12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 (40 page)

“Are the girls being used as pawns in this case?” Maguire asked.

“Absolutely . . . by the paternal grandparents,” Murphey testified.

One of the indications, she said, was the way the girls saw everything the Dulins did as wrong and everything the Bakers did as above reproach, a common symptom in what Murphey called Parental Alienation Syndrome. “It is absolutely a form of child abuse,” she said, and on a scale of one to ten, with ten the most severe, she judged the alienation of the Baker girls as between “eight and ten.”

On cross-examination, the Baker family attorneys worked hard to turn Murphey’s testimony to their advantage. King voiced her argument that Jim and Linda’s wrongful death suit and their efforts to have Kari’s death investigated were to blame for the estrangement, not anything the Bakers had done. And she argued that there was nothing wrong with the girls believing their father was wrongly convicted and that he’d be exonerated. Murphey disagreed: “To think something is a reality before it’s a reality, my granny used to say, ‘don’t count your chickens before they hatch.’ ”

When Henneke challenged the contention that the Bakers were denigrating their dead daughter-in-law’s memory, Murphey said that she had personally heard them attacking Kari in front of the girls. “The tones, the words were not positive.”

At one point, Henneke suggested that the Dulins’ best option was to just walk away since that was what the girls said they wanted. Rather than an irrational dislike of the Dulins, he argued that it was logical for the girls to be angry with their grandparents since they blamed them for their father’s incarceration. “Couldn’t the girls stay in Kerrville and have counseling?” Henneke asked.

“It’s possible, but . . .” Murphey began before Henneke cut her off. Maguire asked her to finish that thought. “It’s possible, but in my opinion, it’s not in the best interest of the girls.”

After Murphey, the Dulins’ attorneys called another psychologist, William Lee Carter to testify more in depth about Parental Alienation Syndrome. Like Murphey, Carter, a thin man with mostly white hair, described Parental Alienation Syndrome as a campaign to discredit a parent or grandparent in the eyes of a child. Reinforcing what the jurors had already heard, he talked of how such emotional and psychological pressure on a child could make a child turn away from family, even alter memories so that they fell more into line with the alienating parent. Children in such situations were sometimes treated as confidants and encouraged to think and feel negatively about the other parent. “They’re told things like the other parent never loved them?” Obenoskey asked.

“That’s a good example,” Carter answered. Like Murphey, he then reviewed Matt’s letters and pointed at examples of just that type of thing, including Matt’s saying that he knew the girls’ visits with the Dulins would be horrible.

What was the harm? “The child ends up living in a world based on a false reality. It dredges up negative feelings that create tension . . . and it emotionally harms the children.” Although the problems often weren’t evident until adulthood, Carter said they ranged from feelings of betrayal to an inability to trust and problems with emotional intimacy.

When it came to the girls’ friends, the ones they’d leave behind in Kerrville, Carter said that while that might hurt, there was something more important: “You’re only born into one family. Friends come and go.”

There were those instances where the Bakers’ attorneys found Carter agreed with them, as when King described a situation where events built, adding one to another, until they resulted in alienation. She included the day the girls were with their father when he was served with the wrongful death suit. “Yes, that makes sense,” Carter said. When Beverly Crowden asked if taking a fifteen-year-old away from home, school, and friends could foster anger and resentment, even acting out, there, too, Carter agreed.

In the end, however, Carter indicated that for severe cases of parental alienation, common therapies rarely worked. Like Murphey, he described the syndrome as a form of abuse.

Once the experts had finished, Obenoskey put Matt back on the stand, and for the next hour snippets of phone conversations were played in the courtroom. Some were between Matt and Barbara, many of which were focused on the Dulins and how to win the custody case. Many sounded manipulative, as when Barbara said that Kensi was old enough to “play the game,” but Grace wasn’t.

“She’ll learn,” Matt replied. What game were they talking about? It appeared the game of keeping the Dulins at bay.

The conversations between Matt and Kensi were particularly disturbing, when he discussed testimony at hearings with his daughter, in one saying that Linda Dulin had lied on the stand. He referred to the Dulins as “idiotic and weird,” and Waco as “that place from hell,” and Kensi responded, one day saying, “Good news. I don’t have to go to Waco.”

At other times, Kensi seemed the only one with common sense, as when she sounded reluctant to write the convicted murderer her father was urging her to form a relationship with. “Write back to him . . . He’s diabetic. You can ask him how he’s doing,” Matt urged.

“That’s awkward,” Kensi responded, sounding disgusted. “I’m not going to do that.”

One of the most disturbing phone calls was one in which Matt and his mother discussed the upcoming custody trial. During it, Matt said sarcastically that Linda Dulin could use drama to sway the jury. Mocking her, he whined, “Boohoo. I lost my daughter.”

As the trial wore on, it became increasingly evident that the children, especially Kensi, were being manipulated and used, so much so that at one point Matt asked Kensi to take pictures inside the Dulins’ house. One was of the inside of their medicine cabinet. Was he looking for Ambien, to prove Linda had some? Did he think this could be useful in his appeal? Is that why he had his teenage daughter spying?

The Bakers’ attorneys took over the trial, and off and on, Matt and Barbara were again on the stand, denying that he’d taken pictures of Kari out of the house within a week of her death or that he’d put one of Vanessa Bulls in their place. The phone calls, e-mails, and letters the Dulins’ attorneys submitted, they suggested, were culled from thousands of minutes on the phone and hundreds of letters, a small sampling. Yet on redirect, Obenoskey brought a bigger stack, putting them into evidence, and had Matt read from them. “They’re representative, aren’t they?” he asked. After some prodding, Matt agreed that they were.

In other e-mails, Kensi chastised Jim and Linda for attacking Matt. Linda denied it, but Kensi said Linda had “talked bad on Mother’s Day with me . . . and Paw-paw said something bad about daddy the day I was sick.” In another e-mail, she said, “When will you stop calling my daddy bad names. I will always protect my dad and my sister. This is from my heart.”

“If it were up to me, I don’t want to see you at all,” Kensi e-mailed in 2008, two years after her mother’s death. Were her memories true or were they distorted by what she was hearing from her father and his parents? Once after the girls visited, Linda found a note left behind: “I hate Jim and Linda.” It was signed, Kensi Baker.

“Have you grieved for your daughter?” Fred Henneke asked Linda.

“Yes,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “I know that I am going to see my child again for eternity. I think that’s a good promise.”

The one thing Pam King agreed with Linda about was that the wrongful death lawsuit hadn’t started the alienation. Instead, it had begun months earlier, on the night in April 2006 when Kari Baker died.

“Do you think it’s in their best interest to put them through this pain?” Henneke challenged.

“Because I want them to grow into healthy adults . . . Sometimes, short-term pain is necessary for long-term happiness,” Linda answered.

The attorneys asked if the Dulins could live with the girls’ belief that their mother had died of suicide, and Linda said she could, but the debate continued, witness after witness. Many were respected members of Kerrville’s community, who testified that Oscar and Barbara Baker were good people, solid members of the church who reached out to help others, and that they were good to Kensi and Grace. Some talked about how well the girls performed in school, while others maintained that they’d visited the foster home when the Bakers ran it and that they’d never seen any indication of abuse.

Early on, there’d been speculation that the Bakers would present their own former foster children to refute the charges made by the four women who claimed that Oscar abused them, but in the end only one of the nearly fifty the Bakers estimated they’d cared for came to defend them, Jamey Hodges. Explaining that he worked at Walmart and that he still called the Bakers Mom and Dad, he said, “They’re my parents. They helped me grow up.” When it came to the allegations of the others that testified, Hodges insisted that not only didn’t he see anything inappropriate at the foster home but that it simply didn’t happen. As he framed it, the women who’d testified were all lying; there was never any physical, emotional, or sexual abuse.

On cross-examination, Obenoskey asked, “How can you be so sure?” He questioned if Jamey was always present, if he ever went to school or church, perhaps out with friends, if he could have been out of the house or even in a different room when the things the women testified to happened. “You can’t say it never happened, can you?”

Defiant, Jamey insisted, “It never happened.”

“You were always right there with them?”

“Correct,” he said.

Of the remaining witnesses, two would later stand out. The first was Matt’s sister, Stacie Segars, a heavyset woman with long dark blond hair, who lived in Denton, Texas, north of Dallas. At the murder trial, many had wondered where Segars was, why she hadn’t come with her mother to defend her brother. When she testified, she began by backing up her parents’ contention that the abuse never happened. “If Tracy says she was sexually abused by your father, did that happen?” Henneke asked.

“No, sir,” Segars answered.

Henneke repeated the other sexual allegations, and Segars refuted each one.

“Would you have any reservations about leaving children in the care of your parents?”

“No,” she answered.

When Pat Maguire began asking questions, Segars said that she and her brother didn’t communicate, either by telephone or in letters. “Do you have any understanding why these women would come into court and say that your father was sexually inappropriate with them? Any motives?”

“None whatsoever,” she answered.

“It’s possible that things happened, and you didn’t know about them?”

At that, she paused just a moment, then said, “It’s possible.”

From the beginning, the witness the Dulins’ attorneys worried the most about was Kensi Baker. “That was really their star witness,” says Maguire. “It’s pretty convincing putting a teenage girl on the stand who says please don’t make me move to Waco.”

After Matt’s sister, the older Baker daughter walked into the courtroom and took the stand. Kensi’s long dark blond hair was braided in the front and pulled back, and she wore a navy blue top with ruffles. Before the questioning began, Crowden asked her witness to take a deep breath. Then they discussed the lives of the fifteen-year-old and her sister, Grace, who was set to turn eleven on the coming Monday. At Tivy High School, Kensi was following in her father’s footsteps, working as a trainer under his old mentor in the sports department.

In many ways, Kensi’s testimony was heartbreaking. At times, it appeared that the teenager was determined to discredit her maternal grandparents, sometimes in ways that conflicted with prior testimony, as when she complained that the Dulins made her and Grace sleep on pallets on the floor in their bedroom during visitation. The problem was that the psychologist, Murphey, had testified earlier that Kensi and Grace had told her that they’d insisted on the arrangement in order to reinforce for the Dulins that they were guests, and that they weren’t moving into the two empty bedrooms in the house.

Then Crowden played an audiotape Kensi made on their first visitation after their father’s conviction. Unbeknownst to the Dulins, when they sat down to talk with their granddaughters, Kensi set her cell phone to record. At first many in the courtroom assumed that there had to be something awful in the recording, something the Dulins said that explained why a granddaughter would go so far as to secretly tape record her grandparents. But there wasn’t. “We can’t pretend like nothing has happened,” Linda could be heard saying on the tape. “We’ve prayed and prayed that God could put wisdom, the right words to say.”

No one, Linda said, should have to go through what the girls had suffered. “I would do anything if things were different . . . You are our children. You are our hearts.”

As the tape played, Kensi cried, and Linda rested her head on Jim’s shoulder, while Oscar and Barbara stared at their granddaughter’s profile. “We want to be part of your lives,” Linda pleaded. Over and again, she said that what they wanted was for the girls to heal and for them to have good lives. “To make you whole . . . Your mom loved you. She would never leave you.”

Confused, some wondered what point Crowden hoped to make with a tape that illustrated both the Dulins’ love for their grandchildren and the alienation they claimed at the root of their suit. When it was finished, the girls’ attorney asked Kensi how she interpreted what her grandmother had said, that she wanted the girls to heal and become whole. “She believes that we haven’t grieved properly, and we’re broken and unhealthy,” the teenager said.

“How does that make you feel?”

“Angry.”

When it came to her father, Kensi said, “I believe that he’s innocent.”

What about those unrealistic beliefs the psychologist said the girls had? Earlier, Crowden had told jurors that they’d hear Kensi say that she understood and accepted that her father could be in prison for many decades to come. Yet when Crowden asked the teenager that question, Kensi replied as the psychologist said she would, stating that she believed her father would not only be freed but that it would be soon.