Part 28 (1/2)

When asked if she had any proof, Tracy said she remembered one thing about Oscar Baker: ”He wasn't circ.u.mcised.”

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

If Oscar Baker was circ.u.mcised, 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 s.e.xual abuse from her foster father.”

The 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 conservators.h.i.+p 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 s.e.x-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 p.a.w.ns . . . asked to take a side.”

”Are the girls being used as p.a.w.ns in this case?” Maguire asked.

”Absolutely . . . by the paternal grandparents,” Murphey testified.

One of the indications, she said, was the way the girls saw everything the Dulins did as wrong and everything the Bakers did as above reproach, a common symptom in what Murphey called Parental Alienation Syndrome. ”It is absolutely a form of child abuse,” she said, and on a scale of one to ten, with ten the most severe, she judged the alienation of the Baker girls as between ”eight and ten.”

On cross-examination, the Baker family attorneys worked hard to turn Murphey's testimony to their advantage. King voiced her argument that Jim and Linda's wrongful death suit and their efforts to have Kari's death investigated were to blame for the estrangement, not anything the Bakers had done. And she argued that there was nothing wrong with the girls believing their father was wrongly convicted and that he'd be exonerated. Murphey disagreed: ”To think something is a reality before it's a reality, my granny used to say, 'don't count your chickens before they hatch.' ”

When Henneke challenged the contention that the Bakers were denigrating their dead daughter-in-law's memory, Murphey said that she had personally heard them attacking Kari in front of the girls. ”The tones, the words were not positive.”

At one point, Henneke suggested that the Dulins' best option was to just walk away since that was what the girls said they wanted. Rather than an irrational dislike of the Dulins, he argued that it was logical for the girls to be angry with their grandparents since they blamed them for their father's incarceration. ”Couldn't the girls stay in Kerrville and have counseling?” Henneke asked.

”It's possible, but . . .” Murphey began before Henneke cut her off. Maguire asked her to finish that thought. ”It's possible, but in my opinion, it's not in the best interest of the girls.”

After Murphey, the Dulins' attorneys called another psychologist, William Lee Carter to testify more in depth about Parental Alienation Syndrome. Like Murphey, Carter, a thin man with mostly white hair, described Parental Alienation Syndrome as a campaign to discredit a parent or grandparent in the eyes of a child. Reinforcing what the jurors had already heard, he talked of how such emotional and psychological pressure on a child could make a child turn away from family, even alter memories so that they fell more into line with the alienating parent. Children in such situations were sometimes treated as confidants and encouraged to think and feel negatively about the other parent. ”They're told things like the other parent never loved them?” Obenoskey asked.

”That's a good example,” Carter answered. Like Murphey, he then reviewed Matt's letters and pointed at examples of just that type of thing, including Matt's saying that he knew the girls' visits with the Dulins would be horrible.

What was the harm? ”The child ends up living in a world based on a false reality. It dredges up negative feelings that create tension . . . and it emotionally harms the children.” Although the problems often weren't evident until adulthood, Carter said they ranged from feelings of betrayal to an inability to trust and problems with emotional intimacy.

When it came to the girls' friends, the ones they'd leave behind in Kerrville, Carter said that while that might hurt, there was something more important: ”You're only born into one family. Friends come and go.”

There were those instances where the Bakers' attorneys found Carter agreed with them, as when King described a situation where events built, adding one to another, until they resulted in alienation. She included the day the girls were with their father when he was served with the wrongful death suit. ”Yes, that makes sense,” Carter said. When Beverly Crowden asked if taking a fifteen-year-old away from home, school, and friends could foster anger and resentment, even acting out, there, too, Carter agreed.

In the end, however, Carter indicated that for severe cases of parental alienation, common therapies rarely worked. Like Murphey, he described the syndrome as a form of abuse.

Once the experts had finished, Obenoskey put Matt back on the stand, and for the next hour snippets of phone conversations were played in the courtroom. Some were between Matt and Barbara, many of which were focused on the Dulins and how to win the custody case. Many sounded manipulative, as when Barbara said that Kensi was old enough to ”play the game,” but Grace wasn't.

”She'll learn,” Matt replied. What game were they talking about? It appeared the game of keeping the Dulins at bay.

The conversations between Matt and Kensi were particularly disturbing, when he discussed testimony at hearings with his daughter, in one saying that Linda Dulin had lied on the stand. He referred to the Dulins as ”idiotic and weird,” and Waco as ”that place from h.e.l.l,” and Kensi responded, one day saying, ”Good news. I don't have to go to Waco.”

At other times, Kensi seemed the only one with common sense, as when she sounded reluctant to write the convicted murderer her father was urging her to form a relations.h.i.+p with. ”Write back to him . . . He's diabetic. You can ask him how he's doing,” Matt urged.

”That's awkward,” Kensi responded, sounding disgusted. ”I'm not going to do that.”

One of the most disturbing phone calls was one in which Matt and his mother discussed the upcoming custody trial. During it, Matt said sarcastically that Linda Dulin could use drama to sway the jury. Mocking her, he whined, ”Boohoo. I lost my daughter.”

As the trial wore on, it became increasingly evident that the children, especially Kensi, were being manipulated and used, so much so that at one point Matt asked Kensi to take pictures inside the Dulins' house. One was of the inside of their medicine cabinet. Was he looking for Ambien, to prove Linda had some? Did he think this could be useful in his appeal? Is that why he had his teenage daughter spying?

The Bakers' attorneys took over the trial, and off and on, Matt and Barbara were again on the stand, denying that he'd taken pictures of Kari out of the house within a week of her death or that he'd put one of Vanessa Bulls in their place. The phone calls, e-mails, and letters the Dulins' attorneys submitted, they suggested, were culled from thousands of minutes on the phone and hundreds of letters, a small sampling. Yet on redirect, Obenoskey brought a bigger stack, putting them into evidence, and had Matt read from them. ”They're representative, aren't they?” he asked. After some prodding, Matt agreed that they were.

In other e-mails, Kensi chastised Jim and Linda for attacking Matt. Linda denied it, but Kensi said Linda had ”talked bad on Mother's Day with me . . . and Paw-paw said something bad about daddy the day I was sick.” In another e-mail, she said, ”When will you stop calling my daddy bad names. I will always protect my dad and my sister. This is from my heart.”

”If it were up to me, I don't want to see you at all,” Kensi e-mailed in 2008, two years after her mother's death. Were her memories true or were they distorted by what she was hearing from her father and his parents? Once after the girls visited, Linda found a note left behind: ”I hate Jim and Linda.” It was signed, Kensi Baker.

”Have you grieved for your daughter?” Fred Henneke asked Linda.

”Yes,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. ”I know that I am going to see my child again for eternity. I think that's a good promise.”

The one thing Pam King agreed with Linda about was that the wrongful death lawsuit hadn't started the alienation. Instead, it had begun months earlier, on the night in April 2006 when Kari Baker died.

”Do you think it's in their best interest to put them through this pain?” Henneke challenged.

”Because I want them to grow into healthy adults . . . Sometimes, short-term pain is necessary for long-term happiness,” Linda answered.

The attorneys asked if the Dulins could live with the girls' belief that their mother had died of suicide, and Linda said she could, but the debate continued, witness after witness. Many were respected members of Kerrville's community, who testified that Oscar and Barbara Baker were good people, solid members of the church who reached out to help others, and that they were good to Kensi and Grace. Some talked about how well the girls performed in school, while others maintained that they'd visited the foster home when the Bakers ran it and that they'd never seen any indication of abuse.

Early on, there'd been speculation that the Bakers would present their own former foster children to refute the charges made by the four women who claimed that Oscar abused them, but in the end only one of the nearly fifty the Bakers estimated they'd cared for came to defend them, Jamey Hodges. Explaining that he worked at Walmart and that he still called the Bakers Mom and Dad, he said, ”They're my parents. They helped me grow up.” When it came to the allegations of the others that testified, Hodges insisted that not only didn't he see anything inappropriate at the foster home but that it simply didn't happen. As he framed it, the women who'd testified were all lying; there was never any physical, emotional, or s.e.xual abuse.

On cross-examination, Obenoskey asked, ”How can you be so sure?” He questioned if Jamey was always present, if he ever went to school or church, perhaps out with friends, if he could have been out of the house or even in a different room when the things the women testified to happened. ”You can't say it never happened, can you?”