12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 (27 page)

Again she repeated, this time for the two new arrivals, that the relationship with Matt had never become “inappropriate” and that it didn’t begin until after Kari’s death.

When she described telling Matt that the relationship was over, Vanessa cried.

Comforting her, the Secret Service agent said: “I’ve been interviewing the Matt Bakers of the world . . . What he did is use you. There’s no doubt in my mind that he did something to his wife. There’s no doubt in my mind that he may have done something to his daughter. Maybe he saw this as getting rid of his wife to have a relationship with you. The person caught in the middle is the twenty-four-year-old divorced woman.”

“He had girls. I had a girl. He was a pastor . . .” Vanessa said. “I didn’t think it would come back to bite me.”

“It didn’t, Vanessa,” the agent again assured her. “It’s just one of those things where it’s up to us to get an insight into his life. The Matt Bakers of the world use young women like you who are vulnerable.”

They talked, Vanessa insisting that they had no need to have Ranger Cawthon or anyone else call her, and that she’d talk with them again if they had any questions. “I was surprised it took you so long to question me,” she said.

“We appreciate your coming in. We all know who Matt is now. He’s a dirtbag.”

“Why’d it take me so long to see that,” Vanessa said, again crying.

In their haste to make her feel better, it would later seem there were many questions left unasked that day. The investigators gathered around her in that room never asked the pretty young blonde when she’d first gone to Matt’s house. They never asked if Matt had ever told her that he planned to kill his wife. And, perhaps most importantly, they never spelled out that Vanessa needed to be careful. If she wasn’t telling the truth, if she lied and they found out, she could be considered a party to a murder. In hindsight, there was much left unasked and unanswered in that dismal interview room in the run-down Hewitt police station.

Two hours after the interview began, the investigators left the room, and Vanessa again waited. Outside of her earshot, they discussed the interview. “The Secret Service agent said he was sure she was telling the truth,” Toombs would say later. “He told me there was no reason to ask her to take a lie detector test.”

Back in the room, Toombs and Spear prepared to take Vanessa back to Temple to pick up her car. “My mother’s going to be upset,” she said to Toombs.

“I’ll talk to her,” he said. “You are in no . . . trouble about this . . . you weren’t involved.”

How were they all so sure? Was Vanessa Bulls telling the truth? Did she know more than she’d told them? Perhaps the Secret Service agent should have listened to his own warnings, when he’d told her, “You just never know about people, you really don’t.”

Chapter 42

A
fter Johnston filed his motions for subpoenas, Matt’s attorneys filed countermotions, attempting to block Johnston from obtaining the records and depositions he’d requested, including those involving Kari’s and Kassidy’s deaths. In the end, the judge ruled that Kassidy’s records weren’t relevant to the wrongful death suit but upheld the subpoenas for information on Kari. Quickly, the records began pouring in.

Among the first to arrive were those from Hewitt PD and the EMT service. Once they had those in hand, Johnston and Bennett traveled to Edmond, Oklahoma, to meet with Tom Bevel, a crime-scene and blood-splatter expert who’d worked for twenty-seven years for the Oklahoma City Police Department. With them they carried copies of the scene photos, the autopsy, the EMTs’ reports, a DVD of Matt’s interview with Cooper, and a time line they’d constructed based on Matt’s statement and the receipts he’d produced to police.

“They were basically looking for an independent analysis of what the scene said,” says Bevel, who’d specialized in forensic science for eighteen years, testifying in high-profile cases including that of Darlie Routier, the Dallas housewife convicted of murdering her two young sons.

After they left, Bevel began by looking at the scene photos, taking in any clues he could find based on what he saw of Kari’s body and the room itself. After he’d absorbed what he could, he turned to the autopsy, statement, and time line, comparing those to what he’d already gleaned from the photos.

Later, Bevel put his findings into a formal letter for Johnston, writing: “I would not expect to be able to observe any visible signs of lividity in less than thirty minutes minimum and up to two hours maximum . . . The extent of lividity seen in the photographs of Mrs. Baker and that reported by the EMT personnel does not comport with the time line given by Mr. Baker. In my opinion much more time has elapsed from Mrs. Baker’s death until it is reported, than stated by Mr. Baker.”

Bevel then pointed out that death is a process that takes time. If Matt was gone for forty-five minutes, and Kari was alive when he left, Kari had to take the pills and the pills had to have time to work. Lividity wouldn’t have begun until Kari’s heart stopped, until she was dead. “This does not comport with the time frame as given by Mr. Baker.” Bevel also questioned how Kari had so quickly become cold to the touch.

As troubling was Matt’s description of dressing Kari’s body before the EMTs arrived. “I have worked a number of cases in which an unconscious or deceased person has been dressed,” he wrote. “Due to their ‘dead body weight,’ this dressing by another is very difficult and usually obvious. The position of Mrs. Baker’s panties are much more consistent with her dressing herself, as they appear in a normal position.”

Bevel also noted what appeared to be bruising on Kari’s nose and lips in the scene and autopsy photos. When he talked with Johnston, Bevel mentioned that this type of injury suggested that Kari might have first been drugged, then smothered.

After bringing up the typewritten, unsigned suicide note, Bevel concluded: “There is enough contradictory information in this case that I would highly recommend further action on this investigation.”

Johnston already had the opinion from the toxicologist, Dr. Stafford, who said unequivocally that Kari hadn’t died of an overdose. Now the lawyer turned to another expert, William Lee Carter, a Waco psychologist who testified in criminal trials. This time, Johnston supplied his expert with information on Matt’s past with women. “I wanted to know what a professional thought of Matt’s personality type,” says Johnston.

When Carter called with his conclusions, they weren’t a surprise to any of those involved in the investigation. “Mr. Baker has a history of serious sexual indiscretion with females. There is an elusive, manipulative quality to his personality. A relationship with a female gave him reason to desire his wife’s absence from his life, creating motive for murder.”

Carter pointed out that Matt himself had made it clear to police that he was the only one with Kari on the night of her death. Also not to be discounted were Kari’s words to Bristol: “Research validates that a woman’s reports of perceived death intentions by a husband is one of the most telling diagnostic precursors to spousal murder.”

Adding Matt’s “dark personal history” to the other evidence the team had pulled together surrounding Kari’s death, including Matt’s apparent lack of grief, Carter said, painted a damning picture.

After Johnston filled Linda and Jim in on the reports, she called the experts, wanting to hear firsthand. Afterward, she was ever more certain that Kari had not died by her own hand. “I thought, oh, my gosh, Matt really is a sexual predator, and he murdered our daughter,” she says. “Everything my sisters had wondered about, it was all true.”

O
ff and on, Toombs and Spear went to the DA’s Office as Cawthon did, talking to Melanie Walker, asking for guidance. “I told them that they didn’t have enough for probable cause,” says Walker. “The scene wasn’t even processed like a questionable death. Without homicide on the autopsy or death certificate, the potential for reasonable doubt was huge.”

Yet the evidence kept mounting. Matt had suggested that the police talk to a woman named Holly Romano, someone who’d seen Kari the evening before her death at the Y during swim practice. What Matt told Cooper was that Romano remarked about how tired Kari appeared. When Toombs talked to the woman, however, Romano said, “That’s not true.”

In fact, Kari mentioned that she’d interviewed for a new job and it had gone well that day, seeming to look forward to the change to middle school. “Did Kari leave to go get sick in the restroom?” Toombs asked, repeating what Baker had told Cooper.

“Not that I saw,” Romano replied.

At about that time, Mike McNamara met with the director of the Y, who showed him records documenting Matt’s firing from the staff. Waiting for an official subpoena, which she hadn’t yet been served, the woman wouldn’t let him take the records, only read them. When McNamara was done, another Y employee approached him. “I always worried about Kari,” she said. “Matt has a terrible temper. I was afraid he could hurt her. When she died, I immediately thought something had to be wrong.”

After McNamara left, he filled in Bennett and Johnston, then talked to Spear and Toombs, suggesting they interview the same women. The two officers followed up quickly and left with another piece in the puzzle of Matt Baker’s personality.

Then, in mid-August, McNamara returned to WCY, this time with the power of a subpoena, one for everything on the facility’s network generated by Matt’s missing computer.

Afterward, McNamara took the CDs to Johnston’s office and began looking through them on a computer. But he and Bennett couldn’t open the files. Deciding it must be encrypted, they returned to WCY and asked to have the documents transferred into “something we can read.”

From there, McNamara and Johnston went on to other matters while Bennett and Johnston’s secretary searched the files. Before long, what Bennett saw gave him chills: Internet searches on drug sites. “We’ve got something,” he said, calling out to McNamara and Johnston.

That evening, Bennett and Johnston worked late, combing through the disks. “We found what looked like a history of Matt shopping for drugs, and we couldn’t be sure, but it looked like he’d purchased Ambien.”

In July, after Linda had taken the disks out of Matt’s garbage, the one with the chilling description of Kassidy’s blue eyes, Johnston had hired another expert to work the case, a computer guru named Noel Kersh, a Texas Tech grad who worked with Pathway Forensics, a Houston-based consulting firm. Now, Johnston called Kersh, asking him to come to Waco. When he did, Kersh and Johnston met with Linda at the office. A short time later, Kersh left with the WCY disks and the Crossroads Dell laptop, the one Waco police had found nothing of interest on.

Back in Houston, Kersh began with the laptop. He wasn’t looking long before he found a history that seemed unusual for a man of the cloth. Baker had been using the computer to access dating and pornographic Web sites, among them private.camz.com and coolanalsite.com. It wasn’t shocking news. Besides Linda’s description of the porn that had shown up on Matt and Kari’s home computer, Bennett had looked at the laptop earlier, finding the porn sites intermingled with Matt’s searches for Internet sermons. “Look at what that idiot’s been up to,” Bennett had told Johnston.

From the laptop, Kersh turned to the WCY disks. Over a period of days, he slowly worked through the material. One of the first things he found was a folder marked Dulin Family Crap. In it were e-mails between Kari and Matt and Linda and Matt. He copied those to a disk and kept going.

As he delved even further, Kersh saw more records illustrating that the chaplain’s eye often strayed from the heavens. Matt’s work-computer trail also led to a long list of dating and pornographic Internet sites. The URLs were descriptive of where the minister’s interests lay, from widewomen.com, to sexlist.com, hotmatchup.com, sextracker.com, sexdatenetwork.com, bustydustystash.com, playboy.com, iwantanewgirlfriend.com, and hornymatches.com.

While that was interesting, perhaps opening the window wider into Matt’s mind, it didn’t answer the important question: Had Matt murdered Kari? Rather than Matt’s sexual leanings, what Johnston was interested in was any computer activity that indicated that Matt Baker had shopped for drugs, most importantly Ambien, the drug found in Kari’s body on autopsy. Before long, there, too, Kersh hit pay dirt.

The list of drug Web sites Matt had visited was long, including drugs.com, medicinenet.com, search.drugs.com, Rxlist.com, hydrocodone.com, drugslist.com, and 1stmeds.com. He’d even dropped in at ambien.com. As Kersh combed through the information, one site stood out, and that was the one Kersh mentioned to Johnston when he called with the results. Explaining that to complete an Internet purchase a buyer had to go to a shopping cart, Kersh pointed to one Web page in particular that popped up on Matt’s history: secure.rx-cart.com. On March 23, two weeks before Kari’s death, Matt’s account accessed that page on the site of a Canadian-based, online pharmacy. It appeared that he’d placed an order in his shopping cart.

After talking to Johnston, Kersh followed through and contacted the company. Before long, he was put in touch with the owner, a man named Mark Henry. “Can you make sure that all of it checks out, find out what he put in the cart?” Kersh asked.

When Henry called back, he confirmed that it was the WCY computer that logged on with the user name mattdb7722. What was even more interesting was the item in mattdb7722’s shopping cart: generic Ambien.

“Did he buy it?” Kersh asked.

It was there that it became more complicated. The purchase was never completed, Henry explained, but that wasn’t unusual. Many potential buyers backed out at that particular juncture, after they had the drugs in their cart. Henry attributed the lost sales to the fact that it was at that very point that buyers learned of a two-week delay before the drugs could be delivered.

Yet if Kersh hadn’t found conclusive proof that Matt Baker had bought the sleeping pills, the computer expert had uncovered evidence that someone on the former minister’s computer was shopping for Ambien.

After documenting all he’d discovered, Kersh again returned to the WCY CDs. It didn’t take long before he found something else intriguing: Matt’s computer had accessed sites that sold hydrocodone painkillers and GHB, a drug similar to roofies, the date rape drug that renders victims unconscious and wipes out their memories.

Yet something else waited for Kersh on the computer. On March 9, a month before Kari’s death, mattdb7722 had Googled the phrase “overdose on sleeping pills.”

Considering what he’d uncovered, Kersh knew he had one more step to pull it all together. While interesting, there was one big question mark: Could Kersh determine who’d been on Matt’s computer when the sites were accessed? Could he prove the mattdb7722 who shopped for Ambien was Matt Baker?

To find the answer, Kersh charted the computer’s activity. What he documented was an interwoven Internet history between Matt Baker and mattdb7722. For instance at 8:30
A.M
. on March 9, Matt sent an e-mail to a work associate. Thirteen minutes later, he scoured the Internet for pharmaceutical sites. After looking up Ambien, Matt then went to a page that included the safety warnings:
The most commonly observed side effects in controlled clinical trials were drowsiness, dizziness, and diarrhea . . . Don’t take with alcohol, as it may increase these behaviors.

Then, after Googling “overdose on sleeping pills” at 9:27 that morning, thirty-six minutes later, Matt sent an e-mail to Kari at school. What those documents proved was that on the morning mattdb7722 was scouting for drugs, Matt Baker was sitting at the computer.

One other thing Kersh found wouldn’t mean anything to those involved in the case until later, that Matt had used his computer to purchase herbal sexual stimulants, over-the-counter capsules that the Web site described as aphrodisiacs “ten times better than herbal ecstasy.”

When they heard the news about the Ambien, Johnston, McNamara, and Bennett felt the sky open up. “We’d found as close as we could to a smoking gun,” says Bennett.

When they told Toombs, his early doubts about the case vanished. “This is the real deal,” he thought.

W
ith the evidence piling up, Bennett and McNamara dropped in at the district attorney’s office and talked to Walker. Cawthon hadn’t been successful getting the prosecutors interested in the case in the past, but the two investigators wanted to keep the assistant district attorney up to date. “We couldn’t prove to her what had happened, but we could show that what Matt Baker said had happened couldn’t have happened,” says McNamara.

Walker listened but didn’t offer to take it on. “It wasn’t handled as a murder investigation from the beginning. It was handled as a suicide,” she’s say later. “There was a lack of evidence. They had a dead girl and a family who cared about her, and Mike and John were doing their jobs, but the finding on the autopsy was still a big problem.”