12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 (37 page)

Chapter 52

W
alking into the courtroom, Vanessa Bulls appeared almost luminescent, a small smile on her lips, her blond hair falling about the shoulders of her prim gray shirt. On day four of the trial, the testimony of the music minister’s daughter would be chilling.

As Susan Shafer asked questions, Bulls, by then a twenty-seven-year-old middle-school teacher, recounted in shocking detail her version of the events that led up to Kari Baker’s death. Her affair with Matt, Bulls said, started slowly, with Matt approaching her at church, making comments that included, “Whoever finds you is going to be a lucky man.”

Consistently in the accounts of the young women who’d complained about Baker, the descriptions had been similar, that of a man stuck in adolescence, unable to talk to a woman as an adult. With Bulls, too, Baker’s immaturity was evident, as he bantered with the young blonde, telling her not to date others, “just your pastor,” then bragging that he’d had a vasectomy and didn’t “have any sexually transmitted diseases.”

As they talked more, Vanessa said Matt criticized Kari as a wife and mother. In church, Bulls had noticed Kari’s attention to the girls. Yet Matt described himself as the main caretaker and called Kari “a fat bitch.” By February, Bulls had agreed to counseling at the Baker house, and by early March the relationship had turned sexual: “He asked if he could hold my hands to pray, and after that he kissed me.” Then, she said, he took her by the hand and led her into the bedroom.

Afterward, she felt remorse, but she said Pastor Matt Baker told her: “Oh, you don’t need to feel bad. God is such a forgiving God, it doesn’t matter what anyone does. Just ask God to forgive you. It’s okay. In reality, I don’t think God believes that anyone can just be with one person the rest of their lives.” And he said something else, that if they fell in love, he’d find a way to dispose of Kari.

Apparently Baker decided quickly that what he felt for Bulls was love, for within weeks of bedding her, Bulls said he began talking of killing his wife. For justification, he argued that Kari was already supposed to be dead. Once, years earlier, after Kassidy died, Matt claimed that Kari had threatened suicide and that he’d taken pills from her hand. Now that he wanted his wife out of his life, he described his action as “cheating death.” Rather than murder, he said killing Kari would put things right by finishing what she’d started.

From that point on, there were breathless discussions of murder. One day Matt talked of killing Kari by putting drugs in a milk shake, saying he’d tried it, but the milk shake tasted like lead, and Kari refused to drink it. It was all so heartless: a husband talking of staging a hanging or a drive-by shooting, coolly plotting his wife’s murder, while his mistress listened and took no action to stop him. In the courtroom, Jim and Linda Dulin softly cried.

On the stand, Bulls’s manner alternated between angry and defiant. As time passed, it appeared that Matt grew more desperate to erase Kari from his life, telling Vanessa he attempted to buy roofies, the date rape drug, to render her helpless. That final week, Matt bragged that he was doing the “husbandly duty,” having sex with Kari to make it appear he was attempting to work on the marriage. When Vanessa asked if anyone would question the faked suicide plan Matt had concocted, he said no: “Everyone knows how depressed she is.”

That Saturday morning, even though Matt had told Vanessa that he planned to kill Kari the previous night, Vanessa said she was stunned when the phone rang and her mother told her that Kari was dead.

Two days later, Matt first said, “You know you’re stuck with me now, right?” Then, she said, he told her about the murder, but he began by cautioning that if she told anyone, it would be to no avail “because he was a preacher.”

“I’ll tell you this once, but never again,” he said. In the audience, Linda and Jim held each other, as Vanessa told a horrifying story, one in which Matt poured Ambien into the shells from sex-stimulant capsules and fed them to Kari with the wine coolers, then handcuffed her to the bed. When she passed out, he kissed her on the forehead, and said “either hug or kiss Kassidy for me.”

Then Matt Baker put a pillow over his wife’s face, to smother her. Yet Kari didn’t die. Instead, after he removed the pillow, she gasped. Matt told Bulls he said, “Oh, shit,” then climbed on top of Kari, this time cupping his hand over her mouth and nose, squeezing them shut. Afterward, he typed the suicide note on the home computer and printed it out on the printer, then ran the palm of Kari’s hand over it. The scene was set with the pills and the empty wine-cooler bottles on the nightstand, and he locked the door and left. He’d chosen
When a Man Loves a Woman
because it was about a mother who treated her children badly. “He said it reminded him of Kari.”

Had Kari looked up at him? Did she see her husband on top of her as she died? Did she look into his eyes, perhaps the way Kassidy might once have done?

From that moment on, Matt expunged his dead wife’s possessions from the house and attempted to do the same to her memory. Only Kari’s family, Linda and the angels, had kept that from happening.

How could Vanessa Bulls have ever trusted Matt Baker? Many in the courtroom stared in disbelief when the pretty blonde said that she’d never loved Matt but initially felt safe with him “because he was a preacher.” Felt safe with a man she knew had murdered his wife?

“I know that sounds ironic,” she said, “But I was like, as long as someone’s good to me, I don’t, I don’t care about being in love. I don’t care about being attracted to someone.” At the jewelry store, he’d inquired about trading in Kari’s rings to buy new ones for Vanessa.

Shafer asked if Vanessa entertained the possibility that since Matt had killed one wife, he could kill another. “He promised me that he would be so happy, he would never hurt me,” she said.

Over the summer, Bulls first grew ashamed and worried about knowing so much, then she grew to fear him. “Who would have believed me?” she asked, ignoring the police and all those who’d asked for her help over the three years of the investigation.

By July, Vanessa testified that she feared that the police would come after her. On the day Kari’s body was exhumed, she called Matt from a Starbucks and told him it was over. “He couldn’t do anything to me because he could never admit guilt,” she said. On that day, she told him that they “didn’t worship the same God.”

“I killed my wife for you, and now you’re leaving me?” he responded. When he asked if he could see her one last time, she simply hung up the phone. Days later, he called again, and she said she urged him to confess to the police. “God has forgiven me,” he responded. When she threatened to turn him in, he replied, “You’d better not do that.”

During the first break in the trial, at 10:24 that morning, while Gray looked over Vanessa’s grand jury testimony, Bill Johnston was in the courthouse and heard what Vanessa had said on the stand. In the hallway, he looked for Linda and found her, hugging her. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

“I know,” she said, tears running down her cheeks. “I know.”

When court began again, Vanessa was still on the stand, and this time Gray asked the questions. One after another he brought up the prior, inconsistent statements she’d given, those in which she denied everything she’d just testified to. She bristled, saying that whatever she said at the time was right, if perhaps she hadn’t said everything. Gray continued to pick away at Bulls, and she contradicted herself time and again, confused, it would seem, by her own long trail of lies. Unable to keep straight what she’d said to which investigator when, she became flustered and angry.

“I was worried that he would come after me,” she said. “Put a bullet in my head, to be blunt . . . I know he’s killed one person. I think he’s killed two people.” What Bulls was referring to were her suspicions that Matt might have also murdered Kassidy, based on what he’d told her about the trach not being in that night and his panic when he thought that the child’s body had been exhumed along with his wife’s. “What’s another notch?” Bulls asked. “I was afraid for my life and for my child’s life.”

On the stand, Bulls claimed that the entire time Matt was free after his first arrest, she slept with a nail file next to her bed. Since the murder, she’d had nightmares, including one just three nights before testifying, in which he hunted her down to kill her. Why would I lie? she asked. “This is making me look bad.”

“You voluntarily went to his bed?” Gray asked.

“I did,” she said. “ . . . He’s a master manipulator. I think you know that, too.”

But was Bulls really afraid? Gray listed all the places she’d gone with Matt, from a motel to shopping, without appearing frightened. She’d been in the limo the day of Kensi’s party and with him at the house. And then there was the immunity prosecutors had given her. Was Bulls lying to save herself? She testified that she’d been threatened if she didn’t tell what she knew. Yet she insisted that no one had asked her to lie. “Just tell the truth.”

“He used me,” she said, pointing at her former lover. “ . . . He wore the mask of God, like he’s doing now . . . He did it. The only thing I’m guilty of is not telling anyone sooner.”

Yet Bulls seemed disconnected from reality, in denial about her part in Kari Baker’s death. She’d bedded a married man, then listened as he planned his wife’s murder. When Gray asked if Vanessa worried that she could be charged with a crime, Bulls looked proud. Despite admitting she’d acted as Matt’s confidante as he planned a cold-blooded murder, to the astonishment of many in the courtroom, the pretty middle-school teacher said: “Absolutely not, because I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Again and again, Gray returned to Bulls’s prior statements, all the lies she’d told over the years. Even with what she had testified to on the stand, she’d made conflicting statements about when the events had occurred. Did Matt tell her how he murdered Kari two days after the killing as she said now? Gray asked. Or was it the way she’d told Rodriguez earlier, that Matt had told her over the phone weeks later. “I told bits and pieces,” she said. “I didn’t tell the whole truth.”

When Gray pushed harder, Bulls became incensed. “What do I have to gain from this right now? I could possibly lose my job as a teacher. Everyone is looking at me really bad right now. I’m setting things right. I made a mistake here because a manipulative liar wearing the mask of God came into my life.”

On redirect, Bulls talked of “not doing the right thing” and “a mother was lost.” But did she truly understand that she could have saved Kari Baker’s life?

There seemed little doubt that Bulls was an unsympathetic witness. Perhaps to rehabilitate her, Shafer asked about the song lyrics Matt had e-mailed her, the words to the All-American Rejects song “Dirty Little Secret.” Those lyrics became state’s exhibit number fifty-seven, and Shafer had Bulls read them into the record, including the chorus: “I’ll keep you my dirty little secret. Don’t tell anyone, or you’ll be just another regret.”

Adding more detail, Bulls said that Matt had told her that they shared a “dirty little secret,” and that what he was referring to wasn’t their sexual liaisons but her prior knowledge of “the murder plan.”

The last thing Vanessa Bulls testified to from the witness stand was Matt Baker’s attitude toward murder: “He said he felt like it was a mercy killing in a way because he felt like he had already cheated death once when he claimed that she had tried to overdose previously and he’d taken the pills from her hand. So, he said that he felt like it was just time now. No, not upsetting. No long face. He was happy afterward.”

The crowd gathered in the hallway watched Vanessa Bulls exit the courtroom. She looked almost regal, that same small smile she’d had when she’d walked in, her head high, her eyes glistening. She could have been walking up the aisle at her wedding or in front of a swarming crowd of paparazzi eager for news of her latest movie. The cameraman for the
Waco Tribune-Herald
caught her expression, and the headline that ran next to the photo the next morning told the story:
MISTRESS: HE KILLED HER
.

Chapter 53

A
fter Vanessa Bulls’s testimony, Susan Shafer put up only one more witness, the second medical examiner. On the stand, Dr. Natarajan described the abrasion on Kari’s nose, one that could have been made by a pillow.

Then the state rested.

The following morning, Matt Baker entered the courtroom in a sport coat as he had the other days, but there was something that made many recall Vanessa Bulls’s words from the day before, when she’d charged that the ex-pastor wore “the mask of God.” Carefully knotted around his neck was a tie, one that had words written across it. Most prominent, front and center:
FAITH
.

From the beginning, Guy James Gray had said that his client would testify, and the mood in the courtroom was expectant. Yet as the defense began, Gray called a forensic scientist, Brent Watson, to talk about DNA found on the suicide note and the bottle. Watson confirmed what the other experts had said, that Matt Baker’s DNA wasn’t found on either piece of evidence. The DNA on both was a mixture, and on the Unisom bottle there was a 1 in 1,029 chance that Vanessa had touched it. Yet that was so low, what could jurors take from that?

“All you can say is that some of these people might have touched the bottle. You can’t say they are a match?” asked Crawford Long.

“That’s right,” Watson answered.

At that, the defense rested after a single witness.

Why didn’t Matt testify? Later, he’d say he wanted to but that Gray told him not to. The reason had to do with a trap Shafer had set for Baker in the fourth-floor grand jury room, a mock-up of the bedroom on Crested Butte, with a 197-pound CPR dummy on the bed, near Kari’s weight on the day of her death. “If Matt had testified, we were going to make him show us with a cordless phone to his ear, how he dressed Kari and did all the things he claimed to have done in those brief minutes,” says Shafer. “We were going to make him do it in front of the jury.”

“I knew he couldn’t do it,” says Gray. “But it was a hard decision. Not putting Matt on the stand cost us dearly since he was going to be the one to talk about Kari’s depression. But he never would have been able to pull it off. Once I found out about the dummy and the bedroom, we had to advise him not to get on the stand. It would have been suicide.”

Testimony ended at 10
A.M
. on the fifth day, and the jurors were escorted to their room to wait, while the judge and attorneys wrote the charge. When the gallery filled and all those involved reclaimed their seats about 1:00
P.M
., Susan Shafer had a diagram scrawled on the courtroom’s whiteboard, a spiderweb labeled
MATT BAKER’S WEB OF LIES
.

Referring to it throughout her closing, Shafer had written details around the edges, everything from “It’s a staged scene,” to the condition of Kari’s body. “If she’d been flat on her back the way Baker had said, Kari wouldn’t have more lividity in her left arm,” Shafer said. “He can’t even remember if she was asleep or awake.”

Why did Shafer theorize that Matt committed the murder: “Kari was in the way of the life he envisioned for himself.”

With that, Shafer told the jurors that they didn’t have to like Vanessa Bulls. They didn’t have to agree with what she’d done. Yes, she’d lied in the past, Shafer said. But there was corroborating evidence that backed up the key parts of her testimony, including the e-mail that proved Matt had made Kari a milk shake. Throughout, Matt stared at his hands as Shafer detailed his attempts to buy Ambien on the Net and retraced his day at his work computer, where he fluctuated between looking up stories to illustrate sermons, e-mailing his wife and saying he loved her, and scouring online pharmacies to buy drugs to kill her.

“Kari left all the flags she could. She struggled for her life. She tried to get some air. And what she got for that was an abrasion on her nose. . . . The last face she saw was his,” Shafer said, pointing at Matt. “In spite of that, he told everyone, including their two daughters, that she committed suicide. Everything is about him.”

Then Shafer instructed the jurors: “Look at Matt Baker and tell him that you understand what he did, and you’re not going to let him get away with it. Look at him and tell him that you’re not going to let him carry on his dirty little lie. Convict him.”

“I
t’s your job to determine who you’re going to believe and what you’re going to believe.” Gray’s cocounsel, Harold Danford, told jurors. After recounting bits and pieces of the evidence, Danford attacked where the prosecutors knew the case was the most vulnerable, first at the medical examiners’ testimony. “If you look at that autopsy report, there are three other doctors who sign off on it,” Danford said. “Three of them sign it, and they can’t find a cause of death. The most important thing is that he didn’t say this was a homicide.”

Secondly, Danford, a large, bulkily built man, set his sights on the second weak link. “The whole thing comes down to Vanessa-full-of-Bulls.”

With that Gray took over and agreed, at times blustering, his emotions running high. “You are required to find proof that Kari was administered drugs and smothered by a pillow. In essence, this means you have to believe Vanessa Bulls,” he told the jurors. “In all of the extra work the prosecutors did, in hiring expert witnesses, it really comes down to, what is the scientific proof?”

As if confiding in the men and women in the jury box, Gray said he had doubts about the state’s case. First: They had no proof that Kari’s death was a homicide. Second, he referred to a palm print on the suicide note, one that hadn’t been traced back to any of the witnesses or Matt. Was it Kari’s? If so, wasn’t that evidence that she’d typed it. But was it? Vanessa had said Matt rubbed Kari’s hand over the note.

“I’m not particularly proud of Matt Baker. I told you in the beginning, he had an affair, and he lied about it. And he lied about it many times. That’s why he’s in this spot, because he kept lying. . . . But I think Vanessa Bulls is at least as bad,” Gray then said. “She may be pathological. . . . Lying and then coming along and saying ‘I’m gonna turn clean, but it’s gonna be in stages’ and then lying to the grand jury and then changing it again . . . and then coming into the courtroom and lying.”

For Danford and Gray both, the bottom line was: “The only way you can get to the facts is by believing Vanessa Bulls.” The question hung in the air: Was Bulls believable?

The last one up was Crawford Long who knew he had to rehabilitate Vanessa Bulls if the jurors were to accept her testimony. “First of all, I don’t think there’s any human being who has never told a lie. . . . Are all of us never to be believed . . . ? Of course not.” When it came to Vanessa, the lead prosecutor said, “The lies she told were because she was trying to totally distance herself from the death of Kari . . . Does anything she said make her look good? . . . Do you think she came in here to commit job suicide? Do you think she’ll get anything out of that? Everything she told you makes her look worse, and that’s how you know it’s true.” With a slight shrug, he then admitted: “Everyone is repulsed by what Vanessa Bulls told us.”

With that, Long focused on the man on trial, asking why Matt hadn’t given police the home computer he’d repeatedly promised? That computer could have cleared him if Kari had written the note while he was gone. Why hadn’t he produced it? Because Matt was the one who’d typed the suicide note, not Kari.

His emotion building, Long said: “You know, ladies and gentlemen, people kill their spouses. It’s hard for us to accept, but they do. This defendant has held himself out as a minister. This defendant perverted what’s good and holy.”

Turning to Kari’s Bible, Long then read her plea to God to protect her from harm. “She’s speaking to you from the grave,” he said, his voice softer. “She’s telling you what she knew, and was afraid of, what her husband was going to do to her. Folks, we can’t protect Kari Baker from harm. The only thing we can do now is give her justice.”

At that, Long turned and pointed at Matt Baker: “I ask you to convict this murdering minister and find him guilty for one reason only. Because he is guilty.”

At 2:20 that afternoon, the jurors left to begin deliberating. From that point on, the room slowly emptied, as many milled through the courthouse, talking, wondering what was going on behind the closed doors of the jury room. Barbara appeared calm sitting in the courtroom, and Matt looked as unflustered, saying hello to reporters and those gathered, as if he were greeting them as they entered one of his churches. To one he said, “I know I’m going home to my girls tonight.”

Meanwhile, Linda and her family congregated in the courthouse break room, away from prying eyes, praying for the justice Long had referred to. They’d had their days in court, the trial Linda, Jim, Lindsey, Nancy, and Kay, Bennett, McNamara, Cawthon, Rodriguez, and Johnston had worked so hard to ensure, but would the jurors believe Vanessa Bulls? Would they trust her enough to find Matt Baker guilty?

While so many waited, a rumor flitted through the courthouse, one that turned out to be true, that after her testimony, Vanessa Bulls had been put on administrative leave from her job as a teacher.

Four hours and twenty minutes after they began deliberating, the jurors sent out a note that asked whether they could exclude “suffocating her with a pillow” or if they had to find both that Baker drugged Kari and suffocated her. The judge’s response referred them to the jury charge, and deliberations continued, but Shafer and Long worried. “We were afraid they’d get hung up on it, and jurors wouldn’t be able to agree to both,” says Shafer.

At 9:11 that evening, the courtroom filled, but it would turn out that it wasn’t to hear the verdict. Instead, Gray presented a motion, one asking for a mistrial based on conflicts in Vanessa Bulls’s testimony. The jurors had asked for portions of it to be given them in writing. “Vanessa Bulls’s testimony is obviously giving the jurors problems,” he said. Judge Strothers denied the request.

Then twenty-eight minutes later, word was sent out that the jury had reached a verdict. Although it was late, the courtroom quickly filled. Matt stood with his attorneys at the defense table, and in the gallery, Jim again put his arm protectively around Linda.

“We find the defendant guilty.”

The room was somber. The judge had warned against any outbursts, and the jury was cleared. At the defense table, Matt didn’t cry, instead looking as if, despite his earlier bravado, he’d expected the outcome. He glanced at his mother, who wore that same taut smile, as if she’d expected it as well. Moments later, two guards walked Matt from the courtroom to be taken to jail, while in the audience, Linda and Jim Dulin and many in their family cried.

The punishment phase began early the next morning, with a range from probation to life. Death wasn’t an option since Texas law limits the ultimate penalty to cases involving either a second felony, like burglary, rape, or multiple murders, or a crime that includes special circumstances, such as the killing of an on-duty police officer or firefighter, or a child under the age of six.

Again, witnesses took the stand, at first those called by the prosecutors. Many of them were the women Matt Baker had made improper sexual advances to over the years, including Lindsey’s friend at the hospital, a young woman Matt accosted at the Y, and Dina Ahrens, Matt’s high-school girlfriend, who’d had to fight him off one evening.

Afterward, Noel Kersh again took the stand, this time to detail Matt’s Web history on both his church and work computer linked to pornographic and dating Web sites like bustydustystash.com, collegewildparties.com, www.americansingles.com, sexlist.com, and iwantanewgirlfriend.com.

To counter the testimony, the defense put up Sharon Rollins, a licensed counselor who’d grown up with Matt. With an air of certainty, Rollins dismissed the idea that Matt Baker could have done what he was convicted of and referred to him as “a fine pastor . . . A man of God.” On the stand, Dr. Theron Hawkins, who knew the Bakers from Trinity Baptist, said Matt came from an “outstanding family that makes service to others their main mission.”

“Let me ask you, does a good father kill their children’s mother?” Crawford Long asked Kerri Spartman, who’d known Matt growing up. She’d called him “one of the good guys” and described Matt’s relationship with Kensi and Grace in glowing terms. “I think it’s possible,” Spartman answered. “I think you could do that. I think you can be a good father and do other things, too.”

The defense rested, and the prosecutors introduced a final witness, Lora Wilson Mueller. A meteorologist with the National Weather Service, she’d flown in from New York to finally accuse Matt Baker from the witness stand, to hold him accountable for his actions nineteen years earlier in Baylor’s football stadium. Describing that harrowing day, Wilson cried softly at times. “I came here to face him, and do right by Kari,” she said. When asked if the attack had affected her life, she said, “Absolutely.”

The testimony completed, the attorneys again argued before the jurors. Crawford Long called for them to put Baker behind bars. “Women aren’t really worth much to him. This is a person who thought about killing his wife . . . He robbed her of her life when she was a young woman. Why did he do it? . . . Ministers don’t get divorced. I think the word for it is a religious word. Out of his religion. It’s
evil.
” Long again pointed at Matt Baker, this time saying directly to him: “I can look you in the eye and say, because of your heartless, soulless conduct, you deserve the maximum sentence.”

Guy James Gray didn’t take the floor. Instead, Harold Danford did, talking about “the good Matt Baker,” the one who did community service and helped others, from a good Baptist family. The state searched high and low to bring you all the bad stuff they could about Mr. Baker’s life. . . . He did some things he’s not proud of,” Danford acknowledged.

Bringing the arguments to an end, Susan Shafer took the floor for the last time. She labeled Baker a narcissist and a sociopath, one who’d victimized women, one who plotted and carried out the murder of a wife who loved him. “We want to send a message to any men out there who are like Matt—and I don’t think there are many. You can’t just erase a life and be out with a slap on the wrist.”