12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 (30 page)

Later that same afternoon, after the inquest took a short break, Ben Toombs’s name was called. That left Jim, Linda, and Matt Cawthon alone in the hallway. Where Toombs had looked nervous during the wait, fidgeting with his necktie, Cawthon, an old hand who’d been in many such circumstances, was laid-back. He talked casually with the Dulins, about family and the small enjoyments in life. Until at one point, he turned to them, and said, “I just want you to know that I’m disgusted about the way this case has been handled.” Cawthon didn’t give any specifics, but the Dulins understood what the Ranger meant and appreciated that he understood what they’d gone through.

Meanwhile, inside the courtroom, Toombs recounted how he entered the case with the Crossroads laptop, followed by the disinterment and autopsy. Then he brought in, for the first time, evidence that Matt had lied. That came from Holly Romano, who Matt said had seen Kari sick at the Family Y’s pool that last night. Instead, Holly insisted that Kari seemed well and was excited about the prospect of a new job.

At that point, Toombs mentioned the paperwork he’d brought in with him, expert opinions he wanted to give the judge so it would be available to consider, much of it regarding the condition of Kari’s body when the EMTs arrived. On that topic, Toombs mentioned one letter in particular, the one from Bevel. “In his opinion, there’s no way possible that it could have happened [the condition of the body], if she’d been alive at eleven fifteen.”

Martin cut him off. “That is an opinion, and I’d rather stick to the facts.”

Assessing that the judge’s mind wasn’t to be changed, the young detective took it in stride. He didn’t push but instead dropped another bombshell, opening a window into what kind of man the young pastor truly was by recounting the information from the YMCA. While Matt worked there, the focus of their inquiry had “basically solicited sex” from teenage girls. Perhaps Martin was finally getting a view of Matt Baker as something other than a devoted man of God.

Still, there was one woman who described Matt in more flattering terms: Vanessa Bulls. Recounting the previous July’s interview with the music minister’s daughter, Toombs said Bulls denied any romantic relationship with Matt until after Kari’s death. “She felt like Matt had grieved at the loss of Kari,” Toombs related from his notes. “She just didn’t notice anything abnormal about it.”

After going through his failed attempts to find the computer and printer the suicide note was written on, Toombs explained that he had done nothing on the case since early October of the previous year. Then Toombs voiced the opinion that the most important evidence was the conflict between the time line Matt gave and the condition of the body.

“That’s the one thing that’s the most suspicious to you?” Martin asked.

“Yes,” Toombs confirmed.

It was Texas Ranger Matt Cawthon who next presented himself, more than eager to answer Martin’s questions. While the other had been more reserved, the Ranger didn’t mince words. “Matt Baker was a womanizer,” Cawthon told the judge. “One who couldn’t control his urges, his needs.”

As Toombs had done, Cawthon painted a picture of the young pastor as a man who sexually harassed women. “There had even been one allegation to police about a sexual assault,” Cawthon said, referencing the attack on Lora Wilson. And then, despite Vanessa’s denials, Cawthon called it as he saw it, describing Matt’s “ongoing illicit sexual affair” with the music minister’s daughter.

Before long, Cawthon turned to the heart of the matter, how Kari might have really died., While not conclusive, the autopsy had revealed that she had the drug Ambien in her muscle tissue. “Ambien was not a prescription drug Kari Baker possessed,” he pointed out. And what had a review of Matt’s computer turned up? That he’d visited a long list of prescription Web sites where Ambien was sold. “These are circumstantial situations that at this point are just too much to ignore,” Cawthon said. Kari was “cold to the touch, lividity was fixed . . . It is our opinion in law enforcement that this couldn’t have happened the way Matt Baker said it happened.”

There was no doubt in Cawthon’s mind about Matt’s having a motive. He’d interviewed a woman who clerked in a local jewelry store, one who told him that within weeks of Kari’s death, Matt was shopping with Vanessa for an engagement ring. “It’s the totality of these things that we believe forms a pretty substantial case against Matt Baker for the death of his wife,” Cawthon concluded.

When the judge asked if Cawthon had anything to add, the Ranger, it appeared, wanted to get what he’d told Linda Dulin earlier that morning on the record. “I’ll even be candid enough to tell you that this was handled poorly . . . by the police,” he said. “Had we been able to gather forensic evidence in a more timely fashion . . . this may have been different.”

What had Matt to gain by murdering Kari? Cawthon again answered without hesitation: $50,000 from her teacher retirement and his freedom to be with Vanessa.

I
n the hallway, Linda had been both anxiously awaiting and dreading this moment, but now she took her place before the judge. Along with others from her group of experts, she held a letter from Bristol in her hands, one in which the therapist recounted her last visit with Kari.

To begin, Linda told Martin about her last phone call with Kari on that final Friday afternoon. As she had so many times before, Linda stressed how excited her daughter was about her performance at the job interview.

Mere hours later, the house phone rang sending Linda and Jim rushing through the night, only to arrive at the house after Kari was pronounced dead. Once the investigators left, Matt fell into an untroubled sleep on the couch. When Martin asked about Kari’s grief over Kassidy’s death, Linda said, “Kari grieved for her daughter. I grieve for my daughter.” But it hadn’t paralyzed Kari. The reverse was true. At the end, Kari had talked about using her experiences to reach out to other grieving parents.

“Two weeks before Kari died, it became very apparent that she and Matt were having problems,” Linda recounted. “I suggested she see Jo Ann Bristol.”

At that, Linda attempted to give Martin the letter from Bristol along with the others, including those from Bevel and Stafford. As he had when Toombs tried to share Bevel’s opinion about the condition of the body, Martin refused to take the letters, saying they were opinions, not evidence. But where Toombs had backed down, Linda firmly disagreed. “Jo Ann Bristol did see Kari, and this letter documents what she saw.”

There were more exchanges, back and forth between a grieving mother and a justice of the peace who held the key to righting what she saw as a great wrong, but in the end, just minutes after she entered the room, Linda was dismissed by Martin, who said that all he wanted to hear from her was about Kari’s mood on that final day. “That’s all you want?” Linda said, incredulous. He’d refused to look at the opinion of a trained therapist yet had solicited the opinion of the victim’s mother. To Linda, it was nonsensical, and she wondered about Martin’s logic.

“That’s it,” Martin confirmed.

Reluctantly, Linda walked out the door wishing she could say so much more. She motioned Jim in and sat back on a chair. As she waited for her husband, Linda considered her brief time before the judge. She still held the experts’ letters in her hands, the ones Billy Martin had no desire to read. So much work and expense. Was it all for naught?

Jim Dulin was that afternoon’s final witness. Kari’s dad verified what his wife had said, that although Kari mourned Kassidy, their daughter was an upbeat, gregarious woman, one who never appeared even vaguely suicidal. And he cleared up something Sergeant Cooper had floundered about earlier. “There was no handwritten signature on the note at all.”

After Jim left the room, Martin said: “This will conclude the death inquest investigation into Kari Lynn Baker.”

Still, the business of the day wasn’t done. Before adjourning, Martin entered three documents into evidence: the EMTs’ run records, the autopsy, and Kari’s death certificate. At that, the afternoon’s session formally ended.

As she and Jim walked from the courthouse to their car, Linda thought back to her less-than-satisfying experience in the courtroom and decided she knew what Martin would do. “This case was a monkey on Judge Martin’s back, and he wanted it gone,” she’d say later. “I felt certain he wasn’t looking for justice, just to get rid of us. So it wasn’t hard to figure out what he was thinking and what he’d decide.”

T
he next day, the fact-finding continued, this time when Judge Martin issued an order for the Waco Center for Youth to turn over to Hewitt Police any and all computer equipment used by Matt Baker during his employment there. Not long after, Toombs and Cawthon showed up at WCY. When Greenfield met them, however, he recounted what they’d already heard from McNamara and Bennett; Matt’s computer was missing.

Nerves on edge, the Dulins and their extended family waited. Finally, on September 18, Martin called a press conference to announce his decision. Although she wanted to be there, Linda had to teach, and she felt certain she’d learn quickly what the justice of the peace had to say. Media descended on the courthouse, and Nancy and Lindsey went as well.

After the press conference, Nancy and Lindsey rushed to the college and found Linda in her classroom. They bounced outside her window, waving at her. When she joined them, they gushed with excitement, announcing that Martin had changed the manner of Kari’s death from suicide to undetermined. It was what Linda had suspected, and she was less than pleased.

“My sister and niece saw it as a door opening, and it was,” Linda would later say. But as she envisioned it, that door had only inched opened a crack. A ruling of undetermined allowed the district attorney to investigate but only if he wanted to. It was far from a demand for action. “I’d hoped Martin would have had the courage to do the right thing and rule Kari’s death a homicide.”

Chapter 45

D
espite their disappointment in Martin’s decision, Linda and Jim held onto hope, believing that although they hadn’t gotten all they wanted, the inquest had worked in their favor and that they’d moved a step closer to the day their son-in-law would be forced to answer for their daughter’s death. For their part, Bennett and McNamara were focused on making sure that happened. “We thought about this case every day. Talked about it every day,” says McNamara. “We knew that Matt Baker was guilty, and we couldn’t abide that he’d get away with murder.”

Now that the door to an arrest had been nudged slightly ajar by Martin’s ruling, the two seasoned investigators were determined to put on pressure and swing it wide open. In their quest to make that happen, two days after Martin changed the manner of Kari’s death to undetermined, Bennett and McNamara again met with Texas Ranger Matt Cawthon, and the topic of conversation was the Matt Baker case.

Over lunch, the three men once again reviewed the evidence they’d collected against Baker, discussing the scenario they agreed was most likely based on the experts Johnston had brought in and the physical evidence. The more Bennett and McNamara considered the abrasion on Kari’s nose in the autopsy and crime-scene photos, the more they agreed with Bevel’s assessment that Kari had been first drugged, then suffocated. As they talked, Cawthon agreed that theory made the most sense and that Matt Baker’s version of his wife’s death was inconsistent with the evidence. The Ranger also agreed that the investigators had accumulated enough to justify a warrant. Yet Bennett and McNamara found Cawthon’s response frustrating. “We still need to work through Hewitt and the DA’s Office.”

“But they’re not doing anything,” McNamara pointed out, to no avail. Cawthon was determined to honor the Texas Rangers’ code of not stepping on the toes of local law enforcement by moving in uninvited and taking over cases. Yet that didn’t mean that the Ranger wouldn’t pursue the case. When lunch ended, Cawthon made his first stop the McLennan County Courthouse, where he again met with the ADA they’d all been keeping informed about the Baker case, Melanie Walker. His goal remained to convince her to put Vanessa Bulls in front of a grand jury. At the end of the meeting, Cawthon walked down the courthouse steps frustrated. “My impression was that the case wouldn’t go anywhere in the DA’s Office.”

It was at that juncture that Cawthon decided the best course of action, whether the prosecutors were interested or not, was to push the matter at Hewitt PD. “I didn’t need the DA to arrest Baker,” he says. “I could go to a justice of the peace and get an arrest warrant signed.”

Yet still mindful of the Rangers’ long-held traditions, he wanted to work through those primarily responsible for the case. In Hewitt’s headquarters, Cawthon confronted Chief Barton, warning that if Hewitt didn’t write a warrant for Baker, the Rangers would. “The chief was upset. He kept asking, ‘Why are you pushing this case? Who are you working for?’ ” says Cawthon. As he had in the past, the Ranger said, “I’m working for that dead girl, and you should be, too.”

After Cawthon again made it clear that he intended to move the case forward with or without Hewitt’s cooperation, the chief instructed Ben Toombs to write a warrant. The finished product began: “I, Ben Toombs, a licensed peace officer in the State of Texas and employed by the Hewitt Police Department and hereafter referred to as the affiant, do solemnly swear that I have reason to believe and do believe that Matthew Dee Baker . . . intentionally or knowingly committed the offense of murder by causing the death of Kari Lynn Baker by using prescription and/or over-the-counter sleeping medication and alcohol to render her defenseless and then using a pillow or similar item to suffocate her.”

From that point on, the warrant laid out the evidence, everything from the expert opinions on lividity to Kari’s prophetic words to Bristol, and the computer evidence that Matt shopped for Ambien on the Internet. The last line of the warrant spelled out Cawthon’s and Toombs’s intentions: “Affiant asks for issuance of a warrant that will authorize the arrest of the suspected party.”

The warrant completed, they drove to Billy Martin’s office and presented it to the judge. “He was part of all this,” says Cawthon, “so Martin was the best one to sign it.”

The justice of the peace agreed. Cawthon then called the Texas Ranger stationed in Kerrville, and instructed, “Go pick him up.”

Finally, it appeared that Matt Baker would be taken into custody. Yet by the time the Ranger arrived at Tivy High School, where Matt was working as a substitute teacher, Baker, alerted by a phone call, had disappeared. “I was told that it appeared that he had fled,” says Cawthon. “He’d left the campus.”

To ensure that Baker knew they’d be looking for him, the Kerrville Ranger tracked down Barbara, who worked on the campus as an aide, and confronted her. “She said she didn’t know where Matt was,” says Cawthon. “The Ranger told her, ‘Well, you better find him pretty darn quick.’ ”

In Waco, Cawthon grew impatient, word not coming of the arrest. Only hours later did he hear that the former pastor had turned himself in at the Kerr County sheriff’s office and been taken into custody.

When Linda and Jim heard that their son-in-law was under arrest, there was gratitude but no sense of jubilation. “We were deeply sad. We not only had a murdered daughter but now the father of our granddaughters had been taken from them and put in jail. Matt belonged there. He needed to be held accountable,” says Linda. “But there was no joy.”

When a reporter from the
Waco Tribune-Herald
called, Linda said she and Jim had been waiting for Matt to be arrested and held accountable for nearly eighteen months, and she thanked Cawthon, calling him a man of courage and determination. “Texas Ranger Matt Cawthon . . . makes Chuck Norris look like a wimp,” Linda said. “Cawthon truly moved a couple of mountains to make this happen.”

Yet Johnston cautioned both of Kari’s parents that an arrest warrant didn’t necessarily predict a trial. Cawthon, too, was well aware of the potential pitfalls ahead. “I’d done my job. I believed Baker was guilty and we had sufficient evidence to prove it,” says the Ranger. “But Segrest wasn’t the type of district attorney who’d work with law enforcement. My opinion of him was that he was too concerned about his win-loss record. The reality was that if the DA’s Office chose not to pursue the case, I couldn’t force it to. The ball was in the prosecutor’s court.”