Deadly Little Secrets Part 15

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 a.s.sistance."

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 b.i.t.c.h killed herself, and her parents are f.u.c.king 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.

Fifty-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 cla.s.ses again," he said. "She's changed cla.s.ses 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 Ka.s.sidy'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 Ka.s.sidy would never come back. "I don't know what she thought," Matt said. "That one day Ka.s.sidy 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 b.u.t.te. "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 a.s.sured 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."

"Hindsight," Cooper said.

"I know," Matt agreed. After shaking hands, they left the room.

Finally, police had interviewed Matt Baker, but had he told the truth? And why hadn't more questions been asked? Why hadn't Cooper pushed harder? Wasn't that the time to ask the tough questions?

Chapter 33.

As May drew to a close, Linda gave up on Hewitt PD. "I got the feeling that they weren't going to be wrong, even if a murderer went free," she'd say later. She and Jim talked over the situation, agreeing to pursue it on their own, and she asked him a favor: "Is it okay if I take the lead?"

"Sure," Jim said. "Of course." To Linda, it was as if her husband had given her a gift, the ability to look into their daughter's death and do one last thing for Kari.

The day after Cooper's interview with Matt, Linda went to Hewitt PD and requested anything that was public on the case. She was given the cover sheet from the police report. The only information on it that helped was the exact time of the 911 call: 12:03 A.M. Once she had that, she asked Nancy to once again go to Hollywood Video, this time to verify when the movie had been checked out. It was 11:48.

At her desk at home, Linda plotted the two events on a time line. She then made more phone calls, including to the EMT service, to determine what time the first responders arrived on the scene. Every fact Linda nailed down added another piece to the puzzle of what happened the night Kari died.

Off and on, Charlie and the angels met at one of their favorite Mexican restaurants, holding lunchtime meetings where they debated what they knew and plotted how to learn more. Topics ranged from, if Matt didn't kill Kari, why wasn't the suicide note signed? To: Why did Kari leave two pills in the Unisom bottle instead of taking them all?

Perhaps feeling the pressure, Matt called Jenny in early June and asked her to go to a movie and to a Wendy's for dinner with him and with the girls. Although she wanted to see Kensi and Grace, Jenny worried about being with Matt, thinking that he might push her for details on what Linda was doing. "I already have plans," she said.

Meanwhile at Crossroads, dissent was growing. Rumors circulated, a growing number of the members questioning whether Kari had committed suicide and their pastor's relationship with Vanessa Bulls. A deacons' meeting was scheduled to address the situation. Before it, Matt contacted church members, pleading his case. Talking to one woman, Matt attacked Kari, saying that she wasn't a good mother. The woman would have none of it. "I knew Kari," she said. "She was a wonderful mother."