12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 (41 page)

Yet there was no mistake about what the teenager said she wanted. Not only did she want to remain in Kerrville with her sister and paternal grandparents, but Kensi wanted even less time with the Dulins than the one weekend a month. Moving to Waco? “It would be terrifying.”

Darren Obenoskey’s voice was soft, not confrontational, when he took over questioning the teenager on the witness stand. Kensi said she did remember a happier time, before her mother died, when the Dulins were a big part of her life. As evidence, the attorney gave her a note to read, one she’d written the year before her mother died, in which Kensi referred to the Dulins’ home as her favorite place. Then he asked her to read the note found just months later: “I hate Linda and Jim.”

“What happened?” Obenoskey asked?

“They took my dad away from me.”

“Who did?” When she answered Jim and Linda, the attorney said, “Why do you believe that?”

“They didn’t have to take it to court,” she said.

Obenoskey pointed out that the state of Texas prosecuted the case, but Kensi had seen Internet news articles, including the ones that said Linda had testified against Matt at his trial. “I don’t feel they love me anymore. They don’t show it like they used to,” she said.

That day, so much of what the psychologist had testified to was evident in Kensi’s testimony. She talked of having gotten over her mother’s death quickly and putting the grieving behind her, so much so that she saw little reason to talk about Kari, who’d been such a big part of her life. And her certainty that her maternal grandparents were to be blamed for her father’s conviction didn’t waver. “I don’t love them . . . they’ve caused me so much pain. I don’t want to be around them,” she said.

“Did they kill your mother?” he asked.

“No,” and she conceded that they hadn’t convicted their father. Yet she insisted that the Dulins had gone after Matt without evidence. “Because he didn’t do it.”

“If something happened to Grace, wouldn’t you want to know what happened to her?” Obenoskey asked.

“Yes,” Kensi said.

“Do you blame a parent for wanting to get to the truth about what happened to their child?”

“No, sir,” Kensi said, tears spilling from her eyes.

There would be more testimony with Linda and Barbara, but in truth the trial felt over as Kensi walked from the stand sobbing. The following day, a Thursday, the attorneys made their closing arguments, reiterating all they’d said throughout the nearly two weeks of the custody trial. They each pointed at exhibits and testimony to back their arguments. After a one-day deliberation, the jurors entered the courtroom one last time.

In the audience, Kensi sat with her friends in the gallery, while Grace waited between Barbara and Oscar. Both began crying when they heard the jury’s decision: As the psychologist recommended, both girls would be moving to Waco and living with the Dulins.

In their seats, the Dulins cried, too, but softly, tears of relief and sadness at all they and the girls had been through. There were tears for their daughter, who’d been stolen from them, for the girls, who’d lost their mother, then their father. Linda and Jim Dulin had won, but had they really? There would be a long road ahead, a painful journey, one they hoped would finally take them to a peaceful and brighter future.

Author’s Note

I
t was earlier, before that final chapter unfolded at the custody trial, when I went to the Dulins’ house outside Waco. Seated in the kitchen, I interviewed Jim, Linda, and the angels, Lindsey, Nancy, and Kay. It was a spirited conversation, one in which they talked of the dark suspicions that had led them to take the actions that eventually brought Matt Baker to justice. But more than that, they wanted to talk about Kari. “Kari was an extraordinary woman and mother, and we loved her. We still love her,” said Nancy. “She should be here with her children. She should be here with her mom and dad.”

Many of the women said they’d been inspired by her memory. Lindsey had gone back to college, determined to become a teacher. “I knew Kari would have whomped me if I dropped out,” Lindsey said with a laugh. She thought about Kari, the strong woman they all knew. “The hardest thing at the trial was hearing how Matt had left Kari defenseless. But if he hadn’t, she would have kicked his ass.”

Vanessa’s name came up often, and everyone at the table agreed that they still wondered if Matt’s ex-mistress had told everything on the stand. Could she have been involved in the actual planning? No one knew, but like so many others, they had little sympathy for her. “I don’t see Vanessa as a victim,” said Lindsey. “It blew my mind that she didn’t think she’d done anything wrong.”

What had all of them learned from what they’d been through? “We made a pact,” Nancy explained, reflecting on all the years they’d kept Matt’s secrets by not telling Linda what they’d seen and heard. “No matter how mad someone will get, how upset, we tell each other the truth.”

My interview with Matt Baker took place the fall before the custody trial, ten months after his murder trial ended. On that November day, I left my Houston home and drove north to Livingston, Texas. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Allan B. Polunsky Unit is off a quiet rural road, and I drove past hole-in-the-wall restaurants, ramshackle wooden houses on stilts, and a trailer park to get there. I also passed a sprinkling of small, clapboard churches, some with spires reaching toward the heavens. At least two were Baptist, and they reminded me of Pecan Grove, the historic church where Baker began his ministerial career.

At the prison gates, I identified myself and was waved through. The prison houses approximately three thousand inmates, including TDCJ’s death row in a two-story, boxy-looking building, detached from the main facility. Like most prisons, Polunsky is a concrete building with slits for windows, watched over by armed guards in high towers, enclosed by a razor-wire-topped fence.

In the parking lot, I left my purse with my cell phone and wallet in my trunk. All I took in was a folder with a pad of paper, my typed questions, two pens, two tape recorders, extra batteries and tapes, and my driver’s license, which I turned in to be held until I left. In its place, I was given a red plastic visitor’s pass to wear around my neck.

No matter how many times I’ve entered a jail or prison, the echoing clank of the metal doors slamming behind me always sends a cold shiver through me. Intellectually, I know I can leave at any time, but there’s a finality about hearing the doors lock. At that moment, I’ve entered another world.

In the visitors’ room, I sat in booth 31 and waited, my tape recorder plugged into the phone line. A thick sheet of Plexiglas separated me from the enclosure in which Matt would sit. Our appointment was for one o’clock, but the minutes passed. He was late. “Does he know I’m here?” I asked a guard.

“Yes,” I was told. She then mentioned that Matt had signed a form with the date and time of our meeting. “They’re saying that he went to his cell to get cleaned up.”

That was fine. I didn’t mind. So I reviewed my questions and waited. About forty minutes later, metal gates swung open and shut, and there was Matt, looking dapper in his prison whites, his hair carefully combed. The guard locked the door and left us. One reason I was there, of course, was to get a feel for Matt Baker, to judge for myself, yet it took me aback when the first thing he said to me was a lie. Scoffing, he shook his head. “I’m sorry you had to wait. They never let me know when you were coming.”

Rather than confront him, I began asking questions. My first was the one I always ask in this type of situation. People are, after all, unjustly convicted. We know that. In fact, just weeks before my visit, a Texas man named Anthony Graves, who’d served nineteen years for a murder he didn’t commit, was finally released and reunited with his family. So I needed information from Matt. I needed to know whom I could talk with who could shed light on his innocence. I needed to know the name of anyone with any evidence that pointed to any other conclusion than that he’d murdered his wife.

When I asked, Matt shook his head, his blue eyes wide and his mouth curled into a slight smirk. At thirty-nine, his face was still round and boyish, but he had a light stubble covering his chin and cheeks. “That’s hard because no one else was in the room that night,” he said. “Just me and Kari.”

I persisted. “Tell me the names of people I can talk to who will back up your side of any of the events surrounding Kari’s death. Anyone who can substantiate what you’ve said, for instance, about Kari being depressed.”

“Her depression is huge,” he said, describing its importance in the trial. “Have the people who knew about it been manipulated to not testify correctly? I think so.”

“This is important, Matt,” I said. “Tell me whom I can talk to who would have information that would help your case.”

He pursed his lips, as if thinking for a moment, then said, “I can’t think of anyone.”

“Would you consider that, write me a letter, and let me know whom to talk to?” I asked. “I want to make sure I cover all sides of the case.”

He nodded, but no such letter would ever arrive.

At first, he said, his marriage to Kari was good. “We had fun together, enjoyed doing things together . . . After Kassidy’s death, things really changed. Kari changed. I don’t know what would have happened if Kari hadn’t died,” he said. “I don’t know where we would have ended up. We were struggling, yes. But we loved each other. If we hadn’t loved each other, we would have walked away from each other a whole lot earlier.”

I’d talked to so many who described Kari as a wonderful mother, dedicated to her girls. Matt hadn’t described her that way. I asked what the truth was. “My wife was very good in front of others putting on a show toward the end. Part of that show was because she was using Xanax.”

Yet that, too, was a lie. Kari didn’t have a prescription for Xanax. She’d asked for one the week she died, but the doctor hadn’t given it to her. It was confirmed by the physician’s own notes, which I’d seen in evidence. None was found in her system in the autopsy.

So much of what Matt would tell me contradicted all that had been testified to at the trial and the documents put in evidence. Under oath, Jo Ann Bristol testified that at the visitation, he’d asked her: “Did Kari tell you that I was planning to kill her?”

“I don’t know if Kari ever said that,” Matt now insisted when I asked why his wife would believe that. “I don’t trust Jo Ann Bristol as far as I can throw her.”

Yet wasn’t Bristol’s statement backed up by what Kari wrote in her Bible, her plea for God to protect her?

As we talked, Matt claimed that many others had lied. His list included Kari, her family, Bristol, the police, everyone who’d testified against him. Throughout, Matt portrayed himself as the innocent victim mistreated by all around him.

We talked about all the women who’d accused him of inappropriate sexual remarks and conduct, even Lora Wilson, who described an attempted sexual assault. Were they all lying? “Yes,” he said. “But then, some people get different impressions from things that are said. They misinterpret.”

“But there are so many women making these allegations, Matt,” I said. Even in the county jail shortly after his trial, two women inmates complained that Matt made an obscene gesture toward them. “Doesn’t that strain your credibility that this keeps happening?”

“I can’t control the credibility of what other people say,” he said, his words measured. I thought that perhaps this was how he’d talked to Kari, sounding so reasonable yet taking a truly irrational stand. “You can’t control what other people think. All I know is some people take things the wrong way and out of context. And some people will say things to get a response and then say you’ve said things wrong. That happens so often.”

We continued to talk, and the conversation turned to Vanessa Bulls. He didn’t dispute the time line she’d presented in court, saying that they’d become intimate months before Kari’s death. But he did disagree with how it had all come about. “She approached me,” he insisted, as if that were a matter of pride.

“What did she say?”

“Her comment to me was along the lines of, ‘Hey, I think you’re cute. Have you ever had an affair? Would you like to have one?’ ” he said. “I thought, well, I’ve never been approached like this, but it was tempting.”

“So she initiated it?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, with a self-satisfied smile. “I was struggling with my marriage . . . The eternal battle takes over, and the good did not win in that.”

When I asked what I should know about Vanessa, he described her as “manipulative” and “calculating.” Yet about her testimony, so damaging at his trial, Matt appeared to not completely hold his ex-lover accountable, instead blaming the prosecutors, who, he claimed, had threatened Vanessa into testifying against him. “Vanessa decided she’d rather make up stories and converse with the DA rather than tell the truth.”

He talked of being a preacher and feeling the calling as a young man and of his children on the morning he told them that their mother was dead. “It was tortuous. Just heartbreaking,” he said. “We told them, ‘Your mom isn’t here anymore. She’s in heaven.’ It wasn’t the proper time, age, all those things to give details. Just, she’s not here anymore. We’ll see her when we get to heaven.”

How did the girls first hear that Kari committed suicide? Matt claimed that Linda told them during that Mother’s Day of 2006, a month after her death. The way he described it, Linda pulled at the girls, screaming: “We know your dad’s lying. We know your dad killed your mom. We know your mom did not commit suicide.” Matt said the girls returned home crying, Kensi asking, “What do you mean suicide?”

“So the subject was not broached until Kensi was grabbed physically, and yelled and screamed at by the Dulin family,” Matt insisted.

The problem with this account was one of his own e-mails, one he sent Linda at 1:07 the morning following that Mother’s Day. It said nothing of this. Instead, he’d written that he was upset about Linda asking Kensi questions. In her response to him, Linda answered with the same account she’d later tell me, that Kensi had arrived upset, and the questioning had been a grandmother trying to determine what was wrong with her granddaughter. Linda wrote: “What I saw was a little girl going through so much pain and crying so hard. I saw her feeling pulled in two and it broke my heart for her.”

Weeks after that Mother’s Day, Matt had also told Cooper that Jim and Linda had never accused him of Kari’s murder.

It was the Dulins, however, especially Linda, whom Matt appeared to despise the most.

“Why do you believe most people believe you’re guilty of murdering Kari?” I asked.

“Because of the Dulins,” he said. “Because they’ve spread misinformation about me.”

“Why would they do that?” I asked.

“Because if I’m innocent, Kari’s not perfect,” he said. “If I’m not guilty, they can’t think of her as a victim. Kari has become a martyr.”

That afternoon in the prison, Matt Baker charged many with lying and manipulation, from the Dulins and Vanessa Bulls, to the prosecutor, the judge, the investigators, all the women who’d said he’d engaged in improper behavior. He was innocent. He was blameless. Someone else used his computer to view pornography. Not Matt. In his version of his life, especially the years since Kari’s death, Baker described himself as not unlike Job in the Bible, a righteous man subjected to trial after trial.

As in so many instances in the past, he changed much of his story as he talked. In the version he told me, he didn’t balance the telephone between his shoulder and his ear as he’d said in the deposition. Instead, he now said he put the telephone down on the nightstand. Yet he maintained that he hadn’t put it on speaker, so how he was talking to the 911 dispatcher seemed unclear. And when it came to Kari’s position in the bed, he had an explanation for the increased lividity in her left arm; the mattress, he said, was a four-year-old pillow top, with a gully in the center. When he found her, she was lying turned slightly to her left, her arm in the mattress’s indentation.

Our talk continued, and Matt at times grew, if not angry, resentful. It appeared that he was a man who was used to giving his version of the world without being questioned. When I again pressed him for the names of those who might be willing to talk to me on his behalf, his shoulders straightened, and his chin climbed, throwing his forehead back. “I respect the privacy of others,” he said, piously. “I won’t give out names unless people give me permission to.”

“Will you ask them?”

“Yes,” he told me. “I will.”

Along with blaming Linda Dulin, Matt Baker blamed Guy James Gray.

“Why were you convicted?” I asked.

“Because my in-laws told lies . . . purchased the legal system,” he said. “And because I had an attorney who didn’t care. He honestly didn’t care. In fact, he wanted me gone.”

Why hadn’t Matt testified? “I wanted to,” he said. “I told them, put me up there.” When I mentioned the stage waiting for him on an upper floor, the room with a bed, nightstand, and a 197-pound dummy, Matt scoffed. “I could have shown them how I did it. I could have dressed her, pulled her onto the floor, and done CPR. It was easy.”

Since it is the only method available to me, I judge whether someone is telling the truth based on what I can verify with other sources. There was much that Matt said during our interview that I had no way of checking, but there were those things that came up that I noted on my legal pad with a star. When I returned to Houston, I worked my way down the list. First, I e-mailed an assistant medical examiner I know. During my talk with Matt, he’d described in detail pulling Kari’s body off the bed: “When I moved her, bits of french fries and everything else came out of her mouth, and the smell of alcohol.”