Part 25 (2/2)

”Undetermined,” Martin answered.

Throughout, the jurors sat at attention while the scientific testimony left question marks. Over and over again it was apparent that law enforcement had failed Kari, never adequately investigating her death. In the end, it would be times such as Jo Ann Bristol in the witness box recounting her last meeting with Kari that would linger. ”I think that Matt is planning to kill me,” Kari had said.

Accounts of Matt's tenure at the Waco Center for Youth were offered by a handful of witnesses. They told of the procedure for distributing pills, one that didn't account for the pills in his briefcase, his strange change in appearance after Kari's death, and the mysterious disappearance of his computer. Not only did Matt not seem upset by Kari's death, but he talked of her as a ”dark cloud,” saying he'd no longer loved her.

Whenever the opportunity presented itself, Gray brought out Kari's journals. Yes, a variety of witnesses said, she'd written often saying she wanted to be with her dead daughter, but the dates, where there were any, were from years earlier. What Kari wrote in her Bible days before her death didn't even mention Ka.s.sidy; instead, it named Matt and asked G.o.d to protect her.

While she had Ben Toombs on the stand, Shafer played the 911 call and put before the jury the receipts from Matt's trip to the gas station and Hollywood Video. Off and on throughout the trial, she played DVDs of Matt's interviews for the jury, demonstrating his contradictory statements. In some, Matt Baker described Kari as awake when he left. In others, she was half asleep or ”lethargic, eyes drooping.”

On the stand, Dr. Reade Quinton talked of the problems he'd encountered during the autopsy. Yet although he couldn't say how much was in her system at the time of her death, he said unequivocally that Kari Baker had ingested the drug Ambien. During cross-examination, Quinton discussed the sedative effect of the alcohol, the Ambien, and the Unisom, but he couldn't say what level would be necessary to prove lethal. ”Bottom line is that you don't know?” Gray asked.

”Yes,” the physician admitted.

The days pa.s.sed, and the trial continued. Todd and Jenny Monsey told of the birthday party and their surprise at finding Matt already inserting Vanessa into his family. With both, Gray asked about Kari's depression after Ka.s.sidy's death.

Bits and pieces, each so important, nearly all of it first pulled together by Charlie's Angels and the Dulins' investigators. Noel Kersh detailed Matt's Internet life on the days leading up to Kari's murder, in which he searched for information on overdoses and shopped for Ambien. Mark Henry, the CEO of one of the pharmacies, took the stand and in staggering detail laid out the route that brought mattdb7722 to put Ambien in his shopping cart. Yet Matt never completed the purchase.

For the prosecution, it felt like one step forward and one step back.

At times, a deep sadness filled the courtroom, perhaps never more so than when Linda testified, introducing herself as ”the mother of Kari and Adam and the wife of Jim.” Her eyes filled with tears, she asked, ”Can you tell this is unsettling?” In the otherwise silent courtroom, Linda Dulin told of the daughter she'd lost, the ambitious young woman who'd worked hard to get her master's and poured her attention and love into building a family. ”Kari was such an extrovert, loved life, a joy to be around,” she said. ”An excellent teacher, and more than anything, she loved her daughters . . . a wonderful wife.”

Like Bristol, Linda talked of what Matt had told her about the WCY pills and about the hundreds of cell-phone calls to Vanessa Bulls that finally led her to believe Matt had committed the ultimate sin, murder.

When Gray asked about Ka.s.sidy's death, Linda answered calmly, not denying that her daughter grieved when Ka.s.sidy died. ”Did she miss her child? Yes. She missed her child. But Kari had faith she would see her again in heaven.”

”Isn't it a fact that she routinely used sleeping pills?” Gray asked.

”Yes, that is a fact,” Linda answered.

So much for the jurors to absorb, but it all laid the groundwork for the prosecutors' twenty-seventh witness: Vanessa Bulls.

Chapter 52.

Walking 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 s.h.i.+rt. 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 s.e.xually 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 b.i.t.c.h.” By February, Bulls had agreed to counseling at the Baker house, and by early March the relations.h.i.+p had turned s.e.xual: ”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. G.o.d is such a forgiving G.o.d, it doesn't matter what anyone does. Just ask G.o.d to forgive you. It's okay. In reality, I don't think G.o.d 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 Ka.s.sidy 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 finis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sed, 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 s.e.x 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 sh.e.l.ls from s.e.x-stimulant capsules and fed them to Kari with the wine coolers, then handcuffed her to the bed. When she pa.s.sed out, he kissed her on the forehead, and said ”either hug or kiss Ka.s.sidy 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, s.h.i.+t,” 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 Ka.s.sidy 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 wors.h.i.+p the same G.o.d.”

”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. ”G.o.d 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 fl.u.s.tered 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 Ka.s.sidy, 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.”

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