Poison Twist

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Tonight on Dateline,

a stunning new ending in a deadly case of poison. It didn't seem like it could be real.
Like, how would this happen to me? People aren't waiting for facts to come out. I'm innocent.
People want me to be guilty. Mary was a chiropractor, very social, very active.
Healthy people don't just drop dead.

Nobody, nobody could do anything. Did somebody deliberately give this to Mary? Did somebody

poison Mary? So many things start gelling to make us suspicious. The poison is found in Adam Yoder's

Jeep. They'd ask me flat out, do you think Adam could have killed his mother? You always look at

the husband. They had found Bill to be with another woman.
They were sure my father had done this. They're interrogating her for murder.
If you

could have seen what they put that girl through. Why would she want Mary dead? No explanation.

She had a great relationship with Mary. Maybe this isn't the slam dunk case that some people

think it is. Who killed the chiropractor? A dash of poison and a dramatic new twist.
I'm Lester Holt and this is Dateline. Here's Andrea Canning with Poison Twist.
It was early afternoon on a Tuesday in central New York's scenic Mohawk Valley. That's where a woman who cherished life and family lived.
On that midsummer day, she dropped by her sister Janine's house. Well, she showed up at my house.
I was really surprised. Mary and I would get together periodically, but never did she ever just pop in.
Mary, who lived nearby, was a chiropractor, loving wife, and mother of three. It seemed Mary had something to confide that day, something to share.
I had the impression she wanted to talk, but it was a time that I would usually be home alone working. But it just so happened my husband and son were there at the same time.
I said, you know, I can take a little time off from work. You want to come upstairs? We'll have a cup of tea.
And she said, no, no, I got to go. And so Mary left.
If she had a secret to share, her sister Janine would never hear it. Because a week later, Mary Yoder was dead.
I got a frantic call from my sister telling me, did you hear about Mary? Did you hear about Mary? Soon a murder investigation was underway, one that would tear a family apart. Why do you think there's such discrepancy between you two and your aunts? They've never sat down and listened to the evidence.
It's very hard to sit here and bite my tongue

when I know that there's so much more going on

than people are aware of.

Then, just last month, a new ruling and new questions.

Maybe this isn't the slam-dunk case

that some people think it is.

It was a July morning in 2015.

Dr. Mary Yoder's day began with a full schedule here at her clinic in Whitesboro, New York.
At 60 years old, the respected chiropractor was the picture of health. She was extremely healthy.
She's fit and beautiful. She ran triathlons.
Triathlons. Janine and her sisters, Sally and Sharon, say Mary was the shining light of the family.
What was she like as a sister? Loving. A darling.
She was always upbeat and full of fun. But as that busy day in July wore on, Mary began to feel sick.
By late afternoon, she had grown violently ill. And the next morning, Mary's husband Bill reached out to their daughters, Tamarin and Liana, who was a doctor.
He's like, Mom, you know, she was up all night with vomiting and diarrhea and abdominal pain, and she's just kind of listless. I don't know if she's just tired.
So he took her right to the hospital that day. Tamarin called me, Mary's daughter, and told you Mary was sick.
Yeah, she said Mary's in the hospital. And she was desperate on the phone, and I was like, well, Mary's the healthiest woman I know.
I just said, Tamron, everything will be fine, everything will be fine. Doctors thought there was a possible infection.
And her CAT scan had showed some inflammation and possibly around the pancreas area, but they really weren't sure. And so it was just like, oh, okay, she has an infection of the gallbladder.
Her having an infection or a sickness was not anything that would cause serious concern. Okay, well, everybody gets this once in a while.
She'll get the antibiotics or whatever if she needs them, and she'll be fine. Mary was anything but fine.
By the time family members arrived at the hospital, she was fighting for her life. We went to the hospital and it was crazy.
They had no idea what was wrong. Tamron was in the room as her mother began to code.
And every time her heart would stop and they would revive her, she would come back and she would be responsive again and she was intubated, but she could still mouth I love you around it. They had everybody there trying to figure out what was happening and nobody could do anything.
They brought in so many specialists, they had no idea. They just couldn't figure out what was wrong with this woman.
This is a medical mystery. No doctor is coming out and telling you, here's what she has, here's what we're doing about it.
Down in Florida, Mary's sister Sharon, a nurse, was getting updates. Janine said that she had coded three times, and I just knew that wasn't good.
So I called my husband, who has more experience working in the hospital than I do. And he said, you need to be prepared.
This isn't good. The family kept vigil in the waiting room.
Then came the awful news. Janine ended up telling me, calling me and saying, Sharon, she's gone.
And I just remember like screaming and banging on the steering wheel. And I said, Janine, 60-year-old healthy people don't just drop dead.
This can't be. Yeah, it was, yes.
It just can't be true. I don't think you feel at that moment.
It really is just a shock, yeah. I remember at the time saying, I don't understand this.
If there had been a car accident or something that I could understand, but I don't understand this. How healthy, yep.
for her body to just quit? Shut down. Because it made no sense at all.
What killed Mary Yoder? Perhaps the real question was who. From the moment Mary died in our gut, we felt something's not right.
We said we'll do anything. We just want the truth.
Did somebody poison Mary?

Did somebody deliberately give this to Mary?

Never, ever in your wildest dreams

would you think that this would happen.

A case that spanned nearly a decade,

an unlikely suspect,

two trials,

and now a new day in court.

It all just really came out of the blue.

I was like, holy cow. Mary Yoder's death was a sudden and devastating blow to her family.
I spoke with the medical examiner's office, and I with one of the doctors and they said they were going to be doing the autopsy the following morning. At that point, the only things that we had that we were trying to use to kind of piece together was there was an infection of some kind.
This was a very brutal death. Very, very.
Mary was active. She was an avid gardener and a musician.
Here she is singing a duet with her sister Sally. Thanks so much Has already been said Her sisters say she was game for almost anything.
Even this. Oh, belly dancing.
We costumed and choreographed a dance for a local havla, which it's Egyptian dance, yeah. Mary grew up in upstate New York in a family of six sisters and two brothers.
While in college in Buffalo, she met her soulmate, husband Bill Yoder. They chose to pursue holistic living and healthy lifestyle, spiritual growth.
Bill and Mary both became chiropractors, opened a clinic together, and eventually started a family. Liana is the oldest.
Tamarin is the younger sister. Two years later, I came along.
And then 10 years after me, Adam came. Tell us about Adam.
What was it like having a little brother? We adored him. Yeah, and he was ours.
I mean, we cuddled him. We held him.
After high school, Adam helped out at the family business. Then his girlfriend Katie took his place as office manager.
I would schedule patients and greet them. Katie says she had a particularly strong bond with Mary, considered her a mentor and a friend.
You couldn't help but to like her. Did you feel inspired by her at all? Yes, I did.
She always kept such a positive outlook no matter what was going on or what was happening in her day. And that was really encouraging.
Mary was a big believer in herbal supplements and often recommended them to her patients. She was always trying to encourage people to live a better life.
In 2015, after 30 years in the business, Mary was thinking about slowing down. But then she was gone.
How did you get the news that Mary had died? I heard from her sister. It was completely shocking.
It was surreal. Because how could this person who was so full of energy and so vibrant just be gone so suddenly.
A few days after Mary died, daughter Liana, the physician, got a call from the medical examiner. And he said, based on the severity of how quickly this illness hit her, and the fact that it looked like it was an infectious cause with a high white blood cell count and her gallbladder being inflamed, we think it's something called colitis or ascending cholangitis.
And this is what you told your aunts? This is what I... That you believed? Yeah, exactly.
The most you had to go on? That was, at that point, that was the most we had. Mary's sister Sharon, the nurse, questioned the explanation.
I said it makes no sense to me, but she told us that, we accepted it and it wasn't easy because we didn't understand it. She requested that the medical examiner do additional tests.
She did say that they are going to do the toxicology tests that you asked for. I said thank you.
While the family waited for those results, Janine ran into one of Mary's doctors who made a stunning revelation.

He didn't think Mary died of colitis.

He said what killed her was still a mystery.

He goes, we have no idea how she died.

He said so many specialists were called in.

We'd never seen anything like this in all of our years of practicing.

You had no idea about any of this?

No, no.

And so we, that's just so many things start gelling to make us suspicious. We always, from the moment Mary died in our gut, we felt something's not right.
But identifying Mary's cause of death was proving difficult. The medical examiner sought the opinion of Dr.
Gina Marafa at the Upstate New York Poison Center.

And that was really what they came to me with. Is there anything that you could think of that we could test for? It was a roll of the dice, but Dr.
Marafa suggested checking for a drug called colchicine, normally used to treat gout, a form of arthritis. In a high enough dose, it becomes toxic.
And that toxic dose can result in anything from significant severe side effects to fatality. Her symptoms really led me down the line of thinking that colchicine was very high on my list as potential causes.
Dr. Marafa's hunch was right.
The M.E. called Mary's daughter, Liana.

He's like, okay, we did get a cause of death back.

It's colchicine.

I said, what?

He's like, he repeated, it's colchicine.

I'm like, the gout medication?

I was completely confused. I mean, the only capacity that I knew that was as a short-term acute treatment for gout.

Which we knew our mother didn't have.

She didn't have.

I was like, what?

Well, how did she get it?

And she didn't know.

So I said, so she was poisoned then?

And she said, well, we have to find out how it got into her system.

Where's your mind going now?

Are you thinking foul play?

I was the first one to take that leap. I was the first one.
I was just getting all these bits and pieces of information, and it was not making sense. Three months after Mary's death, Sharon decided to contact the police.
Lieutenant Robert Nelson, now retired, was a detective with the Oneida County Sheriff's Office. She asked if we would get involved in the investigation

to determine how Mary got this in her system.

Do you feel that this is something that would fall under your purview?

Yes, at this point, we're like, well, we need to get a hold of the ME's office

to see exactly what they have, what did they rule as the cause of death.

The detective learned there was nothing in Mary's medical history

to explain why she'd be taking colchicine. Why would she have this poison, this drug in her system? That they didn't know.
That's when they started looking at different things. She took all these supplements.
They looked at supplement contamination. Anything there? We finally got the test back from there and nothing from there.
Negative. Negative.
How much colchicine do you have to ingest for it to be deadly? If you're talking gout medicine, it's like you'd have to take anywhere from 40 to 60 pills depending on your size. You'd have to take it all at once to be a lethal dose.
The notion that Mary intentionally took an excessive number of pills seemed impossible. We talk to the family, we start talking to people.
We don't believe it's suicide.

That left one other scenario, a chilling one.

Did somebody poison Mary?

Did somebody deliberately give this to Mary?

We sat down with the ME's office and went through everything, all the autopsy.

At that point, we were looking at it as a homicide.

Now began the hunt for a killer. And some of Mary's sisters thought they knew where investigators should be looking.
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For whatever happens next, grab Kleenex. Months after Mary Yoder's death, investigators told the family they were convinced Mary had been murdered.
What is that moment like when your mom is now a murder victim? There isn't even words for it. Your world flips upside down and nothing makes sense and up isn't down and down isn't up anymore.
So that was terrifying. And Mary's daughters believed their mother hadn't just been killed.
She'd practically been tortured. Colchicine, one of the hallmarks of it, it stops your heart.
It breaks it, and it breaks it over and over and over again. There were actually a couple of TV shows that kind of echoed this case.
Yes, there is the TV show House, which had colchicine. Colchicine does its damage in a very specific order.
But this is real life now. Yes.
Did a patient come in that day and do something that we don't know about? Did they give Mary, you know, something to eat? Any obvious suspects? Potential suspects? No, not at first. But Detective Nelson had to start somewhere.
What about the person closest to Mary, her husband? What was it that was leading you in Bill's direction? At this point, basically, just because he was the husband. In these types of cases, it always seems to be the spouse is the one responsible if it's a poisoning case.
Katie Conley was the office manager. She worked for both Bill and Mary.
Mary ran the practice with her husband, Bill? Yes. It definitely sounds like Mary was the popular doctor in the office.

People did prefer her.

Mary's sisters had known Bill for decades.

If there were problems in the marriage, was Mary the type to share with her sisters?

She would talk about frustration in certain situations,

but she tried very hard never to say anything negative about Bill.

She always put a positive spin on anything if she could.

Still, her sisters never forgot a story Mary told them.

It has been a long time. to say anything negative about Bill.
She always put a positive spin on anything if she could. Still, her sisters never forgot a story Mary told them.
It happened before her wedding, 38 years earlier. They're out in my parents' yard, and Bill says to her, you know this is to be an open marriage, right? And she was taken aback.
She said to me, I had the strength to tell him, no, Bill, we're going to have to not get married, you know, if you can't commit to monogamy. He backed down? Yeah, he came back and said, okay, I've thought about it and I can commit.
But did he? It was no secret that in the years that followed, Bill would often disappear on weekends. He'd take night trips to Albany weekends to be by himself, he said, to write.
Janine kept wondering about that day Mary dropped by her house out of the blue. Did she want to tell her something about her marriage? I think she wanted to talk or she wanted to open up the door, you know, for us to start talking about something.
And right after Mary died, she and her sisters were surprised that Bill didn't seem as distraught as they were. Some of the things that we weren't comfortable with was that they didn't know what she died of exactly, but he had her cremated very quickly.
He had her phone turned off very quickly. Too quickly? Yeah, too quickly.
Still, the sisters say the marriage looked pretty solid in recent years. Our brother-in-law seemingly became a really good husband.
You know, he was helpful in ways, letting her do things she wanted to do. I was just thinking, well, gee, Bill has really come a long way.
And certainly no one wanted to believe that Mary's own husband would harm her. When I was interviewed, I was not ready to say that I suspect my brother-in-law because I really had no real evidence and I felt in all fairness to another human being, I'm not going to accuse him of something without evidence.
Any fair-minded detective would need that evidence too, along with a clear idea of a motive. Did Bill stand to inherit everything that was Mary's, everything in the marriage? They had the business together, but there was no large sums of money that Bill would have gotten of Mary's death.
Detectives told Mary's daughters not to talk about the investigation, especially not to their father. Well, we weren't letting him in on the fact that we had been talking with the investigators.
How did you take that, knowing that the police were looking at your dad? It's terrifying. Yep.
But we didn't understand because there was nothing in their relationship that indicated that there was any trouble. Did you think it was possible just...
We didn't know if our father was involved. We didn't know if it was a complete stranger.
We had absolutely no idea. It had taken months for authorities to get involved in the case.
And now that they believed it was a homicide, detectives decided to quietly keep tabs on the husband. After a few weeks of surveillance, they called Bill for an interview.
Bill's not an emotional person, so he didn't seem very upset. You know, he wasn't very outgoing in his emotions.
So that was a concern when we first brought him in and talked to him. We're like, he should be more upset.
He's not shedding any tears or... Well, we're not speaking to Bill until five months later after Mary's death.
Bill spoke to them for five hours, and he gave investigators permission to search the couple's chiropractic business, where deputies collected computers, a typewriter, and a fax machine. He signed a consent.
We went to the office, and he was very helpful. I mean, he was very forthcoming.
He gave us everything we asked for. And they had a lot of questions for Bill.
At the top of the list, something they'd learned while they were tracking him. It turns out Bill was already dating again.
In fact, it was Mary's mother who first called it. Shortly after Mary died, my mother said, why is he always going out of town? And I said, I don't know, Mom, maybe he needs some time or whatever.
And she says, I think he's got a girlfriend. This is coming from a 92-year-old woman, 91-year-old.
And she goes, I'm not feeling right about this. Detective Nelson was the one to tell Sharon their mom was right.
He told me that they had, in fact, found Bill to be with another woman. Did he tell you who the other woman was? No, he did not.
As the detective took a deeper dive into Bill's relationship, a new lead surfaced. And it would change everything.
You might have a smoking gun here. Yes, there was a lot of detail in that letter.
Detective Robert Nelson was working Mary Yoder's homicide when he learned that her husband, Bill, had a girlfriend. We began to wonder, was there a relationship beforehand? Why is it important to determine now if this relationship started before Mary's death? If it was before Mary's death, obviously that would have been a motive.
Then we would have had to say, well, Bill now has a motive for this. That's kind of a big deal.
Yes, and that came up. That was an obvious red flag, and we were very concerned about it.
Then an unexpected clue landed on the detective's desk, and it pointed the investigation in a whole new direction. It was an anonymous letter.
They received the letter stating that Adam did this. He was responsible.
He told this person that he did it. Adam was Adam Yoder, Mary and Bill's son.
The letter said he was the killer. The person who penned the letter claimed to be close to Adam, writing, He got a bottle of colchicine off online and put the toxin in one of her vitamins when he was over at his parents' house.
With a jolt, the letter dramatically shifted the focus of the investigation from father to son. You might have a smoking gun here.
Yes, there was a lot of detail in that letter. Did Adam have any criminal history? No, we didn't have anything on Adam.
Adam was in his mid-20s, the youngest of the Yoder children. He had worked in the family practice as the office manager.
Before he passed that job off to his girlfriend, Katie, Katie's parents, Vin and Kathy, knew him well. When he was dating our daughter, he would come to the house every day.
And how did you feel about the relationship? There was always something off, something we didn't care for with He was kind of off, detached. We'd eat dinner as a family, and Adam would sit across from me and talk.
He wouldn't make eye contact with you, and he wouldn't really talk to anyone in the family. The communication stopped a little bit between myself and him.
Did you at any point feel like, maybe I should say something? Or did you totally stay out of it? No, we did mention to Katie that we didn't think there was something different with Adam and we didn't really feel comfortable about it. Her sisters also recognized that fact too.
Shannon and Sarah Conley are Katie's twin sisters. Things were good.
It seemed good. And, you know, we want her to be happy and she seemed happy.
And then when things started to go a little south, I think she kind of realized it too, that it wasn't a healthy relationship to be in. So she kind of separated her or tried to separate herself from it as much as she could.
Katie and Adam broke up and got back together a few times over three years. Katie just had enough of him being up, being down, being up, being down.
And just some of the things he would say just weren't right. Did Adam have any issues with his mom that you know of? I know they definitely were not as close as our family was.
He would just kind of talk down about his family.

He was like, I don't get it.

Like, I've met your mother.

She's great.

If there was any truth to the letter,

what motive would Adam have?

The letter itself seemed to have an answer.

Why did it say he did?

He thought he'd gain financially.

If his mother passed away,

he thought he'd have a financial gain.

Also, that there was arguments between him and his parents that he was upset with his mother. So it listed that as two of the reasonings.
And the letter told authorities something else. The colchicine container is under the front seat passenger side of his Jeep until he figures out where to dispose of it next.
What's your strategy going in with Adam? We sat down, we talked as to how we want to go about with Adam. We said, let's bring him up here.
Let's see if he comes up in his vehicle. The letter says the colchicine's in the vehicle.
We'll talk to Adam. We'll see if he comes up here with the colchicine.
Was this a bit of a test to see if Adam would show up in the Jeep? Yes. And when Adam arrived to talk to the detectives, he was driving the Jeep in question.
We were trying to get a feel for Adam at that point to see, you know, is he responsible for his mother's death? So we spoke to him. We then showed him parts of the letter that said where this culture scene would be, in which he was taken back.
What was his demeanor over that letter? Shocked. Did you feel his reaction was genuine? Yes, but we still had some concerns also by his reactions.
In what way? He was just hesitant to let us go look in his vehicle. While one detective talked to Adam, another called his sister Liana.
They're like, we actually have a letter. What do you mean you have a letter?

Well, the letter is actually pointing the finger at your brother,

and it says that he's got this in his car.

The poison in his car. The poison in his car.

And I said, what do you mean you have a letter that says my brother did it?

And they said, no, it's important.

We've got to look in your brother's car.

You've got to convince him to let us, you know, if you can talk to him, let him know. Because if he leaves the station, this isn't going to be good.
Adam eventually gave investigators permission and they went outside to the parking lot. Moment of truth.
You open the vehicle door and what do you find inside? They go out there and they search the vehicle right where it says it's going to be in the letter. And we pull out a cardboard sleeve with the colchicine inside the sleeve.

And just like that, the detective seemed to have the weapon right in his hand.

That's your big moment in this case.

A big moment. The anonymous letter had been right.
The colchicine used to kill Mary Yoder was under the front passenger seat of her son Adam's Jeep. It was a pure form of the drug, far more potent than what doctors prescribe.
And Adam? What's his reaction? I think he was shocked at that point when he saw us pull that out. The poison is in his Jeep.
Yes. What's more, in the Jeep, along with the colchicine, there was a receipt for the drug.
And on the receipt? They had an email address. It also had Adam's name on there.
And from there, the Mr. Adam Yoder 1990 Gmail account, which was very important to us, was listed on there.

Adam said he'd never seen the colchicine before in his life.

Someone must have planted it.

In that moment, what are you thinking?

At that moment, we're thinking, would he bring the poison up here with him?

I mean, it doesn't make sense.

If you killed your mother and you got the colchicine, you wouldn't drive up to the sheriff's office with the colchicine knowingly in your car. You would get rid of it.
But again, you have an honest letter saying he admitted to doing it and that the colchicine would be in his car. So you kind of have a split reaction as to which way are we looking at it.
Could Adam really have poisoned his mother? When they looked into his whereabouts on the day Mary got

sick, they discover Adam was more than 300 miles away visiting his sister on Long Island. I knew at the time my mom got sick he was with me, and I couldn't understand, wait, how would he have been involved? My mother was my brother's biggest supporter.
He turned to her first for everything. The thought, them trying to say that he did this, didn't make sense.
It didn't entirely make sense to detectives either. You let Adam go? Yes.
But I would imagine you're not crossing Adam off your list yet. No, we were comfortable enough to let him go, but we didn't say absolutely he had

nothing to do with it. The investigation led them to talk to Adam's cousin and roommate, David King.
He's the son of Mary's sister, Janine. David told them that after Mary died, Adam was enrolled in college, but his life seemed to be falling apart.
He slowly started dropping all of his classes, and he was pretty much staying in bed all day and drinking a lot.

Were you really concerned about him? I was. He had expressed to me that he was suicidal a couple of times, which was very concerning.
It was only when detectives were interviewing David that he realized Adam was a person of interest in Mary's death.

Did that just floor you?

I was absolutely floored.

And at that time, they had asked me flat out, do you think Adam could have killed his mother?

What did you tell them?

At the time, I said, no, I don't think he would.

At the time?

At the time.

David would later wonder if his cousin's behavior was the result of grief or guilt.

Adam's sisters, on the other hand, had no doubt Adam was innocent. They were convinced he was being framed.
Who did you think could have framed him? At that point, a possibility was my father. So you actually believed your father might have framed your brother? It could have been possible.
The investigators were leaning very heavy onto it and pretty much telling us without coming right out and saying it that they were sure my father had done this. It was impossible to wrap their heads around.
This can't be real. This can't really be happening.
We had to reality check with each other because you're like, did it happen or did it not? Is this a dream? What's going on? You feel like all of a sudden somebody dropped you in the middle of hell and you can't find your way out. And every time you get an answer, it's worse.
But detectives didn't have enough evidence to prove any of their theories. It was frustrating.
I mean, there was a lot of nights we were frustrated by this case. We looked at Adam, but yet nothing else was pointing the finger at Adam.
It just wasn't fitting. And the same with Bill.
We'd want to say, OK, Bill did this, but why did Bill do it? One possible motive, that new relationship Bill began so soon after Mary's death. Had it actually started while she was still alive? In his police interview, Bill denied cheating on Mary.
He said the relationship began after she died. And when detectives looked into his phone records, they seemed to confirm it.
We were able to verify all this information that he wasn't having phone conversations, text messages with her prior to Mary's death. Looking for new insight, detectives turned to someone outside the Yoder clan, Katie, who dated Adam and worked for Bill and Mary.

We just wanted to speak to her to see if she knew anything about Bill, about Mary, other than, you know, outside of the office.

Often employees are the ones who hear and see a lot.

Katie was in the middle of final exams at college, but made time to come in for an interview.

Did you wonder why?

I wondered what had started an investigation.

And I wanted to help in whatever way I could.

I just didn't know what they were getting at.

Detectives thought Katie could tell them a lot about Mary and Bill.

They were like night and day.

In what way?

Mary was very outgoing and very vibrant, and Bill? They were like night and day. In what way? Mary was very outgoing and very vibrant and Bill was more reserved.
He was more about the business and less about being friendly with patients. She of course knew a lot about Adam too.
Things weren't perfect between Adam and Katie. No.
But they clearly had something because they kept going back to each other. Yes they would talk on the next few days.
By the third interview, she started telling them the same thing Adam's cousin had said. Adam hadn't been himself lately.
She makes some comments about Adam's acting strangely and isn't acting right. Is she worried about Adam, that maybe Adam had something to do with this? Yes.
She's kind of hinting that, you know, the way Adam is acting, that he may be responsible for his mother's death. As detectives listen to Katie talk about Adam, her ex, they wondered where this was going.
A light bulb went off for investigators.

He took a shot and said, did you write the letter?

And what did she say?

She said yes.

They had found the person who wrote that letter pointing the finger at Adam.

But the discovery was about to point them in a new direction.

That's a twist.

Yes.

Hey, everybody. It's Rob Lowe here.
If you haven't heard, I have a podcast that's called Literally with Rob Lowe. And basically, it's conversations I've had that really make you feel like you're pulling up a chair at an intimate dinner between myself and people that I admire.
Like Aaron Sorkin or Tiffany Haddish, Demi Moore, Chris Pratt, Michael J. Fox.

There are new episodes out every Thursday.

So subscribe, please, and listen wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Willie Geist here, reminding you to check out the Sunday sit down podcast on this week's episode.
I get together with one of the hottest artists in all of music right now. Grammy winner, Lainey Wilson, to talk about her path from the tiny town of Baskin, Louisiana to country music, stardom.
You can get our conversation now for free, you download your podcasts. It was late, past midnight, when they broke into the farmhouse.
Never in a million years would you think that you'd see your parents' house taped off by that yellow tape. And they said, you remember being killed? They left behind a wall of blood and a clue that took a case of double murder on a long, strange trip.

She looked at me and she said, I'm screwed.

Murder in the Moonlight, a new podcast from Dateline.

Listen to all episodes now, wherever you get your podcasts. Detectives had been trying to figure out who wrote that anonymous letter pointing the finger at Mary Yoder's son Adam as the killer.
Now Katie, Adam's ex-girlfriend, admitted it was her. They started recording the interview.
Are you okay? Yeah, I details in the letter. She said Adam confessed to her.
He poisoned his mother with colchicine. He had it shipped to the office.

In the letter, she said Adam hid the poison in one of Mary's vitamin pills.

But Katie wasn't sure if he really meant to kill his mother.

You said it may have been an accident.

Did he express that he didn't mean to do this to you? poison, Katie said he told her when she was literally sitting on top of it. You were in Adam's Jeep, right? He told you that he'd put the culture scene under your seat? Under his seat? Under my seat.
Under your seat? He told you that? But I don't remember. Katie and Adam had been friends since high school, but now she told the detectives she didn't know Adam sooner for one simple reason.

She was afraid of him. you? You can't protect me.
He won't protect you from what, Adam? Yeah. If you're saying Adam's responsible, why would Adam come after you? Why? Yes.
Because if he knows that I'm, like, if he knows that I came to you. Katie's admission that she was the letter writer seemed like the big break detectives needed.
And it was, but not in the way you might think. You thought that possibly the killer wrote the letter.
Yes. Are you thinking Katie could be the killer? Absolutely.
Really? Yes. Once she admitted to writing that letter, it was definitely a turn of events for us.
As the interview went on, the detectives pushed harder. Who made you write the letter? You wanted us to know? Yeah.
Or did you want to see Adam get in trouble? No, it's not to see Adam get in trouble. Is Katie starting to panic? Did you feel that? Yes, I think at this point she's becoming worried about where things are turning and how it's looking for her.
Because if we didn't arrest Adam when we found the culture scene,

now she knows we don't necessarily believe what's in that letter.

At one point, Katie told the detectives Adam had threatened to frame her.

Okay. For what? For being at the office? Yeah, like trying to connect it to everything he said.
So anything we asked her, she says, I know things are pointing at me, but it's Adam. She always tried to point the finger back at Adam.
She also said something they thought was just plain weird. She made an observation about who uses poison.
You guys also don't use poison. What do people do? They say it's a lady's weapon.
They say it's a lady's weapon? Yeah. Of course, that didn't prove Katie was Mary's killer.
She was free to go. But she had not done much during that interview to dispel the detective's suspicions either.
Far from it. We wanted to speak to her again.
But at this point now, we also had a lot more police work to do. They started to dig and quickly thought they were on the right track.
For one thing, Katie had opportunity. She was with Mary at the office that day.
Poison experts thought Mary had ingested the colchicine around lunchtime. There's a kitchen area in the back where they would sit and have lunch and make their drinks.
If Mary was out in this other room a couple offices away working on patients, Katie would have the time to go back there and do something. You think it's Katie, but where's your hard evidence? How do you now go about proving it's Katie? Because she's now your prime suspect, correct? Correct.
Once we learned Katie was the author of this letter, we got a search warrant for her house, for her cell phone. We also had the computers from the office that we had already secured.
We wanted to get all those items and send them out to the forensic lab, to the computer lab, to have them analyzed and see what data was on those. Digital records showed that it was Katie's computer, not Adam's, that had logged into that Gmail account, the one used to buy the poison.
Katie had accessed the Mr. Adam Yoder account from not only home, but from the office.
In fact, the entire digital trail seemed

to lead detectives right to Katie's doorstep. On her phone, they found several searches for the word colchicine.
All this evidence comes in against her. Nothing's coming back on Bill, and nothing came back on Adam.
But there was a gaping hole in their theory. If Katie really was Mary's killer, why had she done it?

By all accounts, this seemed like a very nice... But there was a gaping hole in their theory.
If Katie really was Mary's killer, why had she done it?

By all accounts, this seemed like a very nice relationship

between a younger woman and an older woman.

Yes.

A mentor relationship.

Yes.

So was this very surprising to you then?

Absolutely.

What would motivate her?

What would this...

Why would this girl kill Mary?

I mean, what would be the reason? We started

looking at the relationship between Adam and Katie. The only person who could answer that

was Katie herself. It was time for another conversation.
And this one was going to get

intense. Why did you do it, Katie? Help me understand.
Katie Conley, just 22 years old, was now a prime suspect in the poisoning death of her boss, Mary Yoder. The only thing detectives say they didn't have was her motive.
We had all the other evidence leading to that point that she purchased it. She's the one that poisoned Mary.
We wanted to know why. The conversation started with pleasantries about Katie's family farm.
How's the chickens? Good. Yeah? But the detective quickly got down to me.
I didn't mean to lie to you. But you did.
After a while, they got to the point. That's the only thing we need at this point is why.
You need to tell me whether you wanted to hurt her or did you want her to get sick or what. We need to know.
I wouldn't try to hurt her. Okay.
I wouldn't hurt. You wouldn't hurt Mary? No.
I know killers come in all shapes and sizes, but Katie does not look like a killer. No, but again, it's poison.
And she had made a comment earlier that it's a lady's weapon.

It's not a question anymore of who, Katie, it's why.

Please, just tell me why, Katie, that we can help you.

It's the only thing left.

My life is over.

What drove you to do this, Katie?

Was it Adam?

No, I couldn't do that. I couldn't do that forever.
At one point, she appeared to get sick. At the end, I had her saying a lot of things, but she wouldn't admit to actually why she did this.
She would state her life was over. But again, she would try to throw it back on Adam.
But at this point,

everything was pointing to her. I have a family.
I have a family.

Katie's family was right there at the sheriff's office with her.

Her parents had driven her there thinking investigators needed her to sign a quick deposition, an hour at most. And I went to the window and I said, my daughter is with signing papers.
She's supposed to be out half an hour ago. I want to talk to her.
And I want her out. I mean, what's going on? Her parents had no idea she was being interviewed as a suspect.
But as the afternoon wore on... They're not signing a deposition.

They're interrogating her for murder.

They're interrogating her.

So then the door's locked to get to my daughter.

I beat on the door.

Wow.

And finally, a sheriff came in and I said,

my daughter's in there.

I says, I want her out now or I want to go in there. Something's wrong here.
It was evening when a detective appeared. He comes back out.
Kathy and I are at the door. Katie's not with him.
And he said, Katie will not be going home. With you tonight.
She is responsible for Mary Yoder's death. She killed.
We know she did it. She'll be spending the night in jail.
My wife passed out. She did everything but passed out.
I caught her, and then he closed those at the door. Was this the most helpless you'd ever felt in your lives as parents? That you can't help your child, that you are not in control, that you have absolutely no way to put your arms around her and tell her everything's going to be okay.
Despite what the detectives said, they didn't charge Katie that night. She came out badly shaken.
The Conleys helped each other to the car and headed home. Katie was sitting in the back seat.
And don't ask me, this is the hardest question I've ever asked anybody in my life. Okay? I says, Katie, did you kill Mary? Did you kill Mary, Katie? And without hesitation.
She says, Dan, I loved her. I won't kill anybody.
As a mother, you always think that you're going to get a phone call that your child has been in a car accident or that there's an illness.

But never, ever in your wildest dreams would you think that this would happen at all.

It's not our daughter.

Katie's sisters felt the same way.

Katie had nothing to gain from her death and everything to lose. She lost a mentor, a best friend, no motive, no gain, nothing.
I know her. I know my sister.
Katie did not do this. No way.
Katie? They can't be looking at Katie. Mary's own sisters, who had roped the authorities into the investigation, agreed.
We all called them and said, you know, look, we hear there's another suspect. If by chance that other suspect is Katie, please consider the possibility that she may be being framed.
Even Mary's daughters were at a loss. How could this be? How could she? What do you mean? It was just shocking.
It was the hardest person to even wrap your head around that could be involved. What did your dad say when he heard Katie was being looked at as a suspect? He didn't believe it.
But detectives were convinced. Were you confident you had the killer? Oh, absolutely.
We had the right person. Everything we had, we had the right person, though.
Katie Conley was charged with second-degree murder. Ladies and gentlemen, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
Vengeance, thy name is Caitlin Conley. I've had that really make you feel like you're pulling up a chair at an intimate dinner

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So you can obviously come to the fence. I can come to the fence.
When we met her, Katie Conley had been living under house arrest for several months, confined to her parents' farm, tethered to an

ankle monitor. So your home has kind of become your own prison in a way.
Yes. Katie's lawyer wouldn't let her answer our questions about the evidence in the case.
No. No? Okay.
But she did tell us how much she missed Mary Yoder, her boss and friend. Would you ever have any reason to do anything to marry.
No.

No reason ever.

We never and friend. Would you ever have any reason to do anything to Mary? No.
No reason ever.

We never had so much as a crossword with each other. Did you poison Mary Yoder? No.
At times, Katie seemed overwhelmed by the upcoming trial. I'm sorry.
Okay.

Do you want to?

Yeah, you're okay.

Is it, is your anxiety a bit? I'm sorry. You want to? You can get up.

Yeah, you're okay.

You're okay.

Is it, um, is it, is your anxiety about just what's coming? It's hard to know that I'm innocent and still feel like people want me to be guilty. You do feel that way? I feel like people aren't waiting for facts to come out, and they're ready to believe whatever they're told.
Oneida County Assistant DA Lori Lisi was confident that the facts would speak for themselves. We knew it was a circumstantial case, which means it's always an uphill battle,

but we felt like we could connect all the dots.

The evidence will show that Caitlin Conley...

Lisey told the jury she had overwhelming evidence

that would prove Katie poisoned Mary,

starting with the timeline.

One by one, Mary's patients from her last day in the office

took the stand.

Was Dr. Mary appearing to be ill last day in the office took the stand.

Those who had appointments with Mary before lunch said she was her usual vibrant self.

But her patients in the afternoon... All the patients had agreed that Katie was the only other person at work that day, so the prosecutor suggested she was the only one with the opportunity to poison Mary.
And the toxicologist had estimated Mary was poisoned around noon. And that brings you right at lunchtime, which is when Caitlin Conley would have had the opportunity.
The office doors were locked. There were no patients there.
I think she coded like six or seven times. Bill Yoder, Mary's husband of 38 years, told the jury about Mary's agonizing last hours in the hospital.
She had a huge tube down her throat, tubes everywhere. She just looked absolutely terrified.
The prosecutor wanted to quash any lingering rumors that it was Bill who killed Mary. So immediately after your wife passed away, what did you do? I remember walking out of the hospital door into the sunlight.
And the next memory I have after that was, I was sitting on my bed in the dark, just crying and crying. It hurt so much.
Liana testified for the prosecution that he was a broken man after her mother's death. I couldn't tell you the last time I ever saw my father cry.
But since then, every day, pretty much saw him cry. The prosecutor said it couldn't have been Bill.
There was so much evidence Katie bought the poison. She was the one who searched for colchicine on her phone.
And both Katie's work computer and work typewriter had been forensically linked to the order. Imagine that.
You're purchasing colchicine to kill your employer. And you're doing it while you're at work.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is cold. It was for one gram of colchicine, is that correct? Yes.
And this witness, a sales rep for the company that supplied the colchicine, said she spoke on the phone with someone at the Yoder's practice. Can you describe that individual's voice? It was a female's voice.
It was soft. It was a soft, sweet voice.
You sound old or young? Young. Soft, sweet, young.
Who else could that be, asked the prosecutor. But perhaps the most damning evidence was something Katie told detectives.
The colchicine was purchased with prepaid credit cards. And in Katie's police interview, she admitted to buying those cards.
You purchased those credit cards, didn't you? Yes, yes. If you purchased them, you're involved in this.
But the question hanging over the courtroom was, why? Maybe the email account used to order the poison offered a clue. Mr.
Adam Yoder 1990 at gmail.com. The name of her ex-boyfriend.
Caitlin Conley wanted Adam Yoder back. And I submit to you, she poisoned Adam Yoder's mother, her boss, in hopes of bringing Adam Yoder back to her.
Your own people call Adam Yoder. Adam testified he and Katie were broken up, but stayed friends in the year before his mother's murder.
He called Katie on his way to the hospital when his mother got sick. And why did you call Katie? Because I was panicking and Katie knew my mother.
The prosecution said if Katie's plan was to woo Adam back, it worked.

After his mother passed away, he and Katie got back together.

Did you have sexual relations with Caitlin Connelly on July 25, 2015?

I did.

Was she helping you through your grief?

Yes.

But the relationship collapsed a couple of months later.

And the prosecutor said that's when Katie came up with a new plan. Frame Adam for the killing.
Because, ladies and gentlemen, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Vengeance, thy name is Caitlin Conley.
The prosecutor said Katie planted the bottle of colchicine in Adam's car, then tipped off authorities, something she denied in her interview. So if we say, did you place this under Adam's seat, your answer to that is going to be what? No.
A forensic scientist testified Adam's DNA was not on the bottle's wrapper. Katie's was.
The major contributor, the cardboard wrapper, matched the DNA profile from Caitlin Conley. Her ultimate revenge was not only to take away his mother, but to make it look like he was the one responsible for it.
Mary's daughters thought the evidence against Katie was convincing. Do you believe Katie Conley killed your mother? Absolutely.

Yes.

There is no doubt.

But Katie's defense said they were wrong.

Far from being a criminal mastermind, it was Katie who had been framed.

What's going through your mind when you learn of this relationship?

Unbelievable. On day 11 of Katie Conley's trial, the defense began its case.
Rooting for her were some unlikely supporters. She's on trial for murdering your sister, and you're standing behind the defendant.
The defense, I know. It is a very unusual situation.
Right, but we just felt like this is the last thing our sister would have wanted. But there was another one of Mary's sisters who wasn't sitting on the defense's side.
A sister they didn't talk to anymore. Her name is Kathy.
And it turns out she is the woman Bill started dating so quickly after Mary's death. What's going through your mind when you learn of this relationship? Unbelievable.
Yeah. I mean, that's when we really started thinking seriously that Bill did it.
You will find motive through the testimony

on the part of William Yoder.

In court, Katie's attorney, Christopher Pelley,

told the jury that Mary's killer wasn't Katie.

It was Bill.

He really is the only person that I can,

in good heart and faith, say had motive to actually kill his wife. According to the defense, Bill was no grieving widower.
Do you remember the first time that you had sexual relations with Kathy Richmond? I don't remember the date, no. I wasn't keeping the journal.
Bill said the romance with Kathy started after Mary died. Kathy told the jury the same thing.
The romantic relationship began sometime in September, late September, mid-September. But this woman, one of Kathy's neighbors, told a different story.
She said she'd seen the two kissing on Kathy's porch a couple of weeks before Mary's death. Bill was holding Kathy, and he was kissing her and looking in her eyes, and it was very intense.
The defense said not only did Bill have a new relationship, he just received a big pile of money, too.

I have to ask you how much you inherited in total from your father's estate?

About $400,000.

Mary had been the primary breadwinner for quite a long time.

He'd gotten an inheritance. Now he no longer needed Mary.

So if Bill had motive, did he also have opportunity?

Bill denied he was in the office the day Mary got sick. Remember, her patients hadn't seen him.
But Katie's defense said that didn't mean he wasn't there. This witness used to work with Bill at the office.
Do you remember specifically ever being told, I don't want anybody to know that I'm here? Sometimes he might say, you know, don't tell the patient I'm here because they might want to see me. The defense also suggested Bill had a second opportunity to harm his wife when he was by her side at the hospital.
Toxicologist Gina Maroffa told the jury she couldn't rule out the possibility that Mary got a second dose of poison. If there was a second dose, then there's no possibility, no possibility that Caitlin could have been involved because she didn't have access to Mary at that particular time.
Did you feel that this case was just swimming in reasonable doubt? I felt like I was drowning in it. Katie's DNA may have been found on the colchicine bottle, but the defense said she handled all the deliveries to the practice.
As for the sales rep who who said she'd talk to a woman with a sweet young voice? Dr. Mary Yoder is rather soft-spoken and young-sounding and very vibrant herself.
And think about this, the defense attorney told the jury. Bill had access to Katie's work computer and office typewriter.
If Bill were to frame Katie, you believe it wouldn't be all that hard.

No, I mean, Katie worked at the office.

He would have been able to control

these very important circumstances

that led to her being charged.

Bill told us he did not poison Mary and had nothing to do with her death. He served as a witness at Katie's grand jury hearing, and in New York State, all grand jury witnesses are given automatic immunity from prosecution.
No matter what happens, is he protected? For life, forever. But what about those searches for colchicine on Katie's phone? How do you get around that? She's looking up this very rare drug that I had never heard of until I started working on this story.
The prosecution couldn't say that Katie searched this particular term prior to Mary's death. It appeared that it was afterwards.
The defense said the idea that Katie killed Mary to get back together with Adam was absurd. According to her sisters, she was the one who initially dumped him.
Finally, she just had enough. She didn't want to be with him anymore.
As for the anonymous letter pointing the finger at Adam, the defense never explained why Katie wrote it if Bill was the real killer. But he wanted the jury to see the lengths Katie had gone to help the investigation, enduring hours of intense questioning.
You wanted the jury to know how cooperative Katie was with the authorities. Yes, I did.
She had the opportunity on, I believe, seven different occasions to say, you know, I think I want an attorney. But instead, she continued to cooperate and be subjected to some pretty severe interrogation tactics.
Then if you didn't do it, you knew who did it? I don't know. I wouldn't risk my life for this.
Her attorney said detectives lied to Katie, falsely claiming to have footage of her at the store buying those prepaid credit cards, the ones used to purchase the colchicine. They sent us two DVDs from the dates and times those were purchased.
Who is not on these DVDs? That's not Adam. Who purchases the prepaid cards? I don't know.
You got them. You purchased those credit cards, didn't you? Yes, yes.

That's why the defense said the jury should ignore anything Katie said during that interview.

Do you think that your daughter, your 23-year-old, could give an accurate statement under those conditions?

I think not.

Detectives say their techniques were by the book.

But Mary's sister Sharon couldn't believe what Katie went through. At that point, I wish that I had never called for an investigation.
Sharon was more convinced than ever that Katie was innocent and Bill guilty. She said as much in open court.
It is still my theory that he killed my sister. What if you're wrong? What if she really did do this? Have you thought about that? We just...

Every once in a while, and it's just so not true. We have tried to wrap our heads around it a thousand ways to see if there's any way possible that we think she could have done this.
And it just doesn't make sense. We don't believe she did this.
But what would the jury think? Hey, everybody, it's Rob Lowe here. If you haven't heard, I have a podcast that's called Literally with Rob Lowe.
And basically, it's conversations I've had that really make you feel like you're pulling up a chair at an intimate dinner between myself and people that I admire, like Aaron Sorkin or Tiffany Haddish, Demi Moore, Chris Pratt, Michael J. Fox.
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It was up to a jury to decide if Katie Conley was Mary's killer. In the courthouse, Mary's divided family waited, her husband and children on one side, three of her sisters on the other, still in Katie's corner.
Janine and I both have daughters in their 20s. We were totally terrified for her.
Thank you. But defense attorney Chris Pelley was confident Katie would be acquitted.
I actually thought that after I gave my closing that we'd have a verdict in 15 or 20 minutes of not guilty. What was it like waiting for the verdict? Oh, well, the first 20 minutes were okay, but then it went on for day one and day two.
Two days became three. What were they talking about in there? The detective hoped the jury would see past the pretty, put-together young woman in court.
Was Katie really what she seemed? Katie, I believe, has another side to her other than this side that everybody sees from her that she presents to everybody. If this is true, this is a diabolical side.
Yes, an evil side. Mary's daughters agree.
There was another side of Katie that we had not known was there. The jury deliberated all through day four.
And on day five, they passed a note to the judge. This will be a home jury.

There was no verdict.

The crowd went silent.

Mary's daughters were devastated.

They'd hoped that a guilty verdict would be justice for their mother

and also vindicate their father.

It was just one malicious attack after another.

My dad had never attacked anyone in his life.

He was just a broken 70-year-old man that was barely functioning. Now they prepared to sit through it all again.
There was no hesitation. We were going back.
We were retrying the case. We needed to get justice for this family and for this woman.
Five months later, everyone filed back into the Oneida County Courthouse for trial number two. All rise.
The prosecutor's case was virtually the same. The evidence will show that all roads lead to Caitlin Conley.
But Katie had a new defense attorney and a new twist to her strategy. He said, yes, Katie was innocent.
And yes, Katie was framed. But this time, her lawyer was pointing the finger not at Bill, but at someone else.
Ladies and gentlemen, it was Adam. It was Adam.
Adam, Mary's son. Defense attorney Frank Palaceli argued that the crime happened just the way Katie described in that letter.
He put the colchicine in her supplements when he was over there, either Mother's Day or Father's Day, when he had a falling out. As for how Katie's digital fingerprints ended up on everything related to the colchicine transaction? Katie's attorney suggested that could easily have been Adam.

How do you know, first of all,

that she was the one that was researching the poison

since Adam had total control of all of her electronic equipment

any time he wanted it?

A key witness this time was Adam's cousin and former roommate, David King.

In the years since Mary's death, David had come to doubt Adam and defend Katie. Do you believe Katie had anything to do with the murder of Mary Yoder? No, not at all.
On the stand, David told the jury Adam was no novice with computers. You're familiar with Adam's expertise in computers.
I helped him build a computer in the past. He was going to school for computer science.
Katie's attorney said Adam could have hacked her devices, or maybe he didn't need to. David testified he saw Adam with Katie's laptop.
And how do you know he had her laptop? I had asked him about it since it was in a flowery laptop sleeve, and it had a picture of a Victorian background that just didn't suit Adam's character. So I asked him about it.
He said it was Katie's. And the defense said Adam had access to Katie's work computer too.
David testified that years earlier, he and Adam used to drop by the office when no one else was there. I had helped Adam clean the office a number of times.
Don't think that Adam didn't have full reign of that office, ladies and gentlemen. He came and went as he pleased any time he wanted to, okay? And the defense said there was something else, something important.
Remember in her interview with detectives how fearful Katie said she was of Adam? You can't protect me. We'll protect you from what, Adam? Yeah.
Katie's attorney said there was a good reason for Katie to be afraid. He beat her, he hit her, he raped her, he used her.
Why wouldn't she be scared of him? A year before Mary's death, Katie filed a police report accusing Adam of rape. The defense read a text message Katie wrote to Adam.
You grabbed my right wrist and said you'd snap my wrist and break every one of my fingers. I'm going to kill you.
I'm going to kill you, Katie. The way you said it, the way you looked at me, and then I was afraid.
Adam denied the allegation and Katie dropped the complaint. But the defense hoped the jury would see Katie as a victim, not as a killer.
There's no motive in this case. She loved Mary Yoder.
And there's nothing in this case to indicate that her actions were anything other than loving Mary Yoder. The people call Adam Yoder to the stand.
Adam Yoder had given his side of the story to detectives early on. What would he say now? Did you ever cause

colchicine in any way, accidentally or intentionally, to be ingested by your mother?

At the first trial, the defense said Katie had been framed by Mary's husband, Bill. But at trial number two, the alternate suspect right from the start was Mary's son.
Ladies and gentlemen, it was Adam. It was Adam.
Did it feel like your brother was on trial? Oh, yes. Absolutely.
And it just was one allegation after another. Now, in court, Adam took the stand to respond to the defense firsthand.
Good morning. Good morning.
Adam told the jury he did not plant evidence on Katie's computers or phone. A prosecution computer expert said Katie's devices had never been hacked.
And Adam told the jury he was hardly the hacker Katie's side portrayed. Do you have hacking skills? Are you able to break into systems? No, I do not.
No, I am not. To the defense's claim that Adam physically abused Katie, he did admit to one incident.
I snapped, and I slapped her a few times. I regretted it immediately.
I left the house. But as for the alleged rape, no charges were ever filed against Adam.
And he told the jury he had zero memory of the night it supposedly happened. He'd been drinking heavily.
So was this essentially a blackout period? Yes, it was. He said the next morning, things seemed fine between them.
It wasn't until about three months later that Katie accused him in that text message. I was in shock.
I didn't know how to react. I was panicking.
Ultimately, I had drank enough to black out that night, so I couldn't defend myself. I didn't have a version of the story to say to her in response.
As Adam testified, an accusation against Katie emerged. Adam suggested Katie might have poisoned him too.
A couple of months before his mother's death, he said Katie handed him a bottle of supplements to help him get through final exams. She told me it's to help basically focus, boost memory.

She said, make sure I take it consecutively and consistently because it works better over time.

After taking the pills, Adam said he had to go to the ER with symptoms similar to his mother's.

The vomiting and the pain.

I started experiencing severe abdomen pain and eventually severe back pain as well. Do you believe that Katie gave him something that made him sick? Absolutely.
The prosecution's suggestion was clear. Maybe Katie tried out the colchicine on Adam first.
I asked her if she had poisoned me in a joking way. And what did she say? Said no, she would never hurt me.
Katie's defense said she had nothing to do with Adam's illness, and a lab test on the remaining supplements found no contamination. In fact, the defense had been the one to bring up Adam's illness in court, suggesting that he made himself sick, handling colchicine he'd bought for the murder.
Ten days later, at April 21st, he gets sick with the same symptoms of colchicine poisoning that Mary got sick with. Like his father, Adam also testified before the grand jury and received full immunity from prosecution.
He was also cleared by authorities. Did you ever cause colchicine in any way, accidentally or intentionally, to be ingested by your mother?

No. And there was one last discovery that pointed away from Adam.
The state's computer experts had gotten their hands on a digital backup of Katie's phone. In the files, they found evidence of more incriminating searches they said were done several weeks before the colchicine was ordered.
Before she actually honed in on colchicine, she looked at arsenic.

She looked at arsenic, she looked at thallium, she looked at cyanide. I submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, that the evidence is clear and that the common denominator is this defendant, Caitlin Conley.
Katie's defense disputed the timing of those searches and said there was no way to prove she was the one who did them. After both sides rested, Katie's fate was once again in the hands of a jury.
It's inconceivable. No one can ever say that this is what she did.
This is not her. She's the same nice, nurturing, helping person that she was and always has been.
The charge was second-degree murder. But this time around, the judge allowed the jury to consider a lesser charge of manslaughter.
To convict, the jury would only have to find that Katie intended to hurt Mary, not kill her. A day passed without word.
On day two, the judge received a note. The note reads, on jury.
It was looking like another mistrial. We almost got to the point where we were like, is this all ever going to be worth it? The judge encouraged the jury to keep trying.
I urge that each of you make every possible effort. And just two hours later...
The record will reflect that the jury has reentered the courtroom indicating that they have reached a verdict. First, the most serious charge.
Murder in the second degree. How do you find the defendant? Guilty or not guilty? Not guilty.
Not guilty of second degree murder. As for manslaughter? Guilty or not guilty? Guilty.
As Katie absorbed the news, her mom ran out of the courtroom in tears. Katie tried to reassure her family, but her sisters were distraught.
Katie was sentenced to 23 years in prison. Was justice done with the guilty verdict? There's an accountability.
Yes, she did not get away with it. But that wasn't the end of it.
Not at all. I get a text message on my phone that says,

News Alert.

All rise.

This tournament on Ida County Court is now in session.

There's always more to the story.

To go behind the scenes of tonight's episode,

listen to our Talking Dateline series

with Andrea and Josh, available Wednesday. Katie Conley was in New York's Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, serving 23 years for poisoning Mary Yoder.
Journalist and radio host Rocco Leduca followed both trials and says not everyone agreed Katie belonged there. In the small community where Caitlin lived, there's signs that said free Caitlin Conley.
Caitlin Conley's innocent. Among those calling for her release, three of Mary's own sisters still on her side.
There'll be an appeal and we'll be involved in that and, you know, do whatever we can. So you're going to keep fighting for Katie? Yes.
Definitely. Katie did file an appeal, but lost.
That's when she reached out to attorney Melissa Swartz, a specialist in post-conviction motions. So what's actually really fascinating about this case is Katie's extremely bright.
Katie had a job in the prison law library. And through that position, she just worked tirelessly on her case.
And she said, listen, I'm really focused on this issue regarding the search warrant for my phone. A quick look at the warrant, and Melissa saw red flags.
What was the problem that you could see and Katie could see with the search warrant? I mean, just the warrant on its face is probably the most insufficient, facially insufficient warrant that I've ever came across. They believed that that was a warrant to take her phone and look in it.
But what it needs to be is two separate warrants, one to take her phone, and then one to actually search the contents of her phone. And the warrant needs to say what they're looking for, what crime they think it's going to help them establish in the time frame.
The warrant didn't include any of that. Melissa agreed to represent Katie and began digging into what happened at both of her trials.
I thought it was strange that in this really extremely rare poisoning case that neither attorney that represented her at the two trials would have hired a toxicologist to at least consult with on that type of poisoning. The state's toxicologist told the jury that Mary was poisoned around noon, leaving Katie, the office manager, the most viable suspect.
Melissa hired her own toxicologist, who believed that Mary could have been poisoned up to 16 hours earlier. That significantly expanded the potential time frame where Mary Yoder could have been poisoned.
And because it expanded the time frame, it expanded the other potential people that could be responsible for the poisoning. She identified another mistake she says Katie's defense made, bringing up Adam Yoder's alleged poisoning.
Remember, Katie's second lawyer wanted the jury to think Adam accidentally poisoned himself with colchicine. His defense was that Adam Yoder committed the crime.
So he wanted to get the poison in Adam Yoder's hands. And then, of course, the prosecution runs with this.
This is Katie poisoning Adam.

Correct. It blew my mind that that was a strategy.

This defense that the attorney was launching just backfired spectacularly.

Brutally backfired.

Melissa says it added up to ineffective assistance of counsel. And in 2022, she filed what's called a 440 motion.
It kind of is like this last recourse in order for a court to scrutinize your criminal case. 440s are extremely challenging to win.
The trial judge reviewed the motion and granted a hearing.

On the stand, Katie's first lawyer, Christopher Pelley,

admitted he made a mistake by not challenging the search warrant for Katie's phone. Why not? I didn't see it as an issue.
As in you didn't identify it or you don't think it's an overbrown?

I didn't at the time.

I see it as an issue.

I didn't recognize it.

I failed to recognize it.

Her second trial lawyer didn't challenge it either.

How important is that cell phone evidence in all of this?

The cell phone evidence in and of itself was extremely important. They said that she had searched Colchicine on her cell phone.
They questioned her. They interviewed her using information they found in her cell phone to derive statements from her.
In the end, the motion was denied. But that wasn't the end of this.
Correct. I would say about two to five percent of criminal defendants get permission to appeal from the denial of a 440.
And Melissa succeeded. In December 2024, she argued Katie's case in front of the New York State Appellate Court.
Caitlin Conley has this right to the effect of assistance of counsel. Just a month later.
The appellate division ruled in Katie's favor, granted her a new trial, and ultimately dismissed the indictment against her. I think I screamed.
I ran around my office telling everybody that we had won. All rise.
This terminal of the Narder County Court is now in session. Days later, a judge ordered Katie's release.
Once a defendant's conviction has been reversed and the indictment dismissed, the appropriate remedy is discharged from custody. It's kindly released.
Court's adjourned. All right.
You could see tears were dripping down Caitlin's face and you could just see the father just reached over and said, come here and give me a hug. And they kissed and hugged, and then she hugged all the other family members,

her mother and one of her sisters.

On February 5th, after seven years behind bars, Katie Conley was released from prison.

Did she do anything special after getting out?

Did she go anywhere on the drive home? I asked her, where are you going to eat?

And she said, well, I got a McDonald's milkshake. The current district attorney could refile charges

and try Katie again. He told Dateline he's reviewing the case.
The ruling from the appellate

court says you can't use anything on Caitlin Conley's cell phone. You take the cell phone out,

what's left? Is it bare bones? Is there still meat out there that they can lock onto? Or is this totally going to make it very, very hard to argue that Caitlin Connolly did this again? Whatever the DA decides, Katie's release is not an exoneration. The decision did not say Caitlin Connolly's innocent.
It did not say the evidence was all wrong. What it said was there was a legal mistake in the trial that violated Caitlin's constitutional rights.
It still doesn't change that someone was searching for, you know, poisons on Katie's phone. What is her story on that? Is she saying that someone was using her phone? So Katie's always maintained through the first and second trials, or her lawyers did, that, you know, potentially there's other, two other suspects.
As all sides process the news of Katie's release, Mary's daughters still mourn the family they once had. So many lives shattered.
This destroyed an entire family. Yeah.
Multiple families, not just our family. It destroyed her family it It destroyed so much.
We're hoping to finally be able to go back to the good memories and not have to relive the worst one. We want to be able to actually celebrate her life.
Mary's loved ones may be divided over who killed her, but there's one thing they can agree on. It's not how Mary died that should be remembered.
It's how she lived. She was there for you no matter what, no matter when you called, no matter what you needed your mom for.
The world is not as wonderful a place as it was. Mary loved life more than anyone else I ever knew.
And she made a point of loving it. She really did.

That's all for this edition of Dateline. We're off next Friday, but we will see you again in two weeks at 9, 8 central.
And of course, I'll see you each weeknight for NBC Nightly News.

I'm Lester Holt. For all of us at NBC News, good night.
Hey friends, Ted Danson here, and I want to let you know about my new podcast. It's called Where Everybody Knows Your Name, with me, Ted Danson, and Woody Harrelson, sometimes.
Doing this podcast is a chance for me and my good bud Woody

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Plus, we're introducing each other to the friends we've met since,

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