We Thought We Knew You

by M. William Phelps

  On November 2, 2017, and several days preceding, additional witnesses testified for the state. Then Laurie Lisi rested the state’s case.

  Katie’s defense presented three witnesses of little value, Katie deciding again she didn’t need to testify on her own behalf.

  After that, closing arguments commenced.

  The same day, Judge Dwyer gave the new jury its instructions and off they went into deliberations.

  After two full days of deliberating, stepping out once to proclaim a divided verdict, on Monday, November 6, 2017, the jury sent word it was ready to announce its verdict. There would be no hung jury this time. No questions from the jury. No apprehension about its decision.

  Katie, now twenty-four years old, sat in nervous expectation. She wore a white button-up coat, a purple shawl draped over her shoulders. She had a look of disinterest as she stared straight ahead at noting in particular.

  As these things go, however, Katie had luck on her side. Jurors found her not guilty of second-degree murder, but guilty of the lesser charge, manslaughter in the first degree. As the jury answered with its guilty verdict, Katie’s father and other family members broke out in tears and shrieks. Katie seemed indifferent, undaunted. Just another day. The stoic gaze she displayed said all there was to say about how she felt.

  As Katie was escorted out of the courtroom, on her way to jail to await sentencing, she turned toward family, nodded her head yes, smiled, said nothing.

  “I think it’s a great verdict for us,” Laurie Lisi explained to the media after. “I’m just glad that that’s what they came back with. I think they really worked hard. I think they really spent time going over the evidence . . . It was an excellent verdict. I’m very happy with it. I know the family’s very happy with it as well.”

  The Yoder family held one another as they left the courtroom in silence. They did not speak to anyone.

  “I think they struggled with intent to harm versus intent to kill, and I think that’s why we have the verdict we do,” Lisi added.

  Frank Policelli had an issue with the prosecution introducing the manslaughter option after the trial had already started. Outside the courtroom, he mentioned how the state’s evidence focused on murder, not manslaughter.

  “There was no evidence of any other intent but murder. You can’t constructively amend an indictment in the middle of the trial and change your theory of prosecution. Can’t do that,” Policelli explained. “Not to mention there was never any evidence of her actually poisoning Mary Yoder.”

  He promised to appeal.

  In January 2018, the judge called everyone back for sentencing.

  “Every day I felt blessed and grateful that she was in my life and that she had chosen to share a life with me,” Bill Yoder said before the court. Convicted murderer Katie Conley and her clan looked on. “And she often told me she felt the same. We felt like the two luckiest people in the world to have found each other. After forty years together, we were still deeply in love, still delighted just to spend time together.”

  In tears, his voice cracking, hands shaking, Adam Yoder stood up from his bench seat in the gallery and walked toward the lectern. He held several pages of a prepared victim’s impact statement he’d written.

  “I introduced Katie Conley to my family,” Adam started, his voice already cracking with emotion. “And because I loved her, they all accepted her and treated her as family . . . as blood. I got her a job with my parents, and if I hadn’t done those things”—he broke down, bowed his head, tears pouring out of him, barely able to get the words out—“my mother . . . would still be alive.”

  Katie sat, this time wearing an orange jumpsuit, her state-issued number stamped on the chest pocket, staring directly at the front of the room, Adam to her right, her face still, her demeanor apathetic. It appeared that the proceeding bored her.

  “Make no mistake,” Adam continued, “I hate the defendant with every bone in my body and every drop of blood in my veins. I hate Kaitlyn Ann Conley because Kaitlyn Ann Conley murdered my mother.”

  After Adam returned to his seat in the gallery, Katie stood and shuffled her way to the lectern.

  “I am innocent!” she said before thanking her family, friends, and strangers. “[Thanks] for standing up in support of me, that’s all. Thank you.”

  Katie never mentioned being sorry for the Yoders’ loss, Mary’s death, or acknowledged the pain they were going through.

  Zero remorse.

  Zero empathy.

  Zero sense of the pain the Yoders felt.

  One of Mary’s sisters stood at the lectern and explained that she and her other two sisters support Katie and believe she is innocent, before asking the judge for leniency.

  Dwyer sentenced Katie to twenty-three years. This was about the best the state could have hoped for. One law enforcement official, after sentencing, said she’d hoped the judge would give Katie enough time so that when she was released from prison, she would be too old to have children.

  “We wanted to send her away long enough so that when she got out she was not of childbearing age, because she’d probably kill her own children if things didn’t go the way she wanted.”

  EPILOGUE

  THIS BOOK WAS A project I had not imagined turning out the way in which it has. I don’t mean the trumped-up “is she guilty or innocent” battle cry, and the prosecution having to go on and defend its work long after both verdicts. Almost immediately after I dug into the actual evidence, it was clear Katie Conley committed this crime. What interested me from the moment I started looking at it, instead, was the murder victim, Mary Yoder.

  Mary’s voice needed to be heard. Her life story needed to be made available to as many people as possible within a culture of instant gratification, social media hatred, divisiveness, disunity, and societal anxiety and fatigue. Her story needed to play out against the utter dissolution of the traditional family within a culture shoving celebrity, wealth, power, and materialistic success down our throats at a rate we cannot keep up with or avoid.

  Mary Yoder was the antithesis to all of that toxicity. She was a person who delighted in family and worked her ass off to keep her family intact. She struggled to keep it as traditional as possible within the firestorm of the cultural insanity we experience today.

  As you have read, Mary was passionate about gardening, pottery, and the arts. She enjoyed simple life pleasures—i.e., those small wonders we walk past without noticing: the smell and aesthetic grace of a flower, a blue sky, the sun beating on our face, the subtle (even spiritual) eloquence of a stream softly babbling by during a casual walk or hike. Dancing. Conversation. Sitting on a park bench and watching the world go by. Mary took the time to take such subtle, often overlooked gifts into her soul.

  Yet, she also shared the serenity she had with the people around her. She gave of herself to her community. She helped people realize that the best was available within themselves. She loved (and lived) life. She adored people. She loved her grandchildren more than words could ever provide due diligence.

  According to the evidence and jury, Katie Conley (because she felt scorned by a man?) took all of this away from the world. What’s more, she deprived the community where Mary lived of experiencing the wonder of who she was.

  That’s the ripple effect of one murder: So many people still suffer from not having Mary Yoder in their lives.

  In that regard, I need to mention I made multiple attempts—and made myself available on numerous occasions—to allow Katie Conley, her family, and her friends to speak with me and have a voice in this project. If, as they all claim, Katie is innocent, I wanted those explanations and any proof they had to offer, and would have been happy to publish what they had to say. One Conley family member agreed to meet me in Utica. We set a tentative day and time. I e-mailed her the day before I left Connecticut. She knew ahead of time I was coming. And that night, no surprise to me, she e-mailed and pulled out.

  I get it. I really do. Yet what baffles me
is how outspoken this family has been with certain people, in public, on the Internet, to Dateline. However, a lasting document, such as a book, was of no interest to any of them.

  In my opinion, it says a lot.

  Furthermore, I cannot end this book without sharing my opinion of Adam Yoder. We had long conversations about Katie, his mother, his life, the mistakes he’s made, and how he continues to suffer long after the verdicts. Adam blames himself. He struggles with having brought Katie into the Yoder fold. I cannot pretend to place myself in his shoes.

  What I can say, with absolute certainty, is that sometimes people arrive in our lives and, like black mold, create havoc and hell without us having a clue what is happening. Before we know it, we’re doing things we never saw ourselves ever participating in. It is by no fault of our own. All the therapy and experience in the world cannot prepare us for allowing our judgment and choices to be clouded by what we believe is love disguised as codependency and toxicity.

  Adam loved his mother. He is a good person, son, brother, and uncle. He stumbled. In my opinion, he fell into the web of a cunning sociopath. He did not see it. Breaking free from what was a Velcro-like, emotional clutch seemed impossible. Katie Conley manipulated and lied and tricked Adam into believing falsehoods. She played with his fragile and empathetic mind and heart, and ultimately wielded power over him during one of the weakest periods of his life.

  One cannot blame himself for repeatedly trying—and perhaps needing—to save, or rescue, someone. There are soul-sucking humans in this world. We don’t want to believe we can fall under their spell, because some of us want to see the good in everyone. But it happens. We’re swept up before we realize it. And there really is nothing we could have done differently to see or stop it.

  “People will say how strong I am that I made it through this,” Adam told me during one of our final conversations, “but I never did. I’m not okay. I don’t see myself ever being okay. People might think it’s done because Katie is in prison. But she’s not in prison forever. She will get out. My mother is gone!” He paused there. Emotion took over.

  Concluding a moment after collecting himself, Adam said: “No chapter ended and no recovery ever happened . . . I don’t know how to start that process yet.”

  * * *

  I DIDN’T DWELL ON it in great detail during the actual narrative of the book. However, I need to say something about what several highly credible sources inside the courtroom, and beyond, told me about NBC’s Dateline production while in Utica filming an episode about this case. Several expressed the opinion that as a whole the Dateline people were chummy with the Conley family during both trials. They ate lunch together, laughed, joked around, hugged each other, and cried together.

  “Katie flirted with all the males in the crew, trying to work her charm on them,” several sources observed.

  I did not witness this myself. It hurts me, however, to have to report it was not just one or two individual sources who told me, and, mind you, these sources did not know one another. If half of what was reported to me about this activity is true, it is unsettling to hear. I have tremendous respect for NBC News and I know producers working on Dateline (none of whom were part of the production in Utica). I respect the work they do. To hear this sort of behavior from journalists was not what I would have expected.

  Look, I understand television and what one must do at times to keep sources talking. I have executive-produced hours and hours of true-crime television. Again, I get it. However, when one digs into this case and places personal prejudice aside and looks at (and accepts) the actual evidence, the notion of anyone thinking Katie Conley is innocent is troubling.

  No one else could have committed this crime.

  No one.

  This anecdotal information about Dateline, however, verifies for me the control Katie Conley was able employ, exercise, and maintain over some people—save for law enforcement and a few others in town. I won’t claim to have armchair-diagnosed Katie, nor did I run into any professional diagnosis, but in my opinion sociopaths are expert charmers and con artists. Having written at least twenty-some books about confirmed, diagnosed psychopaths and sociopaths, I can say Katie exhibits all the same behaviors a sociopath would.

  To this day, some residents in Utica (including several of Mary Yoder’s own family members) support and believe Katie is innocent. That is beyond troubling and beyond my understanding. I cannot fathom how anyone studying this case, taking just the computer forensic evidence alone, cannot draw the conclusion—without any doubt—that Katie Conley is guilty. The idea that Bill or Adam Yoder committed this crime and framed Katie is laughable. Impossible. I implore anyone with a doubt to go online and find Adam Yoder’s statement during Katie’s sentencing. Compare the raw emotion he exhibits to that of Katie’s stoic, self-serving demeanor during her sentencing statement, on top of her overall performance throughout both trials. One cannot fake the type of visceral pain Adam Yoder was in as he read his impact statement.

  “This is the most powerful circumstantial case I have ever seen,” said a producer friend, who has, like me, looked at hundreds of murder cases, and has produced an episode of a popular true-crime series about this case.

  All that being said, this book—and the mountain of evidence presented to prove no other person could have killed Mary Yoder—will do nothing to sway those who are still captured by Katie Conley’s manipulating control. I’ll get letters and e-mails and social media messages accusing me of not seeing the truth and siding with prosecutors and law enforcement. I’ll be accused of favoring the prosecution and police while attacking Katie; not allowing myself to get to know the true Katie (I wrote her a letter asking her to participate, but she did not respond); not wanting to see the “real” evidence never allowed into trial; the made-up theories of super marijuana crops and Bill Yoder being some sort of computer savant and mind-controlling wizard; and how Katie was framed.

  Yada yada yada.

  Go ahead, send that BS. I have a delete key. I have no trouble using it.

  * * *

  KATIE CONLEY REMINDS ME of the cone snail, which is known for its brown-and-white, glossy, marble-like shell. You look at this beautiful gastropod found in the shallow waters of the tropics and believe it is harmless. It is, after all, only four to six inches long and has a ceramic-like sheen beckoning one to run a finger over. Yet, if you touch this seemingly harmless creature, you’ll meet up with its concealed teeth, which “resemble tiny harpoons and contain a complex venom known as a conotoxin . . .”5 If stung by the cone snail, you have about five minutes before the venom is working through your body on a path toward your heart, subsequently killing you. There is no antivenin.

  “People can say Katie is smart, and if she is intelligent at all, I don’t know where this fucking idea came in that she had the intelligence to commit this crime and get away with it,” Adam told me over the phone one morning. “Because the way she did it, people can say she’s smart and clever, but in actuality she made really stupid mistakes that hurt her. She didn’t get a lawyer when she spoke to the police those first few times, for one. And, number two, her not understanding technology and how it works.”

  Adam made a solid point that when Katie told Detective Mark VanNamee that “[Adam] hacked into my phone . . . Adam’s name is on the e-mail accounts,” it showed how computer illiterate she was. She unknowingly left behind all these additional electronic bread crumbs. When you consider the evidence from that context, it makes sense Katie would do what she did, without a concern for getting caught. She had no idea she would be.

  “She attached one of the documents used to purchase the colchicine to her student e-mail account,” Adam continued. “She made an account for the CamScanner app when she did not have to—because she didn’t know or realize it could all be traced back to her . . . She just had no understanding of what she was doing.”

  As we spoke, I could hear the emotional strain, the constant pain, and self-hatred in Adam’s voice.
This case is still rooted—and festering—in the guy’s soul. He is struggling to contend with all that had happened and the continued onslaught by his own family members to paint him as someone he is not.

  “Katie is just a bad person. I think she’s a really bad person who figured out how to manipulate people because she has no moral compass whatsoever.”

  Adam makes a valid point. Because once Katie figured out how vulnerable Adam was, the compassion he showed, the drinking and pills and depression, the way that he was willing to rescue her, once she figured that out, she realized it would be easy to control him. On the flip side, once she truly understood she had lost that control, watch out. It was payback time.

  The respect and admiration Adam shared about his father, Bill Yoder, is commendable and sincere.

  “I give my father a lot of credit for who I am and how I think about things,” Adam said. “I do not want anyone to have the impression that I did not equally love and respect both of my parents. They were a huge, wonderful influence on me. I greatly credit my dad for the way I am able to critically think about things and be a good person . . . I want everyone to know how much I love and respect my dad throughout all this.”

  * * *

  DENIAL IS A THICK fog clogging up and confusing the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain, which controls logical and rational thinking. Take that denial, sprinkle a cunning, manipulating liar (whose control and charm are effortlessly exercised) over it, and then add an additional layer of the girl-next-door, poor-me persona Katie has created for herself and worked with the degree of an Oscar-winning actress. When it’s all merged together, you wind up with a toxic, dangerous personality.

  Part of this, I understand, is ignorance.

  Regarding those family members making wild claims about Adam and Bill, Adam said, “I genuinely don’t know what happened to them . . . Conscious or subconscious, I believe the loss of my mother was too much for them.”

  I have studied cases where less evidence has sent men and women to prison for multiple life sentences. It’s comical and inconceivable to me that when so much absolute evidence points in one particular direction—and the answer appears to be direct, simple, and clear—some will push all of that aside to hop aboard a conspiracy-theory train. They’ll ride the rails to the rumor mill, and spin speculation into belief and credibility. True crime has become a cultural pillar, integrated into everyday life. As a result, some feel the need to dramatize and twist basic murder investigations into wild ideas and schemes in order to, I reckon, amp up the entertainment value. It’s as though the actual answer, proven with concrete evidence beyond any reasonable doubt, is not enough anymore.