12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 (39 page)

There were solid arguments for leaving the girls where they were, King argued. Kensi and Grace were thriving, getting good grades, and playing sports. They had friends, the kind of relationships they could count on. His parents, Matt said, were exceptional people, full of love and acceptance. Their reputation in their community was “very respected.”

When it came to the allegations that they all knew lay ahead, Matt insisted that his parents had never abused him and that he’d never seen anything inappropriate with any of the foster children.

“You don’t take responsibility for the death of your wife, do you?” Maguire asked on redirect. Again, Matt took the Fifth Amendment.

“We’ll take that as a no,” Maguire said.

L
ike her son, Barbara Baker insisted that she wasn’t trying to keep the girls from their other grandparents, but like her son’s, her own words came back to haunt her. E-mails she’d sent to Matt at the prison included indications of what was going on inside the house, suggesting that Kensi and Grace were being told about the battle first between the Dulins and Matt, then with the Bakers.

“Has Kensi ever told you that she hates the Dulins?” Obenoskey asked.

At first, Barbara appeared uneasy about answering, but then said, “Yes . . . she said she didn’t like the way Grammy does a lot of things like Mommy.”

“Do you blame the Dulins for your son’s incarceration?”

“Partially, yes,” Barbara admitted. She went on to contend that the Dulins had influenced the justice system, insinuating they set Matt up. But when Obenoskey asked what she meant, Barbara couldn’t give an example of any influence they’d exerted.

“You had no basis for saying that, did you?” Obenoskey said.

“Correct,” Barbara admitted.

In her e-mails to her son in prison, Barbara boasted of refusing to communicate with the Dulins when they wanted to find a compromise and avoid a custody battle. Her influence on Kensi seemed apparent when she divulged a plan the teenager had to sway the impressions of the social worker. When with the Bakers, Kensi would sit close, but with the Dulins, both girls would sit on the opposite side of the table. And although Barbara said she wasn’t trying to keep the girls from the Dulins, in an e-mail she admitted that she wanted the girls’ time with Linda and Jim reduced.

When Obenoskey asked Barbara why she didn’t at least attempt to work out their differences by talking to Linda and Jim, Barbara claimed it was “like trading with the devil . . . You end up giving her five for one.”

Yet when he challenged that characterization, Barbara shrugged and admitted that, too, wasn’t true. “So you just made it up?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. Moments later, Barbara Baker read out loud a passage out of an e-mail where she listed all of those she wanted to “take a fall,” from the attorneys in the murder trial through the Dulins to Obenoskey and Maguire. The woman on the witness stand appeared angry and vindictive, not loving and accepting as Matt described her.

When Fred Henneke, her own attorney, took over, he attempted to rehabilitate Barbara’s image in front of the jury, pointing out that the e-mails were written late at night. “Were you tired?” he asked.

“Yes,” Barbara answered, saying that the only one she thought would ever be reading the e-mails was her son. The letters were a lifeline, she said, one that kept him feeling as if he were tied to his children.

“Is it important that you keep Matt updated on the attacks on the Dulins . . . ? You are carrying on his vendetta,” Obenoskey said on redirect.

“I don’t feel I have a vendetta,” objected Barbara, who’d written in one of her e-mails to her son: “I don’t know if anyone knows how much you’re a soul mate of mine.”

The following morning, the mystery man in the case, Oscar Baker, was seated at the small witness table. In his eighties, Matt’s father was balding, with a thin white comb-over, his face well lined behind wire-rimmed glasses, and his voice hoarse, as his bulky body slumped in the chair.

Beginning questioning, Pat Maguire went directly to the heart of the matter, asking about the seven years, from 1974 through 1981, when Oscar and Barbara were houseparents at the Buckner Baptist home. In response to questions, the retired farm worker and handyman estimated that they’d cared for approximately forty-nine foster kids, from elementary-school age through teenagers. Then Maguire asked about specific foster children, those he planned to call to the stand. One was a mentally challenged girl named Sherry Perkins. “Would you consider her to be a vulnerable girl?” Maguire asked.

“Very,” Oscar agreed.

“Would you agree with me that someone who is a sexual predator has no business raising children?”

“I agree,” the old man said.

“The girls have been told that their mother committed suicide . . . And they still hold that belief?”

“Strongly,” he growled.

Much of what Oscar said that day would echo what had come through loud and clear in the e-mails his wife had written to their son in prison. Yes, they believed their son was innocent, and they reinforced that with their granddaughters. There was so much animosity between the Bakers and the Dulins that Oscar said unequivocally that he and Barbara could never coparent with them. “There’s too much difference in where we’re at,” he said. “They have their way of parenting, and we have our way.”

On cross-examination, Henneke pointed out that Kari’s death had originally been ruled a suicide, and that there was a reason for Oscar and Barbara to have told the girls that. Yet on redirect, Maguire pointed out that suicide was no longer the finding and that their son was convicted of his wife’s murder. “Do you and your wife still reinforce [the suicide theory] with the girls?”

“Yes, sir!” Oscar answered.

The afternoon wore on, and other witnesses took the stand, two of them Terri Corbin and Jill Hotz. They described how Matt had disparaged his parents, saying he rarely saw them and thought ill of growing up as their son. Afterward, a good friend of Linda Dulin’s talked of what she’d seen with the girls since they’d been living in the Baker house, including the way Kensi picked at her skin, causing sores, often a sign of stress. When it was her turn, Kari’s cousin Lindsey described hearing Matt disparage the Dulins in front of the girls.

In response, the opposing attorneys pointed out that the Dulins’ witnesses knew little or nothing of the girls’ lives in Kerrville. Crowden asked about the Justice for Kari bumper stickers, wondering if it hadn’t been a mistake to have them on their cars, saying the girls saw the slogan as “injustice for Matt.”

“The mistake is their father,” Lindsey snapped back.

Emotions ran high, and at times it was easy to see that many had an undercurrent of anger close to the surface. Kensi had apparently made claims against her aunt Nancy, saying she’d once grabbed her breasts. On the stand, Nancy denied that it had ever happened, and when Crowden asked why Nancy said the girls were being taught to lie, Kari’s aunt responded, “Look at what Kensi is saying about me!”

Finally, at 2:20 on the second afternoon of the trial, Linda Dulin took the stand. At times she teared up, as when describing how Matt had told her that she and Jim wouldn’t be allowed to see the girls. Crowden had queried the other witnesses on why they hadn’t driven to Kerrville to go to the girls’ games and events. “We would never put them through that stress,” Linda said. “We wouldn’t want to have them pulled between their allegiance to either set of grandparents.”

On their visits, Linda described the girls as guarded when they picked them up in Kerrville. “They wouldn’t talk to us until we drove several miles outside Kerrville, then that would change . . . Since Kari’s death, there’s been a targeted campaign to erase Kari and alienate the maternal family. You don’t do that. You don’t take away their family.”

Their plans, if the jury decided in their favor, Linda said, was to find a parental alienation program for the girls, one that would teach them that it was “safe to love their mother again, and that it was also good to love their father.” If they came to live with the Dulins, Linda said the girls would be loved and nurtured. And when it came to their belief in their father, they’d be allowed, when they were ready, to do their own investigation, review what was available, and come to their own decisions.

“The girls want to stay in Kerrville. Why do you persist?” Obenoskey asked his client.

“Because we love them with everything we are, and we want them to grow into whole, healthy women,” she said. “They can’t do that if they are alienated from half their family and are living this lie. It’s a lie that their mother took her life and she didn’t love them.”

Some in the courtroom were surprised when the opposing attorneys opted to postpone their cross-examination of Linda Dulin. She’d been articulate on the stand, and it seemed logical that they’d want to bury her testimony early in the trial rather than have her address the jury later. But that was the decision, and Jim followed his wife to the stand. He appeared nervous and uncomfortable, but determined. “Nothing has changed as far as our love for Kensi and Grace,” he said. “ . . . I don’t want to have to pull them out of here, but it has to be done.”

Matt’s lawyer, King, began Jim’s cross-examination, asking if the differences in belief between the Dulins and their granddaughters wasn’t too wide to cross. In response, Jim talked of his faith in God and how he believed that the people they needed to help them through the transition would come through for them. Yet he admitted that it wouldn’t be easy: “I can’t hand them a lollipop when they need turnip greens.”

“You’ve said the girls need to be extracted from Kerrville,” Crowden charged, asking if he and Linda couldn’t respect the girls’ decision, leaving them with their paternal grandparents, where they said they wanted to be.

“If they stay here, their goose is cooked,” Jim maintained, sounding like the military man he was. “We have to fight to get them out of here. Failure is not an option.” When it came to why his granddaughters wanted to stay in Kerrville, Jim said, “I believe it is the result of brainwashing, day in and day out.”

At the day’s end, word spread through the courtroom that the following day’s witnesses would be the Bakers’ former foster children, and that what they would say would cast shadows on both the Bakers’ reputations.

Chapter 55

T
he woman on the stand just after nine the following morning, the third day of the custody trial, was slender, with layered dark hair. When she’d walked in, she glanced at Barbara and Oscar, who looked dour in their seats behind Matt and their attorneys. After she was sworn in, she talked of her time living with the Bakers, from 1974 through 1976, when she was a troubled teen. “Mr. Baker was mostly in the background,” Lori Hardin said. “Mrs. Baker was very aggressive. She ran a tight ship. She was the type of person who always had to have the last word. She always had to be right.”

Hardin had lived at the home when Matt was very young, and she had little to say about him, but she remembered Barbara as being “very harsh with her words. Very degrading. She used to belittle people to make them feel inadequate and wrong.” Among Barbara’s favorite victims, Lori described two foster children who were mentally challenged, a boy with cerebral palsy named Jamey and a mentally handicapped girl named Sherry.

“Do you remember Mr. Baker doing anything inappropriate?” Obenoskey asked.

Hardin said she did. The first time was when Oscar initiated a conversation about sex with her, advising her that sex could be “a beautiful thing when it is shared with someone you love.” That seemed a rather innocuous comment made to a sixteen-year-old, perhaps even fatherly advice. But then there’d been the day at the lake, when the houseful of kids had gone swimming. Sitting beside her while she lay on her blanket in her swimsuit, Oscar was talking, when Hardin said he reached over and ran his fingers up her legs and across the lower part of her buttocks. “I didn’t react,” she said. After saying that the young residents believed the Bakers listened in on their meetings with the caseworker, she said, “I didn’t tell anyone.”

“If you were the mother of a child and someone did that, what would you do?” Obenoskey asked.

“I’d call the police.”

The Bakers’ attorney, Henneke, asked if good things hadn’t come from her years living with his clients. Hardin said she had turned herself around, but she also said that she credited not the former houseparents, but a sponsoring family who’d taken an interest in her.

“Maybe your memory isn’t clear, you were drinking,” Crowden asked, after Hardin said that at the time she’d had a problem with alcohol.

“My memory is very clear,” the former foster child replied.

It was in the girls’ bedroom, adjacent to and sharing a bathroom with the master bedroom, that Connie Mirfakhraie said Oscar kissed her, putting his tongue in her mouth. She was twelve at the time, and through the decades, she’d never forgotten how he tasted and smelled. “I’d never been French-kissed before,” she said. “I was very scared. It was very alien and disgusting.”

Why hadn’t she told anyone? “I was a twelve-year-old foster kid, and you don’t have the same rights as other people have.”

Under cross-examination, Mirfakhraie said that while it never happened again, she had a hazy memory of Baker kissing one of the other girls, the mentally handicapped girl Hardin had referred to, Sherry.

At first, when Frenzel, the private investigator, contacted her, Mirfakhraie, a Florida businesswoman, said she’d denied anything untoward had happened in the Bakers’ care. “Then I talked to my husband about it,” she said. “And I realized how inappropriate it would be if my husband French-kissed one of my daughters’ young girlfriends. So I called Gina back.”

“When you knew there were young girls living with the Bakers, did you report this to anyone?” Crowden asked, pointedly.

“Why would I? There was already a trial scheduled.”

“How long did it take for Mr. Baker to kiss you and stick his tongue into your mouth,” Obenoskey asked. For those who’d been at the murder trial, it brought to mind Matt’s sordid history with women, the times he’d cornered them, lunging out, and kissing them, fondling them, or awkwardly attempting to initiate sex.

“It was very quick,” Mirfakhraie said.

H
er long, graying hair in a ponytail and wearing thick glasses, Sherry Perkins rocked anxiously in the witness chair. Diagnosed with the mental capabilities of a seven-year-old, she appeared terrified. Raised in foster care from infancy to the age of eighteen, she’d lived with the Bakers from fifth grade on, and for many years she’d called the Bakers Mom and Dad. “Did anything inappropriate happen?” Maguire asked.

“He touched me in the wrong places,” she said, referring to Oscar Baker.

“Did he insert his fingers into your vagina?”

“Yes,” she said. “When I was vacuuming the living room.”

After Perkins said that this happened often during the years she’d lived with the Bakers, Maguire asked how the alleged assaults made her feel.

“Scared,” she said.

“What about Barbara Baker?”

“She used to laugh at me. She called me Porky Pig, fatso, stupid, and retarded.”

“Did that make you cry?”

“Yes,” the woman said, rocking ever harder.

Unlike the first two former foster children who’d testified, Sherry had told her caseworker. In response, Sherry said she was placed for a week in a San Antonio psychiatric hospital. “What happened when you were released?” Maguire asked.

“I was sent back to the foster home with the Bakers,” she answered. “I was glad to go home.” From that point on, afraid of returning to what she described as the “crazy hospital,” she never complained to her caseworker again.

“Did anyone ever take you to a doctor for an examination,” Crowden asked.

“No,” Perkins answered.

Perhaps one of the saddest moments was when Crowden asked Perkins why she’d later visited the Bakers, after she’d moved out of the home and had her own apartment. “Because I thought of them as my parents,” she said.

“Are you sure that your memories of what happened are real?” Crowden asked.

“Yes,” Perkins said.

T
he charges against Oscar Baker built as the day wore on. After Sherry left the stand, a middle-aged woman named Tracy Owens replaced her. Thin, with long dark hair, Owens lived outside San Antonio. Unlike the other former foster children, her gaze never strayed from the jurors to look at the attorneys asking questions. Instead, she stared straight ahead, her voice hushed in the horrified courtroom, as she described being in foster care for two years, from the age of seven, while her mother was hospitalized. Oscar, she said, began by touching her while bathing her, then progressed to touching her in bed, through sheets and pajamas. Before long, the woman charged that the petting had progressed to Oscar instructing her to perform oral sex on him, then full sexual intercourse.

Beginning when she was just eight, Owens testified that it occurred often during the two years she lived with the Bakers, and even that he passed her around to other men within the community who’d also sexually abused her, including a popular Kerrville Baptist minister. When asked why she didn’t report it, she responded that the Bakers threatened her. “I was told God was watching me. I was told not to tell anyone. I was told that if I did, I wouldn’t get to go home to my mom. She wouldn’t want me and my brother.”

Tracy, too, described Barbara as emotionally abusive, saying she was controlling and demeaning with the foster children. “I got very few things from my mom while I was there. Barbara took them away . . . I remember being teased by her.”

When asked if the Bakers should be allowed to parent any children, the woman uttered: “No, sir.”

Minutes later, the court took the daily lunch break, and Owens left the courtroom. In the hallway, she saw the earlier witnesses, the other former foster children who were now middle-aged wives and mothers, Perkins, Hardin, and Mirfakhraie. As soon as their eyes met, they all began to cry.

That afternoon, the opposing attorneys came at Owens hard, asking pointed questions about her past. They had listened to her recorded interview with Frenzel, and there were other allegations on the tape, including that during her years in foster care, Tracy had been abused by a relative, a boy a few years older than she was. Beverly Crowden asked if doctors had once suspected Owens had Munchausen syndrome, a psychiatric condition wherein parents hurt their children to get attention. In response, Owens described the event as a misunderstanding cleared up after the doctors secured the children’s medical records.

Over and over again, the attorneys challenged Tracy’s testimony, asking why she hadn’t told anyone during her years at the foster home about the abuse. “I had opportunities,” she said. “I was just scared.”

There was the overdose attempt at suicide when Owens was thirteen that took her to a San Antonio psychiatric hospital for months. “Did you tell the psychiatrist there . . . Did he make a formal report?” Crowden asked.

“Yes,” she said, she had told the physician, then added, “He said he wasn’t sure I was telling the truth.”

“The allegations were not widely accepted?” Henneke queried.

“My mom accepted it, she just didn’t know what to do,” Tracy replied.

“Why didn’t you report it to the caseworker,” the Bakers’ attorney asked.

“I was scared to.”

“Scared of what?”

“The Bakers . . . I was terrified.”

When asked if she had any proof, Tracy said she remembered one thing about Oscar Baker: “He wasn’t circumcised.”

When Crowden asked why Owens didn’t remember having to be taken to hospitals for infections from all the sexual abuse she claimed, she said she didn’t remember needing treatment, “but I remember that it hurt.”

If Oscar Baker was circumcised, the opposing attorneys never put on anyone to testify to that to dispute Tracy Owens’s account. And later, with another witness, Obenoskey brought in information that appeared to corroborate at least part of the former foster child’s account, that the minister in question, the friend of the Bakers who Owens named as one of her abusers, was questioned in the midseventies regarding an attempt to lure a small child into a car by promising candy. The information had come from the former Kerrville detective who’d investigated the case, Pat Wertheim. Within a week after the minister was questioned, he’d packed up and moved out of Kerrville. “The minister had a big youth outreach program in Kerrville, and if it was true, I never believed that child was the only one,” says Wertheim.

On redirect, Maguire put into evidence a medical record from his witness’s 2004 hospitalization. Owens’s physician noted on her chart: “Patient admits she has gone through sexual abuse from her foster father.”

T
he following Monday proved a long, complicated day in the courtroom. The first witness Obenoskey called was the court-appointed social worker, who had prepared a report recommending that sole custody be given to the Dulins. There was a glitch, however, as Crowden and Henneke objected, charging that the woman hadn’t followed procedures by not notifying all the attorneys of communications and evidence she’d had on the case. There was a lot at stake, and the arguments went on for more than an hour before Judge Barton ruled that the woman would not be allowed to testify before the jury.

Instead, the expert in the witness chair that morning was Joann Murphey, an attractive, middle-aged redhead, stylishly dressed in a crisp white summer skirt and a blue, green, and white sweater set. A psychologist, Murphey had been appointed by the court to interview all those involved: Jim, Linda, Barbara, Oscar, and Kensi and Grace. Once done, she’d supplied all of the attorneys with a 116-page written report. Her recommendation: “That Jim and Linda Dulin be given sole managing conservatorship of Kensi and Grace Baker.”

“Did you find that the current environment they’re in is unhealthy?” Maguire queried.

“Yes, I did,” Murphey said. “Every child needs a peaceful and loving family . . . I felt that Jim and Linda Dulin were the people best suited to do that.”

Pulling together her decision, Murphey said she hadn’t spent a lot of time considering either the sex-abuse charges leveled against Oscar or the murder. While she’d interviewed the others, she hadn’t talked with Matt, saying it wasn’t necessary since he wasn’t one of those being considered as the girls’ custodian. On some matters, she found the Bakers and Dulins both able to handle the responsibility, including stability and being able to provide a home and support.

What differed, Murphey said, was the emotional health of the two households. After interviewing both sets of grandparents, the psychologist had come to the conclusion that the Bakers were, as the Dulins charged, disparaging Kari’s memory and waging a campaign to drive a wedge between Kensi and Grace and their dead mother’s family. “The girls hold their maternal grandparents solely responsible for their father’s situation,” Murphey testified. “They have unrealistic views of the court system and the power of their grandparents.”

The Bakers, including Matt, Murphey said, fostered that opinion by maintaining that the Dulins had forced the murder case through to conviction. “Rather than that a jury of their father’s peers made a decision.” That, the psychologist testified, forced the girls to live in an unrealistic world, one in which a successful appeal would quickly bring their father home.

“You heard the girls’ desire, that they want to stay with the Bakers?” Maguire asked.

“I heard that,” Murphey said. “And I felt empathy for the girls. Who would wish this on anyone? It is horrific . . . I do hear their voices.”

“Should that be the determining factor?” he asked.

“No,” she replied. “I don’t know any adolescents who know what’s best for them.”

Maguire then asked about the girls’ school, their friends and church. They appeared to be doing well in Kerrville. Shouldn’t that be a factor? Murphey said that with professional help, the girls would adjust to living with the Dulins and that it was their best opportunity to live happy lives. Although it appeared the girls were doing well on the surface, the therapist said that didn’t always reveal what was truly going on.

“Did you have concerns that the girls are being manipulated?” Maguire asked.

“Yes,” Murphey said. “By their paternal grandparents.” There were also indications that the girls were being talked to about the case as if they were adults, given information they didn’t need that increased their stress and made them feel more torn. “The most disastrous and horrific effects from high conflict are where children become pawns . . . asked to take a side.”