12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 (4 page)

After the party, he followed her to her parents’ house. “Heavy petting,” she’d say. “Things were getting very physical.”

While they’d been boyfriend and girlfriend in high school, Dina would later testify about what happened that night as different than in the past. “He was more aggressive with me,” she’d say. “He was . . . relentless.”

It took all her physical strength to keep her clothes on. Why did Baker finally stop? According to Ahrens, it was only because he heard her mother at the door.

Looking back, Barbara would scoff at both of the young women’s accounts of her son’s actions, the perfect son she’d never had to discipline. The incident with Ahrens, she said, was simply Matt getting “maybe a little too aggressive, but what teenage boy doesn’t?”

As for Lora Wilson, Barbara insisted that the woman was lying. Even as the list of women charging her son with improper behavior would grow, Barbara remained steadfast in her son’s defense, blaming not Matt but the women who made the allegations.

Meanwhile, all continued to go well for Matt Baker. His grades were good, and the month after Wilson accused him of assault, no one from the university apparently protested when Matt was given a highly coveted position, an internship in the recreation department at the First Baptist Church of Waco, the premier church in the city, one tightly tied to Baylor. Perhaps they didn’t realize or maybe didn’t care that at the church Matt’s duties would include working in the recreation center and at the summer youth camp, often around young, vulnerable women.

The man who hired him, Jake Roberts, was one of Matt’s teachers at Baylor, an instructor in church recreation who also worked at First Baptist. Roberts would later say he knew nothing of the charges Lora Wilson had made against his young student. “When it came to church recreation, Matt seemed to know what he was doing, and he was a hard worker and a good student,” says Roberts. “He didn’t seem girl crazy. I had no reason to doubt him. If I’d known about what had happened at Baylor with that girl, I wouldn’t have hired him. Absolutely not. But I didn’t. No one told me.”

Chapter 5

I
t was at First Baptist that Kari met Matt, when she took the lifeguard slot in late spring 1994. Held on undeveloped land, mowed and covered with trees, surrounding the church, the youth camp offered canoeing on the nearby Brazos River and swimming in an aboveground pool. The children played softball and volleyball, did crafts, learned archery, cooking, and fire building. Nearly three hundred participants in grades one through six attended, and each day started with a prayer and a song.

When Kari applied for the First Baptist job, Matt’s boss, Roberts, had a talk with her. During it, she explained that she didn’t want to return to Texas Tech, saying that she felt she’d partied too much and hadn’t paid enough attention to her grades. “Kari said she wanted to get back to the values she’d been taught,” says Roberts. “She felt she’d gotten a little wild.”

Later, Linda would say that she believed what drew her daughter to Matt Baker was Kari’s belief that she’d found “a good boy. Someone who shared her faith.” In truth, although twenty-three, Matt still looked like a boy, his face round, thin-lipped, with those startlingly blue eyes. He was a senior at Baylor to her sophomore, and when Kari wore high heels she stood nearly shoulder to shoulder with her five-foot-seven-inch boyfriend.

Exactly when her relationship with Matt began would later be unclear, but soon after Kari started, Roberts noticed that she seemed interested in Matt. “She pursued him, I think, rather aggressively,” Roberts would say. “Kari was a vivacious girl, and he seemed drawn to her. I didn’t think much of it at first, but I started noticing that they were arriving together in the morning and leaving together at night.”

To friends, Kari said that she knew from the beginning that Matt was the one. “A lot of the girls at Baylor thought he was a catch,” says one of his classmates. “We were Baptist girls looking for the right man to settle down with, and Matt talked a lot about faith. He sounded like a good boy, active in church, and that was very appealing.”

Looking back, Matt would say there were many things that drew him to Kari, including that she seemed upbeat and happy, and that she was a woman who obviously loved her family. “Family came first for Kari,” he’d say. “You could see that in her.”

Their first date was to a just-released Meg Ryan movie,
When a Man Loves a Woman,
in which the actress portrayed an alcoholic wife and actor Andy Garcia her dedicated husband. From the beginning, Matt and Kari’s relationship built steam at a pace their parents would later describe as too quick.

When Linda first met Matt, she was less impressed than her daughter. As full of life as Kari was, Matt’s manner was subdued, and, Linda thought, perhaps not genuine. “I didn’t always have the feeling with Matt that he was the man he portrayed. Jim and I talked about that,” Linda says. “It wasn’t anything either one of us could put our fingers on. He just seemed okay, to me. I could tell Kari was smitten, but I couldn’t understand why.”

Kari’s aunts and her cousin Lindsey, who’d grown up as her unofficial sister, also had misgivings. Nancy, who worked in real estate, thought Matt seemed a little off. At family gatherings, while the other men congregated around the television, Matt shadowed the women, hovering near Kari. At times, Nancy wondered if Matt stayed close because he worried about what Kari might say. “It just seemed odd,” says Nancy. “It looked strange, looking up and seeing him there, listening.”

There was something about Matt that made Lindsey uneasy as well. She didn’t like the way he made suggestive motions, not touching but acting as if he were going to squeeze her breasts. And when he hugged her, it seemed invasive, as if he enjoyed it too much. “But Kari was in love with him, and I loved Kari, so I didn’t say anything,” she explains. “I thought I was just imagining things and let it go.”

Of them all, it was Kari’s younger brother, Adam, still in high school, who was the most upset about his sister’s newfound love. “Adam didn’t like Matt right away,” says Linda. “I had to tell him to be nice.”

A month after Kari and Matt met, he brought her to Kerrville to meet his parents. “I liked Kari. I thought they made a cute couple,” says Barbara. “But I talked to Matt because I thought they were moving too fast, getting too serious.”

Listening to his mother’s concerns, Matt agreed to slow down. Then the living quarters he had lined up for the fall semester fell through. “He didn’t have a place to live,” Barbara says. “Matt called up and told me and his father that two could live as cheaply as one . . . I think Kari was eager to marry Matt because he was a good man. She could see that in him. And Matt was never serious about anyone before Kari.”

Behind the scenes, there were things going on that the Dulins, Kari, perhaps even Barbara, didn’t yet know about. At First Baptist, a teenage girl, a young gymnast, had complained to Roberts’s secretary that Matt was asking her for sex. According to the girl’s allegations, one day Matt tried to corner her, saying he wanted to have intercourse behind the bins that held the roller skates. The secretary told Roberts about the girl’s charges, and he called Matt in for a talk. When confronted, Matt denied anything improper had happened, but Roberts felt uncertain. “She said he grabbed her fanny and tried to talk her into meeting him upstairs. But it was a he-said-she-said situation,” Roberts would say many years later. “I told him he needed to be more careful, to not be alone with the teenage girls who worked at the camp.”

As the summer wore on, just months after meeting Matt, Kari told her parents that they wanted to marry in August before he began his fall semester at Baylor. Worried, Linda asked Kari to wait, arguing that they didn’t know each other well enough. “But Mom, this guy is a really good Christian,” Kari said. “And we don’t want to wait. Matt and I want to get married right away.”

Yet Linda and Jim persisted, telling Kari that if she carried through with her plans, they would no longer pay for her tuition or the car note on the Mustang they’d just bought her. “I tried to get them to postpone for a year, but Kari told me there was no need to wait, she was certain Matt was the right one,” says Linda.

Before long, Kari was wearing a diamond ring, and she and Matt were engaged. Barbara drove to Waco, and she and Linda met for lunch at a Chili’s restaurant. While they ate, Barbara said something that Linda didn’t know how to respond to. “You know, Matt’s a virgin,” Barbara said, looking at her knowingly.

“Oh,” Linda said, at a loss for words.

“Too much information from your future mother-in-law,” Linda told Kari later, filling her in on the conversation.

“That is a little weird,” Kari agreed.

Arrangements for the wedding, planned for August 20, were proceeding at warp speed. Linda hired a caterer and shopped for dresses with Kari. The one she picked had lace on the bodice and a wide, off-the-shoulder neckline that folded over to cover the tops of her shoulders. The veil was a cloud of net anchored by a V-shaped, leafy white, crown.

Just days before the wedding, Linda asked Kari something she’d been wondering about. “Did you tell Matt about the miscarriage?”

“I tell Matt everything,” Kari assured her. “He’s such a good guy, and he’s led such a clean life, I wouldn’t keep anything from him.”

It was about that time that Kari told her mother that Matt’s best man was going to be one of the Baker family’s friends. “Why didn’t he pick his best friend?” Linda asked.

“Matt doesn’t have one,” Kari said. “Matt doesn’t have many friends.”

The night before the wedding, Kari’s cousins and friends took her to a grocery store, where they chuckled and teased as they watched her hold a sign that read, “Tomorrow, I’ll be on my honeymoon.” Kari laughed, too. She was excited, looking toward the future with a young man she loved.

The next day, in her parents’ living room, Kari Lynn Dulin held Matthew Dee Baker’s hands and looked into his eyes, promising to love and be true to him as long as they both should live. Matt was twenty-three and Kari twenty. With her wedding gown, she wore a single-strand pearl necklace and earrings. Looking very young, Matt wore a double-breasted suit that hung loose on him, his shirt collar gaping around his neck.

That day, as their wedding pictures were taken, Matt and Kari were at the beginning of their lives together, and she grinned eagerly for the camera. She thought she’d found her knight in shining armor, the man who’d father her children and be her partner for life.

At First Baptist, Roberts didn’t know that his two employees had married until Matt and Kari told him the following week. It was about that time that more trouble developed, and Roberts once again pulled Matt into his office for another talk. This time, a middle-aged woman, a custodian who worked in the camp, claimed Matt asked her to have sex with him. According to the woman, Matt said, “I know what it’s like to be with a young woman. I’d like to know what it’s like to be with a mature woman.”

Aghast, the woman reported him. It was the last day of the summer camp when Roberts confronted his young assistant with this second allegation. Matt called the woman a liar. Frustrated, Roberts told his young employee, “I don’t know what’s going on here, but if you’re doing this kind of thing, you’ll ruin your life. You need to get professional help.”

Matt again denied that he’d done anything improper, but Roberts felt less than sure he could believe him. Yet he had no proof, and he’d say later that he was unwilling to ruin a young man’s career based on unproven accusations. Matt would work at the church for one more year, until August 1995, and Roberts would hear of no further incidents. Yet the older man didn’t forget what had happened.

Chapter 6

I
n the fall of 1994, Kari was livid about what she described as groundless allegations being leveled against her new husband by women at First Baptist. Perhaps Matt told her, or she’d simply heard. Rumors were, after all, rampant at the church about Matt and two women, both of whom claimed he’d approached them for sex.

Throughout that summer, Lindsey had also worked at First Baptist’s camp. “Everyone was talking about Matt,” she’d say later. “We all knew that some women were saying he’d come on to them.”

When Lindsey reported the rumors to her mom, Nancy wasn’t sure what to do. She didn’t want to start trouble by bringing them up with Linda, but she and Kay talked about the allegations, wondering if they were true. Despite his sometimes-bizarre behavior, Lindsey wasn’t convinced Matt was guilty. How could it be true when he and Kari looked so much in love? “I was on Matt and Kari’s side,” says Lindsey. “I never thought, at least not at that point, that it could be true.”

Meanwhile, Kari was the one who told Linda and Jim, and when she did, she was indignant. “How could they say that?” she asked, furious. “Matt wouldn’t do anything like that.” Were the two women jealous, angry because Matt and Kari had married? Was there some other reason for them to make such unprovoked charges? Matt insisted that they were retaliating. The women, he said, had flirted with him, and their claims were nothing more than revenge because he rebuffed them. In a huff, Matt argued that he was being unfairly accused.

For their part, Linda and Jim didn’t know what to think. So they listened sympathetically to Kari and watched. What they didn’t see was anything happen to Matt. He continued to work at First Baptist, without, it appeared, any repercussions. “We thought, if he’d truly done these things, he’d certainly be fired,” Linda would say later. “When that didn’t happen, we believed him.”

N
ot long after their marriage, Matt and Kari moved into a two-bedroom unit in the Majestic town homes in Royalton Village, a complex of two-story units that backed up to each other with covered parking at the rear. Nancy had begun acquiring rental property, and the unit the newlyweds lived in was one of hers. Before long, Lindsey moved into the second bedroom.

Despite the turmoil in her nascent marriage, Kari had never looked happier. She adored Matt, talking about him constantly, excited about the life they were building. By then, Matt was back at Baylor and Kari had signed up for classes at the community college. They joked with each other, watched television sports together, studied and worked hard. Lindsey didn’t think much at first about the way Matt went everywhere with Kari, even to the beauty parlor when she had her hair cut short and dyed a bright blond, but at times, it was irritating. Lindsey and Kari had been so close, and now they lived together, but Matt was always there. The cousins rarely did anything without him.

Proud of Matt, Kari told her mother she was urging him to continue with his education, to enter Baylor’s Truett Seminary, to get a master’s degree in divinity. “He’ll need it to have a real career,” Kari said, making plans for their futures.

Not long after, Matt called Barbara, and said, “Mom, what would you think if I went into the seminary?”

“I wasn’t surprised,” says Barbara. “I always knew that Matt was destined to do God’s work. That was the way he’d been raised.”

Although supporting Kari and Matt, Linda and Jim had misgivings. “It just seemed strange,” Linda would say. “It just didn’t feel quite right. Things like, Matt wasn’t the one who suggested we say grace before meals.”

Despite their reservations, Jim and Linda understood that Kari believed in Matt and wanted him to succeed. And what was the downside? As far as they could see, there wasn’t any. “We kept saying, ‘Hey, Matt’s going to become a Baptist minister. What could the problem be?’ ” Jim remembers.

Between attending classes at Baylor, Matt continued to work part-time at First Baptist. After a while, no one talked about the charges against him. When nothing more happened, it quickly became old news.

Then the following spring, Linda was alarmed when she reviewed the roster for the classes she taught and noticed the name of the girl who’d made allegations against Matt. The first months in class, Linda eyed the girl suspiciously, watching her carefully. Based on what Kari and Matt had told her, Linda assumed her new student was a troublemaker. Yet to Linda’s surprise, the girl seemed respectful, a good student. Despite that, Linda never made the leap to question whether her son-in-law had told them all the truth. “From the day they married, we accepted Matt as part of the family. We grew to love him like one of our own children,” says Linda. “That the girl wasn’t what I expected did kind of make me wonder, but I shrugged and forgot about it. After all, Kari believed in Matt, she loved him, and he was my son-in-law. I was Kari’s mom. My daughter said the girl was lying. Kari believed Matt, and we believed Kari.”