12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 (28 page)

Although disappointed, Bennett and McNamara weren’t ready to give up. Instead, they pored through the e-mails in the folder marked Dulin Family Crap. Before long, Mike McNamara thought he saw a pattern. In the fall of 2005, the e-mails from Matt to Kari were sweet, even solicitous. But from February on, during the time Matt was calling Vanessa Bulls, “You could see the change of attitude on Matt’s part. It was sickening,” says McNamara.

Other information kept being produced in connection with the subpoenas Johnston’s office cranked out. When they issued one for Kari’s Bible, Matt didn’t produce it, but when the Hewitt PD records showed up, they found the copy Sadler had made of Kari’s plea for God’s protection. “I read it and thought about how frightened Kari was,” says McNamara. “How alone she must have felt.”

L
ike Cawthon, Bennett and McNamara both believed that Vanessa Bulls was the key to the case. On August 30, McNamara called and asked her to meet with them at Johnston’s office. She agreed. When they asked questions, she answered much as she had to Toombs and Spear nearly a month earlier, maintaining there’d been no sexual relationship with Matt Baker. Neither McNamara nor Bennett believed her. “She wasn’t being truthful,” says Bennett. You could tell.”

“She claimed everything was lily-white with Baker, no flirting, no kissing, no sexual encounters. It was unbelievable,” says McNamara. “She kept saying that she had never been attracted to him but that she thought he might make a good father for her daughter.”

One thing Bennett noticed was that Bulls used some of the same phrasing Matt had when describing their relationship. “I felt like he’d schooled her well,” says Bennett.

Meanwhile, at Hewitt PD, the criminal case was stalled. Toombs sent the suicide note to the lab, and when it came back, the report said that it had been printed on a Hewlett Packard inkjet printer. Although Johnston had asked repeatedly, Matt hadn’t turned over the home computer and printer he’d had at the time of Kari’s death, so the only one available for testing was the one from WCY, which turned out to be a Hewlett Packard. Yet when the tests were run, it wasn’t a match.

On October 6, 2006, Ben Toombs performed his final official act on the Baker investigation: He returned the printer to WCY. “I felt like Matt had probably killed Kari,” says Toombs. “I just wasn’t sure that we’d ever be able to prove it.”

Chapter 43

D
espite the disappointments and the lack of encouragement from law enforcement, Linda and Jim remained steadfast, hopeful that eventually they’d prevail. “We weren’t going to just let this fade away,” Linda says. “We were convinced that Matt Baker murdered our daughter.”

With the District Attorney’s Office unwilling to take on the case, the wrongful death suit continued, each side filing motions and countermotions. The first depositions took place in October, beginning with the EMTs. What came through loud and clear was that when they arrived on the scene, Kari’s body was already cool. When it came to being any more precise than that, the shoddy investigation was a problem. Since it had been so quickly written off as a suicide, no one had inserted a thermometer into the liver to record Kari’s core body temperature. They hadn’t even noted the ambient temperature of the bedroom.

Yet common sense said that what the EMTs and paramedics saw contradicted Matt’s account. As a rule, dead bodies only lose 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit per hour. With average human body temperature at 98.6, if Kari had been dead for an hour or less, her body should have been 96 degrees or warmer, not so unnaturally cool that the EMTs noted it on their reports.

Finally, at 9:03 on the morning of November 3, seven months after their daughter’s death, Linda and Jim arrived at the offices of Matt’s attorney, James Rainey. The date for the depositions had arrived, including one the Dulins had anticipated for a very long time. Both Matt and Linda were scheduled to be deposed that day, but it was Matt’s questioning that loomed the largest.

While Matt’s deposition was officially for the wrongful death suit the Dulins had brought on behalf of their granddaughters, everyone gathered knew that the stakes were much higher. Linda and Jim weren’t pursuing money but justice. Matt had successfully sidestepped them for a long time, but on this afternoon, that finally promised to be over.

For the first time, Bill Johnston would be able to question Matt, putting him on the record about so many things, from his relationship with Vanessa Bulls to his account of the events on the night Kari died. That information could help on many levels. Locking Matt into his story on videotape during a sworn deposition could allow Johnston to show inconsistencies with his prior statements to police and with the physical evidence. As important, Johnston could ask questions relating to all Mike and John had uncovered about important topics, including Matt’s tawdry past. Everything they learned could open up more leads and potentially move the investigation forward.

The conference room filled. Both of Matt’s attorneys, James Rainey for the civil case and Gerald Villarrial for the criminal investigation, were there, along with Johnston and the Dulins. Matt looked different than he had in the months following Kari’s death. His hair was longer, and he had bangs, but it wasn’t all gelled up, as it had been when Linda judged he was attempting to look younger for Vanessa. Johnston didn’t recognize a woman with thick, coarse gray hair and a placid countenance, who’d accompanied the others, but Linda did. She was perhaps a little surprised to see Barbara Baker in the room but thought little of it. For his part, Matt barely looked in Linda’s direction.

As they congregated around a table in the conference room, before beginning his questioning, Johnston inquired about evidence Matt had been ordered to bring, items he’d promised to produce. Despite the subpoenas, Matt had arrived empty-handed.

“You felt that you didn’t have adequate time to search for them?” Johnston asked.

“That’s correct,” Matt replied.

At that point, Johnston asked about the individual items: First, Kari’s photographs, journals, diaries, notes, greeting cards, and writings. “Will you agree to diligently search for same, for those and provide them?” Johnston asked.

“Yes,” Matt agreed.

Category two included Matt and Kari’s home computer and printer and everything associated with it, including CDs and memory devices.

“I can search for them, I can,” Matt said. “But I’ve told my attorneys that that computer is no longer in my possession.”

“Can you state what happened to the computer?” Johnston asked.

In Matt’s account, the computer became slow and wasn’t working property, so he used the church laptop instead. Later, he gave the home computer to his father, but the hard drive had crashed and he’d had to rebuild it. “But it does exist?” Johnston asked.

“It does exist,” Matt agreed, saying that he would turn it over. When it came to that crashed hard drive, Matt said he no longer had it but had thrown it into the trash.

The printer was a similar story. Matt said that it wasn’t compatible with his new computer, so he’d disposed of it. “I believe it was a Canon,” he said. The brand was important, because the analysis of the suicide note indicated it had been printed on an HP inkjet. Still, the only evidence of the brand name was Matt’s word. When Johnston asked about the missing computer from the Waco Center for Youth, Matt said simply, “That is unknown . . . I am not sure when they were switched.”

“Do you possess or have you ever possessed an HP printer?” Johnston asked.

“Yeah,” Matt said. Yet, he said he didn’t know when they’d had one or what had happened to it. He said he didn’t believe that he had an HP at the time of Kari’s death.

The final items on Johnston’s list were any Bibles or religious materials of any sort owned or possessed by Kari Baker. “Do you agree to look for those?”

“Correct,” Matt said.

After a series of additional questions about circumstances surrounding the missing WCY computer, Johnston turned to the other important purpose of the deposition: “I would really like to ask you a number of questions about your life and your life with Kari Baker, of the events over the last few years, and the events of this last spring. Will you answer those questions for me today?”

Matt pursed his lips and shook his head slightly. “I will take the Fifth Amendment. I will assert my right for the Fifth Amendment.”

“You previously spoke with the Hewitt Police about this matter?” Johnston prodded.

“That’s correct,” Matt agreed.

“I’m asking you today to do the same courtesy for me that you’ve done for the police, who have much more authority than I, and answer questions for me similar to those asked of you then, and others I may have in mind,” Johnston said. “Will you do that?”

“Under the advice of my attorneys, I assert my right for the Fifth Amendment.”

“Will that be your response if I continue asking questions that are substantive regarding this case?”

“Correct,” Baker said.

With that, Matt’s deposition ended thirteen minutes after it began. Although Johnston had warned the Dulins this could happen, the reality was still crushing. Jim looked at Linda, and she shook her head in disgust.

It took only moments for the room to be resettled, and for the tables to turn from Johnston questioning Matt to James Rainey setting his sights on Linda. To begin, Rainey asked: “Why have you filed a wrongful death suit?”

“Because we believe that Matt Baker took our daughter’s life and set it up as suicide.”

“By ‘took her life’ you mean he killed her?”

Linda didn’t mince words: “I mean he murdered her. Yes, sir.”

“Why do you believe these things?” Rainey asked.

Twice Linda started and stopped, trying to get her words together. “I would have preferred that my daughter had taken her life and have my granddaughters safe.” She sighed, then continued, “I fought these feelings for quite a while, but there were circumstances that happened beginning shortly after Kari died that would not allow us to ignore what was becoming increasingly clear.”

“What do you mean by shortly?” Rainey asked.

“Right after she was buried.”

At times, Rainey seemed surprised, as when he asked twice if Kari had truly been buried just two days after her death. “Yes, sir,” Linda said, not adding that it was at the insistence of his client. When Rainey asked what spurred her suspicions about Matt, Linda laid out what she’d heard from her sisters.

As his client talked, Johnston wondered about the gray-haired woman seated at the table next to Matt and suddenly questioned if she belonged there. When he discovered the interloper was Matt’s mother, Johnston asked Rainey incredulously, “Is she a party to this case?”

“She’s not,” Rainey admitted.

“I invoke the rule,” Johnston said, marveling that the woman would interject herself into the morning’s events. “I object to a nonparty being present.”

Rainey asked Barbara to leave, and she did.

From that point on, Rainey asked questions about the process that had taken Linda from standing up for her son-in-law to believing that he’d murdered her daughter. They talked of Kari’s words to Bristol, and the matters Johnston and his investigators had worked so hard to uncover, including nailing down the allegations in Matt’s past. Through it all, Linda detailed everything from finding Vanessa’s number on Matt’s bills to the way he’d kept the Dulins’ granddaughters from them.

At times, the testimony became highly emotional, Linda needing to pause and calm her tumbling emotions. She apologized, then forged ahead. She couldn’t answer everything Rainey wanted to know, and she told him so, explaining that the investigation was ongoing. In particular, she wouldn’t speculate on how Matt murdered Kari.

Apologetic at times, Linda acknowledged that she was a novice at pulling together the strands of an inquiry into a mysterious death. “I’m not an investigator,” she said.

That day, Linda put on the record that she disagreed with much of what Matt had said, including how he portrayed the ride home from the doctor, in which he claimed Kari attempted to jump out on the freeway.

“Did it seem like Matt was overreacting to that or something?” Rainey asked.

“It sounded like Kari thought Matt was being kind of silly,” Linda responded.

Perhaps, Rainey suggested, Kari blamed herself for Kassidy’s death, agreeing with Matt’s charge that she’d been the one responsible. But it wasn’t that Kari blamed herself, Linda said: “She thought Matt blamed her . . . She loved Matt, and she was very hurt . . . She defended Matt, always defended Matt.”

The conviction that Kari hadn’t died as Matt described came in bits and pieces, including the hours Linda spent at the computer researching Unisom. “It was just me being Nancy Drew,” she said.

“What do you take for a sleep aid?” Rainey asked.

“I have a prescription my doctor gave me for Ambien, but I don’t take it often,” Linda said. Then, knowing Matt’s attorney could suggest Kari had gotten the drugs from her, Linda cleared up precisely when she’d started taking the sleeping pill. “My doctor gave me that prescription
after
Kari died.”

“After Kari died?” Rainey asked.

“Yes.”

At times, Linda became aware of Matt watching, listening to her every word. Usually, she tried to ignore his presence, concentrating on the attorneys, but when Rainey asked how Matt had changed after Kari’s death, Linda turned to the man she blamed for her daughter’s death. “Excuse me, Matt, for saying it this way,” she said. “But, I mean, he just started trying to be some little cool hip daddy guy, you know?”

“You think that the fact that there were pictures of Vanessa up and none of Kari that went to motive, thinking that’s a reason why Matt killed Kari?” Rainey asked.

“You know,” Linda said. “It was another little piece of the puzzle.”

Now it seemed ironic that Kari so believed in Matt that she’d ignored everything that suggested he wasn’t the good Christian she thought she married. That thought flooded Linda with sadness. “Kari loved passionately,” she explained. “The people she loved, she stood up for. And she stood up for Matt.”

“So what you’re telling me then doesn’t sound like Matt Baker was actually ever indicted or actual formal criminal charges brought against Matt Baker?” Rainey asked. When it came to the pornography on the laptop computer from Crossroads, Matt’s attorney asked, “And did the church have a policy against people looking at it?”

“He’s a preacher,” Linda said.

“I understand,” Rainey said.

“Understand, that I’m giving you information that is just little piece by piece that by itself seems fairly harmless, until you start adding up all the pieces . . . I mean, Matt is a minister . . . He preyed on women.”

“Do you have a smoking gun?” Rainey asked a while later.

“Oh, if I had a smoking gun, it would be right here on this table,” Linda said.

“As we sit here today, you don’t have any major piece of evidence that you would call a smoking gun, do you?”

“I do not have a smoking gun,” she said. “ . . . I have pieces of a puzzle that show Kari did not commit suicide, but we’re not at the finish line yet. By the time we get there, we will have the answers we need.”

This was a civil suit, and as the afternoon ground to a close, Rainey wanted to establish what harm had been done to Linda. “Have you had any physical ailments or physical problems since your daughter has died that you might think are related to the stress or anything related to Kari’s death?”

“I’ve lost my daughter, and that has forever changed my life,” Linda replied, her voice thick with emotion. “My daughter was my heart, and my life will never be the same . . . That is a big deal.”

Looking at Rainey, she asked, “Do you have a child?”

“I have two,” he said.

“Then you understand.”

At 2:09 that afternoon, five hours after it began, Linda’s deposition ended. The Dulins had arrived that day hoping that Matt would be made to go on the record. Instead, he’d refused, and Linda had been the one who’d endured a grueling day of questions.