12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 (10 page)

Chapter 15

I
n August, Matt taught a chapel lesson at WCY: Do we help others? His link to the Bible was in Timothy—“People will love only themselves and their money.” Matt’s message to the young residents was to stay away from dangerous people.

Meanwhile, Matt’s attitude toward Terri Corbin had continued to sour. Weeks earlier, he’d complained to his supervisor about Corbin, then, on September 14, he wrote a list of what he called “Terri’s indiscretions” on his computer, including that she’d made unspecified complaints to others about him. Along with that, he filed a report about his duties, including the matter of a resident who wanted demons cleaned from her spirit. In his report, Matt wrote that he’d attempted to remedy the situation by quoting scripture, to illustrate that God loved her. He then showed her a clean sheet of white paper with a small dot on it. “What do you focus on, the clean paper or the spot?” he asked the girl.

“The spot,” the girl answered.

“This demonstrates her tendency to focus on the negative aspects of being here,” Matt wrote. “I prayed that God would help her focus on the positive.” Matt finished his report by noting that he’d discussed the situation with the girl’s therapist.

It was also in mid-September that Matt issued what he called a final warning to Terri, saying that if she complained to others about him, they would talk about “your continuation at WCY.”

A
s 2005 progressed, there seemed one thing missing in Matt and Kari’s return to Waco—Matt didn’t have a church to pastor. That situation changed in the fall when Steve Sadler, a Baylor religion professor, left his position at Crossroads Baptist, the rural church the Dulins attended, where Jim was a deacon. After discussing the situation with Linda, Jim went to a Crossroads meeting in September and asked the other deacons to interview Matt. “How are you going to feel if we have to jerk him out of here, if he’s not for us?” one asked.

“I’m all about this church,” Jim assured them. “If we don’t want Matt, we’ll run him off.”

In truth, Linda had mixed feelings about the situation. “I never thought Matt was a very good preacher,” she says. “But I wanted to do it for Kari.”

That October, Crossroads hired Matt Baker as their pastor. The church, a modest beige-sided building in the bucolic hills, was set back from the road. In the spring, the fields surrounding it were replete with bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush. Summers, a dome of blue sky shone over the church and the small fenced-in playground at the back. Behind the church stood a storage center, one with RVs parked around it. And across the street were single-wide trailers, some with children’s toys scattered about.

Most Sundays about fifty members attended Crossroads. Although it was a comedown from Northlake, a smaller church and congregation, Kari looked proud sitting with the girls in the third row from the front, rubbing their backs as they rested their heads on her lap. Every once in a while, she bent down and kissed their softly brushed hair. For Linda, it felt good to have her daughter and granddaughters closer. When Kensi and Grace saw her at church, they ran to Linda, shouting, “Grammy!”

Once word spread that Matt and Kari were back and that Matt had a church, Todd and Jenny Monsey, the brother and sister from Williams Creek, began attending services at Crossroads. From the beginning, Jenny thought Matt had changed. “He wasn’t the same person we knew. He seemed bossier, telling people what to do. He didn’t seem sincere.”

Although they’d returned because he was being squeezed out of his slot in Dallas, Matt told Jenny and others that they’d come back to Waco because Kari was homesick and didn’t want to be so far from Kassidy’s grave. And as she had at the other churches, Kari jumped in to help, teaching Sunday school and leading Bible studies.

Kimberly Berry met Kari for the first time that August at the Spring Valley teacher’s luncheon, when Kari was introduced as the school’s new third-grade teacher. When Kari started decorating her classroom with lime green, hot pink, and black, Kimberly immediately liked her. “Kari was always cutting it up with the kids,” says Berry. “She sat in a rocking chair to read to them. She always had her makeup on, dressed in the latest styles, and she smiled a lot, and not a teacher’s smile, a real one. And she got the kids excited about school.”

The other teachers at Spring Valley soon learned that Kari wasn’t the quietest of additions. They could hear her calling out spelling words, laughing and joking with the eight-year-olds in her class. When she walked through the halls, the other teachers recognized Kari by the slapping of her flip-flops and the tinkling of her bracelets.

That fall, Kari and another teacher, Shae Dickey, quickly became friends. They had children about the same ages and talked daily while at school. Five years older than Kari, Shae listened sympathetically as Kari told her about Kassidy’s death. “I can’t imagine what it was like to lose a child. If you ever need to talk about it, I’m here,” Shae said.

“Thank you,” Kari answered, giving her a warm hug.

Over time, Kari would confide in Shae. “It was horrible when Kassidy died,” Kari admitted one afternoon. “Kassidy had been so sick. But then, boom, there was Grace. And what could I do but pull it together and take care of my girls?”

As a remembrance of Kassidy, Kari wore a yellow Livestrong bracelet from Lance Armstrong’s cancer foundation, with its mission statement:
To live strong is to not give up
. “Kassidy fought until she couldn’t, so now I have to fight for her,” Kari told Shae, the day she explained why she wore the bracelet.

Each year, the teachers filled out questionnaires called Panther Profiles, named after the school mascot. The purpose was to introduce themselves to the children and their parents. Kari listed her hobbies as swimming and spending time with family, her favorite flower as the Stargazer lily, her favorite cuisines as Japanese and Mexican, and her favorite candy bar as Hershey’s. “Mrs. Baker is funny,” one of her students told his mom during the first weeks of school. “She laughs all the time.”

While Kari settled in, the move seemed to be going well for the girls as well. Grace blended easily into kindergarten, and Kensi became a popular fourth grader. For one class, she wrote a poem about Kassidy entitled, “I learned so much from my baby sister.” The teacher sent it to Kari to read. On her daughter’s school folder, Kari wrote: “I love you, Baby. This is great work.”

After school, Kensi and Grace ran to Kari’s room, where they helped to straighten it for the next morning. Then Kari drove her daughters the short distance home. That fall, Kensi was in swim team at the Family Y, the same one that had fired Matt years earlier, so two nights a week, Kari and Matt hurried out the door, taking the girls to practice. Despite his history at the Y, Matt showed no discomfort. Instead, he walked around with Kari, talking to the other parents, cheering on Kensi’s team from the bleachers.

From the outside, they looked like the perfect family. Kari never hid the fact that she was proud of Matt. “She talked about him constantly,” says a fellow teacher. “She’d say, ‘Come join us at church on Sunday. Give Matt a chance.’ ” Before long, some of Kari’s fellow teachers, including Kimberly Berry, began attending services at Crossroads, drawn by Kari’s enthusiasm. Once she got there, Berry found she liked Matt’s sermons. “I could connect with them,” she says. “Matt talked about life, like about riding in a car with his parents and having his dad say, ‘Now don’t make me pull this car over!’ Matt was really charismatic, and I felt he was talking directly to me.”

Yet, from the beginning, Shea Dickey felt uncomfortable around Matt Baker. And one thing bothered her more than any other, that nearly every time the teachers went out and invited Kari, she’d tell them that she couldn’t go, that she had to get home to be with Matt. Shae saw the Bakers everywhere together, even at the grocery store. It appeared that Matt never let Kari be alone. “The few times we did talk Kari into going with us, her phone rang constantly,” says one of the other teachers. “It was always Matt needing something. He’d call six or seven times. It felt like he was checking up on her.”

“I told Kari that she was entitled to have friends,” says one of her fellow teachers. “Kari said, ‘I know, but I just feel so sorry for Matt.’ ”

Chapter
16

A
t
Crossroads that winter, a new member began attending. Vanessa Bulls was
twenty-three years old, strikingly beautiful, with iridescent blue eyes, a
flawless complexion, high cheekbones, full lips, and long, silky blond hair, a
woman in the throes of a divorce and the mother of an infant daughter named
Lilly. Vanessa’s father was Larry Bulls, Crossroad’s music minister who also
worked for Discount Tires, and his wife, Cheryl, a high-school teacher.

The Bulls were popular members of Crossroads. Larry
was tall and thin, with brown hair, a former high-school football player. His
wife, Cheryl, was a gregarious woman, a former high-school cheerleader. Their
family roots extended far back in Troy, a town of twelve hundred that lay twenty
minutes south of Waco on I-35. “Vanessa never seemed like a wild child,” says a
friend. “Vanessa was an only child and kind of a quiet kid. As pretty as she
was, I remember she had a hard time getting a prom date. She ate lunch with her
mom, and I thought she was a good kid.”

“Troy High School is small, and I thought it would
be rough to be a student and have your mom teach there,” says a friend of the
family. “In small towns, you live in a glass house. Everyone knows your
business. The Bulls were considered middle-income, hardworking people. Cheryl
was a good teacher, and the kids loved her. Vanessa seemed like an average girl
growing up in an average family. She seemed very close to her parents.”

Later, Vanessa would describe her upbringing as
“strict Southern Baptist.”

From Troy, Vanessa went to Mary Hardin Baylor
University in nearby Belton, and one woman who went to college with her would
remember Vanessa as socially involved in this strict Baptist college, one that
split off from Baylor in 1866. At that time, Baylor became all male, and Mary
Hardin was founded as its sister college. While the world changed around them,
and both became coed, the schools remained highly conservative. “We had room
checks, and everything was supposed to be spotless,” says Sara Talbert, who went
to Mary Hardin at the time Vanessa enrolled. “Boys weren’t allowed in the
rooms.”

Talbert would later say that while she didn’t know
her well, she remembered Vanessa. “She came across as superficial, but she might
have been really nice. It was just that something rubbed me the wrong way, like
one of those girls in high school who are Miss Popular but really not what they
appear to be. She had a reputation as a goody/Christian girl, but some people
talked about her like she wasn’t what she seemed.”

Vanessa dressed preppy but wore lots of makeup.
“She didn’t act like she had money, but she acted like a good Christian girl. At
Mary Hardin, it wasn’t about money, it was about how religious a girl appeared
to be.”

In December of 2004, Vanessa married a man who was
twenty years older. Vanessa’s daughter, Lilly, was born eight months later, in
August 2005. A month after Lilly’s birth, Vanessa and her husband separated, and
he filed for divorce, denying paternity, claiming he’d done a home test that
excluded him. In his petition for divorce, he requested DNA testing. Vanessa
counterfiled, stating that Lilly was “a child of the marriage,” asking for
support. But on October 25, the following statement was entered into the case
files: “The alleged father [Vanessa’s husband] is excluded as the biological
father of the child . . . The probability of paternity is 0
percent.”

From that point on, the divorce became merely the
business of dividing property. In December, Vanessa Bulls’s divorce became
final. The order read: “There was a child born during the marriage of petitioner
and respondent that was not a child of the marriage . . . It is
therefore ordered that no orders for conservatorship and support are entered in
this cause.”

A
t the
time Matt and Kari Baker met Vanessa, she and Lilly lived with her parents in
the Bulls’s Troy home, and Vanessa was attending classes at Tarleton in the
evenings, working on a degree in education. At Crossroads, Kari noticed Lilly
quickly. The baby was pudgy and blond and reminded her of the daughter she’d
lost. “Lilly looks so much like Kassidy,” Kari said to more than one person that
fall.

The months passed, and that winter Kari was busy,
teaching at Spring Valley during the day, on the community college campus on
Monday evenings, and conducting an Internet course one evening a week. In her
entrepreneurial class, she gave the students a syllabus for the semester that
included writing business plans.

While Kari ran from one job to the next, Matt had
his duties at Crossroads and his job at the Waco Center for Youth. At times, he
e-mailed Kari on his WCY account to her Spring Valley e-mail, often in the role
of the concerned husband and father. “Maybe Grace can use these?” he asked,
sending along a link to a Web site that sold connect-the-dot alphabet color
pages that read: “Y is for Yarn . . . Z is for Zebra . . . N
is for Nightgown.”

At Spring Valley that December, Kimberly Berry had
health issues and asked Kari to pray for her. In her classroom, Kari took Kim’s
hands and held them in her own, bowing her head and praying. From that point
forward, Kari began talking with Kim about Kassidy, recounting the short time
they’d had her. One day, Kari brought a scrapbook she’d made in Kassidy’s
memory, full of photographs, including some of the child hooked up to the web of
machines that kept her alive in the hospital. “Matt doesn’t like to look at the
scrapbook,” Kari said, as they paged through.

“I think she was glad to share Kassidy with
someone,” Kim would say later. “But she didn’t sound sad, more proud of Kassidy,
of how hard she’d fought to live.”

On the last day of school before Christmas break,
Kari made cocoa for her class on a cold day. When she e-mailed Matt, he told her
it was quiet at WCY. “I love you,” he said.

Kari e-mailed back, sounding a little down because
her students had all come in with individual gifts for her. The year before, in
Dallas, the students’ parents had all donated and given her a hundred-dollar
certificate for Borders Books, money she’d used to buy Christmas presents. Matt
responded that maybe the parents just didn’t do that at Spring Valley, then
said, “I love you,” a second time.

“Hey, I have a gift from one student that we can
give your sister. Ha! Ha! I love regifting,” Kari replied, describing “yucky
candles.” In a later e-mail she said her students were sugared up and having a
hard time settling down, so she put on a movie,
The Polar
Express.
If they didn’t calm down, she joked that she’d have to “Kill
them!!!”

“Don’t leave a mess!!!
” Matt replied.

Matt was noncommittal about whether or not he’d be
able to make it to the girls’ school Christmas parties that afternoon. “I need
to hand out a couple of Bibles, then I will escape,” he wrote.

Later that evening, at the teachers’ party, Kari
presented her gift for the white elephant exchange, a pair of gargantuan
panties. Everyone was laughing and having a good time when Kari’s phone rang.
She answered it, and then said, “That was Matt. I have to go.”

O
n
Christmas Day during services, Kensi and Todd Monsey sang “The Christmas Shoes,”
a song made popular by the group Newsong, in which a child needs money to buy
shoes for his dying mother. In his sermon, Matt reminded the faithful that the
holiday wasn’t about presents and parties but the birth of Christ. “Merry
Christmas to all,” he said. “I wish the blessings of Christ upon you and your
house this season.”

“Everything seemed fine,” says Jenny. “Matt and
Kari looked happy.”

Yet during Christmas week, something happened that
set the stage for the tragedy that was to come. It was at Crossroads’s potluck
supper. The church members were in the recreation area eating, while Vanessa
Bulls talked on the phone with a friend, saying, “Oh, a new guy is calling me.
You know, I’m getting a divorce. I don’t know if I can really like, I can date
again. . . .”

Later, Vanessa would say that was when Matt Baker
motioned for her to follow him into a hallway. She did, and when they got away
from the others, he said, “Will you really?”

“Will I really what?” she responded.

“Will you really date your pastor?”

Vanessa just looked at him until he spoke again:
“Well, I’ve had a vasectomy, so I can’t get you pregnant. And I don’t have any
sexually transmitted diseases.”

“Have you done that before?” she asked.

Matt nodded. “Kari is clueless.”