Part 29 (1/2)

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 pa.s.s 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 s.h.i.+ver 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 pa.s.sed. 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 Ka.s.sidy'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 doc.u.ments 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 G.o.d 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 s.e.xual remarks and conduct, even Lora Wilson, who described an attempted s.e.xual a.s.sault. 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 p.o.r.nography. 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.”