12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 (9 page)

That May, in Northlake’s sanctuary, Matt officiated at Aubrey and Joe’s wedding. After a rousing rendition of “Here Comes the Bride,” Matt stood before those gathered. “One of the most beautiful expressions of love and tenderness comes from the book of Ruth, where it says, ‘don’t urge me to leave you or turn back from you. Where you go, I will go. Where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me ever so severely if anything but death separates you and me.’ ”

After finishing the Bible passage, Matt stood before the young couple, and said, “You will work on your marriage. And the only thing that can separate you is death.”

P
erhaps inspired by Linda’s thirst for education, Kari enrolled in Dallas Baptist University and began working on a graduate degree in leadership studies with an emphasis on conflict resolution. She was ambitious for herself and for Matt and the girls. “She never wanted the girls to miss anything because they didn’t have enough money,” says Jill. “Kari was adamant that they were going to have everything she could give them.”

Yet as there had been at the other churches, problems began to develop for Matt at Northlake. It started within weeks of signing on at the church, when Matt fired a staff member. “The woman was well liked, a founding member of the church, so it was a horrible political move,” says a church member. The man watched Matt, and thought he saw a pattern, one in which the young pastor went behind the backs of those in charge of different aspects of the church and contradicted their orders. “I came to the conclusion that Matt liked to stir up controversy. He didn’t like things to run smoothly.”

As in the past, Matt used little scripture in his sermons, instead telling stories, which upset the older members of the church. “Matt always seemed kind of arrogant,” says one member. “It was kind of like, this is what I’m preaching, and he expected us to accept that and not question.”

Over the months, the complaints multiplied. As always, Kari defended him. “She spent most of her time arguing and standing up for Matt,” says Jill. “Kari was a go-getter, with energy to spare, and she was determined that people would back Matt. Because we were their friends, we fell in line behind them. There was a lot of stress at the church.”

“Matt would tell Kari that some church member did something, and she’d go find them and take up for him,” says another congregant. “She was always defending him, even when he was wrong.”

At times, Kari gave Jill knowing glances, poking fun at one or another of the church members, as he or she ranted about Matt’s latest sermon or the direction the church was taking. “So, do you want to wrestle?” Kari sometimes asked angry church members. At first, they wouldn’t know how to respond. Then they’d laugh and walk away.

There were times when Kari, too, talked about Matt, but never truly complaining, just rolling her eyes, and saying, “Well, you know Matt.”

One thing she didn’t seem to mind talking about was sex. As she had in Waco, Kari complained that Matt seemed overly interested in lovemaking. “Well, you know Matt’s not going to get any,” she said with a grimace. To Jill, it sounded as if Kari didn’t like sex with Matt. So much so that she called it her “wifely duty.”

“It never seemed romantic between them,” says Jill. “It was more like they were best friends. He’d dunk her in the pool, and they’d both laugh and chase each other, like kids.”

As the year wore on, Kari started complaining about the neighborhood in Mesquite, saying Matt was certain they had a Peeping Tom. Before long, they’d sold the house and moved closer to the church. Later, a church member wondered what was really behind the move. “I always felt Matt kept Kari nervous,” he says. “I thought maybe Matt told her about that Peeping Tom wanting to upset her, since no one else I knew out there complained of one.”

The second spring in Dallas, as the anniversary of Kassidy’s death approached, Kari wrote in her Bible: “Don’t grow weary doing good. Because your reward is heaven!”

Jill noticed that her friend didn’t seem as sad as she had the year before during the anniversary. “There was a real difference,” says Jill, who brought Kari ice cream to assuage her sorrow. “It wasn’t like the previous year; it was easing.”

That year, a job teaching leadership and business classes opened up at Tarleton State University in Waco. Kari applied, and Jill wrote her a recommendation, touting Kari’s passion, high energy and self-motivation. When she got the position, Kari began traveling to Waco one evening a week to teach. The result was that her schedule became even more crowded as she juggled caring for the girls, her day job teaching elementary school, teaching at Tarleton, and finishing up her master’s. What complicated the situation even more was that Matt was having increasing problems at Northlake.

During Sunday services, church members angry with Matt were so incensed they’d begun holding up their Bibles and shouting at him to preach from it. At the pulpit, Matt didn’t respond. At meetings, voices grew louder, and the Hotzes backed Matt based on friendship, not conviction. The situation flared hotter when Matt cut the hours of the church maintenance man. “People argued against it, and Kari stood up for Matt,” Jill says. The deacon who oversaw the facilities, the maintenance man’s boss, was so angry about Matt’s plan, “he almost broke the door slamming it behind him on the way out of the building.”

Meanwhile, others were getting a bad opinion of Matt that had little to do with his preaching. “I caught him lying to me more than once,” says one man, who’d recount times Matt told him one thing had happened when it was another. “I came away with the impression that Matt Baker was a pathological liar. That he’d look at you and tell you the grass was blue.”

In Waco, Kari complained to Linda about the church members, echoing complaints Linda heard coming from Matt. While she’d kept quiet in the past, this time Linda spoke up. “Do you hear yourself?” Linda asked. “I want you to think. How could this be at every church? What’s the one common denominator at every church?”

Kari didn’t answer, but Linda knew her daughter understood that what tied the situations together was Matt Baker. At that, Linda stopped pushing, mindful that Matt was her daughter’s husband. But in November 2004, a little more than two years after moving to Dallas, Northlake cut Matt’s salary by $5,000. Not long after, he resigned.

“On paper, it said Matt quit,” says Jill. “The truth was that he left before he was fired.”

When Kari told her family, she insisted that Matt had been treated unfairly. “Bless Kari’s heart, she just wanted to believe in Matt,” says Nancy. “She defended him through thick and thin.”

Chapter 14

“I
f Matt had tried to abuse Kari physically, she wouldn’t have had it. She would never have put up with it. She was too strong for that,” says Linda. “Instead, he made her feel sorry for him. And Matt was persuasive. Things happened, and he always had an explanation.”

As 2005 began, Matt had a new job, this one with the Texas Youth Commission, in Mart, outside Waco, coordinating volunteers and community relations. Linda would later say that even though Kari had family nearby, she wasn’t keen on moving. She’d made friends in Dallas and liked the city. She was also locked into a contract to teach through that May, and Kensi was in school. The decision was made, and Matt moved into Linda and Jim’s spare bedroom, while Kari and the girls stayed in Dallas to finish the school year.

All the turmoil in her life appeared to be taking a toll on Kari. She’d always gained and lost weight, but that year she’d gained and hadn’t lost, her weight hovering near two hundred pounds. She was still a pretty woman, stylish, with bright blond hair, now cut into a short, spiky, fashionable do. She wore trendy clothes and loved to clomp around in girlish flip-flops, the bangle bracelets on her wrist tinkling as she walked.

Moving again had proved expensive, and that spring Kari asked Linda for a favor. “Would you add Matt and me to your cell phone, on the family plan?” she requested. “We’ll have the bill for our phones sent to our house, but it’ll save us money.”

Linda barely thought about it before agreeing.

The TYC job not to his liking, Matt had continued to look, when in March he heard about a chaplain’s job at the Waco Center for Youth, a residential facility for thirteen- to seventeen-year-olds with emotional or behavioral problems.

In aging dark tan brick buildings on a sprawling campus connected by arched brick walkways, WCY was operated by the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation. Its stated mission:
To give each youth a chance for change
. The average stay was eighteen months, and the residents either came voluntarily or by court order. In need of counseling, they weren’t considered psychotic, suicidal, or violent. On the campus, they lived in cottages named after Texas rivers: Brazos, Trinity, Rio Grande, and the Red River.

The former chaplain, popular with the residents and staff, had taken a leave five months earlier for family matters, then decided not to return. Matt began working at WCY near the end of April. His duties included holding Sunday afternoon chapel services, Bible studies, and counseling. Early on he was introduced to Terri Corbin, a woman with curly highlighted hair and a brusque manner, one of his two assistants. She and the other assistant had been covering the chaplain’s duties and were both excited about having Matt take on the responsibilities. Terri’s and Matt’s offices were next to each other on a locked hallway, in the main building near the chapel.

On his first day after training, Matt knocked on Terri’s door, then sat in a chair and began talking, at first detailing his credentials. They were impressive, especially his master’s degree from Baylor. Then he turned to more personal matters. After talking about Kari, Kensi, and Grace, he turned the conversation around to Kassidy. “We had another little girl,” he said. “She died.”

“I thought it was so odd,” says Terri. “He started talking about Kassidy, and he told me step by step everything that happened, starting at her birth through when she got sick, going to the hospital, what the doctors said. The night she died. Everything.”

As the minutes passed, Corbin’s eyes filled with tears. Kassidy’s story was a sad one, and Terri found it difficult to listen to Matt’s account of a beautiful baby who suddenly fell ill. The story turned excruciating, as Matt described finding Kassidy in bed, not breathing, giving her CPR while Kari called 911. “I thought it was strange that he’d share all the details when we’d barely met,” says Terri. Something else struck her as odd, that Matt could recount such a painful time without emotion. “He talked for maybe fifty minutes or more, but he never looked upset. Then he just stood up and left. I was in tears.”

Once he moved into his office, Matt put photos on his desk of Kensi and Grace and one of Kari in her wedding dress. It wasn’t long before Terri met them in person, when Kari dropped in to see Matt, the two girls in tow.
What a cute family,
Terri thought, looking at Kari, who talked nonstop. “Kari was bubbly, fun, and she had the girls all dolled up,” says Terri. “They were darling. I was looking forward to working with Matt. I thought with such a sweet family, he must be a good guy.”

The honeymoon period, however, was short. Not long after, Matt came into the office of one of his supervisors, Sarah Parker, to review complaints residents had filed about the facility. Parker asked his opinion, then realized that Matt changed his to match hers. “It was odd, like he was trying to gain my approval,” she says. Then Matt began coming to her complaining about his staff, especially Terri Corbin. “He used really derogatory terms about them, along the lines of idiots. It was really unprofessional.”

“K
ari missed her family, and she wanted the girls to spend time with them,” says Jill. “She didn’t want to leave Dallas, but she was excited about being back in Waco.”

At first, Matt and Kari moved into a house not far from the interstate. But before long, they relocated again, this time to a tidy redbrick one-story at 803 Crested Butte, in Hewitt, Texas, a mushrooming subdivision just outside Waco. The house was perfect in many ways, including that it was just a twenty-minute drive from her parents’ home. A bustling suburb, the main business district along Hewitt Drive was packed with banks, strip centers, grocers, vet clinics, fast-food restaurants, and churches.

With a fenced-in yard, the house was situated one house off the corner on a quiet street. Inside, it had a split floor plan, the living room and dining room down the center, with the two children’s bedrooms and a bathroom on the right, and the master bedroom and bath on the left.

Making the house perfect, Kari had been offered a third-grade teaching position at Spring Valley Elementary, less than half a mile away, where Grace and Kensi would start in the fall. That spring, another opportunity opened up, a full-time teaching position at Tarleton State. Linda talked to Kari about it, pointing out that college teaching slots were scarce. “I know, Mom,” she said. “But I want to be at Spring Valley for the girls. It’s Gracie’s first year in school, and Kensi’s first year at this school.”

“You’re sure?” Linda asked.

“I’m sure,” Kari answered.”

Quickly, Kari made the Crested Butte house hers. She and Matt painted the inside and hung her cross collection on a wall. Never faint of heart, she chose a rich brown for the dining room and living room and a celery green for the kitchen, all with a crisp white trim. In the dining room, Kari draped flowing curtains dramatically over the bowed window, and in the beige-walled master bedroom, they positioned the bed with its plank headboard trimmed in a metal lattice in front of the windows. The desk with the computer stood at the foot of the bed, with a flat-screen television. All in all, the house, like Kari, had an unusual style for a pastor’s wife, a dose of fun and just a little hip.

Everything undoubtedly felt as if it was working out well that summer. Linda told Kari that in an e-mail, suggesting that the move must be blessed because so much was falling in place. She had no way of knowing what Terri Corbin was experiencing with Matt at work.

In fact, it was just months after he began at WCY, that Matt’s behavior started to raise questions with Corbin. She’d slowly begun to wonder about the new chaplain’s honesty. It seemed harmless at first, but she’d catch him lying to her about small things, especially what he was doing and where he was going. “I’m going to stop out at one of the cottages,” he’d say, sticking his head in her door. “After that, I’ll head home.”

She wasn’t checking on him, but noticed simply by glancing out her office window that Matt wasn’t walking toward the residents’ cottages but the employee parking lot. “I saw him get in his car and drive off the campus,” Terri says. “He wasn’t visiting the cottages; he was leaving work early.”

Over time, Matt started arriving late in the mornings, but instead of walking in the front door, he entered through the auditorium. “That way, others would think he’d been there on time,” says Corbin. “I didn’t say anything to him about any of it.” Meanwhile, in his reports, he suggested that his workload be cut. Few of the residents attended the weekly Bible study sessions, and Matt’s proposal was that if they were held less often, more might participate.

Other things, however, Corbin did speak up about. Where the services in the past had always been reserved for residents and their families, Matt invited members of other churches to WCY on Sunday afternoons. What upset Corbin was that this flew in the face of the residents’ confidentiality. WCY policy stated that no one should be on campus unless they registered at the front desk and that they had to be on campus for specific reasons. “People aren’t welcome to come and just have a look,” she says.

One Sunday, when Terri brought it up, Matt didn’t take the criticism well. “How dare you question me!” he challenged.

“It’s against policy,” she explained yet again. Confused by his reaction, Terri assumed Matt would think it over and understand that she was simply asking him to remember the rules. He was new, and it seemed natural that he’d make a few missteps.

Her assumptions, however, proved wrong. The following morning, Terri turned on her work computer and found a two-page e-mail. In that single e-mail, Matt threatened to fire her for insubordination three times. “I’d never been treated in such a demeaning manner before,” she’d later say. “Instead of calling me to his office to discuss the situation, he sent me a hurtful e-mail, threatening to let me go.”

Still, Matt was her boss. What was she supposed to do?

In the chapel, Matt hung a banner that read: ANGER: Noise of the Soul; Relentless Invader of Silence. Meanwhile, Terri was unimpressed with his preaching. Instead of writing his own sermons, Matt took ideas off the Internet, including one entitled “Wayne’s Rotten Day,” where he talked about a boy who starts the day off falling out of bed. “How do you cope with a rotten day?” Matt asked those attending.

Another Sunday, Matt tackled an issue that would have added meaning in the not-too-distant future: suicide. In his sermon, he told the story of a fourteen-year-old boy who took his own life. “What if you were this boy?” Matt asked. “Or if you were his friend? Would you have seen this coming? How could you have stopped it?”

As the summer progressed, Terri saw more that raised questions about Matt’s professionalism and his motives. A friend of hers, an employee on the campus, confided that she had a run-in with the new chaplain. The woman said that one day in Matt’s office, she was confiding in him about a personal problem. Instead of offering a kind ear or the type of sage advice he’d been trained to dispense, Matt looked at the woman, and asked, “Would you like to fuck me?”

Startled, the woman had no idea what to say. Instead, she quickly jumped up and left. “I’m making sure I’m not alone with him,” she told Terri. “That man scares me.”