Deadly Little Secrets Part 29

In the parking lot, I left my purse with my cell phone and wallet in my trunk. All I took in was a folder with a pad of paper, my typed questions, two pens, two tape recorders, extra batteries and tapes, and my driver's license, which I turned in to be held until I left. In its place, I was given a red plastic visitor's pa.s.s to wear around my neck.

No matter how many times I've entered a jail or prison, the echoing clank of the metal doors slamming behind me always sends a cold s.h.i.+ver through me. Intellectually, I know I can leave at any time, but there's a finality about hearing the doors lock. At that moment, I've entered another world.

In the visitors' room, I sat in booth 31 and waited, my tape recorder plugged into the phone line. A thick sheet of Plexiglas separated me from the enclosure in which Matt would sit. Our appointment was for one o'clock, but the minutes pa.s.sed. He was late. "Does he know I'm here?" I asked a guard.

"Yes," I was told. She then mentioned that Matt had signed a form with the date and time of our meeting. "They're saying that he went to his cell to get cleaned up."

That was fine. I didn't mind. So I reviewed my questions and waited. About forty minutes later, metal gates swung open and shut, and there was Matt, looking dapper in his prison whites, his hair carefully combed. The guard locked the door and left us. One reason I was there, of course, was to get a feel for Matt Baker, to judge for myself, yet it took me aback when the first thing he said to me was a lie. Scoffing, he shook his head. "I'm sorry you had to wait. They never let me know when you were coming."

Rather than confront him, I began asking questions. My first was the one I always ask in this type of situation. People are, after all, unjustly convicted. We know that. In fact, just weeks before my visit, a Texas man named Anthony Graves, who'd served nineteen years for a murder he didn't commit, was finally released and reunited with his family. So I needed information from Matt. I needed to know whom I could talk with who could shed light on his innocence. I needed to know the name of anyone with any evidence that pointed to any other conclusion than that he'd murdered his wife.

When I asked, Matt shook his head, his blue eyes wide and his mouth curled into a slight smirk. At thirty-nine, his face was still round and boyish, but he had a light stubble covering his chin and cheeks. "That's hard because no one else was in the room that night," he said. "Just me and Kari."

I persisted. "Tell me the names of people I can talk to who will back up your side of any of the events surrounding Kari's death. Anyone who can substantiate what you've said, for instance, about Kari being depressed."

"Her depression is huge," he said, describing its importance in the trial. "Have the people who knew about it been manipulated to not testify correctly? I think so."

"This is important, Matt," I said. "Tell me whom I can talk to who would have information that would help your case."

He pursed his lips, as if thinking for a moment, then said, "I can't think of anyone."

"Would you consider that, write me a letter, and let me know whom to talk to?" I asked. "I want to make sure I cover all sides of the case."

He nodded, but no such letter would ever arrive.

At first, he said, his marriage to Kari was good. "We had fun together, enjoyed doing things together . . . After Ka.s.sidy's death, things really changed. Kari changed. I don't know what would have happened if Kari hadn't died," he said. "I don't know where we would have ended up. We were struggling, yes. But we loved each other. If we hadn't loved each other, we would have walked away from each other a whole lot earlier."

I'd talked to so many who described Kari as a wonderful mother, dedicated to her girls. Matt hadn't described her that way. I asked what the truth was. "My wife was very good in front of others putting on a show toward the end. Part of that show was because she was using Xanax."

Yet that, too, was a lie. Kari didn't have a prescription for Xanax. She'd asked for one the week she died, but the doctor hadn't given it to her. It was confirmed by the physician's own notes, which I'd seen in evidence. None was found in her system in the autopsy.

So much of what Matt would tell me contradicted all that had been testified to at the trial and the doc.u.ments put in evidence. Under oath, Jo Ann Bristol testified that at the visitation, he'd asked her: "Did Kari tell you that I was planning to kill her?"

"I don't know if Kari ever said that," Matt now insisted when I asked why his wife would believe that. "I don't trust Jo Ann Bristol as far as I can throw her."

Yet wasn't Bristol's statement backed up by what Kari wrote in her Bible, her plea for G.o.d to protect her?

As we talked, Matt claimed that many others had lied. His list included Kari, her family, Bristol, the police, everyone who'd testified against him. Throughout, Matt portrayed himself as the innocent victim mistreated by all around him.

We talked about all the women who'd accused him of inappropriate s.e.xual remarks and conduct, even Lora Wilson, who described an attempted s.e.xual a.s.sault. Were they all lying? "Yes," he said. "But then, some people get different impressions from things that are said. They misinterpret."

"But there are so many women making these allegations, Matt," I said. Even in the county jail shortly after his trial, two women inmates complained that Matt made an obscene gesture toward them. "Doesn't that strain your credibility that this keeps happening?"

"I can't control the credibility of what other people say," he said, his words measured. I thought that perhaps this was how he'd talked to Kari, sounding so reasonable yet taking a truly irrational stand. "You can't control what other people think. All I know is some people take things the wrong way and out of context. And some people will say things to get a response and then say you've said things wrong. That happens so often."

We continued to talk, and the conversation turned to Vanessa Bulls. He didn't dispute the time line she'd presented in court, saying that they'd become intimate months before Kari's death. But he did disagree with how it had all come about. "She approached me," he insisted, as if that were a matter of pride.

"What did she say?"

"Her comment to me was along the lines of, 'Hey, I think you're cute. Have you ever had an affair? Would you like to have one?' " he said. "I thought, well, I've never been approached like this, but it was tempting."

"So she initiated it?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, with a self-satisfied smile. "I was struggling with my marriage . . . The eternal battle takes over, and the good did not win in that."

When I asked what I should know about Vanessa, he described her as "manipulative" and "calculating." Yet about her testimony, so damaging at his trial, Matt appeared to not completely hold his ex-lover accountable, instead blaming the prosecutors, who, he claimed, had threatened Vanessa into testifying against him. "Vanessa decided she'd rather make up stories and converse with the DA rather than tell the truth."

He talked of being a preacher and feeling the calling as a young man and of his children on the morning he told them that their mother was dead. "It was tortuous. Just heartbreaking," he said. "We told them, 'Your mom isn't here anymore. She's in heaven.' It wasn't the proper time, age, all those things to give details. Just, she's not here anymore. We'll see her when we get to heaven."

How did the girls first hear that Kari committed suicide? Matt claimed that Linda told them during that Mother's Day of 2006, a month after her death. The way he described it, Linda pulled at the girls, screaming: "We know your dad's lying. We know your dad killed your mom. We know your mom did not commit suicide." Matt said the girls returned home crying, Kensi asking, "What do you mean suicide?"

"So the subject was not broached until Kensi was grabbed physically, and yelled and screamed at by the Dulin family," Matt insisted.

The problem with this account was one of his own e-mails, one he sent Linda at 1:07 the morning following that Mother's Day. It said nothing of this. Instead, he'd written that he was upset about Linda asking Kensi questions. In her response to him, Linda answered with the same account she'd later tell me, that Kensi had arrived upset, and the questioning had been a grandmother trying to determine what was wrong with her granddaughter. Linda wrote: "What I saw was a little girl going through so much pain and crying so hard. I saw her feeling pulled in two and it broke my heart for her."

Weeks after that Mother's Day, Matt had also told Cooper that Jim and Linda had never accused him of Kari's murder.

It was the Dulins, however, especially Linda, whom Matt appeared to despise the most.

"Why do you believe most people believe you're guilty of murdering Kari?" I asked.

"Because of the Dulins," he said. "Because they've spread misinformation about me."

"Why would they do that?" I asked.

"Because if I'm innocent, Kari's not perfect," he said. "If I'm not guilty, they can't think of her as a victim. Kari has become a martyr."

That afternoon in the prison, Matt Baker charged many with lying and manipulation, from the Dulins and Vanessa Bulls, to the prosecutor, the judge, the investigators, all the women who'd said he'd engaged in improper behavior. He was innocent. He was blameless. Someone else used his computer to view p.o.r.nography. Not Matt. In his version of his life, especially the years since Kari's death, Baker described himself as not unlike Job in the Bible, a righteous man subjected to trial after trial.

As in so many instances in the past, he changed much of his story as he talked. In the version he told me, he didn't balance the telephone between his shoulder and his ear as he'd said in the deposition. Instead, he now said he put the telephone down on the nightstand. Yet he maintained that he hadn't put it on speaker, so how he was talking to the 911 dispatcher seemed unclear. And when it came to Kari's position in the bed, he had an explanation for the increased lividity in her left arm; the mattress, he said, was a four-year-old pillow top, with a gully in the center. When he found her, she was lying turned slightly to her left, her arm in the mattress's indentation.

Our talk continued, and Matt at times grew, if not angry, resentful. It appeared that he was a man who was used to giving his version of the world without being questioned. When I again pressed him for the names of those who might be willing to talk to me on his behalf, his shoulders straightened, and his chin climbed, throwing his forehead back. "I respect the privacy of others," he said, piously. "I won't give out names unless people give me permission to."

"Will you ask them?"

"Yes," he told me. "I will."

Along with blaming Linda Dulin, Matt Baker blamed Guy James Gray.

"Why were you convicted?" I asked.

"Because my in-laws told lies . . . purchased the legal system," he said. "And because I had an attorney who didn't care. He honestly didn't care. In fact, he wanted me gone."

Why hadn't Matt testified? "I wanted to," he said. "I told them, put me up there." When I mentioned the stage waiting for him on an upper floor, the room with a bed, nightstand, and a 197-pound dummy, Matt scoffed. "I could have shown them how I did it. I could have dressed her, pulled her onto the floor, and done CPR. It was easy."

Since it is the only method available to me, I judge whether someone is telling the truth based on what I can verify with other sources. There was much that Matt said during our interview that I had no way of checking, but there were those things that came up that I noted on my legal pad with a star. When I returned to Houston, I worked my way down the list. First, I e-mailed an a.s.sistant medical examiner I know. During my talk with Matt, he'd described in detail pulling Kari's body off the bed: "When I moved her, bits of french fries and everything else came out of her mouth, and the smell of alcohol."

"I thought you'd said she only had one french fry that night?" I questioned, doubtful that after so many hours he'd see even a trace of the food.

"She ate like two or three French fries," he said, suddenly looking a bit uncomfortable.

My e-mail to the pathologist read: "If a healthy 31-year-old woman eats three French fries at 7:30 in the evening and throws up around midnight, will there be any visible evidence of the potatoes?"

As I suspected, she answered: "The French fries will be long gone." Making it even more doubtful, Matt had said repeatedly that Kari threw up not long after arriving home that last evening.

The other thing I could check on was Matt's home computer, the one so many from Bill Johnston to the prosecutors said that Matt had repeatedly failed to produce. Why not? After all, if he was telling the truth, there was the possibility that the note was written on the home computer during the time he was gone from the house. If that was so, it was powerful evidence. "Why didn't you give it to the police?" I asked.

"I did produce the computer," he insisted. "I took it to my attorney's office in Kerrville and gave it to him."

"Which attorney?" I asked.

"Richard Ellison," he said. "He told me he kept it in his safe. I don't know why he didn't give it to the police. I never tried to hide anything."

The next day, I called Matt's former attorney. When I asked him if he'd ever had possession of Matt Baker's home computer, Ellison said, "No. I never had it. I never saw it. He talked about bringing it in, but he never did."

At that point, I found it difficult to believe anything Matt had told me, but there was one time, when he looked reflective, and I thought maybe, just maybe we got close to the truth. Near the end of our time together, I asked what had happened between three and six on April 7, 2006, the afternoon before his wife died.

"What do you mean?" he said.

"Kari saw Todd Monsey sometime around three," I said. "She was happy. She high-fived him. She talked to her mother, and she was in a good mood. The next thing we know, she's at Kensi's swim-team practice, and she's visibly upset. Something happened, Matt. What happened?"

Matt Baker frowned and shook his head. "Well, we did have a disagreement because she didn't want to go into the Y," he said. "I said, fine. She didn't want to go, and she said, 'Well, maybe I'll just move out and move in with my mom.' I said, 'If you have to do that, fine. I'm not going to help you move out. I don't want you to move out.' "

"Why was she upset?" I asked.

For just a moment, I thought he was going to answer me. Then he shook his head again. "I don't know what the core of the issue was. She just loses it every once in a while, like a switch turned off and on."

"Had she learned about the affair with Vanessa Bulls?"

"At that point, she had never confronted me on it," he said. "She never accused me of it, not to my face. If she'd felt that way, she would have confronted me, told her mom or Jill, and she never did."

But that wasn't true. Kari had told Jill earlier that week. In the conversation in the car, she'd said, "I think Matt is having an affair."

It seemed so odd. Kari was excited that afternoon, enthused by the prospect of a new job. She was on a high. Something brought her down quickly. It was a Friday, Matt's day off, his day with Vanessa. There were so many possibilities, including that Kari left Walmart that afternoon and somewhere saw Matt and Vanessa together. Or she returned home and found something Vanessa left behind, the type of thing that would tip her off that another woman had been in the house.

Kari was upset enough that when one of the moms at swim team asked her not to divulge a secret, she'd sarcastically replied, "Everyone knows you can trust the Bakers."

Clearly, something had happened that brought home to Kari that she couldn't, perhaps especially when the Baker in question was her husband.

As the interview continued, I asked about all those lives he'd touched as a pastor, those who'd once looked at him as an emissary from G.o.d who now struggled with their faith. In Dallas, one couple he'd married had conducted an entire second wedding. "I didn't want my memories of my wedding to include Matt Baker," the bride told me.

There were others I'd talked to, those who hadn't attended a church service since the day they'd come to the conclusion that Matt had murdered Kari. "I can't," said one woman. "I think about it sometimes, but I can't walk through the door. I can't look in the eyes of another minister or pastor and believe him."

Matt appeared untroubled by the damage he'd caused. "I can probably tell you who those people are," he said with a sardonic frown, as if the people I referred to were somehow unworthy and therefore not to be considered.

In the end, the damage Matt Baker had done radiated out from that bedroom on Crested b.u.t.te where Kari's body was found, like long, thin, icy fingers, invading the lives of so many. Yet no one had been so injured as two young girls, his own daughters.

As I write these last paragraphs, in Waco, Linda and Jim Dulin are bringing their dead daughter's children into their home, hoping to do for Grace and Kensi what they can no longer do for Kari: save them from the darkness that is Matt Baker. Will the girls ever come to terms with the truth, that their father murdered their mother? Maybe not, but at least with the Dulins, away from all the manipulation, one day they'll be able to look at all the evidence and come to their own conclusions. Finally, they're free to grieve for their mother and all they have lost, to put aside the hate and sadness and reclaim their place in the world, as two girls, dearly loved, free to be young, not ensnared in a web of lies.

Amazingly, through all they've suffered, the Dulins aren't among those who have lost their faith. When I last interviewed Linda, as she got ready to welcome her granddaughters into her home, I asked her to reflect on all that had happened. She said, "This has been the most difficult journey of our lives. Parents aren't supposed to survive their children. A wife isn't supposed to be murdered by her husband. And precious granddaughters aren't supposed to have their childhoods ripped from them. But I have witnessed G.o.d's love and grace in the most incredible way during these five years. You see, love really does trump evil."

Acknowledgments.

Deadly Little Secrets took more than a year to complete. Before the writing could even begin, I attended Matt Baker's trial, then fanned out to track down and interview sources. That process alone consumed many months, requiring six trips back and forth to Waco from my Houston home, poring over doc.u.ments, long weeks filled with face-to-face meetings and, once back in my office, long days on the phone consulting sources I couldn't visit in person.

I would, therefore, like to begin by thanking those people who shared their experiences with me, those who knew Kari and Matt Baker, their families and friends, the law enforcement folks who worked on this case, everyone who talked with me. Many of you are mentioned in the book, some are not, but I'm grateful to you all. Matt's and Kari's stories are important, shedding a light on how religion can be manipulated for evil ends. Without all of you, I couldn't have told it.

Thank you to everyone at HarperCollins, especially my editor, Will Hinton, and art director Gail Dubov and designer Nadine Badalaty, who provided the wonderful cover. Thank you as well to my agent, Jane Dystel.

In addition, I'd like to acknowledge my friend Kathy L. Patrick, founder of the Pulpwood Queens, a book club phenomenon that began in the small town of Jefferson, Texas, one that has grown to become a force in the publis.h.i.+ng world. I met Kathy in her combination bookstore/beauty parlor five years ago, and she's enriched my life in more ways than I can describe through her generosity, her dynamic personality, her enthusiasm for books and literacy, and introducing me to the esteemed PQs, pa.s.sionate women who advocate for literacy and the power of the written word to change lives.

As always, thank you to my friends and family who've supported me so loyally over the years, understanding when I'm on the road for weeks at a time or locked in my office writing day after day. Please know that although I don't say it as often as I should, I love and appreciate each and every one of you.

Finally, I'd like to express my deep grat.i.tude to my readers, those of you who enjoy my books and recommend them to others. You are the most important element in the equation. Thank you.

About the Author.

KATHRYN CASEY is an award-winning journalist and author, who has written for Rolling Stone, TV Guide, Reader's Digest, Texas Monthly and many other publications. She's the author of six previous true crime books and the creator of the highly acclaimed Sarah Armstrong mystery series. Casey has appeared on Oprah, Oprah Winfrey's Oxygen, Biography, Nancy Grace, E!, truTV, Investigation Discovery, the Travel Channel, and A&E. Casey is based in Houston, where she lives with her husband and their dog, Nelson. Visit her website at www.kathryncasey.com.

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