Deadly Little Secrets Part 16

The evening of the meeting, Jim was out of town and didn't take part. Later, he would hear that the deacons laid out the accusations, including that Matt had been calling the Bulls's household to talk to Vanessa before Kari's death. Matt denied every charge. The problem was that one deacon had already confirmed some of the facts before the meeting, and he judged that their pastor was lying. And there were the practical matters of running the church. Distracted, Matt had become less involved. The members had had enough of his canceling Sunday evening services to be with Vanessa.

Matt put up a fight, but the deacons were determined. They gave him a sixteen-hundred-dollar severance, but his services were no longer required at Crossroads Baptist. Afterward, Matt told a church member that he was disappointed and needed the extra money from his pastor's job to buy a house he and Vanessa were considering. "I'm going to take the girls and move to Kerrville," he said. "Away from all this gossip."

As the days ticked past, Linda carried out the plan Matt Cawthon, the Texas Ranger, had given her. She'd talked to Hewitt PD's chief and gotten nowhere, and on June 2, she wrote a letter to McLennan County's longtime district attorney, John Segrest. "My daughter, Kari Baker, died on April 8, 2006. Her death was ruled a suicide by Judge Billy Martin and the Hewitt Police Department . . . Martin didn't conduct an autopsy. In fact, Judge Martin didn't come to the scene," Linda wrote. Filling Segrest in on the details, including the typed, unsigned suicide note, she laid out what she knew, including the time line she'd pulled together with her family's help.

In the letter, she mentioned Kari's visit with Bristol, noting that after the therapist talked with Cooper, she'd come away believing that nothing would be done with the information. Linda described her dilemma, trying to work with the justice of the peace and Hewitt PD, who continually referred her to each other but took no action. "I have additional information to share with you. However, I wanted to give you an idea of what my family is dealing with here . . . We want to move forward. We don't want to play any sort of blame game."

At that point, Linda asked Segrest to take the case out of Hewitt PD's hands and call in the Texas Rangers. "While I have no doubt that the Hewitt PD are fine men and women, this case may not be something they are trained to handle. I don't mean to dismiss or disparage the work of the Hewitt Police Department. I want to ensure that this case is investigated properly, however." She concluded by writing, "Thank you very much for your time. All my family wants is the truth."

While Linda waited to hear from Segrest, Matt sent her an e-mail on June 4, a Sunday, informing the Dulins that Barbara would be spending time with them over the summer. "I need to inform you that Kensi, Grace, and I have talked and are not at a point to have any extended time away from each other," he wrote regarding short vacations with the girls that the Dulins had proposed for the summer. "I feel any trip apart from each other this summer is not of the best interest of Kensi, Grace, nor [sic] myself."

"It was evident that he was cutting us off from our granddaughters," Linda would later say. After talking over the situation, she and Jim hired an attorney to sue for visitation. When Matt was notified, he e-mailed claiming they had no reason to do so, that he would never keep his daughters from their maternal grandparents. Linda was blunt in her response, saying she knew Matt was turning their granddaughters against them. "You don't need to respond to this e-mail," she concluded. "I think we have both said what needs to be said. Have a good day."

Three days later, the Dulins' civil attorneys formally filed a pet.i.tion for visitation with Kensi and Grace. Along with time with their granddaughters, the Dulins wanted court-ordered counseling for both girls.

The distractions must have been piling up for Matt that summer. He had the battle with the Dulins, the worries of knowing that they were questioning Kari's death, the girls to care for, and, of course, the relationship with Vanessa to nurture. The same afternoon that the Dulins filed their pet.i.tion, Matt was at his computer at WCY working on that latter complication, Vanessa. Using an e-mail address, he sent an e-mail to Turtlefiji.com, a company that booked trips to the island of Fiji. When a reply came, it read: "I am responding . . . regarding your honeymoon in Fiji . . . congratulations on your engagement. What an exciting time for both of you!"

All wasn't going as well at the Dulins'. The following day, Linda received more bad news. In a letter, Segrest, the district attorney, expressed his sympathies but then backed Hewitt and Billy Martin. While admitting that they could make mistakes, Segrest urged the Dulins to trust the JP and the Hewitt officers' judgment. And in the end, he refused to help in any way, writing, "My office is not involved and won't become involved in the inquiry at this stage."

Disappointed, Linda and Jim talked. In the end, they agreed that their best option was to reach out to everyone they knew and ask for help. Linda carried out the plan, calling friends and family. A day later the phone rang. A friend of Kari's from high school had some advice. "Mrs. Dulin," he said. "There's an attorney in Waco, a former federal prosecutor, Bill Johnston. You need to call him."

Chapter 34.

"Let's get started," Bill Johnston said on the afternoon of Friday, June 9, 2006, two months after Kari's death. Six feet four inches, lean, with a thick mop of curly dark brown hair, Johnston had a brusque incisiveness. They were seated around a conference table in a mid-rise office decorated with Western art. The appointment calendar said only that Linda Dulin wanted to talk about her daughter's death, a suicide that the family believed was suspicious.

Johnston and Linda weren't alone in the room.

At Camp Swift for his annual training, Jim wasn't able to be there, but Nancy had come to support Linda. And Johnston had invited two old friends to sit in on the meeting: John Bennett, a wiry, gray-haired man in a leather bomber jacket, and Mike McNamara, tall and angular with a fringe of white hair habitually topped by a cowboy hat. Both men had hung out shingles as private investigators after retiring from long careers in law enforcement, Bennett as an undercover agent for the Texas Department of Public Safety and McNamara as a deputy U.S. Marshal.

A former a.s.sistant U.S. attorney, Johnston had worked with McNamara and Bennett for more than a decade. The law was a family legacy. Johnston's father, Wilson Johnston, had been an a.s.sistant Dallas district attorney for decades, the one who prosecuted Jack Ruby for the murder of President John F. Kennedy's a.s.sa.s.sin, Lee Harvey Oswald. "My dad was a courageous guy, and I grew up wanting to do what he did," says Johnston. As a prosecutor, he had a reputation for working with law enforcement to help along investigations, giving officers advice and the tools they needed when he believed a crime had been committed.

"If Bill saw a problem like a drug-infested apartment complex, he'd say, 'We've got a nest of rats over here to work on,' " says Bennett. "Bill is fearless."

"I took cases where I thought it was the right thing to do," says Johnston. "I wanted to be the person who picked up the flag, and said, 'Follow me.' "

Over the years, Johnston had forged a close relationship with McNamara and his older brother, Parnell, also a deputy U.S. Marshal. Like Johnston's, the McNamara brothers' family had a long history in law enforcement; their father, T. P. McNamara, grandfather, Emmett Parnell McNamara, and uncle, Guy McNamara, had all worn badges for the U.S. Marshal's office.

Then there was Bennett. Not as tall as McNamara and Johnston were, Bennett measured a hair over five-foot-six, with a wide smile and a glint in his eyes. In the late 1960s, Bennett, nicknamed "Little John," joined the navy out of high school and was sent to Vietnam, where he was stationed outside Da Nang. Once home, like Johnston and the McNamara brothers, Bennett enrolled in Baylor. His intention was to go into law. But by graduation, he'd grown weary of school. Instead, Bennett hired on as a state trooper, working his way up the ladder, promoted to undercover narcotics investigations.

Over twenty-five years, Bennett traveled the U.S. pulling together major drug cases, including air conspiracies, where his targets flew in planeloads of drugs, and vast indoor growing operations, some with fingers stretching out to Oklahoma, Virginia, and Florida. A meticulous investigator, Bennett had a talent for detail. "It's a hard life because of who you're dealing with," he says.

All the men had a conjoined history.

John Bennett had been the first narcotics officer Johnston had ever worked with, and it had been the McNamara brothers who in 1992 brought a brutal murder to Johnston's attention, that of Melissa Northrup, a convenience-store clerk. About that time, the McNamaras noticed that a lot of young women were turning up dead, including three Waco-area prost.i.tutes and an Austin accountant. The lawmen quickly suspected Kenneth McDuff, a serial killer who'd been paroled out of a Texas prison. What Johnston did first was take the information to Segrest, the McLennan County district attorney. When Segrest refused to pursue the case, Johnston took it on himself to go after McDuff on a federal drug charge, based on a single tab of LSD. At the same time, the McNamara brothers and others investigated the killings. Based on the information gathered, Segrest then prosecuted the case. In the end, McDuff was convicted of Northrup's murder and executed in 1998.

"The plague of law enforcement is weak prosecutors," says Johnston. "You can have a great investigator, but if he can't get a prosecutor to take a risk . . . he's stymied."

After thirteen years as a prosecutor, it was the Branch Davidian fiasco that convinced Johnston to become a defense attorney. The one who wrote the initial warrant for David Koresh's arrest on a weapons charge, Johnston got caught up in the finger-pointing that followed the lethal fire. The switch to the other side of the courtroom wasn't an easy one. "I missed prosecuting," he admitted. "It's not the same."

Looking across the table at Linda, Johnston said, "Tell me why you're here."

After taking a deep breath, she told the three men about Kari, Matt, Kari's death, Vanessa, and all that they'd uncovered, from the phone calls to Matt's bizarre behavior.

"What do you want us to do?" Johnston asked. It wasn't unusual for family members to balk at the idea that a loved one had committed suicide. For all Johnston knew, that was the case with the two women seated across from him.

Linda had thought long and hard, and what she didn't want was for Johnston to think this was a hunting party out to get Matt Baker. "I don't want you to a.s.sume my son-in-law did anything wrong. I just want the truth," Linda said. "I need to know what happened to my daughter."

Linda had feared Johnston would write off her concerns, the way Cooper and Segrest had. So when Johnston said, "We can do that," she felt an overwhelming sense of relief.

Yet Johnston then explained that Linda really didn't want to hire him, at least not yet. Instead, she needed McNamara and Bennett. "I think the world of these two men," Johnston said. "Let's ask them to do a little digging. Let's see what they find out."

"We'd all worked closely together from the time Bill became the deputy U.S. attorney in Waco," says McNamara. "We were used to working as a team."

Once Johnston turned the floor over to the two investigators, McNamara explained the situation the way he saw it. "If we take this case, we will try to find the facts as best we can," he said. "Those facts will speak for themselves."

"That's all I want," Linda answered. "If Kari committed suicide, I can live with that. It's painful, but I can. I just want to know the truth."

It was Bennett who then detailed how they'd proceed. "First, we'll investigate your daughter," he said. "We're going to go at this with the a.s.sumption that she did take her own life and see if that's true. So let's get started. What do we need to know?"

As the investigators took notes, Linda and Nancy laid out all they knew about Kari's death, including their suspicions about Vanessa, and Kari's haunting words to Bristol. In a folder, Linda had copies of the phone bills and all the doc.u.ments they'd collected, which she gave to the two men. That done, Nancy repeated what she knew of the accusations women had leveled against Matt over the years. "These things happened, and they've made us wonder what's going on," Nancy said. "From my view, Matt was always pretty sketchy."

For the investigators, Linda then compiled a list of places Matt had worked, some of which he'd left under a cloud. She told him about the time Kari went to the bank after their debit card had been maxed out on Internet p.o.r.nography. Listening and taking notes, Bennett and McNamara took their time coming to any conclusions. "I thought it sounded a little suspect, but you don't know one way or the other," says McNamara. "But it seemed there was enough that it needed to be looked into."

The list of names the women supplied included Matt's and Kari's friends and families. As the meeting wrapped up, little more than an hour after it started, Bennett stressed again that the first thing they'd do was to focus on Kari, on the likelihood that she had taken her own life. "Then we'll talk to Bill and get back to you," he said. "Let us find out the facts, and we'll see where we are."

As they walked out the door of Johnston's office, Linda felt better than she had in a long time. "All of a sudden, all the shock I was feeling, all the numbness, was gone. Someone was looking into Kari's death. That was all I wanted."

Chapter 35.

That 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."

On 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."

As 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 Ka.s.sidy. 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."

Behind 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 s.e.xual a.s.sault 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 doc.u.ments, 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.

Six 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 postCivil War day when Texas slaves first heard of the Emanc.i.p.ation 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.

It 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?"