Tamarin Yoder
Appearances
Dateline NBC
Poison Twist
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?
Dateline NBC
Poison Twist
Yep. But we didn't understand because there was nothing in their relationship that indicated that there was any trouble.
Dateline NBC
Poison Twist
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 got to look in your brother's car.
Dateline NBC
Poison Twist
You 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.
Dateline NBC
Poison Twist
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?
Dateline NBC
Poison Twist
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? Was 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.
Dateline NBC
Poison Twist
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.
Dateline NBC
Poison Twist
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.
Dateline NBC
Poison Twist
They had everybody there trying to figure out what was happening and nobody, nobody could do anything.
Dateline NBC
Poison Twist
Mary's daughters agree. There was another side of Katie that we had not known was there.
Dateline NBC
Poison Twist
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.
Dateline NBC
Poison Twist
I spoke with the medical examiner's office, and I spoke 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.
Dateline NBC
Poison Twist
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.
Dateline NBC
Poison Twist
She was there for you no matter what, no matter when you called, no matter what you needed your mom for.
Dateline NBC
Poison Twist
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 that you believed. Yeah, exactly.
Dateline NBC
Poison Twist
He's like, okay, we did get a cause of death back. It's colchicine. I said, what? She's like, do you repeat it? 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.
Dateline NBC
Poison Twist
Colchicine, one of the hallmarks of it, it stops your heart. It breaks it, and it breaks it over and over and over again.