Deadly Little Secrets Part 6

During Sunday services, church members angry with Matt were so incensed they'd begun holding up their Bibles and shouting at him to preach from it. At the pulpit, Matt didn't respond. At meetings, voices grew louder, and the Hotzes backed Matt based on friendship, not conviction. The situation flared hotter when Matt cut the hours of the church maintenance man. "People argued against it, and Kari stood up for Matt," Jill says. The deacon who oversaw the facilities, the maintenance man's boss, was so angry about Matt's plan, "he almost broke the door slamming it behind him on the way out of the building."

Meanwhile, others were getting a bad opinion of Matt that had little to do with his preaching. "I caught him lying to me more than once," says one man, who'd recount times Matt told him one thing had happened when it was another. "I came away with the impression that Matt Baker was a pathological liar. That he'd look at you and tell you the gra.s.s was blue."

In Waco, Kari complained to Linda about the church members, echoing complaints Linda heard coming from Matt. While she'd kept quiet in the past, this time Linda spoke up. "Do you hear yourself?" Linda asked. "I want you to think. How could this be at every church? What's the one common denominator at every church?"

Kari didn't answer, but Linda knew her daughter understood that what tied the situations together was Matt Baker. At that, Linda stopped pushing, mindful that Matt was her daughter's husband. But in November 2004, a little more than two years after moving to Dallas, Northlake cut Matt's salary by $5,000. Not long after, he resigned.

"On paper, it said Matt quit," says Jill. "The truth was that he left before he was fired."

When Kari told her family, she insisted that Matt had been treated unfairly. "Bless Kari's heart, she just wanted to believe in Matt," says Nancy. "She defended him through thick and thin."

Chapter 14.

"If Matt had tried to abuse Kari physically, she wouldn't have had it. She would never have put up with it. She was too strong for that," says Linda. "Instead, he made her feel sorry for him. And Matt was persuasive. Things happened, and he always had an explanation."

As 2005 began, Matt had a new job, this one with the Texas Youth Commission, in Mart, outside Waco, coordinating volunteers and community relations. Linda would later say that even though Kari had family nearby, she wasn't keen on moving. She'd made friends in Dallas and liked the city. She was also locked into a contract to teach through that May, and Kensi was in school. The decision was made, and Matt moved into Linda and Jim's spare bedroom, while Kari and the girls stayed in Dallas to finish the school year.

All the turmoil in her life appeared to be taking a toll on Kari. She'd always gained and lost weight, but that year she'd gained and hadn't lost, her weight hovering near two hundred pounds. She was still a pretty woman, stylish, with bright blond hair, now cut into a short, spiky, fashionable do. She wore trendy clothes and loved to clomp around in girlish flip-flops, the bangle bracelets on her wrist tinkling as she walked.

Moving again had proved expensive, and that spring Kari asked Linda for a favor. "Would you add Matt and me to your cell phone, on the family plan?" she requested. "We'll have the bill for our phones sent to our house, but it'll save us money."

Linda barely thought about it before agreeing.

The TYC job not to his liking, Matt had continued to look, when in March he heard about a chaplain's job at the Waco Center for Youth, a residential facility for thirteen- to seventeen-year-olds with emotional or behavioral problems.

In aging dark tan brick buildings on a sprawling campus connected by arched brick walkways, WCY was operated by the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental r.e.t.a.r.dation. Its stated mission: To give each youth a chance for change. The average stay was eighteen months, and the residents either came voluntarily or by court order. In need of counseling, they weren't considered psychotic, suicidal, or violent. On the campus, they lived in cottages named after Texas rivers: Brazos, Trinity, Rio Grande, and the Red River.

The former chaplain, popular with the residents and staff, had taken a leave five months earlier for family matters, then decided not to return. Matt began working at WCY near the end of April. His duties included holding Sunday afternoon chapel services, Bible studies, and counseling. Early on he was introduced to Terri Corbin, a woman with curly highlighted hair and a brusque manner, one of his two a.s.sistants. She and the other a.s.sistant had been covering the chaplain's duties and were both excited about having Matt take on the responsibilities. Terri's and Matt's offices were next to each other on a locked hallway, in the main building near the chapel.

On his first day after training, Matt knocked on Terri's door, then sat in a chair and began talking, at first detailing his credentials. They were impressive, especially his master's degree from Baylor. Then he turned to more personal matters. After talking about Kari, Kensi, and Grace, he turned the conversation around to Ka.s.sidy. "We had another little girl," he said. "She died."

"I thought it was so odd," says Terri. "He started talking about Ka.s.sidy, and he told me step by step everything that happened, starting at her birth through when she got sick, going to the hospital, what the doctors said. The night she died. Everything."

As the minutes pa.s.sed, Corbin's eyes filled with tears. Ka.s.sidy's story was a sad one, and Terri found it difficult to listen to Matt's account of a beautiful baby who suddenly fell ill. The story turned excruciating, as Matt described finding Ka.s.sidy in bed, not breathing, giving her CPR while Kari called 911. "I thought it was strange that he'd share all the details when we'd barely met," says Terri. Something else struck her as odd, that Matt could recount such a painful time without emotion. "He talked for maybe fifty minutes or more, but he never looked upset. Then he just stood up and left. I was in tears."

Once he moved into his office, Matt put photos on his desk of Kensi and Grace and one of Kari in her wedding dress. It wasn't long before Terri met them in person, when Kari dropped in to see Matt, the two girls in tow. What a cute family, Terri thought, looking at Kari, who talked nonstop. "Kari was bubbly, fun, and she had the girls all dolled up," says Terri. "They were darling. I was looking forward to working with Matt. I thought with such a sweet family, he must be a good guy."

The honeymoon period, however, was short. Not long after, Matt came into the office of one of his supervisors, Sarah Parker, to review complaints residents had filed about the facility. Parker asked his opinion, then realized that Matt changed his to match hers. "It was odd, like he was trying to gain my approval," she says. Then Matt began coming to her complaining about his staff, especially Terri Corbin. "He used really derogatory terms about them, along the lines of idiots. It was really unprofessional."

"Kari missed her family, and she wanted the girls to spend time with them," says Jill. "She didn't want to leave Dallas, but she was excited about being back in Waco."

At first, Matt and Kari moved into a house not far from the interstate. But before long, they relocated again, this time to a tidy redbrick one-story at 803 Crested b.u.t.te, in Hewitt, Texas, a mushrooming subdivision just outside Waco. The house was perfect in many ways, including that it was just a twenty-minute drive from her parents' home. A bustling suburb, the main business district along Hewitt Drive was packed with banks, strip centers, grocers, vet clinics, fast-food restaurants, and churches.

With a fenced-in yard, the house was situated one house off the corner on a quiet street. Inside, it had a split floor plan, the living room and dining room down the center, with the two children's bedrooms and a bathroom on the right, and the master bedroom and bath on the left.

Making the house perfect, Kari had been offered a third-grade teaching position at Spring Valley Elementary, less than half a mile away, where Grace and Kensi would start in the fall. That spring, another opportunity opened up, a full-time teaching position at Tarleton State. Linda talked to Kari about it, pointing out that college teaching slots were scarce. "I know, Mom," she said. "But I want to be at Spring Valley for the girls. It's Gracie's first year in school, and Kensi's first year at this school."

"You're sure?" Linda asked.

"I'm sure," Kari answered."

Quickly, Kari made the Crested b.u.t.te house hers. She and Matt painted the inside and hung her cross collection on a wall. Never faint of heart, she chose a rich brown for the dining room and living room and a celery green for the kitchen, all with a crisp white trim. In the dining room, Kari draped flowing curtains dramatically over the bowed window, and in the beige-walled master bedroom, they positioned the bed with its plank headboard trimmed in a metal lattice in front of the windows. The desk with the computer stood at the foot of the bed, with a flat-screen television. All in all, the house, like Kari, had an unusual style for a pastor's wife, a dose of fun and just a little hip.

Everything undoubtedly felt as if it was working out well that summer. Linda told Kari that in an e-mail, suggesting that the move must be blessed because so much was falling in place. She had no way of knowing what Terri Corbin was experiencing with Matt at work.

In fact, it was just months after he began at WCY, that Matt's behavior started to raise questions with Corbin. She'd slowly begun to wonder about the new chaplain's honesty. It seemed harmless at first, but she'd catch him lying to her about small things, especially what he was doing and where he was going. "I'm going to stop out at one of the cottages," he'd say, sticking his head in her door. "After that, I'll head home."

She wasn't checking on him, but noticed simply by glancing out her office window that Matt wasn't walking toward the residents' cottages but the employee parking lot. "I saw him get in his car and drive off the campus," Terri says. "He wasn't visiting the cottages; he was leaving work early."

Over time, Matt started arriving late in the mornings, but instead of walking in the front door, he entered through the auditorium. "That way, others would think he'd been there on time," says Corbin. "I didn't say anything to him about any of it." Meanwhile, in his reports, he suggested that his workload be cut. Few of the residents attended the weekly Bible study sessions, and Matt's proposal was that if they were held less often, more might partic.i.p.ate.

Other things, however, Corbin did speak up about. Where the services in the past had always been reserved for residents and their families, Matt invited members of other churches to WCY on Sunday afternoons. What upset Corbin was that this flew in the face of the residents' confidentiality. WCY policy stated that no one should be on campus unless they registered at the front desk and that they had to be on campus for specific reasons. "People aren't welcome to come and just have a look," she says.

One Sunday, when Terri brought it up, Matt didn't take the criticism well. "How dare you question me!" he challenged.

"It's against policy," she explained yet again. Confused by his reaction, Terri a.s.sumed Matt would think it over and understand that she was simply asking him to remember the rules. He was new, and it seemed natural that he'd make a few missteps.

Her a.s.sumptions, however, proved wrong. The following morning, Terri turned on her work computer and found a two-page e-mail. In that single e-mail, Matt threatened to fire her for insubordination three times. "I'd never been treated in such a demeaning manner before," she'd later say. "Instead of calling me to his office to discuss the situation, he sent me a hurtful e-mail, threatening to let me go."

Still, Matt was her boss. What was she supposed to do?

In the chapel, Matt hung a banner that read: ANGER: Noise of the Soul; Relentless Invader of Silence. Meanwhile, Terri was unimpressed with his preaching. Instead of writing his own sermons, Matt took ideas off the Internet, including one ent.i.tled "Wayne's Rotten Day," where he talked about a boy who starts the day off falling out of bed. "How do you cope with a rotten day?" Matt asked those attending.

Another Sunday, Matt tackled an issue that would have added meaning in the not-too-distant future: suicide. In his sermon, he told the story of a fourteen-year-old boy who took his own life. "What if you were this boy?" Matt asked. "Or if you were his friend? Would you have seen this coming? How could you have stopped it?"

As the summer progressed, Terri saw more that raised questions about Matt's professionalism and his motives. A friend of hers, an employee on the campus, confided that she had a run-in with the new chaplain. The woman said that one day in Matt's office, she was confiding in him about a personal problem. Instead of offering a kind ear or the type of sage advice he'd been trained to dispense, Matt looked at the woman, and asked, "Would you like to f.u.c.k me?"

Startled, the woman had no idea what to say. Instead, she quickly jumped up and left. "I'm making sure I'm not alone with him," she told Terri. "That man scares me."

Chapter 15.

In August, Matt taught a chapel lesson at WCY: Do we help others? His link to the Bible was in Timothy-"People will love only themselves and their money." Matt's message to the young residents was to stay away from dangerous people.

Meanwhile, Matt's att.i.tude toward Terri Corbin had continued to sour. Weeks earlier, he'd complained to his supervisor about Corbin, then, on September 14, he wrote a list of what he called "Terri's indiscretions" on his computer, including that she'd made unspecified complaints to others about him. Along with that, he filed a report about his duties, including the matter of a resident who wanted demons cleaned from her spirit. In his report, Matt wrote that he'd attempted to remedy the situation by quoting scripture, to ill.u.s.trate that G.o.d loved her. He then showed her a clean sheet of white paper with a small dot on it. "What do you focus on, the clean paper or the spot?" he asked the girl.

"The spot," the girl answered.

"This demonstrates her tendency to focus on the negative aspects of being here," Matt wrote. "I prayed that G.o.d would help her focus on the positive." Matt finished his report by noting that he'd discussed the situation with the girl's therapist.

It was also in mid-September that Matt issued what he called a final warning to Terri, saying that if she complained to others about him, they would talk about "your continuation at WCY."

As 2005 progressed, there seemed one thing missing in Matt and Kari's return to Waco-Matt didn't have a church to pastor. That situation changed in the fall when Steve Sadler, a Baylor religion professor, left his position at Crossroads Baptist, the rural church the Dulins attended, where Jim was a deacon. After discussing the situation with Linda, Jim went to a Crossroads meeting in September and asked the other deacons to interview Matt. "How are you going to feel if we have to jerk him out of here, if he's not for us?" one asked.

"I'm all about this church," Jim a.s.sured them. "If we don't want Matt, we'll run him off."

In truth, Linda had mixed feelings about the situation. "I never thought Matt was a very good preacher," she says. "But I wanted to do it for Kari."

That October, Crossroads hired Matt Baker as their pastor. The church, a modest beige-sided building in the bucolic hills, was set back from the road. In the spring, the fields surrounding it were replete with bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush. Summers, a dome of blue sky shone over the church and the small fenced-in playground at the back. Behind the church stood a storage center, one with RVs parked around it. And across the street were single-wide trailers, some with children's toys scattered about.

Most Sundays about fifty members attended Crossroads. Although it was a comedown from Northlake, a smaller church and congregation, Kari looked proud sitting with the girls in the third row from the front, rubbing their backs as they rested their heads on her lap. Every once in a while, she bent down and kissed their softly brushed hair. For Linda, it felt good to have her daughter and granddaughters closer. When Kensi and Grace saw her at church, they ran to Linda, shouting, "Grammy!"

Once word spread that Matt and Kari were back and that Matt had a church, Todd and Jenny Monsey, the brother and sister from Williams Creek, began attending services at Crossroads. From the beginning, Jenny thought Matt had changed. "He wasn't the same person we knew. He seemed bossier, telling people what to do. He didn't seem sincere."

Although they'd returned because he was being squeezed out of his slot in Dallas, Matt told Jenny and others that they'd come back to Waco because Kari was homesick and didn't want to be so far from Ka.s.sidy's grave. And as she had at the other churches, Kari jumped in to help, teaching Sunday school and leading Bible studies.

Kimberly Berry met Kari for the first time that August at the Spring Valley teacher's luncheon, when Kari was introduced as the school's new third-grade teacher. When Kari started decorating her cla.s.sroom with lime green, hot pink, and black, Kimberly immediately liked her. "Kari was always cutting it up with the kids," says Berry. "She sat in a rocking chair to read to them. She always had her makeup on, dressed in the latest styles, and she smiled a lot, and not a teacher's smile, a real one. And she got the kids excited about school."

The other teachers at Spring Valley soon learned that Kari wasn't the quietest of additions. They could hear her calling out spelling words, laughing and joking with the eight-year-olds in her cla.s.s. When she walked through the halls, the other teachers recognized Kari by the slapping of her flip-flops and the tinkling of her bracelets.

That fall, Kari and another teacher, Shae d.i.c.key, quickly became friends. They had children about the same ages and talked daily while at school. Five years older than Kari, Shae listened sympathetically as Kari told her about Ka.s.sidy's death. "I can't imagine what it was like to lose a child. If you ever need to talk about it, I'm here," Shae said.

"Thank you," Kari answered, giving her a warm hug.

Over time, Kari would confide in Shae. "It was horrible when Ka.s.sidy died," Kari admitted one afternoon. "Ka.s.sidy had been so sick. But then, boom, there was Grace. And what could I do but pull it together and take care of my girls?"

As a remembrance of Ka.s.sidy, Kari wore a yellow Livestrong bracelet from Lance Armstrong's cancer foundation, with its mission statement: To live strong is to not give up. "Ka.s.sidy fought until she couldn't, so now I have to fight for her," Kari told Shae, the day she explained why she wore the bracelet.

Each year, the teachers filled out questionnaires called Panther Profiles, named after the school mascot. The purpose was to introduce themselves to the children and their parents. Kari listed her hobbies as swimming and spending time with family, her favorite flower as the Stargazer lily, her favorite cuisines as j.a.panese and Mexican, and her favorite candy bar as Hershey's. "Mrs. Baker is funny," one of her students told his mom during the first weeks of school. "She laughs all the time."

While Kari settled in, the move seemed to be going well for the girls as well. Grace blended easily into kindergarten, and Kensi became a popular fourth grader. For one cla.s.s, she wrote a poem about Ka.s.sidy ent.i.tled, "I learned so much from my baby sister." The teacher sent it to Kari to read. On her daughter's school folder, Kari wrote: "I love you, Baby. This is great work."

After school, Kensi and Grace ran to Kari's room, where they helped to straighten it for the next morning. Then Kari drove her daughters the short distance home. That fall, Kensi was in swim team at the Family Y, the same one that had fired Matt years earlier, so two nights a week, Kari and Matt hurried out the door, taking the girls to practice. Despite his history at the Y, Matt showed no discomfort. Instead, he walked around with Kari, talking to the other parents, cheering on Kensi's team from the bleachers.

From the outside, they looked like the perfect family. Kari never hid the fact that she was proud of Matt. "She talked about him constantly," says a fellow teacher. "She'd say, 'Come join us at church on Sunday. Give Matt a chance.' " Before long, some of Kari's fellow teachers, including Kimberly Berry, began attending services at Crossroads, drawn by Kari's enthusiasm. Once she got there, Berry found she liked Matt's sermons. "I could connect with them," she says. "Matt talked about life, like about riding in a car with his parents and having his dad say, 'Now don't make me pull this car over!' Matt was really charismatic, and I felt he was talking directly to me."

Yet, from the beginning, Shea d.i.c.key felt uncomfortable around Matt Baker. And one thing bothered her more than any other, that nearly every time the teachers went out and invited Kari, she'd tell them that she couldn't go, that she had to get home to be with Matt. Shae saw the Bakers everywhere together, even at the grocery store. It appeared that Matt never let Kari be alone. "The few times we did talk Kari into going with us, her phone rang constantly," says one of the other teachers. "It was always Matt needing something. He'd call six or seven times. It felt like he was checking up on her."

"I told Kari that she was ent.i.tled to have friends," says one of her fellow teachers. "Kari said, 'I know, but I just feel so sorry for Matt.' "

Chapter 16.

At Crossroads that winter, a new member began attending. Vanessa Bulls was twenty-three years old, strikingly beautiful, with iridescent blue eyes, a flawless complexion, high cheekbones, full lips, and long, silky blond hair, a woman in the throes of a divorce and the mother of an infant daughter named Lilly. Vanessa's father was Larry Bulls, Crossroad's music minister who also worked for Discount Tires, and his wife, Cheryl, a high-school teacher.

The Bulls were popular members of Crossroads. Larry was tall and thin, with brown hair, a former high-school football player. His wife, Cheryl, was a gregarious woman, a former high-school cheerleader. Their family roots extended far back in Troy, a town of twelve hundred that lay twenty minutes south of Waco on I-35. "Vanessa never seemed like a wild child," says a friend. "Vanessa was an only child and kind of a quiet kid. As pretty as she was, I remember she had a hard time getting a prom date. She ate lunch with her mom, and I thought she was a good kid."

"Troy High School is small, and I thought it would be rough to be a student and have your mom teach there," says a friend of the family. "In small towns, you live in a gla.s.s house. Everyone knows your business. The Bulls were considered middle-income, hardworking people. Cheryl was a good teacher, and the kids loved her. Vanessa seemed like an average girl growing up in an average family. She seemed very close to her parents."

Later, Vanessa would describe her upbringing as "strict Southern Baptist."

From Troy, Vanessa went to Mary Hardin Baylor University in nearby Belton, and one woman who went to college with her would remember Vanessa as socially involved in this strict Baptist college, one that split off from Baylor in 1866. At that time, Baylor became all male, and Mary Hardin was founded as its sister college. While the world changed around them, and both became coed, the schools remained highly conservative. "We had room checks, and everything was supposed to be spotless," says Sara Talbert, who went to Mary Hardin at the time Vanessa enrolled. "Boys weren't allowed in the rooms."

Talbert would later say that while she didn't know her well, she remembered Vanessa. "She came across as superficial, but she might have been really nice. It was just that something rubbed me the wrong way, like one of those girls in high school who are Miss Popular but really not what they appear to be. She had a reputation as a goody/Christian girl, but some people talked about her like she wasn't what she seemed."

Vanessa dressed preppy but wore lots of makeup. "She didn't act like she had money, but she acted like a good Christian girl. At Mary Hardin, it wasn't about money, it was about how religious a girl appeared to be."

In December of 2004, Vanessa married a man who was twenty years older. Vanessa's daughter, Lilly, was born eight months later, in August 2005. A month after Lilly's birth, Vanessa and her husband separated, and he filed for divorce, denying paternity, claiming he'd done a home test that excluded him. In his pet.i.tion for divorce, he requested DNA testing. Vanessa counterfiled, stating that Lilly was "a child of the marriage," asking for support. But on October 25, the following statement was entered into the case files: "The alleged father [Vanessa's husband] is excluded as the biological father of the child . . . The probability of paternity is 0 percent."

From that point on, the divorce became merely the business of dividing property. In December, Vanessa Bulls's divorce became final. The order read: "There was a child born during the marriage of pet.i.tioner and respondent that was not a child of the marriage . . . It is therefore ordered that no orders for conservatorship and support are entered in this cause."

At the time Matt and Kari Baker met Vanessa, she and Lilly lived with her parents in the Bulls's Troy home, and Vanessa was attending cla.s.ses at Tarleton in the evenings, working on a degree in education. At Crossroads, Kari noticed Lilly quickly. The baby was pudgy and blond and reminded her of the daughter she'd lost. "Lilly looks so much like Ka.s.sidy," Kari said to more than one person that fall.

The months pa.s.sed, and that winter Kari was busy, teaching at Spring Valley during the day, on the community college campus on Monday evenings, and conducting an Internet course one evening a week. In her entrepreneurial cla.s.s, she gave the students a syllabus for the semester that included writing business plans.

While Kari ran from one job to the next, Matt had his duties at Crossroads and his job at the Waco Center for Youth. At times, he e-mailed Kari on his WCY account to her Spring Valley e-mail, often in the role of the concerned husband and father. "Maybe Grace can use these?" he asked, sending along a link to a Web site that sold connect-the-dot alphabet color pages that read: "Y is for Yarn . . . Z is for Zebra . . . N is for Nightgown."

At Spring Valley that December, Kimberly Berry had health issues and asked Kari to pray for her. In her cla.s.sroom, Kari took Kim's hands and held them in her own, bowing her head and praying. From that point forward, Kari began talking with Kim about Ka.s.sidy, recounting the short time they'd had her. One day, Kari brought a sc.r.a.pbook she'd made in Ka.s.sidy's memory, full of photographs, including some of the child hooked up to the web of machines that kept her alive in the hospital. "Matt doesn't like to look at the sc.r.a.pbook," Kari said, as they paged through.

"I think she was glad to share Ka.s.sidy with someone," Kim would say later. "But she didn't sound sad, more proud of Ka.s.sidy, of how hard she'd fought to live."

On the last day of school before Christmas break, Kari made cocoa for her cla.s.s on a cold day. When she e-mailed Matt, he told her it was quiet at WCY. "I love you," he said.

Kari e-mailed back, sounding a little down because her students had all come in with individual gifts for her. The year before, in Dallas, the students' parents had all donated and given her a hundred-dollar certificate for Borders Books, money she'd used to buy Christmas presents. Matt responded that maybe the parents just didn't do that at Spring Valley, then said, "I love you," a second time.

"Hey, I have a gift from one student that we can give your sister. Ha! Ha! I love regifting," Kari replied, describing "yucky candles." In a later e-mail she said her students were sugared up and having a hard time settling down, so she put on a movie, The Polar Express. If they didn't calm down, she joked that she'd have to "Kill them!!!"

"Don't leave a mess!!! " Matt replied.

Matt was noncommittal about whether or not he'd be able to make it to the girls' school Christmas parties that afternoon. "I need to hand out a couple of Bibles, then I will escape," he wrote.

Later that evening, at the teachers' party, Kari presented her gift for the white elephant exchange, a pair of gargantuan panties. Everyone was laughing and having a good time when Kari's phone rang. She answered it, and then said, "That was Matt. I have to go."

On Christmas Day during services, Kensi and Todd Monsey sang "The Christmas Shoes," a song made popular by the group Newsong, in which a child needs money to buy shoes for his dying mother. In his sermon, Matt reminded the faithful that the holiday wasn't about presents and parties but the birth of Christ. "Merry Christmas to all," he said. "I wish the blessings of Christ upon you and your house this season."

"Everything seemed fine," says Jenny. "Matt and Kari looked happy."