We Thought We Knew You

by M. William Phelps

  Jurors went back in for an hour and indicated they needed to speak to the judge. It was 11:29 a.m., the second day of deliberations. They were still hung on the definition of “intent.” They wanted to understand burden of proof on the state to show Katie had acted intentionally, consciously, and knew her actions could take a life.

  It’s almost humorous to follow this stumbling block: How could somebody purchase prepaid credit cards, order regulated poison online, spend months manipulating documents and forging a fake company, before devising a plan to place the poison in something she knew the victim would eat or drink, and it not be intentional?

  The jury was looking for any way out of this.

  Dwyer advised the jurors that the law permitted each to consider the acts and conduct of Katie before, during, and after the commission of the crime. In other words, downloading CamScanner, forging Mary’s signature, manipulating documents to create a company, writing anonymous letters accusing her ex-boyfriend of killing his mother, mailing them to law enforcement, were “acts” by Katie clearly showing intent.

  Was the jury trying to say they believed Katie wanted only for Mary to become ill? If so, the statement didn’t matter within the scope of the charges because Mary had died.

  The judge wasn’t having any of it. He explained the long version of “intent” and sent them back into deliberations.

  An hour and fifteen minutes later, the jury came back.

  The judge suggested lunch, adding how he would appreciate it if they continued deliberating after some food.

  By 4:00 p.m., the jury surprised everyone, suggesting they were still discussing the case and wanted to return the next morning to continue deliberating.

  First thing the following morning, May 16, they asked for a dry-erase board, markers, and a large pad of paper.

  “To create a timeline.”

  This said a lot. They had entered into a discussion, obviously, regarding who had the opportunity to kill Mary and when the ingestion of poison occurred.

  At 4:00 p.m., the jury asked for “testimony on what days of the week Miss Conley worked while at Chiropractic Family Care.”

  On May 17, deliberations continued all day. The judge dismissed the jury late into the afternoon. When they returned on May 18, deliberations went until lunch. Near 1:00 p.m., they came back and announced: “We, the jury, after taking a break, are still never going to be able to reach a unanimous verdict.”

  Both sides accepted the jury’s decision. Agreed to call it hung, and requested a mistrial.

  “You’ve worked longer than any jury I’ve ever had, and that is twenty-two years,” Judge Dwyer said with both respect and frustration. Katie’s father, wearing a red-white-and-blue, stars-and-stripes flag tie (which he wore quite often), sat directly behind his daughter. He laughed, a smile washing over his entire face. Wearing a blue-and-white, leopard-patterned dress, her hair pulled back into a braid, Katie looked relieved. Bill and Adam Yoder sat in the first row of seats, directly in back of the prosecution. They appeared confused and shell-shocked, obviously devastated. The evidence seemed so clear.

  Outside the courtroom, soft-spoken Chris Pelli talked about the mistrial as a victory, but not worthy of celebration. He uttered the old cliché: “We won the battle, but not the war.”

  Laurie Lisi was not surprised. She knew after a day of deliberations the jury was struggling. “I thought we had a strong case,” Lisi told a local reporter. “I believe we have a strong case, and I’ll be ready to go in the fall.”

  June 2, 2017, was the next court date.

  69

  KATIE’S FAMILY SPOKE TO local media, providing a statement not long after the mistrial had been announced.

  “It’s been a long four weeks, the family has been through a lot, and we are strong and we know she is innocent. And we love [her].

  “A mother knows . . . her child.”

  It was said that a majority of the jury sided with a verdict of not guilty, but there were several unconvinced holdouts.

  On June 2, Judge Dwyer told a packed courtroom the case would likely see retrial in September or October, three months hence. That was enough time, Stacey Scotti and Laurie Lisi felt, to dig into all the evidence and find whatever else they could.

  “Most of our demise in the first trial was that there were too many men on the jury,” Stacey Scotti said. “She’d come in with her short skirts on, no panty hose, and just sit there batting her eyes at the jury the whole time.”

  Even more alarming to Scotti throughout the first trial, “We could not help but feel like we had probably missed stuff with the computer forensics. Katie was just so casual throughout the entire trial. Giggling, checking her phone, braiding her sisters’ hair during breaks.”

  Scotti then made a devastating accusation: “At that time, we were unaware someone on the jury had a connection to her family. I know that it was nagging at me constantly, every single day during the first trial and deliberations. As the jury deliberated, Katie did not seem to have a care in the world, and Laurie and I were sweating bullets. At some point during the first trial, we heard rumors there was a Conley family connection to one of the jurors.”

  The Conley family soon announced Chris Pelli would not be representing Katie in the next trial. The family had retained local hotshot defense attorney Frank Policelli, a guy with over thirty years’ experience in the courtroom.

  * * *

  FRANK POLICELLI STRUCK AN imposing figure: dark, expensive-looking suits; bushy, thick black eyebrows; a receding hairline leading up to a thick shock of gray hair; blue eyes. Policelli is tall, intimidating, and serious—aggressive to Pelli’s passive. Policelli had tried cases in nearly a dozen different states and had a reputation for being uncompromising, a trait that usually bode well for his clients.

  As the summer of 2017 began, Stacey Scotti dug in. She brought home all the computer forensic evidence and began to sift through it whenever time permitted. It became an almost obsession, certainly a challenge she welcomed. It was a mountain of data and metadata. As she stepped into the case and immersed herself in the evidence, what had bothered Scotti from the beginning was Katie’s erratic behavior during her relationship with Adam.

  As Scotti went through the hundreds of pages of texts between the two of them, Katie’s manipulation, lying, teasing, taunting, and testing of Adam became utterly obvious. She lied to him repeatedly. Made herself the victim time and again. She played with Adam’s emotions. Shamed him. She knew exactly which buttons to push to get a rise, and then to rein him back under control whenever she felt he might be slipping away.

  The texts regarding Katie’s pregnancy claims illustrated the impact she had on Adam, and how she could masterfully pull his strings. When Katie had told Adam about being pregnant, she suggested—without coming out with it clearly—that she’d had an abortion. This had infuriated Adam. And Katie knew it would. Then she went on to tell him she’d suffered an ectopic pregnancy, went to the hospital, and had it taken care of.

  “We subpoenaed hospital records in a fifty-mile radius outside the county, into Albany, and found no record of Katie ever being at a hospital for this so-called ectopic pregnancy.”

  What’s more, the entire trip to the hospital and back home, according to Katie’s texts, took sixty minutes. “You’re not going to be bleeding out from an ectopic pregnancy and be home in an hour,” Scotti commented.

  The prosecution theorized that Katie had felt so scorned by Adam leaving her for good that last time, on top of him being with someone new, she retaliated by poisoning him and killing his mother. Then she set out to frame him for it.

  “Her DNA was on the sleeve over the bottle of colchicine, which is put there so the glass doesn’t break, as well as the bottom portion of the bottle,” Scotti recounted. “Her argument was that it had been ‘transfer DNA,’ because she’d spent so much time in Adam’s Jeep and around him.”

  Scotti knew that Katie’s DNA explanation was nonsense, but beyond all reason, t
he scorned young woman was determined to make Adam’s life hell. The ultimate revenge.

  Katie wanted to get even and make him pay for leaving her. It was all rooted in her absolute need for power and control.

  “And look, if Katie would have not sent [the] anonymous letter, she would have never gotten caught,” Scotti emphasized.

  The jury did not buy the prosecution’s argument, however. Now the DA’s office had to make sure that the proof, which they believed they now possessed, was presented clearly, without a lot of computer forensic noise squelching out the important facts. Moreover, the prosecution believed Katie knew what was on her iPhone that they had missed during the first trial. That was one of the reasons why she had been so unconcerned during proceedings.

  “The computer forensic analysis programs had updated since the first trial, so we had them ‘rerun’ the most important pieces of evidence to see if we could uncover additional files.”

  Scotti was chatting with Adam one day while prepping him for the second trial. “Let’s go through everything again,” she suggested. She mentioned Katie’s iPhone. Laurie Lisi sat in the room, looking on, listening. They talked through it, step by step. Had they missed anything important? There had to be something.

  “Katie’s phone had backed up to my personal laptop,” Adam said.

  Scotti and Lisi looked at each other in disbelief.

  “She was downloading an audiobook,” Adam continued. “I told you about this.”

  “Um, no, you did not, Adam,” Scotti said.

  A complete snapshot from the time frame of the murder, including the entire contents of Katie’s iPhone, everything she had deleted, was sitting inside Adam’s laptop.

  Immediately, Scotti made that her focus. She had forensics pull out the metadata so she could run keyword searches.

  “Unfortunately, keyword searches will only capture words that have been searched or inputted by the user. Once I started perusing the backup of Katie’s iPhone, however, it was at that point I realized she had a habit of taking a screenshot all the time when she was online. I figured out then that I would have to go through every single image to see if any were relevant to searches or activity connected to Katie and Mary.”

  One night, Scotti was at home, files spread across her bed. Her Labrador, Libbey, was sitting nearby, staring up at her. A laptop sat on her thighs. She scrolled methodically through every single screenshot, e-mail, text message, and miscellaneous file that the OCSO had not had access to when Katie turned her phone over before the first trial.

  There’s a piece of the puzzle here, Scotti thought. I just need to find it.

  “Between the images and the [thumbprints], there were over twenty thousand to look through. You have to understand, every time a photo is taken, the phone automatically creates a thumbprint. The thumbprint is not accessible to the user, and the user doesn’t even know it is being created. When a user manually deletes a photo/image, it does not delete the thumbprint. The thumbprint is maintained by the device until it runs out of room to hold any more, and then they are automatically deleted by the device.”

  The user, however, would be under the impression that once he or she has deleted an image, it no longer exists.

  “That is an important detail, because it means the user would have no way of knowing the thumbprint was still available. So when I found a thumbprint only, I could conclusively determine that [Katie] had manually deleted the image.”

  The deletion indicated the image was likely something important.

  So now the prosecution had a backup of Katie’s entire iPhone, which dated back to those months before and after the murder. A backup Katie had pestered Adam on multiple occasions to get rid of.

  Scotti loaded the backup onto an office laptop and took it everywhere she went. Whenever she had a free moment, she scrolled, looking for evidence. As Scotti scoured through the files, there were nights when she fell asleep repeating this process, only to wake up with the computer still on her lap.

  She’d jump right back into it.

  “I would also do this all day long at the office.”

  While sitting one afternoon behind her messy office desk, piled head high with files and folders and evidence and testimony from the first trial, Scotti came upon a screenshot that stunned her.

  “On Katie’s iPhone was a screenshot of an Internet search for ‘world’s most dangerous toxins.’”

  This one screenshot energized her to keep searching.

  “I literally could not believe what I was seeing,” she recalled. Everything pointed to Katie searching the Internet for the perfect poison to use in a plot to poison Adam and then, eventually, Mary. And as she thought about the first trial, Scotti realized, “It all made sense as to [Katie’s] level of carefreeness during trial. She had cause to be laughing at us because she knew about all this data on her iPhone we did not have.

  “We could never win the first trial, and she knew it, and we could tell she knew it.”

  In total, the prosecution had millions of files to mine evidence from. They could never look at each file individually, so focus became important.

  Another image Scotti discovered, which she eventually printed and hung on the wall inside her office, reminding her how Katie actually thought when no one was looking, said so much about motive and intent.

  It was an image of a black-and-white drawing found on Katie’s iPhone. The artist is Chiara Bautista. The pencil drawing is of a mermaid poking out of the water, her fish tail curled up in back of her. Naked from the waist up, the exotic mermaid holds a raven’s skull in her hands, most likely the head of her dead lover, as sun-like rays beam out around it. Her long, thick, flowing hair is curled down her back in the shape of an S. In the water, to the mermaid’s right, facedown, is a man. His back torso, from neck to legs, is visible. The man is obviously dead. A sword/dagger penetrates the center of his back; the handle and a portion of the blade are sticking up. There is a hibiscus-type flower floating near the two characters.

  Scotti stared at this image.

  On the bottom, the title read: “The Breakup.”

  “I thought it was completely appropriate for who she is,” Detective Mark VanNamee said later, speaking of the drawing. “It demonstrates her proclivity toward violence when things do not go her way. We had not discussed it with her because she had lawyered up long before the image was located during that search by Stacey Scotti between the two trials.”

  This drawing points to how Katie viewed breaking up with a romantic partner. The man—in this drawing—obviously had to pay a price.

  Scotti kept at it, searching until her eyes became, on some days and nights, so fuzzy she had to stop. In one file, she noticed how Katie had gotten into Adam’s Facebook account and had made screenshots of his list of blocked people. Her name was, of course, on the list.

  “Her resentment of him, as I began to see what she was doing on her iPhone and on the Internet, was so deep and longstanding.”

  As each day passed and Katie realized Adam was not interested any longer, the resentment she harbored manifested into anger.

  Then rage.

  Scrolling through it all, Scotti developed a motive as Katie became more obsessed with getting even with Adam for letting her go. Her bubbling revenge was implicit in so many of the websites she visited and toxins she researched. Not to mention her Notes app, where all the notes Katie had written to herself detailed a murder plan.

  When this new evidence was placed next to what they had already presented during the first trial, it was obvious to Scotti just how guilty Katie now came across.

  With help from OCSO investigators, Scotti created a timeline and chart, detailing every piece of evidence pointing to Katie planning and plotting to poison not only Adam but Mary. Mary’s name was rarely mentioned. If you were to search Katie’s iPhone and look for a person Katie was most interested in killing, Adam came up. Beginning in the fall of 2014, after the entire manufactured rape claim didn’t work, Katie wa
s hell-bent on making sure Adam paid a price for abandoning her.

  “What better way to pay him back than to take away the one person who meant the most to Adam,” Stacey Scotti concluded.

  70

  FRANK POLICELLI COULD EXHIBIT a brash and in-your-face side at times, but he was able to tone it down and come across as likable and polite. Policelli was fighting for the freedom of his client. He was going to do whatever was necessary, within legal parameters.

  As the second trial started, during his opening statement, Policelli focused on the specific charges. This was the burden that a second, more gender-diverse jury faced. At times, Policelli was able to convincingly rein in what he viewed as a flawed investigation that took too long to begin and went no further than targeting his client. He accused investigators of wearing blinders, aiming for Katie, and failing to read in between the lines of how Bill and Adam Yoder could have conspired to kill Mary together or alone.

  Here we go again, Stacey Scotti thought, rolling her eyes, sitting, listening.

  If that was Katie’s only defense, it had run out of steam. The first jury, perhaps Policelli felt, might have believed the Bill or Adam theory, which was why it had hung itself. Yet, by this point in the case, without any tangible evidence to back up such substantial allegations, it seemed impossible for one to draw this same conclusion. The evidence—all of it—pointed to Katie Conley. No one else. Particularly all the new material inside Katie’s iPhone, which Stacey Scotti had uncovered.

  Katie had purchased the credit cards at Hannaford supermarket, which she admitted to Mark VanNamee on videotape during interrogation. Indisputably, those cards were used to purchase the colchicine, a purchase well-documented and time-stamped by computers, backed up with data and testimony.

  Green-haired Rosa Vargas had made this clear during her direct testimony in the first trial—a narrative she would repeat here during the second. While acting as the contact in selling the colchicine, and getting the proper paperwork in order, Rosa had dealt with only one other person. It was a soft-spoken female who matched Katie’s voice and who had answered the telephone at Chiropractic Family Care.