12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 (3 page)

Chapter 4

K
ari Dulin hadn’t entered Baylor yet in 1990 when Matt Baker arrived on campus. While known for its majors in business, law, music, philosophy, and science, the heart of the institution is its emphasis on theology. It’s a rarefied atmosphere, a religiously based, Ivy-League-feeling school. Thick-trunked oaks line the campus, and roses bloom in front of the library. “It’s a different atmosphere than a lot of colleges,” says one student. “You don’t see torn-up jeans and sloppy T-shirts much. Students are judged by not only how wealthy their parents are but how devout the student appears to be.”

That fall, Matt entered as a student majoring in church recreation and specializing in athletic training, preparing to one day work for a church as a youth counselor. As such, he took general classes plus theology. Still the sports aficionado he was as a boy, Matt worked as a trainer with the school’s football team, the Baylor Bears, at the time a member of the later defunct Southwest Conference. Home games were played in the aging Floyd Casey Stadium, located blocks off the main campus and seating some fifty thousand fans.

In the Bears’ locker room, before the games, the players pounded their chests and slapped their helmets, getting into the zone. Then they prayed, as befitting warriors representing a university dedicated to faith. At such moments, Matt’s eyes closed, and he clasped his hands, appearing in tune with the God they worshipped. “Matt always struck me as truly pious,” says one team member. “He seemed to be a genuine kind of guy, dedicated to the faith.”

As that year progressed, however, there were incidents that, perhaps, should have raised flags. “We thought of Matt as a phenomenal Christian, but we did hear rumors, things like that he tried to kiss women at some of the parties,” says another player, one who wrote off Matt’s indiscretions as merely youthful hubris. “To me, it was just a college thing. Even ministerial students, even those at Baylor, get horny.”

Before the games, Matt and the other trainers wrapped ankles and refurbished helmets with gold spray paint, repairing scuff marks. “Matt always did what he was supposed to do,” says one of the other trainers. “He helped the players, bringing ice for injuries, doing what Mike Sims, the head athletic trainer, told him to do. Everybody knew Matt was a good Christian. In the devotionals before the games, he was always reverent.”

Despite the rumors about his behavior at parties, Matt went through his first year without major incident. It wasn’t until mid-December 1991, during finals week, halfway through his sophomore year, that the allegations turned serious. The young woman was Lora Wilson, a pretty young coed with short blond hair, a freshman majoring in premed. Living on campus, Wilson shared a dorm room with one of Billy Graham’s granddaughters. A year behind Matt, Lora met him while they were both participating in the athletic-training program. It hadn’t been an easy year for Lora, but then it wasn’t for many of the freshmen. Like some sororities and fraternities, the athletic-training students had a tradition of hazing.

As Lora would later describe it, the initiation began at the team doctor’s home, where the freshmen were ordered to pretend to be water sprinklers while singing popular songs, such as George Strait’s “Ocean Front Property.” In the Baylor version, Strait didn’t have oceanfront property in Arizona but Waco. Yet that was only fun. The real hazing took place in the stadium during practice and on Thursday nights before home games. It was there that freshmen worked until after midnight, told to clean toilets and baseboards with toothbrushes and sweep the Astroturf with a broom.

Although Wilson felt as if overall Matt Baker barely noticed her, he was the one who ordered her not to wear gloves while cleaning the toilets and urinals. After she suffered bleach burns on her hands, “I told him to clean the urinal himself and walked out.” What that defiance won her was heckling. If she balked, the upperclassmen threatened to have her kicked off the squad. For a while, Wilson did as told, but then she’d had enough. “I got smart when they were attempting to scare me with some treatment or other as I was vacuuming the coach’s office,” she’d say later. “I looked at them, two senior women with a crowd of about ten behind them, and told them that they had absolutely no authority over me. And unless Mike Sims or the assistant head trainer had a problem with me, there was nothing they could say or do to make me do anything else.”

With that, Wilson turned off the vacuum and left it standing in the room as she walked off. On the way out the door, she heard one junior man whisper, “You’re gonna get it now.”

“Whatever,” Wilson said, with a shrug.

Was Matt put up to what happened next? Wilson would never know.

One afternoon during finals week, Wilson was again ordered to clean urinals in the visitors’ locker room, to prepare the stadium for high-school playoffs scheduled for the coming weekend. Because it was outside the normal practice hours, much of the stadium was locked. Although she was supposed to have someone with her, she’d ended up alone. As she walked outside the stadium to get to the old training room, Matt offered to help, falling into step behind her. Surprised since it was unusual for an upperclassman, or even a sophomore, to help the freshmen, she agreed. But as they walked, Matt began acting oddly, like an adolescent, poking her from behind with a broom.

“Stop it,” she told him, but he didn’t. He kept jabbing at her, and she continued telling him to cut it out, until he finally stopped when she reached the doors to the old locker room. Lora thought little of it rather than being annoyed.

Once in the locker room, she told Matt she’d clean the bathroom if he’d work on the rest. He agreed, and she left to get to work. Moments later, while bending over cleaning a stall, she realized that Matt stood directly behind her. Later, all she would remember was that he moved in quickly, pinning her arms behind her back and forcing himself against her, attempting to kiss her. Frightened, she struggled.

“What if I was Brian?” he said, referring to her boyfriend at the time.

“You’re not!” Mustering all her strength, she pushed away. “Stop!”

Ignoring her cries, Matt lunged at her, again attempting to kiss her. Her heart pounding, she again shouted for him to stop, but he persisted, picking her up in a bear hug and putting her down on the sink. He then forced her legs open and stood between them, pushing against her while trying to kiss her. Lora used her only weapon, biting his shoulder. Startled, he let go long enough for her to jump off the sink and run.

In the main locker room, Matt caught up, coming at her from behind, wrestling her over to a bench, where he pulled her on top of him, again pushing her thighs apart. Although not a large man, he overpowered her, managing to use one hand to hold her arms behind her back, while he fondled her.

Wilson screamed, but he ignored her, minutes passing.

“Then he suddenly released me. He looked at me, and said, ‘I’m done,’ ” she’d say years later.

As if nothing had happened, Matt walked from the room, leaving Wilson shaking and stunned. Her hands trembling, she started cleaning again, as if determined to finish what she’d begun. She’d later explain, “I think I was in shock.”

Tears streaming down her cheeks, she ran from the room only to make a wrong turn and find the doors locked. Unable to return to the north-end-zone complex where the other students were working, a sobbing Lora called her mother from a pay phone under the stands.

“Find Mike Sims and tell him what happened,” Lora’s mother told her.

Agreeing that she’d find the head trainer, Lora pounded on the locked doors, but no one answered. Her body shivering, she was forced to walk around the outside of the stadium to get to an open gate. As she passed one coach, the man asked why she was crying. “Did you fail one of your exams?” he wanted to know.

Lora shook her head, then, in tearful gasps, told him what had happened.

“Find Mike Sims and tell him. We won’t stand for this behavior,” the coach said.

Wilson continued on, searching, but finally gave up. She couldn’t find Mike Sims. Instead, she left a note on his desk, asking him to call her at her dorm. Tears streaking her face, Lora left the complex and went to her dorm room, where her mother had said she’d meet her.

When her parents arrived, they accompanied Lora back to the stadium to meet with Sims. Once Lora explained what had happened, Matt was called into Sims’s office. “Matt admitted what he’d done, but he said he didn’t realize he was hurting me,” she said. But there was no doubt that Lora had attempted to fight him off, attested to by the bite mark on his shoulder.

“This will be taken care of,” Sims assured her, saying she didn’t need to involve the police. Lora and her parents agreed to let the university handle the situation. Lora would later say that she vividly remembered Sims then turning to Matt and warning, “You understand you will have to be disciplined for this, right?”

“Yes,” Matt said.

Lora’s father returned home, but her mother stayed through the night in Lora’s dorm room. Lora had a restless night, reliving the attack. She woke her mother off and on, crying. One thing kept going through her mind: That day her sweats had been dirty, and she’d dressed nicer than usual. Was that why Matt Baker had assaulted her? Had she attracted his attention? Her mother assured her that she’d done nothing to provoke the attack. “She told me that it wasn’t my fault,” Lora would say later.

The next morning, Lora Wilson woke up in her dorm room, terrified. She looked at her watch, the one with a green dot sticker on it, the athletic insignia that represented leadership and identified her as a trainer. She began furiously scratching at it, attempting to wipe it away. Her mother found Lora on the bathroom floor manically working on the watch. “I have to get this off,” she told her. “I can’t do this anymore!”

Her mother said, “Lora, we’re going home.”

In the days that followed, Lora’s mother attempted to convince her to go for counseling, but she refused. Going over and over in her mind what had happened, Lora couldn’t figure out what to call what Matt had done to her.

As the Christmas holidays ended, the Bears’ bowl game was coming up on New Year’s Eve day—the Copper Bowl in Arizona, where Baylor would play the Indiana Hoosiers. Lora wanted to go. “I’d worked hard, and I’d earned it,” she’d say. Mike Sims had told her that she didn’t need to attend the practices, but Lora felt the need to go to at least one, to see if she could be around the other trainers, how it would feel. That first day back at the final practice before the bowl game, Lora saw the other students watching her and whispering. Some accused her of making up stories, and others scoffed at her for being upset about something as minor as being poked by a broom, the story that Matt had apparently told the others. After more giggling and taunts, Lora found one of the assistant athletic trainers and told him that she couldn’t stay and that she wouldn’t be attending the bowl game.

In the end, the Bears lost the Copper Bowl 24 to 0 to Indiana, and when Lora returned to the campus after Christmas break, she quickly came to the decision that she’d lost as well. When she reported for work at the stadium, Matt was there, and it appeared his only punishment was to be confined to the training room to work with the players. “That was something that usually only the seniors were able to do,” Lora says. “It wasn’t a punishment. It was more of a promotion.”

For Lora, the effects of Matt Baker’s attack lingered. She dropped out of athletic training and left Baylor before the semester ended. Months later, she was asked to put her recollection of the events in writing for Matt’s file. She did so. At the time, she was told there’d been another episode with Matt. “They said that Matt had been banned from extracurricular activities and could only attend classes,” she’d say. The Baylor authorities she spoke with told her that if Matt stepped outside the lines again, he’d be forced to leave.

Departing Waco and Baylor, however, didn’t end Lora’s suffering. For years after, she endured nightmares in which it happened all over again: Matt’s pinning her down, she unable to move as he fondled her. And afterward, the other student trainers laughing and taunting, failing to support her. Such nights, Lora woke up terrified, tears filling her eyes.

Were there any ramifications for Matt? He would later say that when he registered for the spring semester, his paperwork was blocked until he presented himself at the dean’s office, where the allegations brought by Lora were discussed. In the story he told his mother and others over the coming years, Matt would deny Wilson’s version of the events, instead saying she became hysterical for some unknown reason when the lights went out unexpectedly in the locker room. “They told me not to worry about it,” he’d say. “They said they knew I hadn’t done anything wrong.”

Had the Baylor authorities simply dropped the matter? The university and Mike Sims would later refuse comment, so there would be nothing by which to judge their actions but the results. The undeniable consequence of the attack was that no one at Baylor filed a police report with Waco PD, and Matt Baker was allowed to continue at the university.

Perhaps it would have been expected that Matt would have learned from what he’d done, but then, he’d apparently suffered no punishment, so why should he change his ways? If Baylor had taken action, made sure that he was charged with a crime, Matt might have been held accountable. But they didn’t, and he wasn’t, and the following January, just weeks after Baker’s attack on Lora Wilson, he was home in Kerrville. It was there that he struck up an old friendship with Dina Ahrens, a high-school girlfriend.

“Matt had dated Dina off and on,” Barbara Baker would later say. “I always thought she was a nice girl, but I didn’t know her all that well.”

At a get-together, Dina and Matt saw each other again. She was still in high school, a senior at Tivy, where Barbara Baker worked as an aide. That evening, they were at a party with high-school friends. Dina knew nothing about the Baylor incident when he flirted with her. “It was a cat-and-mouse game,” she’d say later, “Rekindling the old flame.”