12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 (26 page)

“I don’t know,” Bulls responded, according to Bennett.

Meanwhile, McNamara continued his investigation into Matt’s past employment. At the Waco Center for Youth, he heard from Matt’s coworkers about his odd behavior, the strange statements he’d made after Kari’s death, including how he’d flaunted his relationship with Vanessa and claimed the marriage to Kari had been loveless. Then someone brought up a matter McNamara was particularly interested in: Matt Baker’s missing computer. “Matt’s computer had gone missing the same day someone saw him walking through the parking lot with a box,” says McNamara. “My thought was, of course, what was on it that it was so important, he was willing to steal state property?”

That afternoon, the retired deputy U.S. Marshal took a tour of the facility, and Matt’s assistant, Boesche, explained how the doors to the wing that included the chapel and chaplain’s office were kept locked, limiting access. When they reached Matt’s old office, the facility’s head of security, Dennis Edwards, attempted to use a master key to open the door. To his surprise, the key didn’t work. Later, Edwards determined why. Months earlier, Matt had asked the complex’s handyman to change the lock.

“Do you dispense Ambien here?” McNamara asked Edwards.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “But we follow national patient safety regulations, and the nurses dispense the medicines.”

Another piece of the puzzle clicked into place when McNamara talked to Salazar, and she recounted the events of June 19, the day Matt’s computer disappeared, including that she’d told him that the computer was subject to subpoena.

Before he left WCY, McNamara asked Edwards to secure any data off the main network from Matt’s old computer. “We’ll be getting a subpoena,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

Later, at a meeting in Johnston’s office, McNamara filled in Linda, Johnston, and Bennett. Everyone at the meeting immediately realized the importance of what McNamara had found out. “As more information came in, it was like bombshells exploding,” says Bennett.

“It was obvious that this was a deliberate plan to get rid of the computer,” says Johnston.

For Linda, it was another piece of evidence proving how little she knew about her son-in-law. “I could see she really didn’t want to believe all of it,” says McNamara. “But the evidence just kept piling up.”

As reluctant as she’d been to embrace the possibility, by then even Linda was convinced that there was no other feasible explanation. Matt had murdered Kari. “I knew my child. She wasn’t perfect, but she was a good woman. She tried her best to be a good wife and mother. She just didn’t know whom she’d married. Maybe Matt killed my daughter because he’d fallen in love with his latest conquest. Whatever the reason, it was becoming obvious that Matt Baker wanted my daughter dead.”

As they talked, the conversation often wound back to another tragedy, Kassidy’s death. There were so many similarities, too many to ignore. When Johnston wondered out loud if Matt might have killed Kassidy, too, the possibility terrified Linda. “I began to worry that Kensi or Grace could become inconvenient for Matt,” says Linda. “What if they were in danger as well?”

Chapter 40

B
ill Johnston began a war room in his office. Brown butcher paper lined the walls, and each time a new piece of evidence was found in the Baker case, he wrote it on the time line. One afternoon, Matt Cawthon stopped in, and he, Johnston, Bennett, and McNamara looked over the chart and discussed the case, Cawthon making suggestions. As the meeting ended, Linda arrived.

“I don’t know what I can do,” Cawthon said. “But before this is over, I’m going to arrest Matt Baker.”

Tears in her eyes, Linda hugged him, and whispered, “Thank you.”

“It’s not a favor to you,” he replied. “It’s the right thing to do.”

A similar process was under way at Hewitt PD’s headquarters, where Spear and Toombs tracked all the incidents and facts they hoped would reveal how Kari had died. One day, Toombs called Matt’s attorney, Villarrial, asking again about the possibility of Matt’s taking a polygraph. To his surprise, the defense attorney informed him that Matt had already done just that, a private one set up through the law office. “I’ll send you the results.” When they arrived, however, it was Toombs’s opinion that it was worthless: “There were three questions, all about the pills, none of which were conclusive.”

“The questions weren’t substantial enough,” Toombs told Villarrial on the phone. “I’d like to have him take one given by law enforcement.”

“I’ll check with Matt,” the attorney answered, but Toombs never heard from him.

Leads continued to funnel in, often through those who contacted Linda. One was Heather Sigler, the young woman who worked at Kay Jewelers on the day Vanessa and Matt looked at engagement rings. After Linda talked to her, she passed the information on to Bennett and McNamara, who in turn called Matt Cawthon with the lead.

The Ranger was still trying to collaborate with Hewitt PD, but while Spear and Toombs were working on the case, Chief Barton seemed intransigent about pushing it. Cawthon had a hard time understanding that. “He should have been admitting that they screwed up, asking what can we do to fix it,” he says. “But he just wanted it to go away.”

When he looked at the case, Cawthon believed Bulls was the key. He began calling Vanessa, but she ignored his messages. The one time Cawthon got her on the phone, she was at work. “You wait, and I’ll be right there,” he told her. “We’re going to talk.”

“I’m leaving. I don’t want to talk to you,” Bulls said.

“I told her exactly what I thought of her,” says Cawthon. “I knew I wasn’t going to catch a fly with honey with her. I told her, ‘I’ll be coming after you.’ ”

Frustrated, Cawthon decided that the best way to get Bulls to talk was to put her in front of a grand jury. Yet, his badge didn’t give him that power. The only one who could order Vanessa to appear was the county’s district attorney. Determined, Cawthon drove his SUV downtown and parked in front of the grand stone, more-than-a-century-old McLennan County Courthouse. Once there, he ran up the long flight of stairs, through the doors, and into the balconied lobby, under a dome topped with open-winged eagles and a sculpture of Themis, the Greek goddess of law and justice.

Once inside, Cawthon dropped in to talk to Melanie Walker, a slender woman with long dark hair, a prosecutor who’d successfully taken on a spate of murder cases. “I went over all we had with her,” says Cawthon. “I told her what I needed, and that I wanted Bulls brought in front of a grand jury, that I believed that could open up the case. She said, ‘Let’s do it.’ But later, when I talked to her, Melanie had a sheepish look on her face. I asked what was wrong, and she said she’d had a meeting with her boss, Segrest.”

“We’re not going to be able to help you,” Walker said, according to Cawthon. When he asked why, she explained, “Because of Bill Johnston. The district attorney says he won’t have anything to do with anything involving Bill Johnston.”

Later, Walker would deny the above scene, saying she was unsure who gave her the order not to proceed. But Cawthon stood firm on his account, saying he saw the situation as purely political. Over the years, according to Cawthon, when Johnston was a federal prosecutor, he’d taken cases Segrest refused. “Bill Johnston was strong where Segrest was weak,” says Cawthon. “It’s as simple as that.”

What Cawthon said he told Walker was: “You’re telling me that there’s a state law-enforcement agent standing in front of you, requesting the tools you would afford any investigator, and you’re telling me you’re not going to provide me with the tools to continue this investigation? And this is a murder case?”

According to Cawthon, Walker answered, “Don’t kill the messenger.”

A
s soon as he’d filed the wrongful death suit, Johnston had his office write subpoenas for records from all Matt’s former employers, the Hewitt Police Department, the EMT service that sent paramedics to the scene, Baylor University, Kari’s medical records, and something else: records pertaining to little Kassidy Lynn Baker.

While they didn’t have anything solid, Johnston, McNamara, and Bennett had mounting suspicion that if Matt murdered Kari, it might not have been his first killing. They’d talked often about the similarities between Kassidy’s and Kari’s deaths, from the time of night, just after midnight, to Matt’s being the only one with both of them. Bennett involuntarily shuddered when Jill Hotz repeated what Matt had told her: that both Kassidy and Kari were in fetal positions when he found them.

Now something in particular had McNamara’s attention, something he and Bennett found on one of the computer disks Linda had pulled from Matt’s trash: a paper entitled “The Eyes of a Child.” Matt had written it a month after Kassidy’s death for his Human Growth and Faith Development class at Truett Seminary. The paper told Kassidy’s story, but what seemed odd to McNamara was the way Matt repeatedly described his daughter’s eyes. “Kassidy’s blue eyes can pierce the hardest of hearts and melt a heart of stone,” Baker had written.

“What do you think about that?” Bennett asked.

“That is so weird,” McNamara said, explaining that it brought to mind something he’d noticed over the years, that law-enforcement officers who’d taken a life, even in the line of duty, often later remembered looking into the eyes of the person they’d killed. “That Baker wrote about Kassidy’s eyes gave me the chills,” says McNamara. “It made me think about that little girl looking up at him from her bed that night, seeing her daddy. And I wondered what Matt might have done to her.”

Chapter 41

I
n Waco, especially at Crossroads, rumors circulated that Vanessa and Matt had broken up. “We heard that Larry Bulls told people that he and Cheryl asked Vanessa not to see Matt until the investigation into Kari’s death was over,” says a church member.

On August 4, 2006, Cawthon and Ben Toombs again discussed strategy, and it was decided that Toombs and Mike Spear would confront Vanessa and bring her in without prior warning. “We didn’t know for sure what her situation was with Baker,” says Toombs. “We didn’t want her calling him and having him tell her not to talk to us.”

That evening, they went to Tarleton, where Vanessa had a class. She’d say later that not enough students had shown up, and the professor sent her on her way about eight forty-five. Spear and Toombs followed her car to a grocery store.

When they walked up, Vanessa at first looked stunned, perhaps a bit frightened, but she agreed to talk. At the station, they escorted her into the same small interview room in which Cooper had talked to Matt months earlier. They suggested she take a chair in the corner, then they stepped out for a few minutes. At that point, the video camera was turned on, aimed at where Bulls sat. Her long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, she wore a short-sleeved, dark green and gold John Deere T-shirt and black athletic shorts. She had a tube-shaped pink purse on the table beside her. While the officers talked in an adjacent office, Vanessa fidgeted. She alternated between appearing bored and bothered, yawning one moment and peering peevishly at her watch the next.

“Do you want water?” Toombs asked, sticking his head in the door. When she said yes, he returned with a clear plastic bottle. She unscrewed the top and took a swig. A longer wait, then the interview began, with Toombs reading Bulls the Miranda warning. At first, he asked the essentials, including her birth date. At one point she grabbed a tissue and dabbed at her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is just scary.”

The officers murmured that she had no reason to be upset; they simply had a few questions. At first, they let Bulls talk while planting the occasional prod to keep the conversation flowing. Yet, they needed to say little. From the tone of it, Bulls had been thinking for a long time about what she would say if ever questioned by the police. As if she’d rehearsed, she laid out her version of the events that had transpired since she met Matt and Kari in the fall of 2005, when he became pastor at Crossroads, where Bulls’s father was the music minister. “Kari and I became good acquaintances,” she said.

As she described it, Kari often talked with Bulls about her divorce and Lilly. Appearing as angry as sad, Bulls cried when she talked about how her ex-husband had signed away his parental rights “because he doesn’t want anything to do with Lilly.” What Bulls didn’t mention was that this came after a paternity test proved her ex-husband wasn’t Lilly’s biological father.

Rather than Matt, Vanessa said that when the Bakers arrived at Crossroads, it was Kari who reached out to her. “I have a daughter they loved, and their daughters loved mine. Kari and I talked about getting together for dinner and to get the kids and eat out or something.”

It was Matt, however, who Bulls said began calling her house in either late January or early February 2006, two months before Kari’s death. “He asked for my father, but he wasn’t there,” she explained. “He said he didn’t know I’d be home.”

Vanessa was home afternoons with Lilly and going to school at Tarleton in the evenings. From that point on, Matt called often, spiraling from a couple of times a week to two or three calls a day. “He wanted to chat. I thought that he was doing the pastor thing. It didn’t get inappropriate or out of context,” Bulls assured the officers. “He asked about my divorce and said God would work everything out.”

“Did it seem like he was pursuing you a little bit?” Toombs asked.

“He seemed happily married. He never talked bad about his wife or anything,” Bulls answered, gesturing with her hands. “I felt sorry for him. He talked a lot about Kassidy, and my heart went out to him . . . It was nice to have someone to talk to.”

On the phone, Matt went into detail recounting Kassidy’s illness and death. “He said that Kari had never quite gotten over it and was depressed,” Bulls said. “Sometimes she made the other girls feel like she loved Kassidy more than she loved them.”

Answering questions, Bulls related how she’d gone with her parents to the Dulins’ house the afternoon of Kari’s death, then to the funeral. That night, Matt called and spoke with Vanessa’s parents, talking about what Matt described as Kari’s depression. The first time he came to their home was one week to the day after Kari’s death, when Vanessa’s parents invited Matt and the girls for dinner and an egg hunt on Good Friday. “We wanted to be there for him and the girls,” Vanessa stressed. “For the long haul.”

That evening, at the Bulls’s home, Matt suggested that he and Vanessa could take the girls out together for dinners. It was the girls, she said, who drew her to agree. “He really wasn’t my type. He’s shorter than I am,” she said, smacking on a piece of gum she chewed steadily throughout the interview. “But I really loved Kensi and Grace.”

After that, they took the girls to McDonald’s and the movies. It was a surprise, she said, when her father told her about a month after Kari’s death that Matt had come to him and asked if he could begin dating Vanessa. “I just thought all we were doing was taking the kids out,” Vanessa said.

“And what did your parents say?” Toombs asked.

“At that point, they thought he was just a great person who had just suffered so much in his life,” she said, gesturing with her hands. “From what he had started to tell us about Jim and Linda and some other people at Crossroads being out to get him, we all felt sorry for him. . . .”

“How did you feel about his asking your father that?” Toombs asked.

“I was upset about it that he didn’t talk to me first,” she answered. But “it was good to have a friend. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that it would be nice . . .” Bulls began crying again, as she mentioned her daughter, “to have someone who had two daughters and who would possibly be the dad to my child . . . I loved his kids more than him.”

Their dating, she said, had been more than sanitary, chaperoned at all times by their three children. “It was never a one-on-one thing,” she stressed.

Even that, she insisted, had been short-lived. Her parents began telling her that much of what Matt said didn’t make sense and that they were hearing conflicting stories from people at Crossroads, including that the police were investigating Kari’s death.

At first, Bulls said she hadn’t wanted to hear it. With the breakup of her marriage, she said, “I didn’t care about the rumors. I was going to stand by him with those two girls. He made me believe he was totally great, and everyone was out to get him. Another part of me just didn’t want my parents to be right about another guy.”

Her parents, she said, asked her to stop seeing Matt, but she’d initially refused.

From the beginning, much of what she said tracked closely what Matt had told Cooper. And it often appeared that Vanessa wanted to control the interviewing, telling the officers only what she wanted them to know. When one asked a question, she cut him off, then smiled. Despite initially supporting Matt, she said she began to see that he wasn’t being honest. She heard from others about his sordid past. “My parents told me some of the stuff, and it made me want to throw up,” she said, grabbing a tissue.

When she broke it off, Matt was angry but “didn’t rage violent or anything.” How had it affected her? Bulls shrugged again. “I’ve been fine since. I haven’t lost any sleep.”

Throughout the interview, Bulls tugged off and on at her T-shirt’s round neck, as if she felt constrained by it. When it was evident that her recounting had ended, Toombs said, “Let’s go back to where he started calling you.”

“Okay,” she said, nodding.

More details came out as Toombs asked questions about what Matt had said. “He told me that Kari had attempted suicide once before.” That time, as well, it had been with sleeping pills, and Matt insisted that the Dulins knew about all that had transpired.

Bulls said she hadn’t noticed any changes in Matt in the weeks before or the weeks after Kari’s death. At the Dulins’ home the day after Kari’s death, Vanessa, like so many others, had noticed how calm Matt looked. “He told me he was that way when Kassidy passed away, too,” she said. “So I thought that different people just act differently.”

Bulls never mentioned the Christmas potluck where Matt cornered her and suggested they date. Instead, she insisted that Matt had never come on to her. Theirs, she said, had not been a sexual relationship. But there were strange things, like the day he told people at church, soon after Kari’s death, that five-year-old Grace already “knows who she wants her new mommy to be.”

“You didn’t believe that?” Toombs asked.

“It didn’t sound like something a five-year-old would say.”

There were things that, in hindsight, she found odd, including the way Matt talked to his daughters: asking them a question, listening to their answers, then asking them another question. “It was like he kept asking until he got them to say what he wanted,” she said. “I didn’t think about it at the time, but it was manipulative.”

When Toombs asked Vanessa if it was possible that Matt was upset with Kari because he wanted to be with her, Bulls covered her mouth with her hand, as if aghast. “Well, that didn’t cross my mind until a couple of weeks ago,” Bulls said. “I was like, that can’t be . . . I’ve seen too many Lifetime movies.”

Rather than be upset on Kari’s behalf, that Matt might have killed his wife, Bulls seemed to take the suggestion more as a personal insult: “If he did that . . . if he thought that I just got divorced . . . he was . . . going to slide me into their lives . . . That’s wrong.”

Then Toombs asked
the
question: Did she believe Matt murdered his wife?

She grimaced, then said: “Nothing is out of possibility after I found out about the stuff he lied to me about. I think he might have done it.”

“Did you and Matt have any kind of romantic relationship before Kari died?”

“No,” Bulls said, shaking her head. “No!”

“Did you have any kind of relationship anyone else could perceive as romantic?”

“Obviously, other people have perceived it, which to a point offends me,” Bulls said, rather indignantly. When asked, she insisted that Matt had never said anything to her she interpreted as wishing Kari was dead. All he’d said, she repeated, was that Kari was depressed and hard to live with at times.

When asked to, Vanessa, long bare legs crossed and the water bottle close at hand, recounted what Matt had told her about the night Kari died, everything from running to the store and gas station to unlocking the door and finding Kari dead, her lips blue and cold. The story matched what Matt had told Sergeant Cooper the night of Kari’s death, including that he’d been gone about forty-five minutes.

Then Toombs asked something that appeared to take Bulls by surprise. “Did Matt ever mention that Kari found medication in his briefcase?”

“She found medicine in his briefcase?” Vanessa repeated. “No.”

Before long, Vanessa was talking more about what she’d heard, including that the church had found records of Matt’s calling the Bulls’s house when her parents weren’t home. At times, it would be obvious how uncomfortable Toombs was at his close involvement, knowing Vanessa and her parents. As the interview progressed, it would seem ever more apparent that many of those on the edges of the case had been talking and comparing notes. Vanessa even pointed out that Ben’s mother had assured hers that Vanessa wouldn’t be questioned.

When Toombs and Spear stood up and said they wanted to talk a bit, and they’d be back, she asked if she could call her mother. “She’ll be worried,” Vanessa said.

“Sure,” Toombs told her.

Alone in the room, the camera rolling, Vanessa stared at her cell phone, then punched in a number. “Hey, I just wanted to call and let you know it’s going to be a little while longer before I’m home. Ben Toombs asked me if I’d come talk to him.”

Although only one side of the conversation was recorded, it was apparent that Vanessa’s mother was concerned. “I just answered some questions,” Vanessa said. “I’m being truthful.”

Again, she repeated, “It’s okay. I’m just answering questions.”

The one piece of new information she quickly imparted was what she’d just heard from Toombs, that Kari found pills in Matt’s briefcase. Hunched over, her elbows on her knees, Vanessa talked. “I was surprised they hadn’t questioned me before since we dated a little bit afterward,” she said. “It’s good we’re getting this over with now . . . It was scary at first. It was like whoa, why didn’t you just call me and ask me to come in . . . Basically everything I told y’all . . . I stopped talking to him when I found out things were facts . . . I’m nervous, too, Mom. I hate that I ever even showed up at Crossroads and chose to let Matt into our lives once Kari passed away.”

Apparently to still her mother’s fears, Vanessa then said, “I didn’t hide anything, so you don’t have to worry. I really think I’m okay because I don’t have anything to hide.”

Moments later, Toombs and Spear returned, and a few minutes later, two more men entered, one a Secret Service agent who happened to be at Hewitt PD and offered help. Vanessa looked concerned but didn’t miss a beat, answering the questions Toombs asked but turning her chair to look more toward the new arrivals. With that, the visiting Secret Service agent took over, and Vanessa, without protesting, answered again, giving the same description of the events as they’d unfolded.

“Do you think he had anything to do with her death?” the man asked.

“After I found out about his lying, I think anything is possible now,” she answered.

“Was there anything that you found suspicious?”

That was when Vanessa went into more detail about what Matt had told her about Kassidy’s death. In that conversation, he’d said that when he found Kassidy not breathing, he’d had to replace her trach tube. That it wasn’t attached as it should have been seemed odd, and Vanessa later discussed it with a friend, who told her that if someone has a tracheotomy, the tube is left in, not removed. “I began to worry if he did something to his daughter,” she said.