12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 (14 page)

Chapter 22

“T
his is 9-1-1. Do you have an emergency?” a dispatcher asked.

“Yes. I think my wife just committed suicide,” Matt answered.

“Okay. You’re at 803 Crested Butte? Stay on the line with me. I’m going to connect you to the ambulance. Okay?”

“Okay. Thank you,” Matt responded. Moments later, the dispatcher assured Matt that a unit was on its way.

“Tell me exactly what happened,” he then asked.

Kari, Matt said, was on the bed. “Her lips are blue, hands are . . . are . . . are cold, and there’s a note that says ‘I’m sorry,’ basically . . . She’s not breathing at all. No pulse or anything.”

“Did you see what happened to her?”

“Uh, no. I just tried to push down on her chest, and stuff came out of her nose. No, no, no, no, I do not know. She . . .”

“Listen carefully. I need you to get her on her back flat on the ground, and remove any pillows, okay? Do that and tell me when you’re done.”

Matt’s voice sounded as if it were any other day as he agreed to lower Kari onto the floor. “Hold on. Okay hold on,” in the background a brief, low groan was heard. After a long pause, Matt said, “I know how to do CPR.”

“Oh, you do.”

“Yes. I am certified to do that,” Matt answered.

Still, the EMS dispatcher wanted to make sure it was done correctly, and he instructed Matt to check inside Kari’s mouth, to be sure her throat wasn’t obstructed. Matt responded by saying, “There is fluid all in her nose and in her mouth, it just poured out of her . . . on the floor.”

“Put one hand on the floor and one under her neck and tilt her head back,” the dispatcher instructed. Once Matt said that was done, he asked Matt to put his ear near Kari’s mouth, to make sure that she wasn’t breathing.

“There’s nothing. There’s nothing,” Matt responded.

“Okay. We’re going to start with compressions first, okay?” Matt agreed, and the dispatcher told him to place his hands on the center of Kari’s chest, one hand on top of the other, and push. “You’re going to do it fast and hard, four hundred times.”

“Four hundred?”

“Four hundred times is the latest we’ve been instructed to do. Okay? Twice per second,” the dispatcher repeated. “It’s going to take you about three-and-a-half minutes to do it. So start right now. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

Matt agreed, as the dispatcher added, “Let the chest come up all the way between the pumps. Okay?”

“Yes, they are.” After a pause, Matt added, “I think she urinated on herself, too. It smells like it. There’s water everywhere. Something everywhere.”

“Okay.”

Through it all, as he said he pulled his wife’s cold, unresponsive body onto the floor, as he pushed down with his hands on her chest, Matt sounded calm, collected. He asked the dispatcher if he should unlock the door for the ambulance, but the man assured Matt that wasn’t necessary yet and that he’d let Matt know when the ambulance got closer.

Then, it seemed something came to mind, the girls, Kensi and Grace asleep in their beds. “I have two kids. In their bedrooms,” Matt said, suddenly deciding that he needed to call Linda and Jim. “I want them to come over here and be with the kids.” Matt spelled out the Dulins’ last name and gave the dispatcher their phone number.

“You still doing compressions?” the man asked. When Matt said he was, the dispatcher explained, “You do those. I’ll get someone else started on this, okay?”

“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” After a long pause, Matt said, “I dropped the phone . . . Oh, she’s got foam or something coming out of her nose.”

Then, unexpectedly, “Okay, someone’s at the front door. I’ve got to go.”

Somehow, EMS had arrived four minutes and twenty-eight seconds into the 911 call, before the dispatcher alerted Matt that the ambulance was approaching, before he instructed Matt to stop doing CPR and to leave Kari’s side in the bedroom to unlock the front door.

“Okay, go ahead,” the dispatcher said.

What was even odder, however, was that when those first responders arrived on the scene, they didn’t have a siren blaring, one Matt might have heard. Yet they didn’t have to pound on the front door or ring the bell to get his attention. Matt had told the dispatcher that he was in the bedroom administering CPR to his wife. In fact, Matt Baker wasn’t in the bedroom at all. He wasn’t even in the house.

What the first EMT on the scene saw at 803 Crested Butte just minutes after midnight on Saturday, April 8, 2006, was Matt with a cordless telephone to his ear, standing at his open front door.

Chapter 23

T
he dispatcher issued the call as a 2A, high priority. EMT Craig Lott was at home in bed just after midnight when his pager went off. The information relayed to him was that there was a possible suicide. Quickly, he threw on clothes and walked out to his truck, then looked at the address. Lott had recently moved, so it didn’t strike him at first, but then he realized that the call address was on his block. Another look, and he recognized that it was the house directly next door. It was then that John Gates, Lott’s partner, arrived in the ambulance. Still, they weren’t allowed to enter the premises until police cleared the scene, so Lott and Gates walked up to the Baker house but waited. There they saw Matt standing on the front porch talking to the dispatcher.

Moments later, a Hewitt PD squad car pulled up with Officer Michael Irving inside. Irving rushed to the front door, where Baker motioned to come inside. Matt pointed to the bedroom, and there Irving saw Kari on the wood floor, her legs and arms splayed out, wearing a Snoopy Santa T-shirt and a pair of off-white nylon panties. Irving called to Gates and Lott, and the two EMTs rushed in carrying a portable defibrillator.

Once in the bedroom, Lott placed a BVM, a bag valve mask, over Kari’s nose and mouth. As Gates began compressions, Lott hooked the BVM up to a tank delivering one hundred percent oxygen at fifteen liters a minute. With the oxygen flowing, Lott then attached leads from an AED, an automatic external defibrillator, to Kari’s bare chest, and turned it on. What he was looking for were instructions on how to proceed. If the AED’s monitor detected the right type of electrical activity, it would instruct the EMTs to administer a shock. But when Lott pressed the button, the machine’s display read
NO RHYTHM
. That meant that the AED hadn’t detected any electrical impulses in Kari’s heart, nothing to shock. The only treatment option for Lott and Gates was to continue CPR, which they did as they waited for paramedics to arrive. As they worked, Gates noticed something odd about the scene unfolding around him: The woman’s husband showed no emotion, even as the EMTs fought to save his wife.

Instead, Matt stood in the living room calmly answering Officer Irving’s questions. The way Matt described what had happened, he’d been gone for about forty-five minutes and returned to find Kari in bed and not breathing. Where had he gone? “My wife asked me to put gas in the SUV and pick up a movie at Hollywood Video.
When a Man Loves a Woman,
the movie we saw on our first date. I left the house about eleven fifteen,” he said. “When I got back, just before midnight, the bedroom door was locked. I had to use a screwdriver to get in. She was nude in the bed. I called 911, and then I dressed her, pulled her off the bed, and started CPR while I was talking to the dispatcher.

“I found a note on the nightstand,” he then said. In the bedroom, Irving looked and found a sheet of white printer paper, the note read:

Matt,

I am so sorry. I am so tired. I just want to sleep for a while. Please forgive me. Tell Kensi and Grace that I love them VERY much. Tell my mom and dad that I love them to (sic). I love you Matt—I am so sorry for the past few weeks. I want to give Kassidy a hug. I need to feel her again. Please continue to be the great Dad (sic) to our little girls. Love them every day for me.

I am sorry. I love you.

Kari

Did it strike the officer as odd that the note, including Kari’s name, was typed?

Beside the note was a Unisom container with only two pills remaining. Irving asked about Kari’s medications, and Matt told him that Kari was on weight-loss pills and that she took a Unisom every night to sleep, something she’d done ever since their daughter’s death.

“Do you know how many were in there?” Irving asked, referring to the pill bottle.

“No, I don’t,” Matt said. He also mentioned that Kari had been drinking that night; they both had. He estimated that she’d consumed two Bartles & James Fuzzy Navel wine coolers. Two of the empty bottles sat near the Unisom bottle and suicide note on the nightstand.

“Has she ever tried to commit suicide before?”

“No, but she talked about it,” Matt said. “She’s been upset ever since our second daughter died seven years ago. She’s been depressed, and she’s talked about suicide, especially in the past couple of weeks.”

T
he phone rang at Jim and Linda’s home at 12:08 that night. Linda felt an involuntary shudder. She didn’t like late-night phone calls, especially not around midnight. The last time Linda had answered the phone at midnight was seven years earlier, the night Kassidy died.

“There’s been an accident at your daughter’s house on Crested Butte,” a dispatcher said, following through on Matt’s request to have someone call his in-laws. “You need to go there.”

“Oh, my gosh, something’s happened to one of my granddaughters?” Linda said.

“No, it’s your daughter,” the man said.

“My daughter? I’ll be right there.” Minutes later, Linda and Jim had thrown on clothes and were in the car, barreling down deserted suburban streets shrouded in darkness. From the car, Linda called Matt. When he answered, Linda asked, “What’s going on? What’s wrong with Kari?”

“They’re working on her,” he said. “She’s not breathing.”

“We’re on our way,” Linda said.

Once Matt hung up, Linda called Nancy. “We’re on our way to Kari’s. There’s been an accident,” she said.

O
n Crested Butte, other Hewitt PD officers arrived including Sgt. Chad Kasting, who heard the call as he patrolled. The emergency was described as “an unresponsive female, not breathing.” When Kasting called for more information, the dispatcher told him the husband said his wife had committed suicide. Once in the house, Kasting heard the man he’d later identify as Matt tell one of the EMTs that his wife had left a note.

On the bedroom floor, the two EMTs continued to administer CPR, but at least one wondered how long ago the woman on the floor had stopped breathing. When Gates felt Kari’s body, it was cool, and he noticed something else, a pale purplish coloring to the woman’s hands and back, lividity. Occurring after the heart stops beating, lividity is caused by gravity pooling blood in the lowest parts of the body.

“Looks like she’s been unresponsive for some time,” Gates mentioned to Kasting.

The sergeant looked at Kari as the CPR continued and noticed that her fingertips, lips, and feet were all blue. About then, a second ambulance arrived, this one manned by two paramedics. They quickly went to work, and Kasting asked one of the other officers on the scene to stand at the hallway to the children’s bedrooms. The sergeant didn’t want Kari’s daughters to wander into the master bedroom. “Keep them from seeing what’s going on,” he instructed.

On the ambulance that night was Shelton Chapman, a paramedic employed by East Texas Medical Center. He and his partner assessed the situation, and one of the first things he noticed was the same thing that caught Gates’s attention, that lividity had already discolored Kari’s arms, back, and the back of her neck. That was a bad sign. Quickly, Chapman put a cardiac monitor on Kari’s chest, attaching the sensors with tape. The printout verified that there was no electrical activity. Chapman examined the woman’s body, touched her skin, and found it cool. Her pupils were dilated and fixed.

As the others assessed Kari, Irving and Kasting stood not far away in the living room, talking to Matt. Listening in to their conversation, Chapman thought that Baker seemed to be continually changing his answers to the officers’ questions, as if rethinking what he wanted to say. It was frustrating because the paramedic couldn’t get a read on what the man was contending about how long his wife had been unresponsive. But based on the condition of the body, what Chapman knew for sure was that any further attempts to restart Kari’s heart were futile.

As the others talked, Chapman picked up his radio and called the doctor overseeing the ambulance service that shift, reporting to him on the condition of the body. The doctor pronounced Kari dead at 12:17.

Minutes later, Matt’s phone rang. “What’s going on?” Linda asked.

“Kari’s dead,” Matt replied. “She committed suicide.”

“But how could that be?” Linda asked. “I talked to her this afternoon. She was in such a good mood.”

Chapter 24

“K
ari’s dead,” Linda told her sister Kay while she and Jim were still driving to the house. “My daughter’s gone. Matt said she committed suicide.”

Kay insisted that she’d jump in the car and be at Matt and Kari’s house quickly, but Linda wouldn’t hear of it. “I don’t want you to come. Kensi and Grace are there. They’re sleeping, and we want to keep things quiet,” she said. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

News always spread quickly in the family. As soon as she hung up, Kay called Nancy, crying. “Kari killed herself.”

“Oh, my God, there’s no way,” Nancy said.

Shaking hard, Nancy dropped the phone and fell back into the arms of her husband. She lay there for moments, wondering what to do, then decided that she had to talk to Linda. She called, and Linda answered, and like Kay, Nancy insisted on coming to help, but Linda again said no.

When Nancy hung up the phone, she decided to go to Kay’s house, but first she needed to talk to Lindsey. The two girls were closer than cousins, more like sisters, and although it was the middle of the night, Lindsey needed to know.

Once she got her daughter on the telephone, Nancy delivered the terrible news.

“Kari didn’t kill herself. Matt killed her,” Lindsey said. Nancy had been pondering the same possibility. Yet how could they know? They couldn’t say anything to Linda. It would be horrible if they were wrong.

“You could be right,” Nancy told Lindsey. “But we’ll have to wait and see. We need to leave this up to the police. There’ll be an autopsy. That will give us answers.”

“I’m going over there,” Lindsey said.

“Linda doesn’t want us to,” Nancy replied.

“Mom, I’m going,” Lindsey said. “Linda may not want us, but she needs us.”

A
t the house on Crested Butte, as soon as Kari was pronounced dead, Officer Irving called Hewitt PD headquarters and talked with Sgt. Stuart Cooper, the investigator on duty that night, and Captain Tuck Saunders, just under the chief of police in the department’s hierarchy. Irving informed them of the unfolding situation.

Meanwhile, Sergeant Kasting called a local justice of the peace, William “Billy” Martin. A gruff-faced man with thick dark hair and a bushy mustache, Martin was a former DEA, Drug Enforcement Agency, investigator, who’d spent time overseas, including working in Peru and La Paz, Bolivia. He talked about his experiences often, and one of his fellow agents would remark how Martin’s eyes lit up recounting the days when he lived in foreign lands investigating drug cartels. After retiring, Martin moved to Waco and ran for and won a seat as one of eight justices of the peace in McLennan County.

On the phone, Kasting described the scene, telling Martin about the suicide note and the Unisom and wine-cooler bottles, and what the woman’s husband, a Baptist minister, said: that his wife had been depressed and talked of suicide.

The reason Kasting called Martin was that McLennan County, in which Waco and Hewitt were located, had no medical examiner. Not populated enough to support an M.E., decisions involving deaths fell under the purview of the local justices of the peace, elected officials who handled small-claims court and performed marriages. Although not a pathologist or medical expert, it was up to Martin to rule on Kari’s cause and manner of death. It was also at his discretion whether or not her body would be autopsied.

After listening to Kasting, Martin asked a few questions, including if there were any stab or gunshot wounds in Kari’s body. Kasting answered that there weren’t. During their conversation, Kasting read the suicide note to Martin, explaining that the child mentioned in the note, Kassidy, was the couple’s dead daughter.

Based on Kasting’s answers, Martin apparently decided that he didn’t need to leave the comfort of his bed and travel out in the wee hours of a Saturday morning to personally investigate. While just a modicum of care might have convinced Martin that seeing the scene firsthand was a good idea, the law didn’t require it, simply stating that a death determination could be made “any place determined to be reasonable by the JP.”

Without even looking at her body, still on the telephone, Martin ruled Kari’s death a suicide. When asked if he wanted the body autopsied, he answered, “No.”

M
inutes after she’d heard those awful words, that Kari was dead, Linda and Jim arrived on Crested Butte. The street was lined with ambulances and squad cars. Jim parked, and he and Linda ran toward the house. Before they could enter, an EMT, Chapman’s partner, a woman, stopped Linda.

“What happened to our daughter?” Linda asked.

“She overdosed on Unisom,” the woman said.

Inside the house, Linda walked toward the master bedroom, but Matt came up to her and hugged her. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

“How is this possible?” Linda asked, repeating what she’d said on the phone. “I talked to Kari this afternoon. She was happy. Excited about her interview, about the new job.”

Linda began to walk toward the bedroom, but Matt took her arm. “No, don’t go in there,” he said. “You don’t want to see her like this.”

Linda thought for a moment, then agreed. When the EMTs emerged from the bedroom, Linda overheard Matt talking to a police officer. “My wife didn’t want to be buried. She wanted to donate her body to science.”

“No,” Linda said. “Kari wouldn’t have wanted that.”

As soon as she objected, Matt backed down.

In the living room, Linda and Jim, in a state of shock, asked questions. What Officer Irving told them was that Kari’s death was a cut-and-dried case of suicide. In fact, the justice of the peace felt so certain of it, he saw no need for an autopsy.

While Irving talked to the Dulins in the living room, Kasting was in the kitchen with Matt. “Is there anyone else in the house?”

“My two daughters,” he said.

“Are they okay?”

“You don’t think she would hurt them?” Matt said.

Moments later, Kasting had looked in on Kensi and Grace, who were sleeping soundly through all the noise and chaos unfolding in the rest of the house. That done, Kasting asked about Kari’s state of mind. Matt repeated what he’d told the other officer, that in the past couple of weeks, Kari had been depressed and talked about suicide. This time he described the incident Kari had told her mother and Bristol about, the one when Kari and Matt were in the car on the way home from the doctor, when she opened the door. Only instead of the way Kari had described it, while the car was stopped, Matt portrayed it as akin to a suicide attempt, saying the car was moving on the freeway and that he’d had to hold Kari in so she wouldn’t jump.

W
hen she hung up the phone with Nancy, Kay called the associate pastor from her church and asked her to come over, then she put in another call, this one to her friend Bristol. Kay didn’t know that Kari had just been in to see the therapist days earlier, but as soon as she said Kari was dead, Bristol said, “I’m coming over.”

“No, you don’t have to do that,” Kay objected.

“No. I have to. You don’t understand,” Bristol said. “I’ll be right there.”

The moment the grief therapist arrived, she pulled Kay into a bathroom, and said, “I saw Kari this week, and I want to know how she died.”

When Kay told her friend that it was from an overdose, that Matt said Kari had taken pills, Bristol said, “Kari told me she was afraid Matt was trying to kill her. She said she’d found crushed pills in his briefcase.”

“But Linda said that Kari left a note,” Kay said.

“Well, that is odd,” Bristol agreed.

“What Bristol said made sense, but I didn’t want her to call the police right then,” Kay would say later. “I thought the police would investigate. I thought there’d be an autopsy.”

Not long after Bristol arrived, Nancy called Kay and said Lindsey was on her way to Kari’s house. “Jo Ann is here,” Kay said. “Kari talked to her this week, just a few days ago. Kari told Bristol that she was afraid Matt was trying to kill her.”

As terrible as those words were, Nancy felt a sense of relief. “I’d known it all along,” she’d say later. “I knew Lindsey was right. Kari loved her family. She adored her little girls. She wouldn’t have left them.”

A
t eleven minutes before one, Sergeant Cooper arrived on the scene to take over as the lead investigator. While the others waited in the living room, including Jim and Linda, Kasting brought Cooper into the master bedroom to see Kari’s body. Kasting showed Cooper the suicide note and the Unisom bottle and told him what Matt had said about Kari’s depression over Kassidy’s death. The heart-monitor wires were still connected to Kari’s chest, hanging out from under her T-shirt as she lay spread across the wood floor, beside the bed. Her short blond hair was disheveled, and there was something dark on her nose and around her mouth.

When Cooper looked at the suicide note, he saw that it was typed and not signed.

“Did you call a JP?” Cooper asked Kasting.

“Judge Martin. He said no autopsy.”

A bulky man, Cooper, had been a licensed law-enforcement officer since 1994 and with Hewitt PD for nearly a decade. Although Kasting had told him what Martin had said, Cooper placed a second call to the judge, again presumably rousing him in the middle of the night. Cooper would later say that he described the scene to Martin and asked again about an autopsy. Martin again said no “since the person left the note.”

At that, Cooper called Captain Saunders, who told him, “If the judge didn’t order an autopsy, one won’t be performed.”

Later it would seem unfathomable that with a young mother dead, more care wouldn’t be taken. With the matter of the autopsy settled, Cooper interviewed Matt in the kitchen. “Did she give you any indication she might do something like this?”

“No, but she’s been in therapy ever since our child died,” he said. “And she’s been erratic. She tried to jump out of the car while it was moving.”

When the talk turned to what Kari might have taken, Linda overheard the two men. “So she just took Unisom?” Cooper asked.

“And Xanax,” Matt added.

Linda’s head whipped around, and she stared at her son-in-law. “Matt, Kari didn’t have any Xanax.”

“Oh,” Matt said. “I didn’t mean that. Just Unisom.”

Throughout that night, Matt added more detail to his account of what happened earlier that evening. Kari, he said, had thrown up in the bathroom at swim practice and again after they returned home. In the bedroom, she got into bed and drank another Fuzzy Navel. Along with the Unisom bottle and note, the police had the two Fuzzy Navel bottles on the nightstand. It all made a convincing package.

I
t was at one o’clock that Lindsey arrived on Crested Butte, screaming as she walked up to the house, “What happened to my cousin? What happened to Kari?”

Matt rushed out to quiet her. “Keep it down so you don’t wake up the girls,” he ordered, putting his arm around her. “Come inside.”

Inside the house, Lindsey approached one of the officers and asked to see the note. He refused, saying it was evidence. At that, Kari’s cousin sat beside Linda, putting her arm around her. Jim sat quietly in a chair. They both looked as if they were in shock. Meanwhile, Lindsey watched Matt. Just like he had at Kassidy’s funeral, he showed no emotion, but he did look nervous, pacing the living room in front of the fireplace, playing with his keys. Repeatedly, he dropped the key ring, having to stoop to pick it up.

By then, Hewitt Police Officer Brad Bond had arrived with a camera. Kasting asked Bond to photograph the scene. While it wasn’t unusual in a crime scene to take dozens of photos or more, that night in the Bakers’ bedroom, with the body of a young mother dead on the floor, Bond took only eight.

The first one was of the nightstand, a close-in shot showing the suicide note, the two empty Bartles & James Fuzzy Navel bottles, and the Unisom container off to the right edge of the photo. The container had been emptied and two remaining pills lay beside it.

Photographs numbers two and three were of the Unisom bottle, including the upper section of the suicide note. In one the photo extended down far enough to show “Kari” printed at the bottom. Number four was of the wall across from the bed, including the armoire that held the television, and beside it a desk with a computer and printer.

The fifth photo gave the first glimpse of death. The unmade bed dominated the photo, the pillows still in place, and beside it the nightstand, with another view of the wine-cooler bottles, the note, the clock, and the Unisom container. Yet as the officer snapped the photo, extending into the frame were Kari’s legs, from the knees down, splayed out on the hardwood floor. Her body lay to the left of the bed, and a bed pillow was thrown against the wall, not far from her left foot.

If that fifth photo was eerie, the last three were truly heartbreaking. The young mother was now nothing more than a lifeless corpse sprawled out, arms above her head. The camera caught a dark spot on her T-shirt and her off-white nylon panties, tight and smooth against her skin. Leads from the heart monitor still trailed from below her shirt. Perhaps saddest were the small reminders of who she had been, the Santa Snoopy on her shirt and the silver bracelets on her right wrist, the ones students at Spring Valley heard tinkling as she walked down the hall, one in the Christian sign of a fish. Her eyes closed, her mouth gaped open, red and raw, as was a spot on her nose. In one taken head to feet, with her limbs extended, she looked like a child making a snow angel.

In the end, those photos did little to explain what had truly happened that night. Adding to the missed opportunities, Hewitt PD collected only two pieces of evidence from the Bakers’ bedroom: the Unisom bottle and the suicide note. The sheets weren’t taken, not even the Bartles & James bottles.

A
s the police began to close up shop at the house, Lindsey watched as Cooper talked to Matt, telling him that the JP had ruled Kari’s death a suicide. She thought she could see Matt physically relax. “I’ll give you a call and get together with you in the future,” he said. “We may have more questions.”

“That’s fine,” Matt agreed.