12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 (34 page)

Apparently he saw his actions in bed that night not as sex but as a service he was providing.

To drive his point home, that Matt Baker had been caught lying under oath, Johnston asked, “And every answer you’ve given me to one question has been just as truthful and just as important as each other question. Isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir,” Baker said, still defiant.

Johnston smiled.

I
n McLennan County that December, Ellison filed motions in the civil suit for Matt Baker in which he argued that the judge should rule on Matt’s behalf because the Dulins hadn’t supplied evidence of wrongdoing. Johnston responded, attaching the written opinions of the experts who’d reviewed the evidence, including Stafford, who’d written: “Kari Baker did not die as the result of an overdose.”

Six days later, Ellison filed a countermotion, questioning Stafford’s qualifications and asking to ban his testimony. “Baker looks to have civil case thrown out,” read the headline in the
Kerrville Daily News
on December 16, 2008. In the piece, Ellison said the lawsuit was based solely on speculation. Johnston’s response included the scintillating detail that Matt had attempted to order Ambien online just two weeks before Kari’s death.

In the weeks that followed, Ellison continued to contest the testimony of nearly everyone on Johnston’s witness list, from Heather Sigler, the jewelry-store clerk, to Ben Toombs, the young detective who’d written the arrest warrant. “We assumed the civil case would keep grinding along, and we’d get him there,” says Bennett. “It wasn’t what we wanted, but we were playing the cards we’d been dealt.”

Then, right after the first of the year, something happened that none of them could have predicted, and it would change everything.

Chapter 50

I
n January 2009, the chief investigator in the McLennan County District Attorney’s Office picked up the three-ring binder on the Baker case and walked into the office of one of the investigators on his staff, Abdon Rodriguez. A round-faced, jovial man with a friendly manner, Rodriguez was a former detective who had a reputation for getting suspects to confess. “I like police work. To me, it’s all a game,” he says, with a ready smile. “You do the bad things, and my part is to catch you.”

Years earlier, Rodriguez had even managed to convince a good friend to confess after hiring someone to torch his shop. “I don’t care who you are,” Rodriguez says, a bit cocky and with a healthy share of enthusiasm. “I’m going to go after you if you commit a crime.”

The other trait Rodriguez was well-known for was that he was something of a human lie detector. He could look at people, listen to their stories, judge their words and their body language, and he knew if they were lying.

“John Segrest wants you to reinvestigate this case,” his boss said.

After opening the folder, Rodriguez said, “I remember this case.”

Once he was alone, he began reading. He knew of the Baker case but only what he’d heard around the office, read in the newspapers, and seen on the news. So he started on page one, absorbing the crime-scene reports, assessing the photos, the inquest records, becoming familiar with the case and those involved. Once finished, Rodriguez watched videos of Hewitt PD’s interview with Matt. What he saw in Baker was a nervous man. “There were tells, indications he wasn’t telling the truth . . . One was that every time he lied, he closed his eyes. He wouldn’t look at the person while he was lying.”

That done, Rodriguez slipped Hewitt’s interview with Vanessa Bulls into the DVD player. Sitting back in his chair, he knew within minutes that she, too, wasn’t being truthful. “She was evading the questions, not answering, diverting the questioning. There were all kinds of red flags.” What Rodriguez saw was that whenever Bulls didn’t want to answer a question, she distracted Toombs. Sometimes she accomplished it by talking as she took a drink of water. At other times, she simply changed the subject. “When she didn’t want to answer a question, she cried. Women do that a lot, and it worked,” says Rodriguez. What did all this tell him? Based on what he saw, Rodriguez came to a conclusion: “I knew she was either involved, or she knew more than she was saying.”

After he’d finished, he did as his boss had instructed, knocking on the office door of the prosecutor who’d had the Baker case for more than a year, Crawford Long.

Why was the DA’s Office suddenly interested in the case? Later, Long would say that he’d never tabled the case, but it had stalled, and that it was turned over to Rodriguez in hopes that his talent for spurring confessions would break it open. Others would see it differently, wondering if John Segrest’s political situation was behind the sudden interest in the case. Elections were coming up the following year, and there were rumblings that the longtime DA would have a serious opponent, a Waco lawyer. With the streets dotted with cars bearing bumper stickers that read
JUSTICE FOR KARI
, it might have seemed only prudent to take another look at the Baker case.

No matter how he got the case, that week Rodriguez drove with Long to Dallas to talk with Dr. Reade Quinton, the pathologist who had autopsied Kari’s body. What they were told was what others had heard over the years: There was no way after embalming and being in the grave for months to have an accurate toxicology finding. In a courtroom, Long still saw not having homicide on the autopsy as a major hurdle.

Yet, this time that didn’t stop the investigation. Once back in Waco, Rodriguez began collecting statements from witnesses, including Bristol and Jill Hotz, who’d both talked with Kari the last week of her life. They repeated what she’d told them, that she feared that Matt was having an affair. Bristol added that Kari had told her that she feared Matt was trying to kill her.

That done, Rodriguez decided it was time to make it official. At the Dulin house, he stood on the front porch and rang the bell. Linda answered and invited him inside. “I’m here to let you know that I’m going to reinvestigate your daughter’s death,” he said.

Tears ran down Linda’s cheeks. “Do you think you’ll be able to do anything with it?”

“This case has a lot of potential,” Rodriguez said. “I think I can solve it. I really do.”

“I think the Lord sent you to us,” Linda said. “I know you’re going to do it.”

T
he following day at the office, Rodriguez thought about what to do next. He was itching to have a discussion with Vanessa Bulls, wondering,
Why is she lying if she doesn’t have anything to hide?
First, however, he needed to know more about the young woman at the center of the Baker case. Although at first reluctant to talk to him, Bulls’s ex-husband finally agreed to answer questions for Rodriguez, laying out the details of their failed marriage and the paternity test that had proven that Lilly wasn’t his. Next the investigator tracked down a few of Vanessa’s friends. “What they told me was that she didn’t always tell the truth,” says Rodriguez. “After that, I was sure I was right about her. She was lying about how much she knew about Kari Baker’s death.”

The account Vanessa’s friends gave Rodriguez was that she’d told them Matt had begun hitting on her in December and that he’d say things to her like he “could make her feel good.” One friend also said that Bulls was seriously interested in Baker, thinking that he’d be a good father for Lilly.

That Friday, Rodriguez called the cell-phone number Bulls had given Hewitt PD. When she didn’t answer, he left a message and included his cell-phone number. The following morning, an attorney called, identifying himself as representing Bulls. “Why does she need an attorney? Does she have something to hide?” Rodriguez asked.

The conversation went back and forth, and later that day a meeting was scheduled for the coming Monday. At first the attorney wanted Rodriguez to travel to his office, but the investigator insisted Bulls had to come to his office, to meet him on his own turf. “She’s going to talk to me here, or she’s going to talk to the grand jury,” he said. After consulting his client, the attorney called back and agreed to meet at the DA’s Office.

Soon after, Rodriguez was bringing Long up-to-date in his office when another assistant DA happened to walk in. For fourteen years, Susan Shafer’s workweek had focused on prosecuting cases, many of them murders. “So many victims don’t really have a voice,” she says. “Prosecuting gave me an opportunity to fix that as much as possible.” A motherly woman with shoulder-length dark brown hair and glasses, Shafer spent weekends and evenings shuttling her children to sporting events and playing bluegrass music on her guitar.

As Rodriguez and Long talked, Shafer waited her turn. Listening to what Rodriguez told her boss about the Baker case, Shafer began to show interest. A few years earlier, she and Long had prosecuted the case of William Mark Gibson, another cold case. Gibson was charged with barricading his wife and her daughter in the family home, then burning the house down. “It was a difficult case to pull together, and we had to try it twice, but we finally got a conviction,” she says.

Before long, Shafer volunteered to work on the Baker case with Long, an offer he gladly accepted. “It was known in the office to be a tough case, and people weren’t jumping up and down offering their services,” he says.

Parallels she saw between her life and Kari’s spurred Shafer’s interest; they had children of similar ages who went to school in the same district, and Shafer’s husband, like Kari, was a teacher. Shafer even knew people who’d known Kari.

One of the first things Shafer did on the case was to consult Bennett and McNamara. The two seasoned investigators went over all they’d done on the case, Bennett turning over an inch-thick, three-ring binder of their work that he’d pulled together for Shafer. Starting out with so much information was unusual. Shafer had never been involved in a case before where a family had done so much investigation privately. “What they’d pulled together for the civil case was a help for us if we proceeded criminally. As an ex-prosecutor, Bill Johnston knew what he needed, and he’d gone out to get it,” she says. “John and Mike had compiled a lot of evidence that could be helpful if we prosecuted.”

It wasn’t that Shafer doubted Matt Baker’s guilt. After watching him on
48 Hours,
Shafer formed the opinion that Baker was a liar, one who had probably murdered his wife. “I had strong feelings based on what I knew,” says Shafer. “We had enough circumstantial evidence to prove it, we thought, but you hate to take a murder case before it’s ready, and you get an acquittal and you’ve lost it forever. Crawford and I both thought that Matt had murdered Kari, but we weren’t sure we could prove it.”

That Monday, Bulls and her attorney showed up as scheduled at the DA’s Office. Strategizing how he’d handle the interview, Rodriguez had already asked Shafer to divert Bulls’s attorney to an observation room. Shafer agreed, and the two attorneys watched on a monitor as Rodriguez interrogated Bulls.

The questioning took nearly two hours, Rodriguez asking many of the same questions Hewitt PD, Bennett, and McNamara had previously asked Bulls. Rodriguez questioned Bulls repeatedly about her relationship with Matt Baker, and she told the same story she’d told before, that Matt was counseling her. But Rodriguez didn’t believe her, and he let her know, pointing at the phone calls between them. “That’s a lot of counseling,” Rodriguez said, sarcastically, but Vanessa wouldn’t change her story.

After watching her prior interview, Rodriguez knew what questions to push with Bulls, and did so. “Every time I trapped her, she got defensive and would say she didn’t know why something happened,” he says. “She just couldn’t answer the tough questions, and it was obvious that she was lying.”

Rodriguez asked if she and Baker had been lovers before Kari’s death, but Bulls denied it, saying that he’d once tried to kiss her, “But I told him that he was married.”

When it was over, Rodriguez gave Bulls a warning, something Toombs and the other officers had failed to do: “I’m going to get Matt Baker indicted and convicted, and if you don’t tell the truth, you’re going to go down with him. I’ll be following up on what you’ve told me, and I will be getting back with you.”

“We knew she was lying,” says Shafer. “We didn’t believe her.”

Later, Rodriguez took a drive out to the Bulls’s household and talked with Vanessa’s parents. During his interview with their daughter, Rodriguez had asked where she was the night Kari died. Vanessa had said that she was at home, watching television with her mother. Cheryl Bulls backed her daughter up, not only saying Vanessa was home but also describing what they watched that night, a movie on the Lifetime network.

There was also the matter of Cheryl’s Ambien prescription, one that Larry Bulls had talked with Bennett and McNamara about. When Rodriguez brought it up, Cheryl confirmed that she had the prescription and that it was filled the week before Kari’s death. “You’re the only ones we know who had Ambien. Could Vanessa have given it to Matt Baker?” Rodriguez asked.

“No,” Cheryl insisted, saying none was missing. “That’s not possible.”

Still, the investigator wondered.

The investigation continued on, Rodriguez talking to many of the same people Bennett and McNamara had interviewed three years earlier, during the summer after Kari’s death. Then two weeks after his interview with Bulls, Rodriguez was in San Antonio at a conference when he decided to place another phone call to Vanessa. Once he got her on the line, he mentioned that he was in the river city, close to Kerrville, letting Bulls think he was there working on the Baker case. “We need to sit down and talk about this, Vanessa,” he said. Then he bluffed: “I know what you did. I know what Matt Baker did. I know you two were having a sexual relationship. And I know you know what happened to Kari Baker. We’re willing to offer you immunity if you tell us what you know.”

Rodriguez waited. “Okay,” Vanessa said. “When are you going to be back in Waco?”

“Monday,” Rodriguez said, certain he now had her.

Yet Monday arrived, and Vanessa Bulls never showed up in his office as promised. Instead, her attorney called and said that she wouldn’t be keeping the appointment. Rather than stopping the investigator, Rodriguez called Bulls and left messages. She didn’t respond. He e-mailed, and she didn’t reply. “You need to call,” he typed. “This isn’t going away.”

“I want to subpoena Vanessa Bulls and make her talk to a grand jury,” Rodriguez told Crawford Long.

Soon after, the investigator had what Matt Cawthon had asked for nearly two years earlier, a subpoena in his hand as he walked into the principal’s office in the Killeen, Texas, middle school where Vanessa Bulls was teaching. He asked for her, and she was called to the office. When she saw him, her mouth gaped open with surprise.

“You’re going before the grand jury,” Rodriguez said, handing her the subpoena. “And you will testify truthfully to everything. I’m going to be in there with you, and I’m going to make sure that you tell the truth.”

At that, Vanessa began crying. “You could have been more cordial.”

“I tried that,” he said. “Now you’re going to talk to the grand jury, and if you don’t tell the truth, you’re going to be charged with perjury.”

T
he morning of March 25, 2009, the matter of the death of Kari Baker was finally scheduled to go before a grand jury. Abdon Rodriguez got to the courthouse early, wanting Vanessa Bulls to see him. When he saw her waiting to testify, he made it a point to walk past her. “I wanted to remind her that I was there and that I was listening.”

When Crawford Long and Susan Shafer arrived, Bulls’s attorney informed them, “She’s going to plead the Fifth,” meaning that she planned to invoke her constitutional right not to give incriminating evidence against herself. “But she does have information for you. We want transactional immunity.”