12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 (16 page)

Understanding, Linda nodded, but in the back of her mind she wondered, why now? Many of the writings Matt showed them were dated six or more years ago, many not long after Kassidy died. Yet it seemed a pointless question. After all, Kari was dead, and the only explanation Linda had was that her daughter had committed suicide.

The expected crowd was too big for Crossroads, so Kari’s services began at three that afternoon in the funeral home’s large chapel, a room with a soaring ceiling. Despite the substantial accommodations, more chairs had to be brought in. Once the seats filled, mourners stood against the wall and spilled out into the entryway.

Matt cut a sympathetic figure as a widower with two young children abandoned by a wife who’d committed suicide over the death of a child. In his dark suit, he milled through the crowd shaking hands. By then, the church members at Crossroads had voted to donate funds to pay for Kari’s funeral and burial. They also gave him a check to help with his rent on the house for the coming months.

As the crowd arrived, Matt stood at the funeral home’s podium with the girls, greeting those who came through the door. As Crossroads members entered, he assured them he’d be at church the following week, Easter Sunday. Although they insisted he didn’t have to, Matt stressed that he would be there. “I worked right after Kassidy died. I’ll do the same thing this time,” he told one church member. “God has not abandoned me. He will give me the strength to carry on.”

Among those attending were Vanessa Bulls and her parents.

As the service began, Matt and the girls joined Linda and Jim, sitting with Barbara and Oscar in the front row. When he hugged her, Linda said, “I love you.”

Much later, someone would tell her that as he turned away, Matt murmured, “I don’t love you.”

“It was a funeral, nothing stands out that much,” Barbara would say later in her dour way. That day many noticed that like Matt, she expressed little if any sorrow. Like him, she didn’t cry. Later, Barbara would say: “I saw Matt reacting like I’d react. We’re not the type to break down and cry. Crying and screaming and wringing our hands is not who we are. If people judged on how he reacted, I can’t do anything about that.”

Jennifer’s husband, a Florida music minister, had prepared the music. Behind the lectern, photographs of Kari flashed on a screen. As they looked up at the photos of their mother, Grace and Kensi cried softly.

In front of the crowd, Steve Sadler began the service. Later, Kari’s family would say that Sadler said little about Kari. From her Bible, Sadler read underlined passages, many of them about God’s love. Yet his words focused on the living. He asked those gathered to watch over Kensi and Grace, and then talked at length about Matt, about all the help he would need not in just the days but months and years to come. Sadler asked them all to pray for Matt, who sat with his head bowed in his hands. “You need to call him, not just today but in the future, and ask what you can do to help him,” Sadler said. “Clean his house. Clean his toilets. Be there for him and the girls.”

Crying, Linda listened, understanding that Matt would need help with the girls, but disappointed that Sadler hadn’t used the dear stories her family had told him about Kari. Then Sadler suggested that the mourners give their condolences to the family, but he urged them not to dawdle, to shake hands and move quickly through the line.

The burial was private, immediate family and close friends only, at the same cemetery where seven years earlier Kassidy’s body had been laid to rest. As she watched with the crowd, Nancy prayed, but not as Sadler had suggested during the eulogy for Matt, but it wasn’t actually against him either. “I never prayed God would get Matt,” she’d say later. “I prayed God would get the truth out.”

Chapter 27

T
he evening after his wife’s funeral, Matt Baker called the Bulls’s household. Vanessa would later say that he talked first with her, then with her parents, confiding in Larry and Cheryl that Kari had been deeply depressed, detailing all he said he’d suffered with his dead wife. After listening, Cheryl invited Matt and the girls for dinner the following Friday, Good Friday. Over the next three days, Matt called the Bulls’s house eight times and talked for a total of 105 minutes.

That same week at Spring Valley Elementary, two teachers cleaned Kari’s room, pulling together her personal belongings for Matt to pick up. The teachers found photos of Matt and the girls and the e-mail Matt had sent Kari, the one where he accused her of being responsible for Kassidy’s death. “This is what she was so upset about,” one said.

Meanwhile, Linda’s sisters faced a quandary. Suspecting that Matt had murdered Kari, they now realized that they’d been wrong to stay silent and assume that the Hewitt police would investigate. Talking it over, they worried about the consequences, including that the scene had been scrubbed and cleaned, and Kari’s body embalmed and buried. Eager to rectify the situation, they talked about the best way to approach the police. Their decision was that Bristol should talk to Sergeant Cooper, the investigator in charge of the case.

Housed on Chama Drive next to the public library in a modest brick building painted white with blue trim, Hewitt PD was a small operation with twenty-two officers, a department without a considerable amount of resources. The man in charge, Chief James Barton, was a thick-necked, jowly man, with a mustache, graying hair, and wire-rimmed aviator glasses. Over his then-twenty-six years in law enforcement, Barton had worked for a variety of small departments, from the Nueces County constable to the Alice, Texas, police department. He’d hired on in Hewitt in 1983 and worked his way up to the top spot.

Barton’s second-in-command was Captain Tuck Saunders. A police officer since 1991, Saunders’s entire career had been spent in the employ of Hewitt PD. “Tuck did pretty much whatever the chief told him to do,” says a former HPD employee.

The good news was that there wasn’t a lot of serious crime in Hewitt. “We have a little bit of everything,” Chief Barton would say. “But we don’t get a lot of violent crime. Very few murders.”

In the past, there had been questions about the department’s performance. One case that stood out was the death of Joel Gibbs, who had died under mysterious circumstances ten years before Kari. In the Gibbs case, Joel’s body was found with multiple stab wounds, including a slashed throat. Perhaps surprisingly, with those types of injuries, Hewitt PD officers initially assumed the death was a suicide and allowed the scene to be cleaned, even tearing out the bloodstained carpeting, destroying evidence, and hampering the investigation. Perhaps because of the lost evidence, no one was ever charged with the murder.

That first week after Kari’s death, Bristol made her way over to Hewitt PD’s offices and talked to Cooper, identifying herself as Kari’s therapist. Tall and heavyset, a former coworker says that Cooper had a reputation for not liking to be questioned.

When she met with Cooper, the therapist recounted what Kari had said at their final session, including her suspicions about an affair and that Matt was trying to kill her. Relaying how Kari had then quickly laughed off her suspicions about Matt, Bristol concluded with her assessment of her patient, saying, “I saw Kari three days before she died, and I had no indication that she would commit suicide.”

When Cooper appeared not to take the situation as seriously as she expected, Bristol prodded, “What’re you waiting for? For Matt Baker to marry and kill a second wife?”

After hearing Bristol’s account of her meeting with Cooper, Kay called the police department and talked with the sergeant on the phone. Like her friend, Kay got right to the point, telling Cooper: “I think Matt Baker had something to do with my niece’s death.”

As she would remember the conversation, the sergeant replied, “We don’t have any evidence of foul play.”

“Why wasn’t an autopsy done?” Kay pressed.

“Judge Martin was notified and didn’t order one,” Cooper said.

“I don’t understand why not,” Kay said. “Kari wouldn’t have killed herself.”

“Well, it’s an open case. If you have any more information, let me know,” Cooper responded.

“That’s it?” Kay asked.

“As I said, if you get any more information, call us and let us know.”

Kay hung up, certain Cooper had no intention of investigating Kari’s death.

That afternoon, Kay filled Nancy and Lindsey in on Bristol’s unproductive visit with Cooper and her follow-up phone conversation. Frustrated, they weren’t sure what to do. The only step they could take was one they dreaded. “We didn’t know how to tell Linda,” says Nancy. “We wanted to, but we knew it would hurt her. And we didn’t have proof.”

Hoping to gather more information before talking to Linda, Kay called the doctor Kari had seen on the Monday before her death, the one who’d written a prescription for an antidepressant. Kay’s attempt to glean any insight, however, proved fruitless. The physician’s nurse listened to the news of Kari’s death sympathetically but refused to ask the doctor to come to the phone. Citing privacy laws, the nurse said, “The doctor won’t be able to talk with you.”

After she hung up, the nurse noted her conversation on Kari’s chart and notified the doctor, who put in a call to Matt. In Kari’s chart, the doctor wrote: “I spoke with Matt and expressed my prayers and thoughts. He states that she must have consumed a large amount of Unisom and mixed drinks, then she aspirated.”

Days passed, and the women talked often, yet Linda’s sisters and niece remained uncertain about how to proceed. “Hewitt police hadn’t done their job,” Nancy would say later. “We wanted an investigation.”

That same week, on April 12, Kari Baker’s death certificate was printed, the cause of death listed as an overdose of Unisom sleep aid. The manner of death was a check in a box beside the word “Suicide.” Where the form required information on how the death occurred, someone had typed: “overdose of over-the-counter Unisom. Left note.” The death certificate was signed by Justice of the Peace Billy Martin.

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Kari Dulin and Matt Baker fell quickly in love,
so much so that their parents feared that it could be a mistake.