12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 (24 page)

Chapter 35

T
hat summer, 2006, Barbara Baker traveled to Waco often. She’d say later that she was concerned about the relationship between her son and Vanessa. “I could see that this woman was attached to my son. Her hands were all over him. Physical touch.” Frowning, Barbara added, “I saw a high-school girl crush all over a young man.” Yet at the same time, Barbara insisted that nothing happened. Matt was home every night, in his own bed, alone. “I don’t remember anything but her coming over for dinner a few times.”

If his mother didn’t see signs of her son’s intentions, others certainly did. Early that summer, Matt went to the Bulls’ house and asked Larry if he could officially date his daughter. Crossroads’ former music minister replied that was Vanessa’s decision. As for Vanessa and Matt never having a date, on the very evening after Linda and Nancy met with Johnston, Bennett, and McNamara, Matt arrived at the Bulls’ household. Lilly was left with her parents, and Vanessa climbed into Matt’s new truck and left.

Meanwhile, at Crossroads, a storm brewed.

Although he’d been fired, Matt hadn’t returned the Dell laptop he’d been supplied for church business. At the time he’d been let go, he argued that it had personal files including the girls’ games on the hard drive. A deacon told Matt that the computer was church property and needed to be returned. When that didn’t happen, one of the deacons, Monty Toombs, called his son, Ben, who worked as a detective at Hewitt PD. “Matt Baker’s refusing to return the church laptop,” he said.

After substantiating that the church had a receipt for the computer to prove ownership, Toombs said, “If he’s not willing to return it, the church can file a report for theft.”

Based on that advice, the deacon called the ex-pastor again, stressing that if the laptop wasn’t returned, the church would file a formal police report. Only then did Matt turn the computer over to Toombs.

Once he had it, Monty Toombs took the laptop to Hewitt PD and turned it over to his son. Ben then took it to Waco PD and asked to have it examined for anything that could tie into Kari’s death. A week later, Waco called. “They said that they couldn’t find anything useful,” says Ben. “I returned it to the church.”

O
n June 12, Matt received a report from a home inspector on a house he was considering buying in Lorena, Texas, near Crossroads. On a corner lot with a detached garage, the price was more than $200,000, a considerable step up from the homes he’d lived in with Kari.

That afternoon, John Bennett drove to Troy and tracked down the Bulls’s house. For a few hours, he sat outside in his truck with a camera, hoping to see Vanessa and/or Matt, to substantiate that the rumors were right and that they were a couple. Neither one appeared. At the end of the afternoon, Bennett drove back to Waco.

The following day, McNamara and Bennett met with Bristol. In her cozy office, she offered them a cup of coffee and spent the next three hours talking about Kari. The woman the therapist described wasn’t one who appeared on the threshold of suicide. “She was well dressed. She was clean and taking care of herself,” Bristol said. “She was upset about her marriage, but she had plans, including a new job and finding ways to help other parents who had lost children. I asked more than once if she was suicidal, and she said, ‘No.’ ”

To both the investigators, it was easy to see that Kari’s counselor was struggling with what had happened. “It was weighing on her, very much so,” says McNamara.

When they believed they’d heard everything the therapist could tell them, McNamara and Bennett left, walking toward the parking lot. Bristol followed, talking as they walked, saying over and again, “I don’t believe Kari committed suicide.”

A
s the summer went on, two investigations unfolded, separate and unbeknownst to one another: the one mounted by Linda Dulin with Bennett and McNamara in the lead made progress; at the same time, Hewitt PD’s lukewarm investigation stumbled along.

About that time, Sergeant Cooper walked in the door at the Waco Center for Youth, following up on his interview with Matt, hoping to set up the polygraph Matt had agreed to. After Matt and Cooper talked briefly, the officer left. Afterward, Matt appeared nervous and disappeared into his office, then left the campus a short time later. Later that day, it wasn’t Matt who called Cooper but a criminal defense attorney the pastor had hired, Gerald Villarrial. If Cooper had held off on asking Baker the tough questions until he was attached to a lie detector, it had been a bad decision. “Matt won’t be talking with you anymore,” the lawyer said. “And I’ve advised him not to take a polygraph.”

Cooper might have been stymied, but Bennett and McNamara were moving on.

About that time, Bennett called Jill Hotz, hoping to hear what Kari had said the final days of her life. Since the day her friend had died, Hotz had struggled with all that had happened. She was still having days when it weighed heavily on her. Off and on, she’d called and talked to Linda, and they’d discussed the theory that maybe Kari hadn’t killed herself. After seeing the photo of Vanessa on Matt’s refrigerator, Jill had begun to feel more confident that it was true. “It made sense,” she says. “That Kari killed herself, that didn’t make sense.”

In the Hotz household, Jill was the only one who believed Matt could be a murderer. Stephen, Jill’s husband, considered Matt a friend, and he was loyal. “It was hard,” Jill said later. “We had arguments. I kept saying, ‘I know Kari didn’t kill herself,’ and Stephen would say, ‘Matt couldn’t have done it.’ ”

The Kari that Jill described to John Bennett wasn’t depressed. “Kari thought her husband was having an affair,” Jill said. “But the Kari I knew loved her girls too much to ever leave them. She was excited about the future but worried about her marriage.”

Writing up what Hotz told him, Bennett shared the information with McNamara. That evening, their investigation continued in the living room of a home not far from Spring Valley Elementary, where a group of teachers congregated. They’d all worked with Kari, seen her day after day. The gathering was a somber one as the women described Kari when she first began at the school and in the months that followed, culminating in the turmoil they saw in her life during the final months. One after another, the women recounted how anxious Kari had become about her marriage. What Bennett and McNamara heard was not that Kari was obsessed with Kassidy. While the loss of her daughter was on her mind that spring, what the teachers agreed on was that Kari seemed infinitely more concerned about Matt.

One of those in attendance was Shae, the teacher Kari had confided in. “Kari told me that she almost dropped the girls at my house and left,” she said, detailing how just days before Kari died, she’d said she feared that Matt might be trying to kill her.

As the investigators talked over what they’d discovered, things started to line up. “Not a single person we talked to thought Kari Baker committed suicide,” said McNamara. “Every person we talked to said she would not. We even heard from one woman that Kari had called suicide a cop-out.”

B
ehind the scenes, the Dulins’ lawsuit to get court-ordered visitation with their granddaughters gained steam. It was on June 16, the Friday following the investigators’ meeting with the teachers, that an agreement was reached. Under it, Linda and Jim had Kensi and Grace two Sundays and one Saturday a month. There were also weekends scheduled for summer visits, including one from July 24 to 26, while Linda’s sister Jennifer visited from Florida. As part of the decision, Matt also agreed to enroll the girls in counseling. It all appeared congenial, at least on paper, with the exception of one admonition: “There would be a mutual injunction prohibiting any party from making disparaging remarks regarding any other party or any other party’s family.”

The same afternoon that the ruling on visitation came down, Bennett and McNamara had lunch with an old friend, Texas Ranger Matt Cawthon, along with Detective Kristina Woodruff from the Waco PD. While they ate, the investigators talked about their latest endeavor. Cawthon already knew of the Baker case because he’d advised Linda on how to proceed weeks earlier. He didn’t know if there was anything beyond a family unwilling to accept suicide, but what he heard piqued his interest. Cawthon had worked with Johnston, Bennett, and McNamara often in the past, and he trusted them. “These guys are men of grit,” says Cawthon. “They see an injustice and go after it. They’re righteous in what they do. I’ve never known them to be on the wrong side.”

As he considered what the others were saying, Cawthon regretted that more hadn’t been done at the scene. If he’d been there that night, he felt certain that Kari’s body would have been autopsied and Matt thoroughly questioned. “Mistakes were made when you looked at the case,” he said. “There should have been someone there with common sense who said we’ve got a healthy young woman dead with an unsigned suicide note. We need to investigate.”

When he considered what had happened, Cawthon wondered if money had been behind the decision. “Autopsies are expensive,” he says. “Maybe there was a move to keep costs down?”

Detective Woodruff knew nothing about the case, but she listened as the others talked. After they parted, she called Bennett with an idea: “You should do a public information request on Baker with Waco PD.”

It wasn’t an unusual thing to do. In fact, such a request was standard procedure. “But Matt’s being a preacher, we hadn’t thought we’d find anything,” says Bennett. “But oh my gosh. We did.”

The paperwork that was turned over to McNamara and Bennett was the first real red flag. It contained a detective’s notes on an alleged attempted sexual assault on the Baylor campus. The frustrating thing was that while the report was public information, many of the names had been blacked out. Once they had it, the investigators worked on the documents, deciphering what was below the black marker. The name of the woman who’d called Waco PD years after the attack hoping to file charges was listed as a Laura Mueller. Yet when they accessed other records to find her, nothing came up.

Chapter 36

S
ix days after Cooper talked to Matt, June 19, the WCY campus was quiet. Most of the employees had the day off in honor of Juneteenth Day, the state holiday that commemorated the post–Civil War day when Texas slaves first heard of the Emancipation Proclamation. Only a skeleton staff was on-site at WCY that morning, and Christina Salazar was covering the switchboard when Matt walked up.

“Oh, I guess you were the one who walked past me earlier?” Salazar asked. She’d heard someone walk in but hadn’t been sure who it was.

“Yes,” Matt replied.

A conversation commenced, and Matt mentioned insurance he had on Kari through his job. Salazar replied that she doubted that it would pay since the cause of death was suicide. “You need to call HR, but usually there’s a waiting period,” she explained. “I don’t know if you’ve been here long enough.”

Matt looked disappointed, and Salazar offered her sympathies for his loss.

“Our relationship ended a long time ago,” he said, his voice flat. “I wasn’t Kari’s husband, more her counselor and her friend.” When Salazar asked about the welfare of the girls, making observations about how they’d miss their mother and all the things Kari did for them, Matt shrugged. “I’ve really been the one taking care of the girls, not Kari,” he said. “She was so depressed, she never really did anything with them. Kari was like a black cloud around the girls. The girls always felt like they had to tiptoe around her.”

Salazar then listened in disbelief as Matt said that he was giving the girls more freedom. He’d even given Kensi permission to use “the F-word,” if she wanted to. After they talked for a while, Matt retrieved a photo of Vanessa with all three of their daughters from his wallet. “We’re into each other,” he said. “The girls want a new mommy.” When he pointed at Lilly, he asked, “Doesn’t she look like me? She could be mine.” Vanessa, he said, looked so much like Kensi and Grace that she could have been their mother. “She has a year left in college, then I think we’ll get married.”

The conversation continued, and Matt launched into an account of the night Kari died. Yet there were differences from what he’d said in the past. No longer did he say Kari was awake when he left the house; instead, his dead wife had “a hard time holding her eyes open.” He also said police found the note. “It wasn’t signed,” Matt said, saying that he’d been called in to talk to police.

“You could tell when the note was typed,” Salazar offered. “If it was written on a computer, there’s a time on it. If it was while you were gone, that should answer any questions.”

“Oh, I got rid of our home computer,” he said. “Maybe Kari wrote it at work.”

“Well, they can subpoena her computer from work and your computer from your work,” Salazar explained.

Not long after, Matt excused himself and left. Later that afternoon, a security guard noticed the chaplain carrying a box through the parking lot toward his truck.

Chapter 37

I
t would turn out that Salazar was right; Matt’s insurance wouldn’t pay anything on Kari’s death. Her retirement fund money came in a few weeks later, however, and he pocketed $51,644.80. Matt also filed for social security survivors’ benefits, including stipends for each of the girls.

On June 20, Barbara e-mailed Matt about his plans to move to Kerrville, saying she’d heard of a job opening for a hospital chaplain. “In rethinking about you bringing Vanessa and Lilly,” she wrote, “I think you might make some people question your quick relationship, marriage etc. I think if you and the girls come for a little while, then they come, it would probably be more acceptable. If you and the girls stay with us, I think it will make it look more innocent . . . Do you understand what I am trying to say?”

Apparently, Vanessa’s parents were also against her plans to move to Kerrville with Matt. Barbara wrote: “You don’t need two sets of in-laws having problems with you.”

That same day, Mike McNamara questioned another of the third-grade teachers at Spring Valley Elementary. What she said was that the week after Kari’s death, she happened upon Matt and the girls at Walmart. As they talked, Matt described finding Kari’s body, saying that when the police asked if the girls were all right that night, he went into their bedrooms to check them. “If Kari did anything to my girls, I would go get her out of the ambulance,” he said. The problem was that no one saw Matt enter his daughters’ bedrooms that night. It was what the teacher said Matt had in his Walmart cart, however, that caught McNamara’s attention: a new computer, printer, and monitor.

Baker replaced the home computer,
McNamara thought.
Why?

Computers were the topic of conversation again three days later at WCY, when chaplain’s assistant Gene Boesche went into Terri Corbin’s deserted office to use the printer and discovered that her computer tower was missing. Immediately, Boesche reported the situation to Matt, his boss. The two men then inspected Corbin’s office, Matt looking around the filing cabinet and the desk. “I’ll report it,” he said.

Five days later, Matt reported the missing computer to security, and Keith Lowery, the facility’s tech expert, was notified. He, too, looked through Corbin’s office and verified that the computer was, indeed, gone. Then he went back to the system and ran a check, to see when it was last connected to the network. What he discovered was that Corbin’s computer was still being used. Investigating further, he determined that the one using Corbin’s computer was Matt Baker.

Lowery then went to Matt’s office and inspected the computer on the chaplain’s desk. A WCY sticker identified it as Matt’s, but when Lowery checked the serial number, he determined that the computer was actually the one from Terri Corbin’s old office. Apparently someone had switched the computers. The question then became: Where was Matt Baker’s computer?

To find out, Lowery searched Matt’s office, but to no avail. Matt’s computer was gone, apparently stolen. The only conclusion was that someone had taken Matt’s computer and covered up the theft by replacing it with the one from Terri Corbin’s old office, going so far as to change the WCY tags to hide the thievery. When Lowery asked Matt where his computer was, Matt said he didn’t know.

Not long after, Matt wrote a report. In it, he claimed that he’d noticed something that could explain what had happened: “I do not remember the exact date that I found my computer turned out at a different angle, but it would be approximately two weeks ago, around the time the tower might have been exchanged.” Although his office was down a locked hallway, he then suggested that volunteers and others who came on the campus had access to the offices and would have been able to make the switch, including a rabbi who’d used Matt’s office. “I do not see any other items missing from my office,” he concluded, signing it Chaplain Matt Baker.

In the weeks that followed, the campus was searched, but Matt’s CPU was never found. In hindsight, two things stood out. First, Lowery would recall how Matt had once asked him if deleted e-mails could be retrieved off a computer. They could. The other was that tracing Matt’s IP address back, Lowery discovered that the missing computer was disconnected from the WCY network at 11:37 on the morning of June 19, the holiday when Matt talked with Christina Salazar, who’d told him that his work computer could be subpoenaed. That was the same day Matt was seen walking to his truck carrying a box.

WCY’s security notified Waco PD, where a case file was opened on the missing computer.

R
umors had been stirring in Hewitt since Matt had first shown up at the school with Vanessa just two weeks after Kari’s death, but once two private investigators were looking into the case, the word spread quickly. At Crossroads, many doubted that Kari had committed suicide. After Matt’s firing, the pastor who had preceded him, Steve Sadler, returned. He was the one who’d presided over Kari’s funeral, the one who’d seen her plea for God’s protection in her Bible. Perhaps hearing the rumors convinced Sadler that the police needed to know what he’d seen.

Whatever the reason, on June 26, Sadler wrote a letter on his Baylor stationery to Ben Toombs, the Hewitt PD officer whose parents attended Crossroads: “As of conversations at Crossroads Baptist Church yesterday, I feel it is time for me to give you this Xerox copy of a page in Kari Baker’s Bible . . .

“On Sunday night April 9 as I was thumbing through Kari’s Bible, I came across this notation attached. It had a very sobering and lingering impact. I xeroxed it but filed it away as 99% unrelated to anything of significance. Matt and I have never discussed this or any of the other markings I read in the Bible.

“With the knowledge I now have concerning an investigation into Kari’s death, I feel I should give this to you. I am available for further conversation should you want it.”

The Hewitt police now had in their hands Kari’s own words:
Lord, I am asking you to protect me from harm. I am not sure what is going on with Matt, but Lord help me find peace with him.