12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 (23 page)

“Hindsight,” Cooper said.

“I know,” Matt agreed. After shaking hands, they left the room.

Finally, police had interviewed Matt Baker, but had he told the truth? And why hadn’t more questions been asked? Why hadn’t Cooper pushed harder? Wasn’t that the time to ask the tough questions?

Chapter 33

A
s May drew to a close, Linda gave up on Hewitt PD. “I got the feeling that they weren’t going to be wrong, even if a murderer went free,” she’d say later. She and Jim talked over the situation, agreeing to pursue it on their own, and she asked him a favor: “Is it okay if I take the lead?”

“Sure,” Jim said. “Of course.” To Linda, it was as if her husband had given her a gift, the ability to look into their daughter’s death and do one last thing for Kari.

The day after Cooper’s interview with Matt, Linda went to Hewitt PD and requested anything that was public on the case. She was given the cover sheet from the police report. The only information on it that helped was the exact time of the 911 call: 12:03
A.M
. Once she had that, she asked Nancy to once again go to Hollywood Video, this time to verify when the movie had been checked out. It was 11:48.

At her desk at home, Linda plotted the two events on a time line. She then made more phone calls, including to the EMT service, to determine what time the first responders arrived on the scene. Every fact Linda nailed down added another piece to the puzzle of what happened the night Kari died.

Off and on, Charlie and the angels met at one of their favorite Mexican restaurants, holding lunchtime meetings where they debated what they knew and plotted how to learn more. Topics ranged from, if Matt didn’t kill Kari, why wasn’t the suicide note signed? To: Why did Kari leave two pills in the Unisom bottle instead of taking them all?

Perhaps feeling the pressure, Matt called Jenny in early June and asked her to go to a movie and to a Wendy’s for dinner with him and with the girls. Although she wanted to see Kensi and Grace, Jenny worried about being with Matt, thinking that he might push her for details on what Linda was doing. “I already have plans,” she said.

Meanwhile at Crossroads, dissent was growing. Rumors circulated, a growing number of the members questioning whether Kari had committed suicide and their pastor’s relationship with Vanessa Bulls. A deacons’ meeting was scheduled to address the situation. Before it, Matt contacted church members, pleading his case. Talking to one woman, Matt attacked Kari, saying that she wasn’t a good mother. The woman would have none of it. “I knew Kari,” she said. “She was a wonderful mother.”

The evening of the meeting, Jim was out of town and didn’t take part. Later, he would hear that the deacons laid out the accusations, including that Matt had been calling the Bulls’s household to talk to Vanessa before Kari’s death. Matt denied every charge. The problem was that one deacon had already confirmed some of the facts before the meeting, and he judged that their pastor was lying. And there were the practical matters of running the church. Distracted, Matt had become less involved. The members had had enough of his canceling Sunday evening services to be with Vanessa.

Matt put up a fight, but the deacons were determined. They gave him a sixteen-hundred-dollar severance, but his services were no longer required at Crossroads Baptist. Afterward, Matt told a church member that he was disappointed and needed the extra money from his pastor’s job to buy a house he and Vanessa were considering. “I’m going to take the girls and move to Kerrville,” he said. “Away from all this gossip.”

A
s the days ticked past, Linda carried out the plan Matt Cawthon, the Texas Ranger, had given her. She’d talked to Hewitt PD’s chief and gotten nowhere, and on June 2, she wrote a letter to McLennan County’s longtime district attorney, John Segrest. “My daughter, Kari Baker, died on April 8, 2006. Her death was ruled a suicide by Judge Billy Martin and the Hewitt Police Department . . . Martin didn’t conduct an autopsy. In fact, Judge Martin didn’t come to the scene,” Linda wrote. Filling Segrest in on the details, including the typed, unsigned suicide note, she laid out what she knew, including the time line she’d pulled together with her family’s help.

In the letter, she mentioned Kari’s visit with Bristol, noting that after the therapist talked with Cooper, she’d come away believing that nothing would be done with the information. Linda described her dilemma, trying to work with the justice of the peace and Hewitt PD, who continually referred her to each other but took no action. “I have additional information to share with you. However, I wanted to give you an idea of what my family is dealing with here . . . We want to move forward. We don’t want to play any sort of blame game.”

At that point, Linda asked Segrest to take the case out of Hewitt PD’s hands and call in the Texas Rangers. “While I have no doubt that the Hewitt PD are fine men and women, this case may not be something they are trained to handle. I don’t mean to dismiss or disparage the work of the Hewitt Police Department. I want to ensure that this case is investigated properly, however.” She concluded by writing, “Thank you very much for your time. All my family wants is the truth.”

While Linda waited to hear from Segrest, Matt sent her an e-mail on June 4, a Sunday, informing the Dulins that Barbara would be spending time with them over the summer. “I need to inform you that Kensi, Grace, and I have talked and are not at a point to have any extended time away from each other,” he wrote regarding short vacations with the girls that the Dulins had proposed for the summer. “I feel any trip apart from each other this summer is not of the best interest of Kensi, Grace, nor [sic] myself.”

“It was evident that he was cutting us off from our granddaughters,” Linda would later say. After talking over the situation, she and Jim hired an attorney to sue for visitation. When Matt was notified, he e-mailed claiming they had no reason to do so, that he would never keep his daughters from their maternal grandparents. Linda was blunt in her response, saying she knew Matt was turning their granddaughters against them. “You don’t need to respond to this e-mail,” she concluded. “I think we have both said what needs to be said. Have a good day.”

Three days later, the Dulins’ civil attorneys formally filed a petition for visitation with Kensi and Grace. Along with time with their granddaughters, the Dulins wanted court-ordered counseling for both girls.

The distractions must have been piling up for Matt that summer. He had the battle with the Dulins, the worries of knowing that they were questioning Kari’s death, the girls to care for, and, of course, the relationship with Vanessa to nurture. The same afternoon that the Dulins filed their petition, Matt was at his computer at WCY working on that latter complication, Vanessa. Using an
[email protected]
e-mail address, he sent an e-mail to Turtlefiji.com, a company that booked trips to the island of Fiji. When a reply came, it read: “I am responding . . . regarding your honeymoon in Fiji . . . congratulations on your engagement. What an exciting time for both of you!”

All wasn’t going as well at the Dulins’. The following day, Linda received more bad news. In a letter, Segrest, the district attorney, expressed his sympathies but then backed Hewitt and Billy Martin. While admitting that they could make mistakes, Segrest urged the Dulins to trust the JP and the Hewitt officers’ judgment. And in the end, he refused to help in any way, writing, “My office is not involved and won’t become involved in the inquiry at this stage.”

Disappointed, Linda and Jim talked. In the end, they agreed that their best option was to reach out to everyone they knew and ask for help. Linda carried out the plan, calling friends and family. A day later the phone rang. A friend of Kari’s from high school had some advice. “Mrs. Dulin,” he said. “There’s an attorney in Waco, a former federal prosecutor, Bill Johnston. You need to call him.”

Chapter 34

“L
et’s get started,” Bill Johnston said on the afternoon of Friday, June 9, 2006, two months after Kari’s death. Six feet four inches, lean, with a thick mop of curly dark brown hair, Johnston had a brusque incisiveness. They were seated around a conference table in a mid-rise office decorated with Western art. The appointment calendar said only that Linda Dulin wanted to talk about her daughter’s death, a suicide that the family believed was suspicious.

Johnston and Linda weren’t alone in the room.

At Camp Swift for his annual training, Jim wasn’t able to be there, but Nancy had come to support Linda. And Johnston had invited two old friends to sit in on the meeting: John Bennett, a wiry, gray-haired man in a leather bomber jacket, and Mike McNamara, tall and angular with a fringe of white hair habitually topped by a cowboy hat. Both men had hung out shingles as private investigators after retiring from long careers in law enforcement, Bennett as an undercover agent for the Texas Department of Public Safety and McNamara as a deputy U.S. Marshal.

A former assistant U.S. attorney, Johnston had worked with McNamara and Bennett for more than a decade. The law was a family legacy. Johnston’s father, Wilson Johnston, had been an assistant Dallas district attorney for decades, the one who prosecuted Jack Ruby for the murder of President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. “My dad was a courageous guy, and I grew up wanting to do what he did,” says Johnston. As a prosecutor, he had a reputation for working with law enforcement to help along investigations, giving officers advice and the tools they needed when he believed a crime had been committed.

“If Bill saw a problem like a drug-infested apartment complex, he’d say, ‘We’ve got a nest of rats over here to work on,’ ” says Bennett. “Bill is fearless.”

“I took cases where I thought it was the right thing to do,” says Johnston. “I wanted to be the person who picked up the flag, and said, ‘Follow me.’ ”

Over the years, Johnston had forged a close relationship with McNamara and his older brother, Parnell, also a deputy U.S. Marshal. Like Johnston’s, the McNamara brothers’ family had a long history in law enforcement; their father, T. P. McNamara, grandfather, Emmett Parnell McNamara, and uncle, Guy McNamara, had all worn badges for the U.S. Marshal’s office.

Then there was Bennett. Not as tall as McNamara and Johnston were, Bennett measured a hair over five-foot-six, with a wide smile and a glint in his eyes. In the late 1960s, Bennett, nicknamed “Little John,” joined the navy out of high school and was sent to Vietnam, where he was stationed outside Da Nang. Once home, like Johnston and the McNamara brothers, Bennett enrolled in Baylor. His intention was to go into law. But by graduation, he’d grown weary of school. Instead, Bennett hired on as a state trooper, working his way up the ladder, promoted to undercover narcotics investigations.

Over twenty-five years, Bennett traveled the U.S. pulling together major drug cases, including air conspiracies, where his targets flew in planeloads of drugs, and vast indoor growing operations, some with fingers stretching out to Oklahoma, Virginia, and Florida. A meticulous investigator, Bennett had a talent for detail. “It’s a hard life because of who you’re dealing with,” he says.

All the men had a conjoined history.

John Bennett had been the first narcotics officer Johnston had ever worked with, and it had been the McNamara brothers who in 1992 brought a brutal murder to Johnston’s attention, that of Melissa Northrup, a convenience-store clerk. About that time, the McNamaras noticed that a lot of young women were turning up dead, including three Waco-area prostitutes and an Austin accountant. The lawmen quickly suspected Kenneth McDuff, a serial killer who’d been paroled out of a Texas prison. What Johnston did first was take the information to Segrest, the McLennan County district attorney. When Segrest refused to pursue the case, Johnston took it on himself to go after McDuff on a federal drug charge, based on a single tab of LSD. At the same time, the McNamara brothers and others investigated the killings. Based on the information gathered, Segrest then prosecuted the case. In the end, McDuff was convicted of Northrup’s murder and executed in 1998.

“The plague of law enforcement is weak prosecutors,” says Johnston. “You can have a great investigator, but if he can’t get a prosecutor to take a risk . . . he’s stymied.”

After thirteen years as a prosecutor, it was the Branch Davidian fiasco that convinced Johnston to become a defense attorney. The one who wrote the initial warrant for David Koresh’s arrest on a weapons charge, Johnston got caught up in the finger-pointing that followed the lethal fire. The switch to the other side of the courtroom wasn’t an easy one. “I missed prosecuting,” he admitted. “It’s not the same.”

Looking across the table at Linda, Johnston said, “Tell me why you’re here.”

After taking a deep breath, she told the three men about Kari, Matt, Kari’s death, Vanessa, and all that they’d uncovered, from the phone calls to Matt’s bizarre behavior.

“What do you want us to do?” Johnston asked. It wasn’t unusual for family members to balk at the idea that a loved one had committed suicide. For all Johnston knew, that was the case with the two women seated across from him.

Linda had thought long and hard, and what she didn’t want was for Johnston to think this was a hunting party out to get Matt Baker. “I don’t want you to assume my son-in-law did anything wrong. I just want the truth,” Linda said. “I need to know what happened to my daughter.”

Linda had feared Johnston would write off her concerns, the way Cooper and Segrest had. So when Johnston said, “We can do that,” she felt an overwhelming sense of relief.

Yet Johnston then explained that Linda really didn’t want to hire him, at least not yet. Instead, she needed McNamara and Bennett. “I think the world of these two men,” Johnston said. “Let’s ask them to do a little digging. Let’s see what they find out.”

“W
e’d all worked closely together from the time Bill became the deputy U.S. attorney in Waco,” says McNamara. “We were used to working as a team.”

Once Johnston turned the floor over to the two investigators, McNamara explained the situation the way he saw it. “If we take this case, we will try to find the facts as best we can,” he said. “Those facts will speak for themselves.”

“That’s all I want,” Linda answered. “If Kari committed suicide, I can live with that. It’s painful, but I can. I just want to know the truth.”

It was Bennett who then detailed how they’d proceed. “First, we’ll investigate your daughter,” he said. “We’re going to go at this with the assumption that she did take her own life and see if that’s true. So let’s get started. What do we need to know?”

As the investigators took notes, Linda and Nancy laid out all they knew about Kari’s death, including their suspicions about Vanessa, and Kari’s haunting words to Bristol. In a folder, Linda had copies of the phone bills and all the documents they’d collected, which she gave to the two men. That done, Nancy repeated what she knew of the accusations women had leveled against Matt over the years. “These things happened, and they’ve made us wonder what’s going on,” Nancy said. “From my view, Matt was always pretty sketchy.”

For the investigators, Linda then compiled a list of places Matt had worked, some of which he’d left under a cloud. She told him about the time Kari went to the bank after their debit card had been maxed out on Internet pornography. Listening and taking notes, Bennett and McNamara took their time coming to any conclusions. “I thought it sounded a little suspect, but you don’t know one way or the other,” says McNamara. “But it seemed there was enough that it needed to be looked into.”

The list of names the women supplied included Matt’s and Kari’s friends and families. As the meeting wrapped up, little more than an hour after it started, Bennett stressed again that the first thing they’d do was to focus on Kari, on the likelihood that she had taken her own life. “Then we’ll talk to Bill and get back to you,” he said. “Let us find out the facts, and we’ll see where we are.”

As they walked out the door of Johnston’s office, Linda felt better than she had in a long time. “All of a sudden, all the shock I was feeling, all the numbness, was gone. Someone was looking into Kari’s death. That was all I wanted.”