12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 (2 page)

In the days that followed, Kari miscarried. Upset by all that had happened, Kari turned to her mother for strength. They were so close that Linda could feel her daughter’s pain. She knew how embarrassed, hurt, and upset Kari was. To put it in perspective, Linda said: “No matter what happens, your dad and I are here for you. We love you. Grow and learn from this experience.”

In her high-school graduation photo, Kari has a slight smile and engaging blue eyes. At the ceremony, she wore a red gown with a white collar, her hair in blond curls. Life lay ahead, and Linda and Jim had no doubt that Kari was ready to grab it with both hands.

Yet there was one issue that Kari seemed to need to look back on before she moved ahead. With college looming, Kari asked about her biological father, who’d died so young. Linda sent Kari to a counselor, where she could talk freely. “I knew that my daughter might not feel comfortable telling me everything, that she’d worry that she would hurt my feelings,” says Linda. “I wanted her to have a safe place where she could say anything.”

It was a brief exercise, only two sessions, and in the end the counselor suggested Kari write Scott a letter, to say good-bye to a father she couldn’t remember. Kari did and afterward appeared ready to go on with her life.

That fall, in 1993, Kari left Waco for Lubbock, where she enrolled in Texas Tech, intending to major in family studies. It was there that she met Melody Mabry, another freshman, when they both pledged Pi Beta Phi sorority. “Kari was a hugger,” Melody remembers. “Not an uptight sorority girl.”

When the other girls talked about being homesick, Kari was the one who comforted them. In some ways, she didn’t quite fit in. Most of the other girls had long, straight hair, but Kari still wore hers curly and cut short. And she had a style of her own, one that allowed her to stand her ground the night her sorority sisters asked if she was really wearing
those
red jeans to a party? “Yup,” she answered, and she did.

“Kari walked with her shoulders back, with confidence,” Melody would recount. “It was obvious that she’d been raised to be her own person. But she was hard on herself, always trying to be a better person.”

As the year progressed, Kari would come to believe that Tech wasn’t the school for her. There were too many parties and temptations, and Kari told friends that she wanted to get her life back on track. That spring, she told Linda she wanted to stay home and attend college in Waco. “I really want to teach,” she said. “I’d like to work with kids, get my master’s like you did.”

It seemed that Kari was thinking a lot about the future and preparing for her life. There was something else she told her parents. Kari had a plan, and a big part of it was finding the right man. As it was in her parents’ home, Kari wanted faith to be the center of the family she’d one day build. “I want a good Christian guy for a husband,” she said.

Before long, she’d believe she’d found the perfect man to build that life around. In June 1994, Kari began working at Waco’s First Baptist Church, where as a toddler she’d gone to day care. As a lifeguard at the church youth camp, she met a seemingly affable young man from Kerrville, Texas, Matt Baker. On the surface, they had a lot in common, and in no time Kari Lynn Dulin was in love.

“Love is blind, and lovers cannot see,” Shakespeare wrote in
The Merchant of Venice.
Many examples, famous and not, prove his words true. How many have looked back after the haze of passion has worn off and found they didn’t know those to whom they’d given their hearts?

To the world, Matt Baker appeared the epitome of the “good Christian boy” Kari said she wanted. But was he really?

Chapter 3

“T
he last person in the world I would have predicted would ever get in any kind of trouble was Matt Baker,” says someone who went through school with the future minister. “He just wasn’t the kind. The Matt I knew was always trying to help others. That he could do anything to hurt anyone? Not possible.”

It wasn’t just Matt but the entire Baker family that many in Kerrville saw as above reproach. Considered staunch Baptists, Matt’s parents, Oscar and Barbara, were community mainstays, regular churchgoers, and the kind of people who pitched in when needed. To the outside world it appeared that Matt’s life, from youth on, revolved around the principles Christianity teaches. “The Bakers I knew were the first ones to raise their hands when there was a job to be done,” says Theron Hawkins, M.D., a retired urologist and friend, who met the family through Kerrville’s Trinity Baptist Church. “I’ve never known a finer family, one more involved in the community. Why, I can’t say enough about the family, or Matt for that matter. He always struck me as a fine young man.”

“The Bakers went to three services a week,” says Jeanne Lehrman, an old friend. “They were involved in all the activities. You won’t find finer Christians than the Bakers.”

In Kerrville, Trinity Baptist is a low-slung, beige brick complex on Jackson Road. The church itself has a steeply pitched roof and a tower rising into a spire. There are Texans who never worry about seeing the world. For them, the Hill Country, the rugged terrain west of Austin, is as close to heaven as one can get on God’s good earth. In Kerrville the hills are jagged, the ground thin layers of soil over rock, and the scenery spectacular.

Named after James Kerr, a major in the Texas Revolution, Kerrville rests on I-10, a little more than two hundred miles southwest of Waco and an hour from San Antonio. A city of some twenty thousand residents, it’s a prosperous place, one where wealthy Texans buy second homes, a destination for those searching for a picturesque setting to retire. The result is that in the midnineties, the
Wall Street Journal
described Kerrville as one of the wealthiest small towns in America.

Yet few places are as serene as they first seem. The rugged, thickly forested landscape around Kerrville makes a good place to hide. For years, no one noticed, for instance, what was going on in the nearby settlement of Mountain Home. It was there, in 1984, that federal, state, and local lawmen converged on what became known as the Texas Slave Ranch, a thirty-five-hundred-acre spread where hitchhikers were allegedly forced into slavery. During the day, they dug ditches and built fences; at night they carved religious trinkets bearing the phrase “Jesus Loves You.” After one man escaped, the rancher, his son, and one of the ranch hands were convicted of conspiracy to commit aggravated kidnapping.

It was marriage that brought Matt’s mother, Barbara, to Kerrville.

As she would describe it, she came from hostile roots, the unwanted illegitimate daughter of a mother who repeatedly attempted to abort the pregnancy. “She never wanted me, and she let me know that. I was an oil-field kid,” Barbara would say. “I went to fifteen different grade schools, never really knew a home.”

Her bitterness still evident many decades later, Barbara, a short, stocky woman with a thick cap of pin-straight, salt-and-pepper hair, would have little flattering to say about her mother. The picture she drew was of a cold woman, one who demanded much but gave little. “I grew up knowing that if I got a ninety-nine, it was why didn’t you get one hundred,” she’d say. “I worked hard to get my mother’s blessing, but she never gave it to me.”

It was her brother who’d stopped their constant moving, and the one who brought Barbara to her faith. “After my mother married and had my brother, we settled down. Then my mother decided that my brother needed to go to church,” Barbara says, her frown curling ever downward. “When I was twelve, she told me to find us a church. So I visited some, and when I went to the Baptist church, that felt good to me. So I told my mother we were going to be Baptists.”

At the time she met her future husband, Barbara lived in Odessa, running an ice-cream/hamburger parlor. “Oscar grew up in Kerrville and was still living there, farming other people’s land, baling and harvesting,” she said. After they married in 1967, she relocated to Kerrville. Matthew Dee Baker was born on September 7, 1971, their second child. Their daughter, Stacie June, was nineteen months old at the time. “There was never a bond with my mother, and even as a child I realized I was in this world by myself,” Barbara says, her face grim. “That’s not the way I would raise my children.”

When Matt was one year old, the family moved into a large, rambling two-story, wood-frame house with a wide front porch on Earl Garrett Street, where Barbara and Oscar became house parents of a group home, part of a chain of Dallas-based orphanages and foster homes, the Buckner Baptist Benevolences. From July 1974 through June 1981, the Bakers oversaw the care of up to ten foster children at a time plus their two biological children. “In all, over that ten years, we had about fifty foster kids,” Barbara would later explain. “I was just a mom, and ten was the perfect number.”

The home was coed, and the children all ages. Some children lived in the home for the Bakers’ entire tenure there while others came and went. Some returned to their families while others were adopted. When one left, another arrived. Some suffered from handicaps, others were troubled, while still others simply had the misfortune of not having parents able to care for them. The majority of the foster children were boys, and they bunked in two upstairs bedrooms, along with Matt. Downstairs, the girls, including Stacie, slept in a bedroom that shared a bath with her parents’ bedroom.

Looking back, Barbara described fostering as an idyllic experience for her own children, saying that Matt learned to live with children of different races and backgrounds. And from early on, she’d contend that her son was special. “He had a God-given talent with the children,” she’d say, maintaining that at the young age of six, Matt, a diminutive boy with shaggy brown hair and denim blue eyes, counseled the other children. “Even then, Matt had leadership qualities.”

Describing his own childhood, Matt would say: “I learned Christian love. We were all brothers and sisters. Sometimes the foster kids had been abused, and the kids would show up with black eyes. But when they were in our house, they were family.”

In her portrayal of her son’s early years, Barbara describes Matt as a boy who loved school, his home, his paper route, climbing trees, and playing word games. “He was an all-around nice kid. Never got in any trouble,” concurs Hawkins. “Or if he did, I never heard about it.”

Why did the Bakers stop foster parenting in 1981? “Because we owed our own, natural-born kids some normal life,” says Barbara. “With the foster kids, we had runaways, attempted suicides, sometimes the police knocking on the door.”

From the foster home, the Bakers moved into a trailer planted on a lot outside Kerrville, on a meandering street made up of a patchwork of houses nestled against the hills and into the brush. Over the years, the trailer would settle and appear crooked from the street, as if the foundation needed work. Matt would later describe his sister, Stacie, as more like his father, a quiet person. “I’m like my mom,” he’d insist. “More outgoing.”

Unlike in some other Christian churches, Baptists often aren’t christened as babies but only when they are old enough to individually accept Jesus. Matt apparently reached that milestone early. “I was baptized at Trinity Baptist in Kerrville when I was six,” he would say, with pride. “We attended Sunday school, sang in the choir, and went on mission trips.”

The journeys took them into Mexico and deep into the Valley, the expanse of Texas along the Rio Grande, where the Bakers joined with others to build schools and churches, staffing clinics and teaching Bible studies. “It depended on what that particular community needed,” says Dr. Hawkins. “Oscar couldn’t always go because they couldn’t afford for him to take off work, but Barbara and the children went.”

In Kerrville’s Tivy High School, Matt was a scrawny kid with a cap of bushy brown hair combed down over his forehead. He played the tuba and French horn in the band, enjoyed sports, and worked as a student trainer with the basketball team under the supervision of a teacher who had majored in athletic training at Baylor. Although Matt talked of going to the University of Texas in Austin, it was then that he decided he’d head to Waco and follow in his mentor’s footsteps.

“Matt was a good kid. He tutored some of the other kids,” says a classmate. “He made good grades. I don’t remember anyone’s not liking Matt.”

But there were some who were struck by something else about Barbara and her son, an unusual similarity. “I don’t know how to describe it except that you never saw either one of them show any emotion,” says one of Matt’s friends growing up. “Barbara was always pretty dour. And Matt was like that, too, kind of expressionless.”

In high school, Matt had a couple of steady girlfriends, but his friends say he wasn’t one of those boys who “went gaga over the girls.” After school and on weekends, he worked with his father, who’d become a handyman, hiring out to do painting, carpentry, mowing grass, whatever work he could find. “From the time I was a kid, I was out working with him,” Matt would say. “He taught me a lot.”

Those who knew Matt wouldn’t be surprised that he’d become a pastor, yet it wasn’t something they would have predicted, either. “He never struck me as churchy,” says an old friend. “He wasn’t quoting scripture all the time or anything.”

Yet Matt would say that he felt the calling early on. “It happened gradually,” he says, recounting how in his sophomore year in high school, he attended a youth retreat where “I put my intentions on record, announcing that I would dedicate my future to preaching the gospel. It was basically, ‘God, I’m here. Take me where you want me to go.’ ”

Looking back, Barbara would describe her son as exceptional in every way, so well behaved that while parents around the globe are forced to sometimes take their children to task, she’d insist that was never the case with her son. “I can honestly say I can’t remember ever punishing Matt,” she said, her face blank, as if looking for a memory of some transgression and not remembering any, even a slight one calling for any type of reprimand. “That’s hard to believe, I know, but it’s true.”

In the spring of 1990, Matt graduated from Tivy High with a partial scholarship waiting for him at Baylor, where he planned to major in church recreation and athletic training. In Waco, he moved into a dorm and went to class, earning good grades. “His intention was to become a youth minister,” Barbara would say,

But was the Baker family as squeaky-clean as Barbara described it? Was it as grounded in church and doing the right thing, as many thought?

In August 1990, Matt left Kerrville and moved to Waco to enter Baylor. One month later, on September 10, Barbara Baker was ticketed in Kerrville on a shoplifting charge, an item less than $20. The woman with the stoic bearing who spoke of God and held her head high was fined $169.50. Was it a onetime mistake? An aberration? It was a minor transgression, after all, and isn’t everyone entitled to one slip? Later, she’d peg the cause on empty-nest syndrome.

Three years later, in 1993, however, Kerr County records would show that it happened again, on June 13, another theft charge, this time a more serious class B misdemeanor for which Barbara was fined $287 and given deferred adjudication. If these run-ins with the law revealed a different side of the staunch churchwoman Barbara professed to be, allegations waited in the future that cast shadows on much, much more, especially what went inside that house on Earl Garrett, the foster home during those seven years when the Bakers were houseparents.

What about Matt? Before long, he, too, would reveal another side, not that of the admired young man with his eye on the ministry, someone dedicated to helping others, but that of a sexual predator.