12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 (5 page)

Chapter 7

L
ater, some would wonder why Kari didn’t piece it together, why she failed to understand to whom she was truly married. The rips in Matt Baker’s disguise frequently became visible over the years. Yet they were brief if painful interludes, and for the most part, Matt seemed like a good guy. His boss at First Baptist would describe him as a hard worker, someone who said the right things, and to others Matt talked about his future in altruistic terms, his calling to carry the message of God and help others find salvation.

On the surface, Matt was an impressive young man, a future Baptist minister in a city known as Jerusalem on the Brazos, and Kari was not only in love with but dedicated to him. Their lives, after all, didn’t revolve around the brief upsets but centered on the day-to-day business of living, hurried breakfasts as they rushed out the door, classes and studying, family dinners, holidays, dreaming of their future together, building a family, and climbing into bed together at the end of the day and turning out the light.

With family, Matt didn’t seem like the type of person who would ever cross the line. “Around us, he was always timid. He let Kari be the alpha,” says Linda, who’d later maintain that from the beginning Matt and Kari acted less like lovers than buddies.

Over the years, there would be characteristics Linda noticed in Matt that she wondered about. For instance, he enjoyed taunting others yet he took himself seriously, growing angry if teased. There was the day Matt, who always enjoyed buying himself things, especially new shoes, wore a recently purchased pair of fuzzy black slippers. “Those are women’s slippers,” Linda pointed out.

“I know,” Kari agreed, at which point both the women laughed.

“Matt was unhappy,” says Linda, remembering how he sulked. “You couldn’t do that.”

Another thing Matt didn’t like was being questioned. When others made accusations, Matt adamantly defended himself, insisting that if Kari didn’t believe him, she was disloyal. He was her husband, a future Baptist minister, one day he would be the father of her children, and he acted as if he expected to be taken at his word.

A year had gone by since the allegations against him, when, in September 1995, Matt turned in his resignation at First Baptist and took a job at the Family Y, a large facility not far off the freeway in west Waco.

That December, Matt graduated from Baylor in a ceremony steeped in tradition, wearing a green gown and a mortarboard, with his parents, Kari, and her family proudly in attendance. He’d earned an education degree, specializing in church recreation.

For a while, all went well at the Y, with Matt running the children’s after-school program. Then, six months after he signed on, in January 1996, he approached a young student worker named Jackie. The Y had been quiet that day, with few children in the competition swimming pool where she worked. Matt suggested they go to the youth recreation room to work on the receipts. It was Jackie’s last day before leaving to return to college, and she replied that she knew how to fill the forms out. Matt, however, persisted, claiming that she’d made errors and that he needed to walk her though the process.

Moments later, in the recreation room, Matt came up from behind the teenager, slipping his hand onto her breast. “No!” she ordered, pushing him away.

Rather than backing off, Matt lunged at the girl, trying to kiss her. Jackie again pushed away. “I know you want it,” he said, groping between her legs. When she fought, he grabbed her hand and forced it onto his pants, on top of his penis.

“No!” she screamed, as Matt pushed her against a wall.

“I just want to fuck you right here, right now!” he seethed.

At that moment, the phone rang. Appearing startled, Matt let go of the girl. “They must be looking for us,” he said. “We’d better head back.”

The following week, Jackie left for college without reporting what had happened.

K
ari was pregnant with their first child the winter her husband attacked Jackie at the Family Y, and on April 22, 1996, Kensi Baker was born, a blond-haired, blue-eyed, little bundle. Barbara would later describe Kari as an uncomfortable mother, one who wouldn’t easily take on the responsibilities of a baby. “Everyone doesn’t have a natural parenting instinct,” she would say.

It was true that Kensi wasn’t an easy infant, suffering from colic in her first months. But the Kari others describe was far from uneasy with her child. In fact, they say Kari was a doting mother, dedicated to her firstborn, dressing Kensi in pretty clothes and pinning her hair back in bows.

Still, Matt did take on a share of the parenting role. “Matt wanted to,” Linda would say later. “He was the one who jumped up to bathe Kensi, to wash her hair. It became his thing. It wasn’t that Kari didn’t want to do it but that Matt insisted he would.”

The spring became summer. Kari seemed unaware of the gathering storm clouds, when that June, complaints were filed at the Y by three teenage girls who said Matt had made unwanted advances. The reports were similar, describing clumsy sexual confrontations in which Matt pressured them to have sex. As with Lora Wilson and Dina Ahrens, Matt didn’t back off even after the girls turned him down. One said that he approached her and asked about her sex life, then wanted to know if she’d have sex with a married man. The girl said, “No.”

“I’m happily married and I plan to spend the rest of my life with my wife, and I wouldn’t do anything like that either,” he said. Despite those assurances, minutes later he confronted her in the fitness area, asking “How about it?” “It” was a sexual liaison.

“Are you trying to get me fired?” the girl asked.

“No. If we get found out, I’ll get fired, too.” Matt suggested they steal away to the attic together. He then checked his watch, and said, “I have fifteen minutes before the kids get out of the pool.”

Although the girl turned Matt down, he kept propositioning her while she was handing out Pop-Tarts to the children in the recreation room. “I want your cherry,” he said.

When he didn’t stop, she filed a complaint. Afterward, he came up to her, and said, “You knew that I was just joking, didn’t you?”

By then, Jackie had returned from college and was again working at the Y. When she heard what had happened, she decided to talk to the facility’s administrator. After she described her experiences, Jackie was asked to document her January encounter with Matt. In her report, she wrote: “I remember this the most. When he had me against the wall, he put his body up against me, and said, ‘I just want to fuck you right here, right now.’

“I didn’t say anything before because it was just one day, and since I left right after, I didn’t know that he was doing this to other girls . . . I have tried to block it from my mind.”

On June 14, the Y’s administrator called Matt in to discuss the allegations. He never denied the women’s claims, and that same day, he was fired. In his termination letter, effective immediately, it pinpointed the cause as “a lack of performance of job duties in a professional and effective manner, for display of poor attitude toward responsibilities of your position, lack of positive influence and direction of supervised staff, and for inappropriate behavior toward female staff members.”

What did Matt tell Kari? Most likely what she told Linda about the incident: that Matt was trying to counsel the girls against becoming sexually active, and they misinterpreted his intentions. In this version, Matt’s only mistake was attempting, as a future minister, to help the young women. “None of us believed him, but Kari did,” says Kay. “Every time Matt got fired, we wondered if it had something to do with harassing some woman.”

After his termination, Matt applied for unemployment insurance, but the administrators at the Family Y successfully fought his request, filing a letter with the Texas Employment Commission that said: “We are protesting this claim based on the fact that Mr. Baker was discharged on June 14, 1996, for misconduct . . . inappropriate behavior towards a camp counselor he supervised . . . he did not deny.”

The letter also cited a lack of performance on Matt’s part, and concluded, “Sexual harassment towards employees or other individuals will not be tolerated.” As usual, Kari stood by Matt, accepting his explanation that the girls were confused teenagers who’d misinterpreted his interest.

Three months after he was let go from the Y, Matt gave Kari a gift, a green leather-bound Bible,
The Quest Study Bible.
It was to become a record of her life, a haven where Kari read about the foundation of her faith and one where she wrote her innermost thoughts. On the first page, it bore a quote from Proverbs 2:6, “For the Lord gives wisdom and from his mouth come knowledge and understanding.”

Inside, Matt inscribed:

With all my heart and soul, I love you. Kari, I want you to use this to grow closer to the Lord, and also learn more about Him. I love you very much, and hope that we will forever be rooted together through the words of this God-breathed masterpiece. I love you, Matt.

On the page designated to record marriages, Kari wrote the date of hers to Matt, and on the form recording births, she noted that on that past April 22, Kensi had been born.

It seemed that by then there was much that could have been easily discovered about Matt Baker if anyone at Baylor had taken the time to run even a cursory background check. Without even leaving the campus, they had only to talk to his instructors in the athletic training department to learn of his assault on Lora Wilson. An employment check at either First Baptist or the Family Y could have uncovered the allegations of sexual misconduct at both. One might have assumed that such an investigation would have been done before admitting Matt to the seminary, where he’d study to be a minister.

Apparently, none of those things were done. In the fall of 1996, Matt would become a student at Baylor’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary, named after a popular minister of the late 1800s. The seminary had only recently opened and had yet to erect its own building, instead meeting in classrooms on First Baptist’s second floor. That year, fifty-one students enrolled, putting them on the road to earning either a master of divinity or a doctorate of ministry degree. The school’s charter said it was “centered on the gospel of Jesus Christ and consistent with his Baptist commitments to prepare persons to carry his gospel to the churches of the world.”

Meanwhile, Kari enrolled at Baylor the following January, 1997, and continued her own education, working toward becoming a teacher. That year, she took a class taught by Dr. Jeter Brasden, director of the ministry guidance program. While he didn’t have Matt as a student, Brasden knew him as well and was impressed by the young couple. “Matt seemed outgoing and pleasant, not wrapped up in his ego,” Brasden would remember. “I’d heard nothing bad about him, and I had no reason to question things about him.”

In Kari, Brasden saw a young woman intent on preparing herself for the life she’d chosen. “She was a fine student,” he says. “They were just recently married, and she seemed concerned about being a good pastor’s wife, about what it meant to be the spouse of someone in the ministry.”

How did Kari see her role? Years later, she’d advise another young woman about to marry a man studying for the ministry: “People will attack your husband. They’ll say false things because they’ll have agendas. Sometimes, women will tell lies because they’ll see a good man and want him for themselves.”

Looking at the woman meaningfully, Kari appeared to be willing the other woman to understand the importance of what she was saying. “You have to love your husband and believe in him, even when no one else does. The ministry is a hard life, and you have to back up your husband and be there for him, so that he can do God’s work.”

Chapter 8

U
nlike with some other religions, Baptist churches are autonomous. In Texas, many belong to the Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT) at the state level and the Southern Baptist Convention at the national level. Yet joining is voluntary, and the conventions have no input regarding an individual church’s activities or policies. For the most part, the conventions are used to pool resources for larger projects, including sending members on missions and building schools, hospitals, and churches in impoverished communities. When it comes to the nuts and bolts of daily life, the churches function as individual entities.

“We strongly suggest churches do background checks,” says a former member of the BGCT’s board. “But we can’t force them. And we can’t tell them whom to hire. Basically, to be called a pastor of a Baptist church, all you have to do is have a church vote to hire you. We don’t license or ordain pastors. That’s done by individual churches.”

When it comes to ministerial misconduct, including sexual abuse, the Baptist General Convention of Texas keeps complaints on file, yet not all of the churches report. “Many just fire the offending pastor or ask him to find something else and move on,” says a former BGCT employee. “They want to get rid of their problem. They don’t worry about where that pastor goes next and what he might do once he’s there.”

Sexual misconduct and the abuse of power by religious leaders, of course, is a problem in many faiths. When it comes to the Baptists, a study was conducted in 1991 by the Fuller Institute of Church Growth that came to a startling conclusion: 37 percent of ministers interviewed confessed to inappropriate sexual behavior with someone in their church. A later Baylor study concluded one out of 33 women in Baptist congregations had been victims of clerical sexual misconduct.

It would later be unclear whether anyone at First Baptist reported to the BGCT regarding the allegations against Matt Baker since BGCT would refuse requests for records. But Matt’s supervisor at the church, Jake Roberts, did try to alert churches that inquired about the young seminary student. At one point, a church in Longview contacted Roberts asking for a recommendation for Matt. “I told them that he knew church recreation,” Roberts explains. “But I told them they needed to look at other aspects of this young man’s life.”

“You’ve told me all I need to know. I’m not hiring him,” the Longview pastor responded.

Concerned about Baker, Roberts took an additional step, writing a report on all that had transpired and putting it in First Baptist’s safe, to have it on hand for others to refer to in case he wasn’t available when a church inquired about his former student, a young man he once thought had potential who he now viewed with different eyes. The problem, it would seem, was that few of the churches would bother to make that phone call.

Later it would be difficult to pin down dates when Matt Baker worked at particular churches since few kept records. According to Matt’s résumé, his first church position after First Baptist Waco was as a part-time youth and music minister working under the pastor at the small, metal-sided, beige-painted church of First Baptist of Robinson in August 1995. This was during the same period he worked at the family Y. Like so many of his jobs, his position in Robinson was short-lived, less than a year. “We don’t know why, but he was fired pretty quickly,” Linda would remember later. “Kari was upset about it, and she asked me to write a letter to the pastor for Matt, which I did. But he didn’t hire Matt back.”

Meanwhile, Kari was busy taking her classes at Baylor and caring for Kensi. She adored the child, pouring so much of her energy into her. “Kari always had Kensi dressed up in the cutest little outfits, her hair fixed,” says a friend. “She looked like a little doll. Half the time, Kari was on the floor playing with her, patty cake, laughing, like two little kids. Matt was a good dad. He doted on Kensi, too. He really seemed taken with her.”

The young family still lived in the town house Nancy rented them. Even after he and Kari had married and had a child, Matt hovered at family events, never far from Kari, listening in on the women’s conversations instead of watching sports with the men. “It was like he didn’t have any boundaries,” Nancy would say later. “He’d ask really intrusive questions, like how much money people made. It was just odd.”

The younger women continued to feel uneasy around Matt. One day at a family gathering, when he was alone with one of them, he flirted and asked if she wanted to go somewhere with him. Another time, at a family holiday get-together, Kay’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Hailey, had on a short skirt. “Have you got any panties on under that dress?” Matt asked.

Hailey didn’t answer, she just walked away, and Kay stood nearby but unseen as Matt followed Hailey, asking again, “Hailey, do you have on panties?”

Repulsed, Kay wanted to jump in, but Hailey saw her mother staring at them. She gave Kay a look that said, “Forget it. Don’t say anything.”

Matt never saw Kari’s aunt standing there, watching, furious, as Hailey pushed him aside and walked away. While Kay and Nancy talked about Matt, they didn’t tell Linda.

The result was that Linda and Jim knew little of the rumors and suspicion floating around their son-in-law. Yet Linda did worry about the effect he was having on Kari. “I’m not criticizing,” Linda said to her daughter one day, choosing her words carefully. “But I think it’s strange that you don’t even go to get your hair cut without Matt, that he’s with you all the time.”

“Matt says he just loves me and doesn’t want to be without me,” Kari answered. “And I feel sorry for Matt. He doesn’t have any real friends.”

At that, Linda dropped the matter. “I didn’t want to influence her,” she explained.

In the summer of 1996, after losing the job in Robinson, Matt worked as recreation director at the prestigious Columbus Avenue Baptist Church in downtown Waco. An impressive facility, the congregation of more than sixty-five hundred entered the redbrick sanctuary through doors framed by elegant white pillars. Matt’s sojourn as assistant recreation director, however, lasted only four months. Had someone at Columbus Avenue talked to Roberts at Waco’s other massive church, First Baptist, and learned of Matt’s past?

Yet, that fall, Matt was given another plum job, to pastor Pecan Grove Baptist, a small country church outside Waco. Pecan Grove was known as a good assignment for Truett students, a place where the seminary’s stars were groomed for the future. “It’s one of those places where six families built a church, and they get a pastor to preach,” says one former pastor. “It’s a small church, but it’s well-known.”

The church was founded in 1882, and the Texas historical marker outside reads: “Pecan Grove, recognized by Baylor University for its support of ministerial students . . . As many as six generations of local families have been members of this congregation.”

Dr. Paul Stripling, a Baylor professor of church history and then head of the Waco Baptist Association, would later say that the reports of Baker’s transgressions weren’t reaching those in the Baptist hierarchy. “All in all, I couldn’t have been more pleased with Matt and Kari,” he says. “I never once heard any rumors about his being involved in immoral activities. Not one. As far as I was concerned, he was one of our good young pastors, doing very good things.”

With Kensi in her arms, Kari began attending the small church, sitting in the front pew, listening with rapt attention to Matt’s sermons. She was proud of him, and Linda and Jim could see that she truly loved him. She talked excitedly about the future, how she would teach while Matt moved on to more impressive jobs at larger churches after earning his master’s. Yet while they both worked hard to finish their educations and make that future happen, Matt didn’t make it easy for Kari.

One after another, the events would line up, the indications that he wasn’t what he pretended to be, like the afternoon a teenage girl who lived in the town house behind theirs cried to her mother, saying that Matt had accosted her in the parking lot. The way the girl recounted the event, Matt first asked her, “Have you ever been kissed by a boy?” then grabbed her and kissed her on the lips.

The mother was a friend of Kari’s aunt Nancy, and she told her what happened. “I don’t know, she’s a teenager, and sometimes she exaggerates,” the woman said. “I’m not sure what to think.”

Meanwhile, Nancy thought back to what she already knew about Matt, how her own daughters, Ami and Lindsey, felt odd around him, and the only formal allegations she knew of, those made at First Baptist. “I believed what the girl had said,” says Nancy. “It broke my heart. But I had to protect Kari, so I acted noncommittal.”

This time, Nancy did call Linda to tell her, and Linda relayed the conversation to Kari, who became immediately angry with the girl, insisting she was lying. “Matt didn’t do that, Mom,” Kari said. “He didn’t do anything to her.”

After she hung up, Kari pounded on her neighbor’s door and burst through. While Matt shadowed her, never saying a word, Kari defended him, sobbing and questioning the girl’s mother, asking over and over again, “How can she say something like that?” This would become a pattern: Whenever evidence of Matt Baker’s dark side appeared, Kari would not only turn a blind eye but defend him. “Kari was strong, and she loved Matt, she was loyal to him,” Linda would say later. “He’d hang back and let her argue for him, and because she believed in him completely, she was persuasive. We believed her. I wondered why my sisters weren’t more supportive of Matt. Why they weren’t defending him.”

O
n November 20, 1997, when Kensi was nineteen months, Kari gave birth to a second daughter, a round blond baby girl she and Matt named Kassidy. An easier baby than Kensi, without colic or any of her sister’s early digestive problems, Kassidy was a stocky child, a Gerber baby with a clear, pale complexion.

Unbeknownst to Matt, Kari, or anyone in their families, that same month Lora Wilson called the Waco police and talked to an investigator. It had been six years, but she was still having nightmares of the afternoon in Casey Stadium when Matt Baker had attacked her. In her dreams, she relived the assault. In those terrifying moments, once again she heard his voice and felt him hold her down, helpless. That day, she talked to a detective, who recorded the information. He seemed interested in pursuing charges against Matt. “This was an attempted sexual assault,” he told Lora. “We can charge him with this.”

“It was the first time I had a name for what Matt Baker had done to me,” she said later. “The first time I realized he had, in fact, committed a crime.”

Later, however, the officer called with disappointing news: The statute of limitations had expired. “We can’t do anything,” he said. “I’m sorry, but it’s too late.”