Deadly Little Secrets Part 24

After opening the folder, Rodriguez said, "I remember this case."

Once he was alone, he began reading. He knew of the Baker case but only what he'd heard around the office, read in the newspapers, and seen on the news. So he started on page one, absorbing the crime-scene reports, a.s.sessing the photos, the inquest records, becoming familiar with the case and those involved. Once finished, Rodriguez watched videos of Hewitt PD's interview with Matt. What he saw in Baker was a nervous man. "There were tells, indications he wasn't telling the truth . . . One was that every time he lied, he closed his eyes. He wouldn't look at the person while he was lying."

That done, Rodriguez slipped Hewitt's interview with Vanessa Bulls into the DVD player. Sitting back in his chair, he knew within minutes that she, too, wasn't being truthful. "She was evading the questions, not answering, diverting the questioning. There were all kinds of red flags." What Rodriguez saw was that whenever Bulls didn't want to answer a question, she distracted Toombs. Sometimes she accomplished it by talking as she took a drink of water. At other times, she simply changed the subject. "When she didn't want to answer a question, she cried. Women do that a lot, and it worked," says Rodriguez. What did all this tell him? Based on what he saw, Rodriguez came to a conclusion: "I knew she was either involved, or she knew more than she was saying."

After he'd finished, he did as his boss had instructed, knocking on the office door of the prosecutor who'd had the Baker case for more than a year, Crawford Long.

Why was the DA's Office suddenly interested in the case? Later, Long would say that he'd never tabled the case, but it had stalled, and that it was turned over to Rodriguez in hopes that his talent for spurring confessions would break it open. Others would see it differently, wondering if John Segrest's political situation was behind the sudden interest in the case. Elections were coming up the following year, and there were rumblings that the longtime DA would have a serious opponent, a Waco lawyer. With the streets dotted with cars bearing b.u.mper stickers that read JUSTICE FOR KARI, it might have seemed only prudent to take another look at the Baker case.

No matter how he got the case, that week Rodriguez drove with Long to Dallas to talk with Dr. Reade Quinton, the pathologist who had autopsied Kari's body. What they were told was what others had heard over the years: There was no way after embalming and being in the grave for months to have an accurate toxicology finding. In a courtroom, Long still saw not having homicide on the autopsy as a major hurdle.

Yet, this time that didn't stop the investigation. Once back in Waco, Rodriguez began collecting statements from witnesses, including Bristol and Jill Hotz, who'd both talked with Kari the last week of her life. They repeated what she'd told them, that she feared that Matt was having an affair. Bristol added that Kari had told her that she feared Matt was trying to kill her.

That done, Rodriguez decided it was time to make it official. At the Dulin house, he stood on the front porch and rang the bell. Linda answered and invited him inside. "I'm here to let you know that I'm going to reinvestigate your daughter's death," he said.

Tears ran down Linda's cheeks. "Do you think you'll be able to do anything with it?"

"This case has a lot of potential," Rodriguez said. "I think I can solve it. I really do."

"I think the Lord sent you to us," Linda said. "I know you're going to do it."

The following day at the office, Rodriguez thought about what to do next. He was itching to have a discussion with Vanessa Bulls, wondering, Why is she lying if she doesn't have anything to hide? First, however, he needed to know more about the young woman at the center of the Baker case. Although at first reluctant to talk to him, Bulls's ex-husband finally agreed to answer questions for Rodriguez, laying out the details of their failed marriage and the paternity test that had proven that Lilly wasn't his. Next the investigator tracked down a few of Vanessa's friends. "What they told me was that she didn't always tell the truth," says Rodriguez. "After that, I was sure I was right about her. She was lying about how much she knew about Kari Baker's death."

The account Vanessa's friends gave Rodriguez was that she'd told them Matt had begun hitting on her in December and that he'd say things to her like he "could make her feel good." One friend also said that Bulls was seriously interested in Baker, thinking that he'd be a good father for Lilly.

That Friday, Rodriguez called the cell-phone number Bulls had given Hewitt PD. When she didn't answer, he left a message and included his cell-phone number. The following morning, an attorney called, identifying himself as representing Bulls. "Why does she need an attorney? Does she have something to hide?" Rodriguez asked.

The conversation went back and forth, and later that day a meeting was scheduled for the coming Monday. At first the attorney wanted Rodriguez to travel to his office, but the investigator insisted Bulls had to come to his office, to meet him on his own turf. "She's going to talk to me here, or she's going to talk to the grand jury," he said. After consulting his client, the attorney called back and agreed to meet at the DA's Office.

Soon after, Rodriguez was bringing Long up-to-date in his office when another a.s.sistant DA happened to walk in. For fourteen years, Susan Shafer's workweek had focused on prosecuting cases, many of them murders. "So many victims don't really have a voice," she says. "Prosecuting gave me an opportunity to fix that as much as possible." A motherly woman with shoulder-length dark brown hair and gla.s.ses, Shafer spent weekends and evenings shuttling her children to sporting events and playing bluegra.s.s music on her guitar.

As Rodriguez and Long talked, Shafer waited her turn. Listening to what Rodriguez told her boss about the Baker case, Shafer began to show interest. A few years earlier, she and Long had prosecuted the case of William Mark Gibson, another cold case. Gibson was charged with barricading his wife and her daughter in the family home, then burning the house down. "It was a difficult case to pull together, and we had to try it twice, but we finally got a conviction," she says.

Before long, Shafer volunteered to work on the Baker case with Long, an offer he gladly accepted. "It was known in the office to be a tough case, and people weren't jumping up and down offering their services," he says.

Parallels she saw between her life and Kari's spurred Shafer's interest; they had children of similar ages who went to school in the same district, and Shafer's husband, like Kari, was a teacher. Shafer even knew people who'd known Kari.

One of the first things Shafer did on the case was to consult Bennett and McNamara. The two seasoned investigators went over all they'd done on the case, Bennett turning over an inch-thick, three-ring binder of their work that he'd pulled together for Shafer. Starting out with so much information was unusual. Shafer had never been involved in a case before where a family had done so much investigation privately. "What they'd pulled together for the civil case was a help for us if we proceeded criminally. As an ex-prosecutor, Bill Johnston knew what he needed, and he'd gone out to get it," she says. "John and Mike had compiled a lot of evidence that could be helpful if we prosecuted."

It wasn't that Shafer doubted Matt Baker's guilt. After watching him on 48 Hours, Shafer formed the opinion that Baker was a liar, one who had probably murdered his wife. "I had strong feelings based on what I knew," says Shafer. "We had enough circ.u.mstantial evidence to prove it, we thought, but you hate to take a murder case before it's ready, and you get an acquittal and you've lost it forever. Crawford and I both thought that Matt had murdered Kari, but we weren't sure we could prove it."

That Monday, Bulls and her attorney showed up as scheduled at the DA's Office. Strategizing how he'd handle the interview, Rodriguez had already asked Shafer to divert Bulls's attorney to an observation room. Shafer agreed, and the two attorneys watched on a monitor as Rodriguez interrogated Bulls.

The questioning took nearly two hours, Rodriguez asking many of the same questions Hewitt PD, Bennett, and McNamara had previously asked Bulls. Rodriguez questioned Bulls repeatedly about her relations.h.i.+p with Matt Baker, and she told the same story she'd told before, that Matt was counseling her. But Rodriguez didn't believe her, and he let her know, pointing at the phone calls between them. "That's a lot of counseling," Rodriguez said, sarcastically, but Vanessa wouldn't change her story.

After watching her prior interview, Rodriguez knew what questions to push with Bulls, and did so. "Every time I trapped her, she got defensive and would say she didn't know why something happened," he says. "She just couldn't answer the tough questions, and it was obvious that she was lying."

Rodriguez asked if she and Baker had been lovers before Kari's death, but Bulls denied it, saying that he'd once tried to kiss her, "But I told him that he was married."

When it was over, Rodriguez gave Bulls a warning, something Toombs and the other officers had failed to do: "I'm going to get Matt Baker indicted and convicted, and if you don't tell the truth, you're going to go down with him. I'll be following up on what you've told me, and I will be getting back with you."

"We knew she was lying," says Shafer. "We didn't believe her."

Later, Rodriguez took a drive out to the Bulls's household and talked with Vanessa's parents. During his interview with their daughter, Rodriguez had asked where she was the night Kari died. Vanessa had said that she was at home, watching television with her mother. Cheryl Bulls backed her daughter up, not only saying Vanessa was home but also describing what they watched that night, a movie on the Lifetime network.

There was also the matter of Cheryl's Ambien prescription, one that Larry Bulls had talked with Bennett and McNamara about. When Rodriguez brought it up, Cheryl confirmed that she had the prescription and that it was filled the week before Kari's death. "You're the only ones we know who had Ambien. Could Vanessa have given it to Matt Baker?" Rodriguez asked.

"No," Cheryl insisted, saying none was missing. "That's not possible."

Still, the investigator wondered.

The investigation continued on, Rodriguez talking to many of the same people Bennett and McNamara had interviewed three years earlier, during the summer after Kari's death. Then two weeks after his interview with Bulls, Rodriguez was in San Antonio at a conference when he decided to place another phone call to Vanessa. Once he got her on the line, he mentioned that he was in the river city, close to Kerrville, letting Bulls think he was there working on the Baker case. "We need to sit down and talk about this, Vanessa," he said. Then he bluffed: "I know what you did. I know what Matt Baker did. I know you two were having a s.e.xual relations.h.i.+p. And I know you know what happened to Kari Baker. We're willing to offer you immunity if you tell us what you know."

Rodriguez waited. "Okay," Vanessa said. "When are you going to be back in Waco?"

"Monday," Rodriguez said, certain he now had her.

Yet Monday arrived, and Vanessa Bulls never showed up in his office as promised. Instead, her attorney called and said that she wouldn't be keeping the appointment. Rather than stopping the investigator, Rodriguez called Bulls and left messages. She didn't respond. He e-mailed, and she didn't reply. "You need to call," he typed. "This isn't going away."

"I want to subpoena Vanessa Bulls and make her talk to a grand jury," Rodriguez told Crawford Long.

Soon after, the investigator had what Matt Cawthon had asked for nearly two years earlier, a subpoena in his hand as he walked into the princ.i.p.al's office in the Killeen, Texas, middle school where Vanessa Bulls was teaching. He asked for her, and she was called to the office. When she saw him, her mouth gaped open with surprise.

"You're going before the grand jury," Rodriguez said, handing her the subpoena. "And you will testify truthfully to everything. I'm going to be in there with you, and I'm going to make sure that you tell the truth."

At that, Vanessa began crying. "You could have been more cordial."

"I tried that," he said. "Now you're going to talk to the grand jury, and if you don't tell the truth, you're going to be charged with perjury."

The morning of March 25, 2009, the matter of the death of Kari Baker was finally scheduled to go before a grand jury. Abdon Rodriguez got to the courthouse early, wanting Vanessa Bulls to see him. When he saw her waiting to testify, he made it a point to walk past her. "I wanted to remind her that I was there and that I was listening."

When Crawford Long and Susan Shafer arrived, Bulls's attorney informed them, "She's going to plead the Fifth," meaning that she planned to invoke her const.i.tutional right not to give incriminating evidence against herself. "But she does have information for you. We want transactional immunity."

Long balked, not willing to give Bulls the type of immunity that ensured she couldn't be tried for any crime tied to Kari Baker's death. "I didn't know what her involvement was, and I wasn't going to give her a get-out-of-jail-free card," says Long. Instead, he offered testimonial immunity, which guaranteed only that her grand jury testimony couldn't be used against her. At that, an agreement was signed.

Inside the room, the grand jurors listened as Long asked questions of Bulls, including ones about her relations.h.i.+p with Baker, stressing all the phone calls. "She admitted a certain extent of relations.h.i.+p but not boyfriend girlfriend." Bulls appeared nervous. Her eyes were red, and at times she cried, as she had with police, usually when her little girl, Lilly, was mentioned. Gradually, Long worked up to the most important question: "Did Matt Baker ever tell you anything about his wife's death?"

"He told me that he killed her to be with me," Bulls answered.

"We were all stunned," says Long. "None of us expected her to say that."

That same afternoon, the McLennan County grand jury returned an indictment on the charge of murder against Matthew Dee Baker.

John Bennett was helping a friend remodel a house when the phone rang.

"They've done it," Linda said, crying. "They've indicted Matt."

At four the following afternoon, Thursday, March 26, 2009, nearly three years after Kari's death, Matt Baker again turned himself in at the Kerr County Courthouse. On a charge of murder, based on an indictment stating that he'd drugged then suffocated his wife, the bond was set at half-a-million dollars. Two weeks later, Ellison argued successfully and had Baker's bond reduced to $250,000. The following day, Matt posted bond and was released, to await his trial.

Immediately after Bulls's grand jury testimony ended, Rodriguez told Susan Shafer he wanted another interview with the woman at the center of the Baker case. "I want the whole story," Rodriguez said. Shafer agreed, and on March 20, the investigator and his prime witness came face-to-face again, this time in her attorney's office. As the interview progressed, Bulls fluctuated, initially denying then admitting that her relations.h.i.+p with Baker had been s.e.xual, but still claiming it didn't start until after Kari's death. At Kensi's party, she said she slept on the couch while Matt slept in his bedroom. "I have information that you slept in the same bed," Rodriguez bluffed.

"Okay," she said. "We did."

"I have information that even before Kari's death, you were at his house," Rodriguez challenged, gradually pulling out more detail. To get her to talk, over and again, Rodriguez acted as if he understood Bulls, and that he sided with her, saying repeatedly that Baker had used the pretty young woman.

"Yes," she agreed.

The account that Bulls finally gave that day was that in the beginning, Matt counseled her on the telephone, until one day when he insisted they needed to continue their work at his house on Friday afternoons, while his wife and children were at school.

"If you didn't have anything to hide, why did you park in his garage and put the door down?" Rodriguez asked.

"I don't know."

In the end, Vanessa stood fast, saying she hadn't slept with the errant preacher until Kensi's birthday party.

As their time together drew to a close, Rodriguez turned off his tape recorder.

"Do you believe me now?" she asked.

"No," he said. "Because I know you all had s.e.x prior to Kari's death. Y'all were having an affair, and you had s.e.x at his house."

"Just one," she said. "One Friday only. One of those Fridays we did have s.e.x."

"Well, okay."

"Do you believe me now?"

"Well, I still believe that you provided that," Rodriguez said, referring to a more frequent s.e.xual relations.h.i.+p.

"No," she said. "I promise. I would never tell you I did that."

As the trial approached, Bulls hired a new attorney, this one a criminal defense lawyer, Russ Hunt, Sr. A bearded man with gla.s.ses, Hunt was a Baylor University law graduate and a former prosecutor. One of his first acts was to inform Shafer and Long that his client refused to have any further contact with Abdon Rodriguez. When he heard the news, the investigator laughed. He understood why. "That's fine," he said to Shafer. "But tell them I need to have one last interview with her. She's still not telling us everything."

Over Labor Day weekend 2009, that interview took place at the DA's Office in the book-lined law library, with Vanessa's attorney present. At first, Bulls appeared reluctant, saying, "You know, this is going to make me look bad. What about my job?"

"Vanessa, you could be charged with this, too," Rodriguez said. "You could be going to prison and leaving your daughter and family. Just think, you're going to be free. I don't know what's going to happen with your job. It's not going to look good for you, all the involvement you've had. But you will be free rather than behind bars."

At that, Rodriguez and Shafer left the room, so that Hunt could talk to his client. Afterward, Shafer would form the opinion that the woman at the center of the Baker case finally comprehended that the charade was over. "I think she realized that it was becoming ridiculous, that we didn't believe her," says Shafer. "We were all catching her in so many lies."

When they returned, Hunt said, "She'd like to talk to you."

"We just want the truth," Shafer said. "We don't want you to elaborate, we just want to know what really happened, what you really know."

For the next three hours, Bulls appeared to open up, telling Shafer and Rodriguez the details of how the affair began months before Kari's death. By late February and into March, she said Matt began planning how to kill his wife. As they continued their affair, Bulls said Matt discussed a variety of plans to dispose of his wife, so that he and Bulls could be together, including tampering with the brakes on Kari's car, staging a drive-by shooting, using chloroform or roofies, the date rape drug, to knock her out, then making it look like a suicide. The methods included hanging Kari or making it appear that she'd intentionally overdosed.

Nonchalantly relaying the conversations, Bulls showed no regret. Instead, she laughed, saying she'd brushed off his ideas as preposterous. In the end, Bulls said Baker focused on drugging Kari. "He talked about putting it in a milk shake," she said.

When Rodriguez pressed Bulls about where Matt got the Ambien, she said that Matt told her that he'd taken it from Kari's mother's medicine cabinet. That wouldn't have been possible since Linda didn't have a prescription for the drug, but that day in the DA's Office, Vanessa had center stage and she told her version of the events surrounding Kari's death. "Matt said he was going to type the suicide note," Bulls said. "I told him, 'You can't type it. Suicide notes are handwritten.' "

"Kari types everything, so I can do it that way," he said.

This time, the preacher's ex-mistress admitted that Matt Baker told her beforehand that he'd murder Kari that Friday night. "He had it all planned," she said.

The next morning, he called her and let her know it was done.

Yet Rodriguez still wondered if Bulls was telling them everything. "Vanessa showed no remorse, and when she talked about Kari's death, it was as if she didn't even acknowledge that a woman had died."

Then Bulls described how Baker said he'd killed Kari. After buying capsules for s.e.xual enhancement on the Net, he emptied the contents and filled the sh.e.l.l with Ambien. Kari was trying hard to keep the marriage together, and she'd been more amenable to doing what he asked. Bulls said Matt realized that, and he planned to use it to get her to take the Ambien by pretending it was a drug to stimulate their s.e.x life.

"Vanessa said that Matt and Kari were drinking the Fuzzy Navel wine coolers, and he gave her the pills," says Rodriguez. "He handcuffed her to the bed when they were having foreplay, then, of course, she pa.s.sed out with all the alcohol and Ambien, and he took a pillow and put it over her face."

Rodriguez had wondered how Kari had pieced it together, how she'd come to suspect that Matt might be having an affair and planning to take her life. Something Vanessa told him that day gave an inkling of a possibility. One day at church while Vanessa was talking to Kari, Vanessa mentioned something Matt had said to her on the telephone. As Vanessa told the story, Kari homed in on the fact that Matt was talking to the music minister's attractive, young daughter.

"Why were you talking to Matt?" Kari asked, sounding suspicious.

Rodriguez guessed that was when Kari began to suspect the affair. Then when she found the crushed pills, "I think she put it all together."

In the end, Kari's mistake was that despite everything, she still loved and believed in Matt, and she never allowed herself to make the leap from suspicion to certainty.

One area that Rodriguez didn't delve into was Ka.s.sidy. One of the accounts Bulls gave that day left a dark cloud over the infant's death. When she heard that Kari's body was being exhumed, she called Matt. He was at the cemetery, going to the grave. "Yes, her body's gone," he told her. What was so frightening was that he then ran over to see if the authorities had dug up Ka.s.sidy's grave as well. Why would he think that the police might get his daughter autopsied? What did that mean?

"We suspected he might have murdered Ka.s.sidy, too," says the investigator. "But we had no evidence."

In the days that followed that interview, Shafer thought about the woman who'd been Matt Baker's lover. In a courtroom, Bulls's testimony could be d.a.m.ning, but there were problems, the major one that Bulls had lied for so long and so often about what she knew. Would a jury believe that now she was telling the truth?

What Shafer needed was physical evidence corroborating Vanessa Bulls's testimony. One thing immediately came to Shafer's mind: Bulls said that Matt attempted to murder Kari weeks before her death by feeding her drugs in a milk shake. When Shafer looked through Matt's e-mails, ones retrieved off the WCY network, she found what she was looking for in an exchange between Kari and Matt dated March 21, 2006, the day before the seventh anniversary of Ka.s.sidy's death. "Do you want anything special tonight?" Matt wrote. "How about a chocolate shake with even MORE chocolate syrup? Just joking. :-) Love you!"

There it was, evidence that two weeks before Kari's death, Matt had fed his wife a milk shake, one Vanessa Bulls said he'd bragged about lacing with drugs.

One afternoon, Shafer called Bulls and asked another question: Had Matt Baker ever sent her any e-cards or songs? Kersh had explained to Shafer that he had batches of information off Matt's computers, but it was like being in a library filled with books without a card catalogue. What he needed were specific search terms, things he could use to find the right book/batch of information. When Shafer asked that question, Bulls was silent, then described something that had happened after the murder: "There was this song Matt sang to me, to intimidate me. "Dirty Little Secret" by the All-American Rejects."

When Shafer looked up the lyrics, she understood why Bulls saw the song as a threat. The words cautioned to keep silent. If secrets were divulged, the chorus warned that she could become "just another regret."

"Would you look for the song on his computer?" Shafer asked Kersh. "Or the lyrics, anything that ties into it?"

"Sure," Kersh said. Before long, he called back. "I found it. I found the MP3!"

As Shafer's dialogue with Bulls continued, other discoveries followed. After Bulls divulged Baker's pa.s.swords, including that he used her name, "Vanessa," Kersh searched again. This time he found an account with a Fiji travel site. Adding even more confirmation to Shafer's belief that Bulls was finally telling the truth was an e-mail sent by a booking agent, one that offered Baker congratulations on his upcoming marriage and discussed the details of a Fiji honeymoon.

"It was all checking out," says Shafer. "The little bits and pieces fit together."

As they talked, Bulls sounded embarra.s.sed that she'd ever had a relations.h.i.+p with Baker. Says Shafer, "She sounded stunned that she'd trusted him and frustrated with her own willing blindness, that she'd known he was going to kill Kari and never did anything about it." Now that Vanessa had opened up, "She really did seem to be trying to a.s.sist as much as possible."

The immunity Bulls had been granted wasn't all-inclusive, so if Shafer and Long discovered any evidence that Vanessa had been instrumental in either planning or carrying out the murder, they had the lat.i.tude to prosecute her. "The immunity only covered the grand jury," says Shafer. "And Vanessa never asked for it again. We never found any evidence that she had done anything other than know about Matt's plans."

When they talked, Long and Shafer both believed Vanessa was being honest. First, they saw no reason for her to say what she did if it weren't true since everything she'd told them made her look bad. Secondly, Bulls didn't know about the e-mails and other evidence, yet what she said dovetailed with all they had.

At times, Shafer wrestled with the fact that Vanessa knew Matt Baker was going to kill his wife and did nothing. While the prosecutor felt strongly that Bulls should have spoken up, in Shafer's a.n.a.lysis, she wasn't sure it would have changed the outcome. "I don't think anyone would have believed Vanessa," says Shafer. "Maybe Kari, but that would have taken the mistress calling the wife, and Kari had already voiced suspicions and written them off. She wasn't ready to believe her husband could kill her."