interview with the OCSO, a friend had texted her. It was near 8:00 p.m. They began the exchange discussing how behind Katie had gotten with finals. How she’d reached out to a professor and he was going to help her catch up. Her friend sounded upbeat, in a good mood. She wondered how Katie was feeling these days.

  It was an empathetic gesture. Katie’s friend assumed the murder of Mary Yoder, a woman Katie had professed her love for, would have sent Katie into a dark place. The past several months must have been hard to deal with.

  Instead, Katie complained about the investigation and how the OCSO had been pestering her.

  “Yikes,” her friend texted. “Are they still considering you a suspect?”

  “Development on the dr. case,” Katie shot back. “On Monday, the investigators called me fifteen times and showed up at my house. Persistent! I went and talked w them and gave a DNA sample. I hope they appreciate my valuable finals time!”

  Such a revealing comment. So crass. So devoid of empathy. Mary had been murdered. The Yoder family was grieving and in shock by all the latest revelations. The OCSO was pushing back at the information Katie had shared, focused on her as a potential suspect. In the midst of this, she was talking about “valuable finals time.”

  As Katie and her friend texted further, Katie mentioned Adam: “I’m circumnavigating him! I was getting nowhere and he was being so rude all the time.”

  Answering that question, her friend asked again if Katie was still a suspect.

  “No. I think they know I’m just doing my job. Work and school. Work and school. They’re looking at the husband.”

  “Okay, just being sure you didn’t poison her,” her friend wrote back in jest, ending the text with a wink-face emoji.

  Katie did not respond to that comment directly; she continued talking about how behind she was with finals.

  Throughout the next several days, Katie wrote several significant comments in her iPhone. To investigators later on, it was obvious how Katie, through her Notes app, seemed to be planting seeds: “Strange—Adam asked if my phone was still connected to his. I think it is bc not everything on there is mine.”

  In another comment, she made it appear as though she was going through invoices at the office one afternoon. When she came to one in particular, she wrote out a rhetorical (random) question: “When did [the woman’s name] bring thieves toothpaste, ordered Jan 16.” It didn’t make any sense.

  The OCSO investigators were also interested in a statement she’d copied into the Notes app in mid-November 2015: “A warrant cannot be issued on an informant’s tip unless the officers state the reasons that led them to believe the informant are credible or that the information is reliable on this particular occasion.”

  A quick Google search for the first fifteen words proved Katie had copied and pasted the passage from the National Criminal Justice Reference Service’s website. Specifically, a document from the Iowa Law Review titled “Probable Cause, Good Faith and Beyond.” The piece focused on a Supreme Court discussion regarding “probable cause standards.” Katie was studying the proper legal language to use in constructing the anonymous letter so the OCSO would have probable cause to search Adam’s Jeep.

  As they looked even deeper into Katie’s iPhone at several items she’d authored the same week, they found excerpts from the anonymous letter. Katie had practiced how to write out a particular phrase correctly: “AY k his mother. He put something called cokillsin. AY k his mother. He put something called cokillsin in one of her vitamins when he was at her house for Father’s Day. . . .”

  55

  KATIE WAS DOING THE best she could to deflect and impede the OCSO’s investigation. Her focus now was placing blame on either Adam or Bill. As Nelson had explained to Katie, telling the truth wasn’t hard, and being honest was going to set her free. If she did that, the OCSO could move on. If Katie was not involved, they could find the person who killed Mary Yoder.

  Katie, however, had a different plan.

  “I’m afraid it is never going to be attached to Adam,” she repeated to Nelson. Her voice went up an octave as she said this. She became animated. Irritated.

  Nelson sat and thought: There is no other explanation available for Katie to talk her way out of logging into the Gmail account from her iPhone and her mother’s house.

  “Tell us when you set up the account?”

  “I didn’t set it up.”

  “Yet you know how to log in and get the password to it?”

  “Right.”

  During her first interview with Mark VanNamee, Katie had said she did not have any idea what type of toxin killed Mary. VanNamee told her it was colchicine. She denied ever having heard of colchicine (despite having written “cokillsin” in her Notes app the previous month). Now she had not only admitted knowing colchicine killed Mary, but she had logged into the same account (on multiple occasions). She had left an electronic trail that computer forensics could then look at and trace how the toxin had been ordered.

  Nelson asked why she had done that.

  Katie opened a bottle of water in front of her. Took a quick sip. Then, as Nelson echoed that she needed to “help” explain the Gmail account, and why she was distancing herself from it, Katie slammed the water bottle down on the table: “I’m trying to help!”

  Katie had momentarily lost control.

  Nelson was getting to her.

  The lieutenant brought up the CVSA again, the voice stress test. Why not take the test and be done with it?

  “I know that you cannot protect me from Adam.”

  “From Adam?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What is Adam going to do to you? Why is Adam going to come after you? We can protect you from that. That is not impossible.”

  Katie then said again: Adam killed Mary.

  Nelson asked how she knew. “We still have to prove certain facts. We have to rule people out . . .”

  It had been five months since Mary’s murder. Adam hadn’t threatened Katie or given her the impression he was going to hurt her. To the contrary, he had told Katie to stay away from him. Why would he risk hurting her now?

  Nelson broke into a lengthy soliloquy regarding how often Katie had lied to the OCSO. How each time she spoke to the OCSO, she gave up something new, in between several lies. A person uninvolved, Nelson pointed out, would have no reason to lie, backtrack, and distance herself from certain facts in a murder investigation. Nelson was having a difficult time getting beyond this.

  “I’m trying,” Katie said again, while slapping her hands on her thighs, twisting her head toward Nelson, getting louder.

  Nelson stood. Walked out.

  Katie kept her eyes on the lieutenant. As soon as the door closed, she picked up her phone. Her thumbs jackhammered up and down on the screen. To VanNamee, watching from a video monitor in another room, clearly she had become agitated and anxious.

&nbs
p; VanNamee walked in a few minutes later.

  “I cannot stay too much longer,” Katie said, putting her phone away before VanNamee sat down.

  VanNamee had a stack of papers in his right hand. He was hoping Katie could explain a few things they had just found out—and ask a few more questions—before she left.

  Katie wasn’t sure about this, she said.

  “Can you at least do the voice stress test? It won’t take long.”

  “I think I’m a little nervous for that.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m being connected to everything and I am afraid it’s not going to come back on Adam at all.” She used her hands to reiterate this point.

  VanNamee pushed hard for Katie to take the voice stress test. Katie rejected the idea. She was too nervous.

  The OCSO’s main concern, VanNamee explained, was how many times Katie’s iPhone had been connected to accessing the Mr. Adam Yoder 1990 Gmail account. This number told them she had continually lied about that particular thread of the investigation. For example, VanNamee added while working in a bit of new information: “I am concerned about your phone coming back to trying to set up a PayPal account to order this thing.”

  Katie turned her head to one side. She spoke, but had a hard time articulating what she wanted to say. She then mentioned how someone had likely set up a PayPal account in Mary’s or the business’s name.

  “This is where the downfall is,” the detective added, “people don’t realize that their phone leaves the trail . . .”

  “No, no, I know that,” Katie responded.

  “So you’re one hundred percent sure it’s not going to come back with your number or your IP address?” VanNamee asked, referring to the PayPal account. “I need you to be honest.”

  “No. No. I am sure. I am being honest.”

  VanNamee knew which phone number/IP address the PayPal account had been set up from and later accessed. Or he would not have asked the question. But Katie wasn’t hearing him. She was too focused on trying to place the blame on Bill and Adam.