Deadly Little Secrets Part 19

When she described telling Matt that the relationship was over, Vanessa cried.

Comforting her, the Secret Service agent said: "I've been interviewing the Matt Bakers of the world . . . What he did is use you. There's no doubt in my mind that he did something to his wife. There's no doubt in my mind that he may have done something to his daughter. Maybe he saw this as getting rid of his wife to have a relationship with you. The person caught in the middle is the twenty-four-year-old divorced woman."

"He had girls. I had a girl. He was a pastor . . ." Vanessa said. "I didn't think it would come back to bite me."

"It didn't, Vanessa," the agent again a.s.sured her. "It's just one of those things where it's up to us to get an insight into his life. The Matt Bakers of the world use young women like you who are vulnerable."

They talked, Vanessa insisting that they had no need to have Ranger Cawthon or anyone else call her, and that she'd talk with them again if they had any questions. "I was surprised it took you so long to question me," she said.

"We appreciate your coming in. We all know who Matt is now. He's a dirtbag."

"Why'd it take me so long to see that," Vanessa said, again crying.

In their haste to make her feel better, it would later seem there were many questions left unasked that day. The investigators gathered around her in that room never asked the pretty young blonde when she'd first gone to Matt's house. They never asked if Matt had ever told her that he planned to kill his wife. And, perhaps most importantly, they never spelled out that Vanessa needed to be careful. If she wasn't telling the truth, if she lied and they found out, she could be considered a party to a murder. In hindsight, there was much left unasked and unanswered in that dismal interview room in the run-down Hewitt police station.

Two hours after the interview began, the investigators left the room, and Vanessa again waited. Outside of her earshot, they discussed the interview. "The Secret Service agent said he was sure she was telling the truth," Toombs would say later. "He told me there was no reason to ask her to take a lie detector test."

Back in the room, Toombs and Spear prepared to take Vanessa back to Temple to pick up her car. "My mother's going to be upset," she said to Toombs.

"I'll talk to her," he said. "You are in no . . . trouble about this . . . you weren't involved."

How were they all so sure? Was Vanessa Bulls telling the truth? Did she know more than she'd told them? Perhaps the Secret Service agent should have listened to his own warnings, when he'd told her, "You just never know about people, you really don't."

Chapter 42.

After Johnston filed his motions for subpoenas, Matt's attorneys filed countermotions, attempting to block Johnston from obtaining the records and depositions he'd requested, including those involving Kari's and Ka.s.sidy's deaths. In the end, the judge ruled that Ka.s.sidy's records weren't relevant to the wrongful death suit but upheld the subpoenas for information on Kari. Quickly, the records began pouring in.

Among the first to arrive were those from Hewitt PD and the EMT service. Once they had those in hand, Johnston and Bennett traveled to Edmond, Oklahoma, to meet with Tom Bevel, a crime-scene and blood-splatter expert who'd worked for twenty-seven years for the Oklahoma City Police Department. With them they carried copies of the scene photos, the autopsy, the EMTs' reports, a DVD of Matt's interview with Cooper, and a time line they'd constructed based on Matt's statement and the receipts he'd produced to police.

"They were basically looking for an independent a.n.a.lysis of what the scene said," says Bevel, who'd specialized in forensic science for eighteen years, testifying in high-profile cases including that of Darlie Routier, the Dallas housewife convicted of murdering her two young sons.

After they left, Bevel began by looking at the scene photos, taking in any clues he could find based on what he saw of Kari's body and the room itself. After he'd absorbed what he could, he turned to the autopsy, statement, and time line, comparing those to what he'd already gleaned from the photos.

Later, Bevel put his findings into a formal letter for Johnston, writing: "I would not expect to be able to observe any visible signs of lividity in less than thirty minutes minimum and up to two hours maximum . . . The extent of lividity seen in the photographs of Mrs. Baker and that reported by the EMT personnel does not comport with the time line given by Mr. Baker. In my opinion much more time has elapsed from Mrs. Baker's death until it is reported, than stated by Mr. Baker."

Bevel then pointed out that death is a process that takes time. If Matt was gone for forty-five minutes, and Kari was alive when he left, Kari had to take the pills and the pills had to have time to work. Lividity wouldn't have begun until Kari's heart stopped, until she was dead. "This does not comport with the time frame as given by Mr. Baker." Bevel also questioned how Kari had so quickly become cold to the touch.

As troubling was Matt's description of dressing Kari's body before the EMTs arrived. "I have worked a number of cases in which an unconscious or deceased person has been dressed," he wrote. "Due to their 'dead body weight,' this dressing by another is very difficult and usually obvious. The position of Mrs. Baker's panties are much more consistent with her dressing herself, as they appear in a normal position."

Bevel also noted what appeared to be bruising on Kari's nose and lips in the scene and autopsy photos. When he talked with Johnston, Bevel mentioned that this type of injury suggested that Kari might have first been drugged, then smothered.

After bringing up the typewritten, unsigned suicide note, Bevel concluded: "There is enough contradictory information in this case that I would highly recommend further action on this investigation."

Johnston already had the opinion from the toxicologist, Dr. Stafford, who said unequivocally that Kari hadn't died of an overdose. Now the lawyer turned to another expert, William Lee Carter, a Waco psychologist who testified in criminal trials. This time, Johnston supplied his expert with information on Matt's past with women. "I wanted to know what a professional thought of Matt's personality type," says Johnston.

When Carter called with his conclusions, they weren't a surprise to any of those involved in the investigation. "Mr. Baker has a history of serious s.e.xual indiscretion with females. There is an elusive, manipulative quality to his personality. A relationship with a female gave him reason to desire his wife's absence from his life, creating motive for murder."

Carter pointed out that Matt himself had made it clear to police that he was the only one with Kari on the night of her death. Also not to be discounted were Kari's words to Bristol: "Research validates that a woman's reports of perceived death intentions by a husband is one of the most telling diagnostic precursors to spousal murder."

Adding Matt's "dark personal history" to the other evidence the team had pulled together surrounding Kari's death, including Matt's apparent lack of grief, Carter said, painted a d.a.m.ning picture.

After Johnston filled Linda and Jim in on the reports, she called the experts, wanting to hear firsthand. Afterward, she was ever more certain that Kari had not died by her own hand. "I thought, oh, my gosh, Matt really is a s.e.xual predator, and he murdered our daughter," she says. "Everything my sisters had wondered about, it was all true."

Off and on, Toombs and Spear went to the DA's Office as Cawthon did, talking to Melanie Walker, asking for guidance. "I told them that they didn't have enough for probable cause," says Walker. "The scene wasn't even processed like a questionable death. Without homicide on the autopsy or death certificate, the potential for reasonable doubt was huge."

Yet the evidence kept mounting. Matt had suggested that the police talk to a woman named Holly Romano, someone who'd seen Kari the evening before her death at the Y during swim practice. What Matt told Cooper was that Romano remarked about how tired Kari appeared. When Toombs talked to the woman, however, Romano said, "That's not true."

In fact, Kari mentioned that she'd interviewed for a new job and it had gone well that day, seeming to look forward to the change to middle school. "Did Kari leave to go get sick in the restroom?" Toombs asked, repeating what Baker had told Cooper.

"Not that I saw," Romano replied.

At about that time, Mike McNamara met with the director of the Y, who showed him records doc.u.menting Matt's firing from the staff. Waiting for an official subpoena, which she hadn't yet been served, the woman wouldn't let him take the records, only read them. When McNamara was done, another Y employee approached him. "I always worried about Kari," she said. "Matt has a terrible temper. I was afraid he could hurt her. When she died, I immediately thought something had to be wrong."

After McNamara left, he filled in Bennett and Johnston, then talked to Spear and Toombs, suggesting they interview the same women. The two officers followed up quickly and left with another piece in the puzzle of Matt Baker's personality.

Then, in mid-August, McNamara returned to WCY, this time with the power of a subpoena, one for everything on the facility's network generated by Matt's missing computer.

Afterward, McNamara took the CDs to Johnston's office and began looking through them on a computer. But he and Bennett couldn't open the files. Deciding it must be encrypted, they returned to WCY and asked to have the doc.u.ments transferred into "something we can read."

From there, McNamara and Johnston went on to other matters while Bennett and Johnston's secretary searched the files. Before long, what Bennett saw gave him chills: Internet searches on drug sites. "We've got something," he said, calling out to McNamara and Johnston.

That evening, Bennett and Johnston worked late, combing through the disks. "We found what looked like a history of Matt shopping for drugs, and we couldn't be sure, but it looked like he'd purchased Ambien."

In July, after Linda had taken the disks out of Matt's garbage, the one with the chilling description of Ka.s.sidy's blue eyes, Johnston had hired another expert to work the case, a computer guru named Noel Kersh, a Texas Tech grad who worked with Pathway Forensics, a Houston-based consulting firm. Now, Johnston called Kersh, asking him to come to Waco. When he did, Kersh and Johnston met with Linda at the office. A short time later, Kersh left with the WCY disks and the Crossroads Dell laptop, the one Waco police had found nothing of interest on.

Back in Houston, Kersh began with the laptop. He wasn't looking long before he found a history that seemed unusual for a man of the cloth. Baker had been using the computer to access dating and p.o.r.nographic Web sites, among them private.camz.com and coola.n.a.lsite.com. It wasn't shocking news. Besides Linda's description of the p.o.r.n that had shown up on Matt and Kari's home computer, Bennett had looked at the laptop earlier, finding the p.o.r.n sites intermingled with Matt's searches for Internet sermons. "Look at what that idiot's been up to," Bennett had told Johnston.

From the laptop, Kersh turned to the WCY disks. Over a period of days, he slowly worked through the material. One of the first things he found was a folder marked Dulin Family c.r.a.p. In it were e-mails between Kari and Matt and Linda and Matt. He copied those to a disk and kept going.

As he delved even further, Kersh saw more records ill.u.s.trating that the chaplain's eye often strayed from the heavens. Matt's work-computer trail also led to a long list of dating and p.o.r.nographic Internet sites. The URLs were descriptive of where the minister's interests lay, from widewomen.com, to s.e.xlist.com, hotmatchup.com, s.e.xtracker.com, s.e.xdatenetwork.com, bustydustystash.com, playboy.com, iwantanewgirlfriend.com, and h.o.r.n.ymatches.com.

While that was interesting, perhaps opening the window wider into Matt's mind, it didn't answer the important question: Had Matt murdered Kari? Rather than Matt's s.e.xual leanings, what Johnston was interested in was any computer activity that indicated that Matt Baker had shopped for drugs, most importantly Ambien, the drug found in Kari's body on autopsy. Before long, there, too, Kersh hit pay dirt.

The list of drug Web sites Matt had visited was long, including drugs.com, medicinenet.com, search.drugs.com, Rxlist.com, hydrocodone.com, drugslist.com, and 1stmeds.com. He'd even dropped in at ambien.com. As Kersh combed through the information, one site stood out, and that was the one Kersh mentioned to Johnston when he called with the results. Explaining that to complete an Internet purchase a buyer had to go to a shopping cart, Kersh pointed to one Web page in particular that popped up on Matt's history: secure.rx-cart.com. On March 23, two weeks before Kari's death, Matt's account accessed that page on the site of a Canadian-based, online pharmacy. It appeared that he'd placed an order in his shopping cart.

After talking to Johnston, Kersh followed through and contacted the company. Before long, he was put in touch with the owner, a man named Mark Henry. "Can you make sure that all of it checks out, find out what he put in the cart?" Kersh asked.

When Henry called back, he confirmed that it was the WCY computer that logged on with the user name mattdb7722. What was even more interesting was the item in mattdb7722's shopping cart: generic Ambien.

"Did he buy it?" Kersh asked.

It was there that it became more complicated. The purchase was never completed, Henry explained, but that wasn't unusual. Many potential buyers backed out at that particular juncture, after they had the drugs in their cart. Henry attributed the lost sales to the fact that it was at that very point that buyers learned of a two-week delay before the drugs could be delivered.

Yet if Kersh hadn't found conclusive proof that Matt Baker had bought the sleeping pills, the computer expert had uncovered evidence that someone on the former minister's computer was shopping for Ambien.

After doc.u.menting all he'd discovered, Kersh again returned to the WCY CDs. It didn't take long before he found something else intriguing: Matt's computer had accessed sites that sold hydrocodone painkillers and GHB, a drug similar to roofies, the date rape drug that renders victims unconscious and wipes out their memories.

Yet something else waited for Kersh on the computer. On March 9, a month before Kari's death, mattdb7722 had Googled the phrase "overdose on sleeping pills."

Considering what he'd uncovered, Kersh knew he had one more step to pull it all together. While interesting, there was one big question mark: Could Kersh determine who'd been on Matt's computer when the sites were accessed? Could he prove the mattdb7722 who shopped for Ambien was Matt Baker?

To find the answer, Kersh charted the computer's activity. What he doc.u.mented was an interwoven Internet history between Matt Baker and mattdb7722. For instance at 8:30 A.M. on March 9, Matt sent an e-mail to a work a.s.sociate. Thirteen minutes later, he scoured the Internet for pharmaceutical sites. After looking up Ambien, Matt then went to a page that included the safety warnings: The most commonly observed side effects in controlled clinical trials were drowsiness, dizziness, and diarrhea . . . Don't take with alcohol, as it may increase these behaviors.

Then, after Googling "overdose on sleeping pills" at 9:27 that morning, thirty-six minutes later, Matt sent an e-mail to Kari at school. What those doc.u.ments proved was that on the morning mattdb7722 was scouting for drugs, Matt Baker was sitting at the computer.

One other thing Kersh found wouldn't mean anything to those involved in the case until later, that Matt had used his computer to purchase herbal s.e.xual stimulants, over-the-counter capsules that the Web site described as aphrodisiacs "ten times better than herbal ecstasy."

When they heard the news about the Ambien, Johnston, McNamara, and Bennett felt the sky open up. "We'd found as close as we could to a smoking gun," says Bennett.

When they told Toombs, his early doubts about the case vanished. "This is the real deal," he thought.

With the evidence piling up, Bennett and McNamara dropped in at the district attorney's office and talked to Walker. Cawthon hadn't been successful getting the prosecutors interested in the case in the past, but the two investigators wanted to keep the a.s.sistant district attorney up to date. "We couldn't prove to her what had happened, but we could show that what Matt Baker said had happened couldn't have happened," says McNamara.

Walker listened but didn't offer to take it on. "It wasn't handled as a murder investigation from the beginning. It was handled as a suicide," she's say later. "There was a lack of evidence. They had a dead girl and a family who cared about her, and Mike and John were doing their jobs, but the finding on the autopsy was still a big problem."

Although disappointed, Bennett and McNamara weren't ready to give up. Instead, they pored through the e-mails in the folder marked Dulin Family c.r.a.p. Before long, Mike McNamara thought he saw a pattern. In the fall of 2005, the e-mails from Matt to Kari were sweet, even solicitous. But from February on, during the time Matt was calling Vanessa Bulls, "You could see the change of att.i.tude on Matt's part. It was sickening," says McNamara.

Other information kept being produced in connection with the subpoenas Johnston's office cranked out. When they issued one for Kari's Bible, Matt didn't produce it, but when the Hewitt PD records showed up, they found the copy Sadler had made of Kari's plea for G.o.d's protection. "I read it and thought about how frightened Kari was," says McNamara. "How alone she must have felt."

Like Cawthon, Bennett and McNamara both believed that Vanessa Bulls was the key to the case. On August 30, McNamara called and asked her to meet with them at Johnston's office. She agreed. When they asked questions, she answered much as she had to Toombs and Spear nearly a month earlier, maintaining there'd been no s.e.xual relationship with Matt Baker. Neither McNamara nor Bennett believed her. "She wasn't being truthful," says Bennett. You could tell."

"She claimed everything was lily-white with Baker, no flirting, no kissing, no s.e.xual encounters. It was unbelievable," says McNamara. "She kept saying that she had never been attracted to him but that she thought he might make a good father for her daughter."

One thing Bennett noticed was that Bulls used some of the same phrasing Matt had when describing their relationship. "I felt like he'd schooled her well," says Bennett.

Meanwhile, at Hewitt PD, the criminal case was stalled. Toombs sent the suicide note to the lab, and when it came back, the report said that it had been printed on a Hewlett Packard inkjet printer. Although Johnston had asked repeatedly, Matt hadn't turned over the home computer and printer he'd had at the time of Kari's death, so the only one available for testing was the one from WCY, which turned out to be a Hewlett Packard. Yet when the tests were run, it wasn't a match.

On October 6, 2006, Ben Toombs performed his final official act on the Baker investigation: He returned the printer to WCY. "I felt like Matt had probably killed Kari," says Toombs. "I just wasn't sure that we'd ever be able to prove it."

Chapter 43.

Despite the disappointments and the lack of encouragement from law enforcement, Linda and Jim remained steadfast, hopeful that eventually they'd prevail. "We weren't going to just let this fade away," Linda says. "We were convinced that Matt Baker murdered our daughter."

With the District Attorney's Office unwilling to take on the case, the wrongful death suit continued, each side filing motions and countermotions. The first depositions took place in October, beginning with the EMTs. What came through loud and clear was that when they arrived on the scene, Kari's body was already cool. When it came to being any more precise than that, the shoddy investigation was a problem. Since it had been so quickly written off as a suicide, no one had inserted a thermometer into the liver to record Kari's core body temperature. They hadn't even noted the ambient temperature of the bedroom.

Yet common sense said that what the EMTs and paramedics saw contradicted Matt's account. As a rule, dead bodies only lose 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit per hour. With average human body temperature at 98.6, if Kari had been dead for an hour or less, her body should have been 96 degrees or warmer, not so unnaturally cool that the EMTs noted it on their reports.

Finally, at 9:03 on the morning of November 3, seven months after their daughter's death, Linda and Jim arrived at the offices of Matt's attorney, James Rainey. The date for the depositions had arrived, including one the Dulins had antic.i.p.ated for a very long time. Both Matt and Linda were scheduled to be deposed that day, but it was Matt's questioning that loomed the largest.

While Matt's deposition was officially for the wrongful death suit the Dulins had brought on behalf of their granddaughters, everyone gathered knew that the stakes were much higher. Linda and Jim weren't pursuing money but justice. Matt had successfully sidestepped them for a long time, but on this afternoon, that finally promised to be over.

For the first time, Bill Johnston would be able to question Matt, putting him on the record about so many things, from his relationship with Vanessa Bulls to his account of the events on the night Kari died. That information could help on many levels. Locking Matt into his story on videotape during a sworn deposition could allow Johnston to show inconsistencies with his prior statements to police and with the physical evidence. As important, Johnston could ask questions relating to all Mike and John had uncovered about important topics, including Matt's tawdry past. Everything they learned could open up more leads and potentially move the investigation forward.

The conference room filled. Both of Matt's attorneys, James Rainey for the civil case and Gerald Villarrial for the criminal investigation, were there, along with Johnston and the Dulins. Matt looked different than he had in the months following Kari's death. His hair was longer, and he had bangs, but it wasn't all gelled up, as it had been when Linda judged he was attempting to look younger for Vanessa. Johnston didn't recognize a woman with thick, coa.r.s.e gray hair and a placid countenance, who'd accompanied the others, but Linda did. She was perhaps a little surprised to see Barbara Baker in the room but thought little of it. For his part, Matt barely looked in Linda's direction.

As they congregated around a table in the conference room, before beginning his questioning, Johnston inquired about evidence Matt had been ordered to bring, items he'd promised to produce. Despite the subpoenas, Matt had arrived empty-handed.

"You felt that you didn't have adequate time to search for them?" Johnston asked.

"That's correct," Matt replied.

At that point, Johnston asked about the individual items: First, Kari's photographs, journals, diaries, notes, greeting cards, and writings. "Will you agree to diligently search for same, for those and provide them?" Johnston asked.

"Yes," Matt agreed.

Category two included Matt and Kari's home computer and printer and everything a.s.sociated with it, including CDs and memory devices.

"I can search for them, I can," Matt said. "But I've told my attorneys that that computer is no longer in my possession."

"Can you state what happened to the computer?" Johnston asked.

In Matt's account, the computer became slow and wasn't working property, so he used the church laptop instead. Later, he gave the home computer to his father, but the hard drive had crashed and he'd had to rebuild it. "But it does exist?" Johnston asked.

"It does exist," Matt agreed, saying that he would turn it over. When it came to that crashed hard drive, Matt said he no longer had it but had thrown it into the trash.

The printer was a similar story. Matt said that it wasn't compatible with his new computer, so he'd disposed of it. "I believe it was a Canon," he said. The brand was important, because the a.n.a.lysis of the suicide note indicated it had been printed on an HP inkjet. Still, the only evidence of the brand name was Matt's word. When Johnston asked about the missing computer from the Waco Center for Youth, Matt said simply, "That is unknown . . . I am not sure when they were switched."

"Do you possess or have you ever possessed an HP printer?" Johnston asked.

"Yeah," Matt said. Yet, he said he didn't know when they'd had one or what had happened to it. He said he didn't believe that he had an HP at the time of Kari's death.

The final items on Johnston's list were any Bibles or religious materials of any sort owned or possessed by Kari Baker. "Do you agree to look for those?"

"Correct," Matt said.

After a series of additional questions about circ.u.mstances surrounding the missing WCY computer, Johnston turned to the other important purpose of the deposition: "I would really like to ask you a number of questions about your life and your life with Kari Baker, of the events over the last few years, and the events of this last spring. Will you answer those questions for me today?"

Matt pursed his lips and shook his head slightly. "I will take the Fifth Amendment. I will a.s.sert my right for the Fifth Amendment."

"You previously spoke with the Hewitt Police about this matter?" Johnston prodded.

"That's correct," Matt agreed.