12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 (21 page)

Chapter 31

“K
ari loved life. In her deepest sorrow, she loved life,” Linda would say years later. “I just kept trying to convince myself that she committed suicide. I didn’t want Matt to be a murderer. But once I saw those phone bills, I had to know what had really happened.”

When Todd visited Matt that spring, Matt complained about Kari’s family. “Maybe I’ll move the girls to a different district,” Matt said. “I’d like distance from the Dulins.”

Perhaps he realized Linda was questioning. That wouldn’t have been a reach after AT&T mistakenly sent the records Linda requested to Matt’s address. Later, he’d say that he immediately realized that his mother-in-law was looking at his phone bills. Not long after, Linda received a call from a friend who saw Matt and Vanessa at a fast-food restaurant and another who saw them shopping for cell phones.

Meanwhile, still struggling with what to believe, Linda met with Jo Ann Bristol, to hear in person what Kari had told her. As she had to others since that day, Bristol carefully laid out her final session with Kari, talking of how excited Kari was about the prospect of the new job and finding a way to work with parents who’d lost children. When Bristol turned to the conversation about Matt, however, Linda felt her heart sinking. As the therapist relayed Kari’s fears, for the first time Linda had a glimpse into why Kari suffered from anxiety in the final weeks of her life. “Kari was trying to make sense of it all, but still not trusting her instincts,” Linda would say later. “Listening to Jo Ann, I hurt for my child. I wished I had known. I wanted to hold Kari. But I couldn’t. My daughter was dead.”

Afterward, Linda talked with Jim, relaying all she’d learned. With little discussion, they agreed Kari’s death needed to be investigated. From what her sisters and niece had said, however, they concluded that Hewitt PD wasn’t interested in looking into a death they’d already written off as suicide. Yet Linda wasn’t without help. Nancy, Kay, and Lindsey were as eager as she was to uncover the truth.

In the days that followed, e-mails and phone calls flew back and forth among the women, Linda divvying up tasks, issuing orders about who should do what. Before long, the women had renamed themselves. Linda was Charlie, the leader, and began even signing her e-mails that way, and Nancy, Kay, and Lindsey were the angels. Their task, the one they’d gladly accepted, was to look into the strange circumstances surrounding Kari Lynn Dulin Baker’s death.

One Friday afternoon, Matt’s day off, Lindsey drove to Crested Butte hoping to see Vanessa arrive or leave. She sat there for hours, wondering whether or not Vanessa’s car was inside the garage. On the street were piles of garbage. She thought about searching through it but worried that Matt would see her. She had to fight the urge to walk up to the door and tell him what she thought of him. She left that afternoon without ever seeing either Matt or Vanessa.

Another day, Lindsey received an early-morning call. “Your assignment is to call more of the numbers on Matt’s phone bill,” Linda said. “Let’s find out what he’s up to.”

“Yes, Charlie,” Lindsey said. “Will do!”

What Lindsey discovered was Matt was calling Realtors in Lorena, near Crossroads. Matt and Vanessa, it appeared, had been out shopping not just for an engagement ring but a house. Not long after, Linda heard from someone at church that her son-in-law was also looking at homes in Troy, near the Bulls’s home.

Meanwhile, in the moments stolen between teaching classes, Linda did more investigating on the Net, much of it about Unisom. What she found were cases of children who took three times more of the drug than prescribed and didn’t die. When someone did overdose, it appeared that the result was a slow death, which didn’t seem to fit Matt’s story. After all, he’d told Linda and Jim that Kari had been awake when he left and that he was only gone forty-five minutes. “That meant that she had to ingest the drugs and die all before he returned,” says Linda. “I’m not an expert, but that doesn’t make sense.”

At other times, instructions went out to Linda’s sisters, like the morning Linda e-mailed Nancy asking her to go to Hollywood Video to find out if Matt had done what he said he had the night of Kari’s death. The e-mail was signed, “Charlie.”

The next day, Nancy drove to the Hollywood Video on Hewitt Drive. Inside the store, she spoke with an assistant manager, a woman, explaining she was there to find out what time Matt was in the store and to get the surveillance tape from that night. Standing in the store with racks of DVDs fanning out around them, the manager said she couldn’t give Nancy the surveillance video from the store cameras. “If the police need them, they can come in and get them.”

“Okay,” Nancy said. “But can you pull them for that night and keep them safe, so that nothing happens to them?”

That the assistant manager agreed to, along with reviewing the records and giving Nancy the time Matt checked out the Meg Ryan movie
When a Man Loves a Woman
: 11:48
P.M
.

Then, as their efforts continued, there was another tragedy in Hewitt—one of Kay’s friends lost a son to suicide. When Kay heard that Billy Martin had ordered an autopsy for the boy, she called Martin. “I just want to understand why there was no autopsy in my niece’s death,” Kay said.

“My understanding was that there was a handwritten suicide note,” Martin responded.

“No, it was typed, and there was no signature,” Kay said. She then detailed what they’d uncovered so far, including Kari’s haunting words to Bristol. Stressing that they weren’t saying they had proof Matt had killed Kari, Kay said, “We want someone to look into this.”

“It definitely needs to be looked into,” Martin said. “I’ll call Hewitt PD today.”

After relaying the conversation to Linda and the others, it was agreed that they would wait one day, giving Martin time to follow through.

The next day, Kay called Sergeant Cooper. He wasn’t in and didn’t return her call. The following morning, after still not hearing from Cooper, Kay asked to speak to the sergeant’s boss, Captain Tuck Saunders. On the phone, she explained what had transpired with Martin. After listening, Saunders said Kari’s death was Cooper’s case and that the sergeant would call her back.

Meanwhile, that same afternoon, Lindsey and her sister, Ami, arrived at the house on Crested Butte. Lindsey had e-mailed voicing support, hoping Matt would talk to her. In one e-mail, he offered to let her look at what remained of Kari’s things, to find a remembrance. Yet when she tried to set a time, he didn’t respond. So Lindsey and Ami simply showed up.

At the house, all the drapes and blinds were down. Although it was bright sunshine outside, inside it was pitch-dark. Most of what Kari owned was gone, but Matt showed Lindsey a memory box he’d put together for the girls, including wedding photos and his wedding ring. Kari’s diamond engagement ring wasn’t there. Kensi and Grace were quiet that afternoon, as they had been often since their mother’s death. Like Jenny and Todd before her, Lindsey noticed that all the photos of Kari were gone and saw the one with the girls and Vanessa on the refrigerator.

“I’m just looking for something to remember Kari by,” Lindsey said, flipping through the box. “I still miss her so much. I want the memories of her to help me move on.”

“Well, some people aren’t able to move on, are they, Kensi?” Matt asked his oldest, who sat nearby. “Who isn’t able to move on in this family?”

At first, Kensi didn’t answer, but Matt asked again. The girls had always called their grandmother Grammy, but Kensi finally said, “Linda can’t move on.”

Hearing Kensi call her grandmother by her first name hit Lindsey hard. “It was just so strange,” she says. “That wasn’t Kensi.”

Nothing of Kari’s beyond the memory box remained in the house. In the garage, looking through a few things Matt stored there, Lindsey talked about a movie she wanted to see. Saying he’d wanted to see the movie as well, Matt categorized it as a date movie. Not wanting to interject what she knew about Vanessa Bulls, Lindsey said, “Well, maybe someday that will happen.”

“According to you know who, I already have a date, right Kensi?” Matt said. When Kensi didn’t answer, Matt said again, “Right Kensi? Grammy thinks I’ve been dating.”

T
he next day, May 18, Cooper finally called Kay. Grateful to have the sergeant’s ear, Kay filled him in on her conversation with Judge Martin and again stressed all that Kari had told Bristol. In response, Cooper asked for the therapist’s number. Kay gave it to him, but when Kay talked to Bristol the next day, Cooper hadn’t contacted her. With Sergeant Cooper continuing to act disinterested in the case, Linda talked the situation over with Jim, who decided it was time for a personal meeting with the sergeant.

The following morning was a Friday, and Kay and Jim walked together through the doors into the small entry of Hewitt PD’s modest offices. The receptionist notified Cooper, who escorted them to an office.

On the desk, Jim laid out paperwork he’d brought, including copies of the bills documenting that Matt was talking with Vanessa Bulls months before Kari’s death. Going through the records, Jim showed the sergeant that Matt had even called Vanessa the morning of Kari’s death and the evening after the funeral. “It appears this relationship has been going on for quite some time,” Jim said.

“Why wasn’t an autopsy done?” Kay asked yet again. “I’ve talked to people who know about these things, and they tell me it’s standard procedure in a suicide case where the victim is young and healthy and leaves a typed suicide note.”

“That was Judge Martin’s decision,” Cooper said, sounding defensive.

“How do we get the body exhumed then?” Kay demanded. “We need an autopsy!”

“You need to talk to the judge,” Cooper said. “I can’t issue that kind of an order.”

As they talked, Kay’s cell phone rang, and she walked from the room.

“Jo Ann Bristol’s testimony will be important in this case,” Cooper told Jim, while they were alone. “And we are going to need that autopsy.”

When Kay returned, she pressed Cooper again about the autopsy, wanting to know why one wasn’t ordered the night of Kari’s death. “I could tell he was getting irritated with me,” she’d say later. “He didn’t like that question.”

When Kay explained that Bristol was leaving in just days and would be out of the country for weeks, she suggested that the therapist come in that same afternoon to give a statement, but Cooper, to her dismay, said that wasn’t necessary. “I’ll tell her to come in today,” Kay said, leaving no room for argument.

Bristol arrived at Hewitt PD a few hours later, bringing with her seven pages of notes she’d made on Kari’s last session. After again recounting Kari’s concerns about Matt, Bristol told the sergeant to call if he needed more. Cooper never called.

That same day, Linda received an e-mail from Matt, one in which he told her that the girls wouldn’t be staying with them the coming Sunday afternoon, while he conducted chapel at WCY. A friend’s mother had offered to take them shopping.

Tension was building, and Linda e-mailed Matt, inquiring about the upcoming fourth-grade talent show, in which Kensi would be performing. Linda had asked repeatedly when it was without a response, and this time she wrote. “I will get the info . . . the choice is yours. You just need to be on notice that you will NOT keep Jim and me from our granddaughters. No matter how much you are trying to poison them against us.”

When he responded, Matt acted like the wronged party: “I am asking for the final time—STOP! Stop accusing me. Stop blaming me. Stop cursing my name. Stop trying to make it appear that I don’t care for my girls properly. Stop! Please stop before it causes a rift too deep . . . I have been praying for my family and you and Jim every day.”

“Enough of this—I will not be bullied by you,” Linda responded. “Do not threaten me in e-mails or anywhere else.”

Matt e-mailed again, this time telling Linda she wasn’t dealing “properly” with Kari’s death and saying that hurt the girls. “I can and will have to keep Kensi and Grace at a distance from you. Stop blaming me . . . Love, Kensi & Grace’s FATHER, Matt Baker.”

Through it all, Linda could feel her oldest granddaughter being pulled away. In some ways the area around Hewitt is a small town, and when Linda happened by chance upon Matt and the girls at Target, Grace ran to her, but Kensi hung back. “I love you!” Linda said, noticing that Kensi looked up warily at her father, who quickly shuffled the girls away.

It would turn out that Jim and Linda weren’t in the audience at Kensi’s talent show that month. Matt hadn’t notified them of the day. Later, Linda heard that Vanessa was there, however, holding her infant, Lilly. Many of the teachers noticed them, whispering afterward about how strange it was with Kari dead not even two months.

T
hree days after Jim and Kay met with Cooper, Linda composed a letter for Jim to take to Hewitt PD. She’d thought of some things she believed the sergeant would like to know. “I wanted to write down a couple of events that Matt Baker described to me regarding the death of my daughter, Kari Baker . . . I just want to be sure you have as much information as possible to help you with this case,” she said.

At that, she recounted the events as Matt had told them to her and Jim, everything from the trip to the video store to finding Kari. “I wanted you to have this information, so that you can use this time frame of events when you check the video rental time at Hollywood Video in Hewitt.” Not wanting to outright tell the sergeant what to do, she then suggested he could inquire at the video store about the possibility of a surveillance video from the night of Kari’s death.

Whether or not Cooper was interested in investigating, Linda was intent on making sure that he understood there were ways he could look into Matt’s account of that night, including checking bank records. “Matt and Kari always used a debit card for fuel; you could get information regarding the fuel from the debit card. A toxicology report and autopsy will answer other questions about what she ingested,” she pointed out.

The second area Linda wanted to clarify involved Bristol and the pills in Matt’s suitcase. She recounted for Cooper how she approached Matt, asking him to “help me understand” where the pills had come from. He’d specifically said that he later reported the breach of security, the pills in his briefcase, to WCY security.