12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 (31 page)

Chapter 46

O
nce Matt was arrested, the Dulins filed a motion for a nonsuit, putting the wrongful death case on hold pending the outcome of the criminal charges. Since the case was now in the hands of the District Attorney’s Office, Johnston, Bennett, and McNamara all stood down, determined to stay out of the way of law enforcement. Meanwhile, the former pastor was pictured wearing a charcoal-and-white-striped jailhouse uniform, his wrists and ankles in chains, in a front-page article on his arrest that ran in the
Waco Tribune-Herald.

At the District Attorney’s Office, Matt’s fate landed in the hands of Crawford Long, the office’s top prosecutor. A lean, finely built man with a gregarious manner, a wide smile, and a stiff gait, Long had been a fixture on the staff for nearly a quarter of a century. The son of a Baylor English professor, he had a halting manner of speech and a sardonic sense of humor. In a courtroom, he heightened the drama by pointing a long, thin, accusatory finger at defendants as he eyed them intently and called them murderers. At other times, he recited Shakespearean and biblical quotes, occasionally throwing in remarks from other luminaries to make his point. Unlike Segrest, Long had a good working relationship with Bill Johnston. Years earlier, they’d served together as special prosecutors on two hundred sting cases for Waco PD. As a memento, Long kept a photo of their swearing in on his office wall. The Baker case, however, wouldn’t be one where Johnston and Long initially agreed. While Johnston saw the evidence against Baker as substantial, Long wasn’t so sure.

When Linda and Jim met with Long, he explained that he wasn’t in a rush to pursue Baker. “It was obvious that the Dulins thought their daughter had been murdered, but they never put any pressure on me,” Long says. “And I wasn’t going to get pushed into prosecuting anyone unless I had a good case. Since there’s no statute of limitations on murder, there wasn’t any hurry.”

In the weeks that followed, Long would later say that he took a hard look at the case and didn’t particularly like what he saw. First, he sent the Unisom bottle and suicide note out for DNA testing and fingerprinting. What didn’t come back was evidence proving Baker had ever held either one in his hands. While Johnston relied on his experts and their definition of lividity, Long called others and heard less certain opinions. “What I was told was that the doctors thought it was highly unlikely that lividity would show up in such a brief period of time, but they wouldn’t absolutely rule out the possibility.” The autopsy’s toxicology was also a problem. In front of a jury, Long worried that a defense attorney could make it add up to reasonable doubt.

Weeks passed, and Long considered the case. “I wanted to keep an absolutely open mind. You had the two sides, and I told everyone involved that the case was not going to be rushed through the system.”

Meanwhile, the former pastor remained in the McLennan County jail on $400,000 bail. Baker had frequent visitors, his two daughters and his mother. Behind the scenes, Barbara was raising money. In October, a month after his arrest, Baker’s attorney went before the judge, and Matt’s bond was dropped to $200,000. He made bail and returned to Kerrville, moving in with his daughters and his parents in their modest gray-sided home on the outskirts of the city. Charged with a serious crime, he couldn’t substitute teach, but instead did handyman work as his father had over the years.

In his hometown, many came to Matt’s defense. “The community stood behind us,” says Barbara. “People know us here, and we had a lot of support.” In November, friends held a barbecue fund-raiser in a pavilion at Louise Hays Park, sixty-three acres of rolling green grass and trees. That afternoon, Matt wore a green bracelet that read:
DEFENSE
, as friends and his parents’ fellow church members from Trinity Baptist gathered. One woman told the local newspaper that she felt “called to attend,” and that she remembered Matt as “likeable” and “genuine.” A former high-school classmate said about the murder charges: “No one wanted to believe it.”

“I am still very puzzled by what is happening to this family,” said another friend.

“It’s unbelievable to know the support I have. Some of the people, I don’t know who they are. It’s amazing,” Matt was quoted as saying.

When the festivities ended, $7,500 had been collected to help pay for Matt’s defense. In all over the coming year, Baker would receive donations of more than $20,000.

F
rom the time of his arrest, a Kerrville attorney named Keith Williams, a Baker family friend, had been handling Matt’s case. That ended, however, when Williams made arrangements to leave private practice to become a district court judge.

At the time, many in Kerrville were talking about a relatively new lawyer in town, Guy James Gray, an aging former prosecutor who’d gone into private practice. Gray and Williams were acquainted, and what Gray heard from Williams was that Matt was a young father, a preacher who’d been charged with the murder of his wife. The Matt Baker Williams described was a good man from a churchgoing family who was being falsely accused. Based on what he heard, Gray formed an opinion: “It appeared that there wasn’t sufficient evidence, that it was a witch hunt.”

Looking back on his long career, Gray would say that he came to the practice of law reluctantly. His grandfather was a lawyer, and Gray’s father bribed him with a Corvette to get him to enter law school. Decades later, Gray still voiced regret about his decision. “I’ve never really been crazy about law,” he says. “I did it for a living.”

Yet, he did it well, not losing a case in twenty years as a deep East Texas piney woods district attorney. “The thing I liked about prosecuting was that I had control,” he’d say. “If I didn’t think a case should be pursued, I was free to drop it. At all times, I felt like I was on the right side.”

Over the years, he’d handled high-profile cases, the most famous the 1998 murder of James Byrd, Jr., who was dragged to death by three white men in the small town of Jasper. The men chained Byrd, a black man, to the back of a pickup and drove, severing his head and arm when he hit a culvert. The murder made national headlines and inspired Texas’s hate crime law. Looking back, Gray would say the Byrd case helped ease him out of prosecuting. “The dragging case just wore me out.”

There were other reasons to want a change, however, when Gray’s stepson died. “There wasn’t an autopsy,” the attorney says, shaking his head at the memory. “It was probably prescription medications that caused it, but we don’t know exactly.”

Considering the Baker case in relation to his own experience, Gray thought he understood how Kari could have committed suicide. “Like Mrs. Baker, I knew what it was like to lose a child,” he’d say. “From what I’d heard, Kari Baker was depressed, a good candidate to take her own life.”

Dealing with the loss of their son, Gray and his wife looked for a place to start over. They chose Kerrville in the beautiful hills of central Texas, where Gray settled into a comfortable brown brick and glass office building. Once there, he did some civil work and some criminal, about half the time donating his services to those he judged were getting a raw deal and couldn’t afford an attorney. Based on what he’d heard from Williams about the former preacher, Gray believed Matt Baker was just such a man. What Gray heard about Linda Dulin was that she was an overly aggressive woman unwilling to accept her daughter’s suicide. One thing in particular made him believe that had to be true, that the Dulins had initially tried to investigate Matt regarding Kassidy’s death.

Precisely how Gray became Matt’s attorney would later be controversial. Barbara would say that the slightly built, gray-haired man with a goatee inserted himself into the case, lobbying for the job to garner headlines. In stark contrast, Gray maintained that Williams referred Matt to him. One way or another, after Matt was released from jail, he and his mother stood in Gray’s office. “Preachers are generally a little bit sissy. Baker didn’t strike me as an outdoorsman or a hunter but someone who was raised in the environment of the church,” says Gray, a taut frown on his well-lined face.

His career as a prosecutor had left its mark on Gray, however, and he had a hard time envisioning himself on what he considered “the wrong side” of a murder case. Before he took Baker on, he “needed to know that Matt was innocent.” To appease his conscience, the lawyer interviewed Matt, who swore he hadn’t murdered his wife. In fact, Matt denied all the allegations, including the affair with Bulls.

Yet, Baker’s denial wasn’t enough. To make sure he had the full story, Gray personally called Vanessa. If Matt was lying, Gray wanted to know. “She told me there’d been no physical contact and that she knew nothing about the way Kari died,” says Gray. “I went a step further and had an investigator call her, and it was the same. Matt told me the affair wasn’t true, and Vanessa said the same, that nothing ever happened.” Without a romance with Bulls, Gray figured that Matt didn’t have a motive, leading the attorney to believe that Baker was innocent.

His conscience appeased, Gray agreed to take Matt on as a client, offering to do the case pro bono, without charging a fee. “I believed in Matt Baker,” Gray would say later. “I truly thought these charges were unjust.”

Assessing the circumstances, Gray had his dander up about the way the Baker case was being handled. He didn’t like the affidavit Ben Toombs had written, one that talked of experts who’d looked at the case and voiced opinions that Kari couldn’t have taken her life. “That affidavit made it look like Matt was lying,” says Gray. “If you just read that, you’d come away believing that Matt was guilty.

Early into their lawyer-client relationship, Gray and Baker conferred about how to respond. With a Baptist preacher accused of murder, the case had caught the attention of not only local and state news outlets, but also national media programs.
Texas Monthly
was working on a cover story, and the reporter was asking for an interview, as were the news magazines
48 Hours
and
20/20.
The Dulins and others were talking to the reporters. Should Matt respond? When potential jurors might see the programs, could he afford to remain silent?

“Our discussion was whether to fight or just sit back and take it,” says Gray. During his years as a prosecutor, especially working the Byrd case, Gray had experience with the media, and his advice to Matt Baker was to fight back. Yet Gray warned that if Baker did so, he had to give honest answers. “We had some eye-to-eye, hard conversations about how if you’re going to talk to the media, you have got to be truthful, because the eye of the camera catches every little lie, and you can’t remember everything you tell them. They catch inconsistencies.”

Over the weeks that followed, Gray, Barbara, and Matt met with reporters in Gray’s wood-paneled office, decorated with a worn leather saddle with a lasso looped around the horn, Western art, and cowhide chairs. On those days, Matt did a series of interviews, first with Tommy Witherspoon, the veteran
Waco Tribune-Herald
reporter who’d been a mainstay at the McLennan County Courthouse for decades, Skip Hollandsworth with
Texas Monthly
, Erin Moriarty with
48 Hours,
and Jim Avila with
20/20
.

The months clicked off the calendar, and in the spring, the articles began appearing and the TV programs aired.
Texas Monthly
entitled their piece on the case “The Valley of the Shadow of Death,” and in the lead photo, Matt Baker had his eyes closed and his hands folded in prayer. With Hollandsworth, the former pastor compared himself to Joseph in the Old Testament, a man falsely imprisoned and betrayed by his family and friends. “He came back and helped the family that had tried to destroy him,” Matt said with tears in his eyes. “I have said a prayer asking God to forgive the Dulins. And I have prayed for God to let me forgive them. But I don’t blame them. I understand they are hurting so deep inside that the only way for them to deal with this is to lash out at me.”

Ever the model minister, Matt quoted a verse from Proverbs: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart. In all your ways, know him, and he will make your paths straight.”

On some points, Baker remained steadfast, especially denying any sexual or romantic relationship with Vanessa Bulls. When the
Tribune-Herald
’s Witherspoon asked about the myriad of cell-phone calls Baker made to the beautiful young blonde, Matt insisted that she was merely a friend. And as for Bristol, Matt charged that the counselor had told him that she knew Kari was depressed.

What would stand out later were the inconsistencies. As Matt talked to reporter after reporter, his story strayed, and the poised pens of the reporters and the camera lenses caught glaring differences. At times, he said he never saw the suicide note until the police showed it to him, despite his having told the 911 dispatcher that Kari had left a note “basically saying I’m sorry.” Even with the same reporter, Matt gave contradictory accounts of the night Kari died. With Moriarty, in front of the
48 Hours
cameras, Baker initially said that Kari was awake and talking when he left for the video store. When Moriarty interviewed him a second time, he described that crucial moment differently: “She’d rolled over and gone back to sleep. So when I left, she was asleep.”

When Bennett and McNamara saw the interviews, they shook their heads. “It was like he’d read the arrest warrant and was changing his story to account for Kari’s body being cold and the lividity,” says McNamara. “It was transparent that he was lying.”

In all, the media reports only cast more doubt on Baker’s innocence. For their broadcast,
48 Hours
went so far as to ask a toxicologist, hired by the program, to look at the evidence. “What part of Matt Baker’s story bothers you?” Moriarty asked.

“Being cold in an hour is nonexistent unless you’re killed in the arctic or in an icebox,” he answered.

As Baker’s interviews aired, a deadline approached. The arrest warrant would be for naught unless Crawford Long took action. By law, the prosecutor had only 180 days before the warrant lapsed unless he took the case to a grand jury and secured an indictment. Yet from the perspective of those who’d worked the case, they saw nothing being done. “It surprised me that I didn’t get a phone call from the DA’s Office to talk about the case. It was like it had never been filed,” says Ben Toombs.