12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 (22 page)

Already certain that Matt had never reported the pills, Linda suggested Cooper inquire with the facility’s security. “How would a youth in the WCY facility have access to a bottle of pills?” she asked in her letter. “If pills were being stashed in Matt’s briefcase, were other employees notified via e-mail or other means to be aware of such activities?”

Suspecting that the detective wouldn’t be happy to hear from her, Linda then tried to assuage his ego, telling Cooper that she appreciated his work on the case and that she knew he’d do everything possible “to ensure that the facts are uncovered so that we can know for certain what happened surrounding our daughter’s death on April 8.

“I know you are a very qualified and competent officer. I don’t mean to sound like I am telling you how to do your job in this letter. I just don’t want to leave any stone unturned. My husband said you have two daughters. I know you can empathize with what we are going through.”

When Jim dropped off the letter, Cooper assured him that the case was a priority, but Linda soon doubted the sergeant’s sincerity. “He never even contacted me to ask any questions,” she’d say later. “It was as if he’d never received it.”

Unbeknownst to Linda and Jim, three days earlier Sergeant Cooper did take some action on the case, going to Waco Center for Youth and talking with Eddie Greenfield, the director, asking about the pills in Matt’s briefcase.

“Did Matt report this to you?” Cooper asked.

“No. I have no record of any report like that,” Greenfield said.

Perhaps that information, backing up what Kari’s family had told him, might have spurred on the investigation. Yet, when Nancy checked back with Hollywood Video, the manager told her that the police still hadn’t picked up the surveillance tape. “Release it to me then,” she asked, but the manager said she couldn’t.

L
inda and Jim were in the audience at Grace’s kindergarten graduation. When Jenny arrived, she sat with them, and a short time later, Matt entered with Vanessa, pushing Lilly in a stroller. Kensi walked in but didn’t rush to Linda and Jim as she would have in the past, instead going directly to Matt on the other side of the room. When Jenny averted her eyes from Matt and Vanessa, Linda leaned over, and said, “You know?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jenny said.

“We’ll talk afterward,” Linda said, as they watched Grace queue up with the other kindergarteners in her gown and mortarboard.

Later, in the parking lot, Jenny described what she’d seen at Kensi’s birthday party, including Vanessa’s head on Matt’s lap. “I didn’t want to tell you. You had just lost your daughter,” Jenny said.

“I don’t blame you,” Linda said. “I wouldn’t have wanted to hear it.” At that, she looked up and saw the hurt in Jim’s eyes.

“Do you think Kari could have killed herself?” Linda asked.

“No.” Jenny answered. After they parted, Jenny wrote out an account of everything she remembered about Kensi’s birthday party. When she got it, Linda placed Jenny’s notes in a growing stack of paperwork she was collecting in what was becoming her personal investigation into her daughter’s death.

F
or Jim, the anger was building inside of him. He didn’t like that. He was a military man, a man who took action. Sitting back and waiting for others to do something was an untenable situation. Linda was still at times unable to believe that Matt had truly murdered Kari, but Jim knew it with his heart, which ached. He felt the guilt of a father who was unable to protect a daughter.

Looking for an outlet, Jim went to a T-shirt shop at the mall, clutching a photo of Kerry with Kensi and Grace. The following Sunday when Matt stood at the Crossroads’ pulpit, Linda and Jim sat in the front row, and Jim stared up at him, his eyes burning but a smile on his face, wearing a new T-shirt, one with the photograph of Kari with her beloved daughters front and center.

“Oh, I like your T-shirt,” Matt said sarcastically afterward.

Jim just smiled.

The church seemed to be taking up little of Matt’s attention that May. He repeatedly canceled Sunday evening services to spend time with Vanessa. He’d sold both his car and Kari’s and bought a new four-door pickup, and he took a photo of Vanessa, her blond hair falling about her shoulders, a smile on her pretty face, behind the wheel. When the church flooded in a spring deluge, Matt walked through the sanctuary and said hello to those cleaning it up but didn’t offer to help. Instead, he kept walking. He was on his way to Troy to visit Vanessa.

A
s May drew to a close, the Dulins became increasingly frustrated with Hewitt PD in general and Sergeant Cooper in particular. They continued to funnel him information as they uncovered it. Unaware of the actions he had taken, they saw no evidence that he was conducting any kind of investigation. Kay delivered information from the director of the Family Y regarding Matt’s activities while he was there, the sexual harassment of young girls that resulted in his firing. But when she checked, Kay was told that Cooper never called the woman at the Y to follow up. When Kay visited Billy Martin to ask him about exhuming the body for an autopsy, Martin said he hadn’t heard from anyone at Hewitt requesting one.

Meanwhile, Linda called experts who told her that every day an autopsy was postponed and Kari’s body lay in the grave meant more evidence was lost. Searching for help, Linda consulted with a friend who suggested she contact the Texas Rangers. Linda did and talked with a veteran ranger named Matt Cawthon.

Tall and fit, Cawthon had steel blue eyes and a studied gaze that could cut to the quick. He’d started at DPS as a trooper in 1982, fulfilling a childhood dream. Seven years later, Cawthon was promoted to criminal intelligence and from there to the state’s elite law-enforcement group, the Texas Rangers. Over the years, he’d worked on vice, homicide, theft, gambling, and corruption cases. One murder-for-hire case took him to Honduras, where he uncovered a child-pornography ring. For that, he was honored as a policeman of the year, and Janet Reno, then the attorney general, gave him an award.

On the phone, he listened quietly to Linda, not at all surprised. He’d encountered other officers and police departments over the years who’d dug their heels in once they made a decision, unwilling to reconsider when they were presented with evidence that suggested their take on a case was wrong. But the Rangers have a tradition of rarely entering a case except at the invitation of local police.

“You need to go through channels,” Cawthon said. “You need to talk to the detective in charge in Hewitt, and then you need to talk to the chief. Once you’ve done that, if they don’t help you, you can write a letter to the district attorney and ask him to request our assistance.”

Linda listened, took notes, and thanked him.

It was on May 26 that Jim and Linda arrived at Hewitt PD for yet another conference with Cooper, asking if he had done anything toward getting Kari’s body exhumed. “We don’t have any probable cause for an autopsy,” Cooper replied.

Linda couldn’t believe what she heard. Texas law allowed autopsies of any questionable death, and she believed that they’d certainly given Cooper enough evidence to find that to be true. “Isn’t the information from Kari’s therapist probable cause?” Linda asked.

“No, we need evidence for probable cause. I am not sure that we will ever be able to do an autopsy. The judge wants more,” Cooper said.

Frustrated and growing angry, Linda noticed that Cooper wasn’t taking notes. When he asked Linda where Matt banked, she’d had enough, telling the detective that she’d given him that information weeks earlier. “Are you doing any work on this case yourself, or are you waiting for me to do it all for you?” she asked. “I’m done talking to you. I want to talk to the person in charge.”

After Captain Tuck Saunders walked into the room, the discussion continued. Linda and Jim continued to prod. As they would later recount it, Cooper eventually said that he had no way of knowing what Martin would say about an autopsy since he’d never talked to the judge about one.

“I want to remain calm with you,” Linda said.

“You don’t have to. There’s nothing you can do to upset me,” Cooper responded.

“You told us you were trying to get an autopsy and the judge was resisting,” Linda said. “So, Sergeant, which one is it? Billy Martin won’t exhume my daughter’s body, or you haven’t even talked to him? Let’s get this story right.”

Furious, Cooper stalked out, leaving them alone with Saunders. In his reports, the sergeant had written that he’d talked with the justice of the peace a week earlier about the case and that Martin was the one who’d told him that they’d need evidence to dig up Kari’s body. Cooper had perhaps interpreted the conversation as the judge saying that he needed clear-cut proof of a homicide. In his report, the sergeant had discounted everything the Dulins had given them, typing:
I have no definite indication of any criminal activity
.

“We’re not going to have this. I want to talk to the chief,” Linda said, mindful of the instructions the Texas Ranger had given her. “Today.”

The meeting with Chief Barton took place just after four that afternoon, but from the beginning the Dulins sensed that the top officer in Hewitt law enforcement had no interest in what they had to say. “If you’re just here to rehash the same old stuff, you’re just wasting your time,” he said. “My men are not going to discuss this case with you.”

“I don’t want them to. But I want an autopsy,” Linda argued. “Every day that goes by, the evidence is more compromised. We just want the truth. We want to know what happened to our daughter. That’s all we’re asking.”

Growing red-faced, Barton argued vehemently that it didn’t matter how long a body was in the grave, it wouldn’t affect the accuracy of an autopsy, but Linda had done her homework, contacting forensic experts, and they’d all told her that wasn’t true. Neither one backed down. Through it all, Jim kept cool although he had to fight the urge to jump over the table and grab the chief by his collar. In the end, the Dulins’ arguments fell on deaf ears, and they walked out, shaking their heads.

Later, someone who was in the police station that day would say that after Jim and Linda left, Chief Barton stalked around the station swearing about the Dulins and their audacity at coming into his department and making demands. “It was like he was backing Cooper, no matter what,” the observer said. “He didn’t like that anyone questioned one of his men. I heard him say, ‘That bitch killed herself, and her parents are fucking crazy.’ ”

Yet something apparently did make an impression, for just days later, Sergeant Cooper decided to have a sit-down with the man they were all talking about, Matt Baker.

Chapter 32

F
ifty-two days after Kari’s death, Cooper finally asked Matt to come to Hewitt PD to give an official statement. While Kensi and Grace waited in the squad area, Cooper and Matt met in a small, wood-paneled room with two metal and brown vinyl chairs and a table pushed against a wall. A video camera ran, and Cooper sat just off camera to the right while Matt leaned back in a chair, his legs crossed. He wore a striped polo shirt and jeans, tennis shoes, and his hair was carefully combed, a new addition, a thin goatee, encircled his lips.

“I want to talk about what happened that night,” Cooper began. “We can clear all this up, as far as Linda and Jim.”

Matt nodded and quickly launched into a soliloquy of the events of April 7 of that year, the last day of Kari’s life. Much of it would be unchanged from the report he’d given on the scene. They arrived home from swimming at approximately seven fifteen, and he’d spent the evening taking care of the girls while Kari went to the master bedroom to lie down. As Matt explained it, she’d vomited twice after they arrived home. “Now, I’ve played some mind games and I wonder if she’d already taken some medicine before that time,” he said, his speech quick and unemotional.

Although he said she’d thrown up as recently as eight thirty that evening, Matt said Kari asked him to get two wine coolers out of the garage refrigerator. She was half-asleep, half-awake, in bed watching television, at ten thirty, when she asked him to fill her car up with gas and rent a movie. “She wanted to see
When a Man Loves a Woman,
” he said. “That was the movie we watched on our first date. That’s cool. We’ve done that a few times.”

In detail, he described to the sergeant how he left the house at approximately ten after eleven. This time, however, the account included details Matt hadn’t mentioned earlier, eating up more of the forty-some minutes he claimed to have been gone. First, he said he went to the corner convenience store near the house, only to find it shuttered for the night. “Hewitt closes down at eleven,” he said, and Cooper agreed.

From there, Matt said he stopped at a second gas station, one that wouldn’t take cards at the pump. When he went inside, “I found out they only sold diesel.” In this new account of his activities that night, Matt took three stops to buy gas, eventually filling up at an Exxon. That task completed, he drove north to Hollywood Video, where he bought a Diet Pepsi, Peanut M&Ms, and rented the movie.

“How long do you think you were in Hollywood Video?” Cooper asked.

“Ten minutes,” Baker said, estimating that he’d arrived at around eleven forty, and left at eleven fifty. He then drove straight home, and upon arriving found the bedroom door locked.

“I thought maybe she was trying to be romantic,” Matt said, with a shrug. But when he opened the door with a screwdriver, Kari was pale, her lips blue, and she wasn’t moving. “I thought:
That’s not good
.”

Recounting the trauma of finding his wife dead, Matt Baker shed no tears. Describing his talk with the dispatcher, Matt said he’d pulled Kari’s lifeless body off the bed and onto the floor. She’d urinated in the bed, and vomited as he moved her, and as he gave her CPR, fluid poured from her mouth and nose. “On the floor, everywhere,” he said. “When I did chest compressions, foam was coming out of her nose.”

Later, it would seem odd that Cooper didn’t ask more questions at junctures like this. The sergeant had been at the scene, and no one had noted urine or vomit on the bed or floor. When Cooper asked if Matt saw the note, he said, “It’s a whirlwind. I know there was a note . . . I know it said I’m sorry, and tell my parents I love them.”

Through it all, Matt acted as if he were still trying to piece together what drove Kari to kill herself. Although she’d told others how excited she was about the prospect of a new job, Matt said he wondered if that played into her motives. “She dreaded changing classes again,” he said. “She’s changed classes every year. I know she was playing that game of, I like junior high, but do I want to move again?”

That afternoon, when he was at the grocery store, Kari called from Walmart to say she was stopping to pick something up. He’d offered to get it for her, but she’d said she wanted to. “I bet she was getting the pills,” he told Cooper.

Since his wife’s death, Matt claimed that he’d “played a mind game” with those events, and that he’d talked with Kari’s friends. “If we’d pieced it all together . . . things she said to me . . . we might have thought she might have been at a point . . . You know what I’m saying?”

“Explain to me what was said,” Cooper suggested.

Matt then went into greater detail, this time talking about what he described as Kari’s nature. As he often did, he put it in his daughters’ mouths instead of his own. “My oldest daughter said this recently, that Kari would blow up over nothing. It could be if there wasn’t a cold Diet Pepsi in the refrigerator, and it’s a heated battle.”

Sounding like the victim, Matt shrugged and said, “I loved Kari, don’t get me wrong, but that’s just who she was.”

As an example, he said that two weeks prior to her death, Kari hadn’t wanted to go to Kensi’s swimming team practice. Matt said he told her he’d take the girls. “Well, maybe you’d all be better off if I wasn’t here,” he quoted Kari as saying. “I asked her what she meant, and she said that maybe she’d just move out and move in with her mom and let me have the girls.”

That last anniversary of Kassidy’s death was a “real down time” for Kari. Yet when her doctor wrote her a prescription for an antidepressant, Kari was furious. “She didn’t want to be labeled depressed,” Matt told Cooper. “I don’t know if she thought sickos are labeled depressed, but she fought not to be labeled depressed.”

On the way home, Matt said Kari fell apart, screaming at him in the car, grabbing the door handle and attempting to open it. In this version, unlike what Kari had described to others, Matt contended that she’d tried to jump out of the car on the freeway. Yet if that were true, wasn’t it reasonable to pull off the road and park? Instead, he claimed he drove around holding on to Kari while he “circled blocks.”

“It was just a weird week, odd behavior,” he said. “I knew she was depressed.”

As the interview continued, Matt talked of the e-mails Kari had sent, including the one in which she said she’d suddenly realized Kassidy would never come back. “I don’t know what she thought,” Matt said. “That one day Kassidy was just going to walk in the door?”

As proof of his wife’s depression, her desire to die and be with their daughter, Matt told Cooper about the notations in Kari’s Bible. Most were years old, yet Matt said he had looked at them, and thought, “Wow. Should I have reached out to her before this?”

When it came to Linda and Jim, Matt sounded magnanimous. “I know they’re grieving differently than I am. They lost a daughter. Our girls are grieving differently. They lost a mother,” he said. “We’re all in this weird grieving state. Some not-so-good things have been said back and forth, and a lot of it is anger that Kari’s not here anymore . . . It’s just been an interesting time.”

Perhaps Matt knew that Linda had questioned whether Kari could die so quickly from an overdose of a sleeping aid. “This is my thing,” he said, as if confiding in Cooper. Repeating what he’d told Kari’s doctor the week after her death, Matt said, “I don’t think the medicine is what killed Kari. I think she threw up into her mouth, and it choked her.”

Cooper didn’t comment but asked Matt more questions about the time line the night of Kari’s death, particularly about Kari having been naked when Matt found her body. Why would she undress? Matt’s theory was that perhaps she’d felt trapped, as she had in the car when she attempted to open the door. Suddenly, he added another detail to his account, one that suggested Kari’s disrobing was part of a pattern—as she’d tried to jump from the moving car, Matt said that she’d tugged at her shirt, as if trying to pull it off. So how was it that Kari was wearing panties and a T-shirt when the first EMT arrived? “I put her panties on while in the bed and I’m getting her on the floor, then I put her shirt on.”

All this, he said, was while he held the phone to his ear and talked to the dispatcher. In those brief four-plus minutes, Matt claimed to have dressed Kari’s lifeless body, pulled it off the bed, and administered CPR. Was that possible? Could anyone have done that while continuing to talk to the dispatcher?

Yet Cooper didn’t bring up the logical questions about Matt’s account. Perhaps he was waiting, wanting to make sure Matt kept talking. When Cooper asked about the pills Kari found in his briefcase, Matt again changed his story. In contrast to what he’d told Linda, he now claimed that he’d never seen the pills in his briefcase, and, in his opinion, the likeliest scenario was that the pills weren’t his but Kari’s. “I told Kari to go have them tested,” he said.

“You told her that?” Cooper repeated. Bristol had said that Kari had wanted to have them tested, but Matt had disposed of them.

“I told her that,” he insisted. “But she washed them down the sink.”

“Did you tell her that someone else put them in there, one of the kids?”

“One of my things I said, that if it is from my work, that’s what it would be,” he said, gesturing palms open. “I know there are kids who hide things. If you want me to, I’ll talk to security, but she said no, no, no, and that’s when she washed them down the sink.”

“Did you tell anyone at work about them?” Cooper asked. Since he’d already talked to Greenfield at WCY, the sergeant knew Matt hadn’t reported any pills.

“No. I truly didn’t believe it was from the kids at work,” he said.

At nearly every juncture, there were differences from what Matt had said in the past, from what he’d told Linda, and from what Kari had told Bristol.

“Who is Vanessa Bulls to you?” Cooper asked.

“A good friend of mine now,” Matt shrugged. “We knew her before. Her mom and dad were members at Crossroads. Her dad was the music minister.” As Matt told it, Vanessa and Kari were friends, and he and Kari were concerned about Vanessa’s messy divorce and that she’d been left with a small child. After her parents left the church, Vanessa came to Sunday evening services three or four times. Then, after Kari died, Matt contacted the Bulls. Why? Matt said only to ask what it was like having Vanessa and Lilly live in their home because he was considering moving in with the Dulins.

“I wanted to know how they handled it,” he said. “Since then it has grown into a friendship. I know my in-laws don’t like that. I guess they think I’m moving on too quickly . . . She makes my girls happy, and that’s my number one concern right now.”

When Cooper asked about Matt’s relationship with Linda and Jim, Matt said, “It’s frayed. They’ve attacked me for everything and nothing.”

Then Matt talked about Mother’s Day, repeating his charge that Linda grabbed Kensi’s arm, this time expanding it to claim that she’d held Kensi’s arms so tightly that it had left a mark. “The Dulins think I’m trying to keep the kids away from them,” he said. “Even though we’ve been there more in the last month than we were there the six months preceding it . . . Linda is a very controlling person.”

As he had earlier, Matt then relayed what he said his girls had told him about the house on Crested Butte. “Kensi has said to me that she wants out of that house so bad. It’s dark. It’s dreary. It’s such a sad house,” he said. “And Grace said recently that there’s no happiness in that house.”

Did that sound like a five-year-old? Was it possible?

So many questions Cooper didn’t ask. Why didn’t he bring up the cell-phone records that proved Matt had called Vanessa well before Kari’s death? Jim had given Cooper copies, highlighting the calls. Instead, Cooper asked, “Do you think that your mother- and father-in-law think you played a part in Kari’s death?”

Matt looked indignant. “I don’t know. They’ve never said that. I’d be very hurt if they thought that. Personally, that would destroy any relationship I have with them.”

“I understand,” the sergeant agreed.

“I wouldn’t want them around if they believed that,” Matt said. “I don’t think they think I was involved.”

Leaning back against the chair, his legs still crossed, Matt had his hands folded over his chest. Kari had told Bristol about the pills. “Do you think at any time Kari might have thought you were trying to hurt her?” Cooper asked.

“I don’t know. For a while, she was paranoid,” Matt replied.

“It’s a question I had to ask,” Cooper said, apologetically.

“She never said to me that I was trying to kill her,” Matt then said.

“Do you think Kari would have said that to anyone else?”

“The only one would be Jo Ann Bristol that week,” Matt admitted. “The only thing is if she accused me of trying to do something with those pills.”

When it came to Kari’s fears that he was having an affair, Matt said she had a history of accusing him of being unfaithful even if he casually mentioned a woman. How could he be having an affair? he asked dismissively. With two jobs, he said he had no time for anything other than work.

“Okay,” Sergeant Cooper said. “I just wanted to sit down and talk to you about that night and everything. One last thing that would really put the icing on the cake, quell everything. If I asked you to, would you take a polygraph test?”

Matt nodded, yes.

“Would you have a problem with that?” Cooper asked.

Matt shook his head and mumbled, “No.” Then, after a pause, he asked, “Are you thinking I did have something to do with it?”

“I’m just looking at everything,” Cooper said. “ . . . I’m not accusing you of anything . . . the Dulins are asking questions. So I just want to clear it all up.”

“Are they accusing me of anything?” Matt asked, appearing agitated.

“No, no one is accusing you of anything,” Cooper assured him. “They’re not doing anything. I’m just clearing things up for myself. So will you take the polygraph?”

Without hesitation, Matt said, “Absolutely.”

The meeting ended, Matt agreeing to track down bank records to substantiate the exact times when he’d filled the SUV’s tank and rented the video. “I knew people would question, but I think anybody who knew Kari the last month or so knew there was something different with her,” he said. “I did see a change. I did see her act differently.”