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Shortly after midnight on Saturday, April 8, 2006, Waco, Texas Baptist preacher, 35-year-old Matt Baker, dialed 911 & calmly told the dispatcher that he thought his 31-year-old wife, Kari Baker, just committed suicide. She was laying in their bed, her lips were blue, her hands were cold & there was a note that said she was sorry. Since she wasn’t breathing & she had no pulse, the dispatcher told him to move her to the floor & start CPR until paramedics arrived.
When EMTs & police arrived, Matt led them to their bedroom, but sadly they were unable to revive Kari & she was pronounced dead at the scene at 12:17 am.
While this was happening, their two daughters, 9-year-old Kensi & 5-year-old Grace, were asleep in their bedrooms. Matt told investigators that Kari had been battling depression since they lost their 16-month-old daughter, Kassidy, to a brain tumor seven years earlier in 1999. Despite the passage of time, he said that Kari wasn’t getting better.
Matt, who was a minister at Crossroads Baptist Church in Hewitt, ten miles south of Waco, told investigators that Kari sent him to the video store at 11:15 pm to rent When a Man Loves a Woman, the 1994 romantic drama starring Meg Ryan & Andy Garcia that just so happened to be the movie Matt & Kari watched on their first date. When he came back, he found her in their locked bedroom, not breathing.
Investigators reviewed the typed suicide note that included a typed signature that read:
Matt, I am so sorry. I am so tired. I just want to sleep for a while. Please forgive me. Tell Kensi & Grace that I love them very much. Tell my mom & dad that I love them too. I love you, Matt. I am sorry for the past few weeks. I want to give Kassidy a hug I need to feel her again. Please continue to be the great dad to our little girls. Love them every day for me. I am sorry. I love you. Kari.
Officers took photos of the scene & contacted a McLennan County justice of the peace. Since the town was so small, they didn’t have a medical examiner. They spoke over the phone & explained what they’d found & without going to the house or ordering an autopsy, the justice of the peace ruled Kari’s death & the case was officially closed.
Kari was born on August 13, 1974 to parents Linda & Scott in Salt Lake City, Utah, but Scott sadly died when Kari was only a baby. After his death, Linda, who was suddenly a single mother, decided to relocate to Waco, Texas to be closer to her sister. Once they were settled, Linda met & married Jim Dulin when Kari was very young. Jim eventually adopted Kari & the couple went on to have a son together. Kari was a kind, outgoing girl who was always surrounded by friends. She volunteered at homeless shelters & was very involved in her Baptist church.
Jim & Linda Dulin were called to their daughter’s home on the night of her death & although they struggled to accept that Kari would have killed herself, there seemed to be no other explanation at the time. Through their immense grief, they were forced to accept what they were being told.
However, strange little hints began to creep in that led them away from believing that their daughter took her own life & they began to question if Matt was responsible for her death.
Matt was adamant that Kari’s funeral be as soon as possible & despite the fact that she died early Saturday morning, Matt insisted that the funeral be held on Monday.
About ten days after her daughter’s funeral, Linda got together with her three sisters who told her that they’d been keeping information from her that they now felt comfortable to share. They told her that over the years, Matt had come on to several young women, something they hadn’t wanted to tell her while Kari was married to him so as to not disrupt the family.
Not only that, but it seemed as if Matt was trying to erase Kari’s existence from their lives. Linda & Jim’s granddaughter told them that their dad took the photos of their mom out of their house & allegedly told them that they were ready for a new mother.
Most concerning, Matt & Kari had been on the Dulin’s cell phone plan & when Linda looked through their phone bill, she noticed a number of phone calls from Matt to Kari’s cell phone that were placed after her death. Over the span of weeks, Matt made approximately 180 calls to her phone & as many as 17 in one day. When she confronted him about it, Matt told Linda that he’d given Kari’s phone to a parishioner in need. This was a recently divorced single mother who worked as a sixth grade teacher, Vanessa Bulls.
Linda’s intuition immediately kicked in & she questioned if there was more to the story than a preacher who was simply counseling a parishioner. Linda, believing that Kari would not have abandoned her living children, vowed to learn the truth.
Since Hewitt authorities did not want to reexamine Kari’s case, Linda hired attorney Bill Johnston since she was convinced that her son-in-law murdered her daughter. Johnston brought on Texas Ranger Matt Cawthorn to assist & both were critical of the fact how Kari’s case had been handled. They questioned if someone who was wanting to take their life would have left two sleeping pills behind & whether 29 sleeping pills would have killed her in such a short amount of time.
They also wondered if Kari’s body would have sufficient time for the level of lividity it reached in the 45-minute window of time Matt had been gone from the house. Lividity occurs within hours of death & refers to the bluish-purple discoloration that occurs when gravity pulls the blood down to the lowest point in the body once the heart is no longer pumping blood throughout the body.
Not only had the suicide note been typed rather than handwritten, but it also contained grammatical errors that Kari’s loved ones felt were highly uncharacteristic for her. Not only that, but the note praised Matt while blaming Kari.
Around the time of Kari’s funeral, a preacher had access to her Bible & found a handwritten note inside that was dated April 2, 2006, only days before her death that was scribbled in the pages & read, Lord, be the center of our relationship. Lord, I’m asking for you to protect me from harm. I am not sure what is going on with Matt, but Lord, help me find peace with him.
Kari’s grief counselor also contacted Linda & told her that Kari believed that Matt was having an affair. Even more alarming, Kari told her that she had found crushed pills in Matt’s briefcase & she feared he was planning to harm her. When Linda confronted her son-in-law about this, he claimed that kids from the Waco Center for Youth where he worked put them in there because they didn’t want to take their medicine. He said that he reported this incident to security at the center, but it was later confirmed that he never made this report.
As Johnston began to look into Vanessa Bulls, the woman who phone bills proved Matt had been in frequent contact with, he learned that she was the younger, attractive daughter of the music minister at Matt’s church. Matt adamantly denied having any sort of relationship with her outside of a friendship, arguing that he often spoke with many friends & Vanessa was no exception.
At this point Texas Ranger Cawthorn was unsure if Vanessa Bulls had any part in Kari’s murder or if she was just someone who caught Matt’s attention.
When Matt voluntarily spoke with investigators with the Hewitt Police Department a few months after Kari’s death, he reiterated that he had been gone for about 40-45 minutes. When he came home, he found their bedroom door locked & when he managed to pry it open with a screwdriver, he found Kari’s nude, lifeless body in their bed with empty wine coolers & a near-empty bottle of over-the-counter sleeping pills.
Johnston & his team found it highly unlikely that in such a small window of time that he was gone, Kari could have ingested the drugs, died & reached that state of lividity. There were also inconsistencies in Matt’s versions of events from that night. There were times he said that Kari was asleep when he left the house & during other interviews, he said she was awake. He told one officer that the door from the garage to the house was locked while he told another officer that it was their bedroom door that was locked.
Matt Baker met Kari Dulin in the summer of 1994 while they were students at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. They were each working at the summer camp for the First Baptist Church, Kari as a lifeguard. She always dreamed of becoming a teacher & marrying a man of faith & Matt seemed like the perfect fit. Little did she know, he had been accused of several inappropriate sexual advances toward women during college & even at the summer camp, but in each of these instances, his behavior was only brushed under the rug. Only three months after they met, they were married at her parent’s house.
Even after they got married, Matt’s inappropriate behavior toward women & young girls continued, but somehow, he continued to fly under the radar from punishment. Kari always seemed to believe in her husband & couldn’t accept that he could possibly be responsible for such horrible actions.
While Kari went on to get her master’s degree from Dallas Baptist University, Matt later attended Baylor’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary & went on to become a Baptist preacher.
Throughout the years, the couple had three daughters together, Kensi, Kassidy & Grace. Sadly, in 1998 Kassidy was diagnosed with a brain tumor, but after she was treated in the hospital for months, she was discharged home with a great prognosis & she appeared to be improving. However, early one morning on March 22, 1999, Matt went into her room & found that she wasn’t breathing. Family members couldn’t help but notice that while Kari was inconsolable, Matt seemed unusually calm & didn’t seem to comfort his grieving wife.
When Kari called the oncologist who had been treating Kassidy throughout her battle with cancer, the doctor couldn’t understand how Kassidy suddenly passed away when her prognosis had been so good when she was discharged from the hospital. The doctor felt so uneasy that she contacted child protective services (CPS) who came out & spoke with Kari & Matt, but nothing came of this visit. Although, a family friend said that Matt seemed almost relieved after Kassidy was gone so he could get back to his normal life.
Kari, who had always been an outgoing, lively young woman, was understandably devastated by the loss of their baby girl & was deeply grieving. She sought out counseling & wrote passages about Kassidy in her Bible. When Kari died, it was only seventeen days after the seventh anniversary of her daughter’s death.
Bill Johnston felt that police had dropped the ball; there was no autopsy & the death was very quickly classified a suicide. Despite the fact that Matt told investigators that he found his wife naked, emergency responders found Kari in a t-shirt & underwear. In response to this discrepancy, he indicated that he dressed her while he was on the phone with the dispatcher. Investigators believe that Kari hadn’t been nude as Matt claimed & that she died wearing what emergency responders found her in, the t-shirt & underwear. It took paramedics only four minutes to arrive at the Baker home & in that time, he claimed that he dressed Kari in her shirt & underwear, moved her to the floor & began CPR, all while cradling the phone on his shoulder without sounding out of breath.
Johnston & his team were able to turn up several instances of Matt’s sexual advances toward young women during his years in college as well as throughout his marriage with Kari. Records that were recovered from Matt’s workplace server also made him look that much more guilty; he spent many hours on porn websites & had searched terms that included overdose & death by sleeping pills, something he later argued he searched only because he was fearful his wife would overdose on the sleeping pills she routinely took.
Matt also searched pharmaceutical websites where Ambien & other drugs could be purchased without a prescription. With this information, the Dulins filed a wrongful death lawsuit in July 2006, three months after Kari’s death.
When investigators spoke with Vanessa Bulls in August 2006, she denied having an affair with Matt & denied knowing about Kari’s death.
Based on the evidence that was obtained in the continuing investigation, the justice of the peace, Billy Martin, decided to reopen his ruling. Kari’s body was exhumed & an autopsy was done at Southwest Institute of Forensic Science in Dallas. However, because of the passage of time paired with the fact that Kari’s body was embalmed, meaning her blood wouldn’t be able to be tested, the pathologist was only able to confirm traces of alcohol, Ambien & Unisom in her muscle tissues at the time of her death. Neither the timeframe nor amount of the drugs in her system could be determined in order to conclusively say what drugs caused her death. It can be noted that Keri was not known to take Ambien & had no prescription for the medication.
The Dulins hired a toxicology expert from Tennessee who felt that because there were no pills found in Kari’s stomach during the autopsy, it’s unlikely that she died from an overdose nor that she died within the 45 minute timeframe Matt had been gone.
The justice of the peace (JP) held an inquest in August 2007 & reviewed the evidence from the toxicologist, pathologist, police officers & the Dulins while Matt Baker did not testify at the hearing. At this point, the JP changed his previous ruling of suicide to undetermined.
Matt Baker was arrested for murder on September 21, 2007 based on the improbability of his provided timeline on the night of his wife’s death, inconsistencies in his statements during the 911 call, the searches made on both his office & home computers, the likely affair with Vanessa Bulls, the toxicology report as well as the JP’s change in manner of death from suicide to undetermined. He was released on bond due to his highly successful defense attorney, Guy James Gray, who took on the case pro bono.
Matt told investigators that he left their house at 11:10 pm while credit card records proved he rented movies at 11:50 pm & the 911 call was placed at midnight. Although they did not believe that it was impossible, medical experts doubted that Kari overdosed & died within this window of time.
Photos of Kari’s body were taken at 12:30 am which depicted lividity which can begin to form in as little as 20 minutes to two hours after death. Because the photos were not close-ups, the doctors were unwilling to estimate a time of death based on the pictures.
Six months after his arrest, the murder charges against Matt were dropped because Assistant DA Crawford Long felt it was too risky to take him to trial since the evidence was too speculative & entirely circumstantial.
Investigators turned their attention to Vanessa, who was interviewed on January 27, 2009, nearly three years after Kari’s death. She was in the presence of her lawyer & maintained what she originally told investigators in August 2006, that she hadn’t been involved in an affair with Matt.
When Vanessa was subpoenaed to the grand jury her attorney indicated that she planned to take the Fifth, but that she did have some information. Cell phone records proved that she had been with Matt about a week after Kari’s death & an employee at a jewelry store reported that they had been shopping for wedding rings only weeks later.
Matt also removed Kari’s photos & clothing from their house & replaced them with pictures of Vanessa & his daughter. Despite the fact that Vanessa admitted that she frequently spoke with Matt on the phone & they’d spent time together, including shopping for rings, she continued to deny that their relationship was intimate.
Now under oath, Vanessa was asked if Matt ever told her anything about his wife’s death & she dropped a bombshell when she indicated that Matt told her that he killed Kari for her.
The Criminal DA instructed the prosecution to prepare a murder indictment against Matt Baker & present it to a grand jury that afternoon. In the meantime, the prosecution believed that Vanessa was withholding further information & sent Investigator Abdon Rodrigues to speak with her, a man who had a reputation for getting suspects to confess their crimes.
Rodriquez spoke with Vanessa on March 31 & she was given immunity & told that her testimony wouldn’t be used against her. She went on to repeat what she said in front of the grand jury, but as soon as he turned the tape recorder off, Vanessa finally admitted that she & Matt slept together one time in the master bedroom of the Baker’s home before Kari’s death.
Moving forward to September 2, Vanessa spoke with a team of investigators & prosecutors & over the course of four hours where she elaborated about her relationship with Matt Baker & what she knew about Kari’s death.
According to Vanessa, Matt began flirting with her in November or early December 2005 & the flirtation only escalated by mid-December. He would say things like, Don’t date that guy, only date your preacher. He would often disparage Kari during their conversations & he confessed that he had cheated on her in the past, but Kari never had a clue. He said that he was the primary caretaker of their two daughters because she was so depressed. He said that Kari was lazy & their girls didn’t like their mother.
Matt told Vanessa that Kari was hideous & if he & Vanessa fell in love, he would find a way out of his marriage. Vanessa indicated that in February 2006, two months before Kari’s death, her relationship with Matt turned sexual.
She said that by March, Matt began discussing ways that Kari could die. He considered tampering with her breaks or arranging a drive-by shooting. He also mentioned hanging Kari & staging it to look like a suicide. He also said he tried to purchase Rohypnol (a date rape drug) to incapacitate her.
Matt told Vanessa that he finally came up with a solid plan; he would slip something into Kari’s drink, type a letter & stage the scene as a suicide. When he told Vanessa he planned to type the note, she said that was a bad idea, but Matt indicated that Kari typed everything. He also felt confident that because the anniversary of Kassidy’s death was looming & Kari was grieving her death, no one would question suicide.
Two weeks before Kari died, Matt told Vanessa that he put medication in a milkshake that he made for Kari, but she refused to drink it since it tasted like lead. Investigators later found an email that Matt sent to Kari’s work account from around this date where he wrote that he would make her a better drink than the one he made the night before by putting more chocolate in it.
On Friday morning, April 7, one day before her death, Vanessa was aware that Matt planned another attempt at ending Kari’s life during a planned date night they had scheduled for that evening. By Saturday morning, Vanessa was awoken by her mom who told her that Kari was dead & word quickly spread among the church. Vanessa & her parents went to the Dulin home later that day to offer their condolences & as they were leaving, Matt followed them & winked at Vanessa as she & her parents drove away.
Vanessa told investigators that she went back to Matt’s house on Wednesday, four days after Kari’s death, while his two girls were at school. While they sat together in the living room, he told her the full details of Kari’s murder. He said that he pulled apart some sexual stimulant capsules & filled them with Ambien which he gave to Kari. She believed she was taking an over-the-counter stimulant as part of their date night, but instead, Matt took the sexual stimulant himself. As Kari started to feel groggy from Ambien, he took her to the bedroom, handcuffed her to the bed & engaged in foreplay until she fell asleep.
Kari was snoring, but still alive at this point & Matt said he kissed her forehead & told her to give Kassidy a hug or a kiss from him as he placed a pillow over her face. Kari began to struggle & thrash her face back & forth a few times, but because of the Ambien & the handcuffs, she was unable to fight him off. He told Vanessa that he removed the pillow from her face, believing she was dead, but her eyes suddenly flew open & she took an enormous gasp of air. He put the pillow back over her face & made sure to put pressure around her mouth & nose. When he was sure she was dead, he removed the handcuffs, typed the suicide note on their home computer, rubbed Kari’s hands on the note in case it was checked for prints & placed both the note & the bottle of sleeping pills on the bedside table.
After he staged the scene, Matt left the house to establish an alibi & rented a movie & purchased gas. Before he left, he locked the bedroom door & left their 5 & 9-year-old sleeping daughters alone in the house with their mother’s body. When police arrived, they never checked the home computer for the suicide note or took the computer as evidence. The wine coolers on the bedside table were also not collected as evidence.
Vanessa said that Matt sent her an MP3 of the song Dirty Little Secrets by the All-American Rejects & reminded her that if she told anyone what he told her, she would be his next regret. By July 2006, Vanessa ended her relationship with Matt & had no further contact with him.
In March 2009, Matt was re-arrested & charged with Kari’s murder. The trial began in January 2010 & the state’s star witness was Vanessa Bulls. Up until that point, Matt continued to maintain that he never had an affair with Vanessa or anyone else until his defense attorney, Guy James Gray, stood in front of the court & admitted that his client had indeed had an affair. Gray later indicated that he realized Matt was lying about his involvement with Vanessa about a month before the trial while he maintained that Kari had ended her own life due to her fragile emotional state.
Meanwhile, Linda Dulin was forced to listen to stories about her daughter who wasn’t there to defend herself. Gray spoke of the lack of physical evidence & that there was no cause of death to be even certain that it was a murder.
Assistant D.A. Crawford Long indicated that this was the most difficult case he had ever prosecuted.
Meanwhile, witness after witness testified about Kari’s mental state & the fact that Kari had been looking forward to an interview for a new teaching position, something that was scheduled for the day that she died. Her grief counselor also disputed Matt’s claims that Kari was a despondent, dysfunctional parent.
On day three of the trial, Linda testified that after her daughter’s death, Kari’s grief counselor told her that Kari had found crushed pills in Matt’s briefcase & she feared he was planning to harm her.
Prosecutor Susan Shafer believes that Matt wasn’t even in the room with his wife while he spoke with the dispatcher. Matt told investigators that he found his wife on her back with both arms stretched out flat on the bed & drew a diagram of how he claimed her body to be. However, crime scene photos depict an uneven pooling of blood or lividity in Kari’s arms which contradict this statement. There was more lividity on Kari’s left arm as opposed to her right arm which meant that her left arm would have been lower, likely hanging off the side of the bed.
Dr. Sridhar Natarajan, Chief Medical Examiner at the Lubbock County ME Office testified that when he reviewed the photos from both the crime scene as well as the autopsy, he noted a mark on Kari’s nose which was consistent with a pillow being pressed over her face.
The jury also heard that Matt visited online pharmacies regarding purchasing Ambien. Mark Henry, the owner of a website from Spain, indicated that Matt attempted to buy a generic form of Ambien that he placed in his online shopping cart while defense attorney Gray argued that he never actually made the purchase. According to Henry, many potential customers stop the order after a message pops up that shipping would take two weeks. There was also no evidence that he purchased the Ambien anywhere else.
On day four of the trial, 27-year-old Vanessa Bulls took the stand & admitted that for years, she lied about her relationship with Matt. This was something the prosecution worried would make her an unreliable witness in the jury’s eyes. She told the jury that she met Matt at the church in the fall of 2005, a time when she was a single mom going through a divorce.
According to Vanessa, Matt often complained about Kari & called her a horrible wife & mother, that they no longer had sex, something that Vanessa believed at the time. When Matt invited her to his home in early March 2006, they had sex for the first time. He asked if he could hold her hands to pray & afterwards, he started kissing her & led her to the bedroom he shared with Kari.
Vanessa said that she was extremely remorseful afterwards, but admitted that the affair continued while Matt’s bitterness toward his wife only grew. He said he wanted her out of his life & only weeks later, Kari was dead.
After Kari’s death, Matt told Vanessa that he was going to tell her what happened that night, but then he never wanted to talk about it again. Vanessa told the jury that under the pretense of a romantic evening, Matt gave Kari a mix of wine coolers & pills that he claimed were sex stimulants. This was when he handcuffed her to the bed, began kissing & touching her until she fell asleep from the sleeping pills that she’d actually taken & he suffocated her with a pillow, staged the scene as a suicide & left for the video store & to fill his car with gas as a way to establish an alibi.
Vanessa admitted that she was aware that Matt was planning on killing his wife before he actually went through with it, something that haunted Linda since she never reported it to anyone & Kari’s death could have been prevented.
Only two weeks after Kari’s death, Vanessa was at Matt’s side, assisting him in hosting his daughter Kensi’s 10th birthday party. When asked if she was fearful that Matt could also be capable of murdering her one day, she admitted that it was something she thought about, but he promised her that he would be so happy that he would never do that. She continued to date him & never came forward about what she knew regarding his involvement in Kari’s death.
Vanessa argued that she feared that since Matt was a preacher, no one would believe her so she felt like she was stuck. She started to worry that Matt might kill her too if she came forward.
Defense attorney Gray called only one witness forward, a forensic expert who speculated that traces of DNA found on the suicide note might be Kari’s. However, Vanessa had told investigators that according to Matt, he rubbed the suicide note across his wife’s hands in case it was tested.
Matt never testified in his own defense.
The jury deliberated for 7.5 hours & Matt Baker was found guilty of first-degree murder. Linda Dulin was flooded with relief that he would never again be able to hurt anyone else.
Following the verdict, Matt’s attorney, Guy James Gray, admitted that he stopped trusting his client once he confessed that he was lying about the affair with Vanessa. He requested to be taken off the case while Matt insisted he remain his lawyer & Gray indicated that never in his life had he been forced to go to trial in a case he didn’t believe in.
When Linda Dulin was given the chance to address Matt she said, You haven’t looked at me in almost four years. Can you look at me today? You murdered the mother of your children.. But the most tragic victims, Matt, are Kensi & Grace, those sweet, sweet babies.
In January 2010, 38-year-old Matt Baker was sentenced to 65 years in prison. During the sentencing, four women testified that Matt had made unwanted sexual advances toward them, including one who complained to police of an attempted sexual assault. It also came to light that he utilized his church-issued laptop as well as a computer at the youth center to look at porn websites & those for married adults looking to have an affair.
A year-&-a-half after Matt went to prison, Jim & Linda Dulin were back in court to seek custody of their two granddaughters who had been living with Matt’s parents. Sadly, Kensi & Grace had been taught to hate their maternal grandparents since they were portrayed as the villains who caused the upheaval in their lives & they were brainwashed to believe that their father was innocent.
During the custody trial that took place in Kerrville, Texas in 2011 when Kensi was 15 & Grace was almost 11, the Dulins accused Barbara & Oscar Baker of parental alienation for ruining their once loving relationship with their granddaughters.
During the trial, it came out that the Bakers ran a foster home in Kerrville so during much of Matt’s early childhood, he grew up around nearly 50 foster children. Now adults in their forties, some of these then-children came to Kerrville to accuse their former foster parents of abuse. One woman, Betsy Maloney, who was mentally handicapped, accused Barbara of mocking her & calling her disparaging names such as Porky Pig & Fatso & encouraged the other children in the home to join in on the name calling. She accused Oscar of touching her in what she referred to as, wrong places.
Another former foster child, Laurie Miller Hardin, recalled that Betsy was the butt of the jokes & also accused Oscar of inappropriate behavior such as tracing a finger down the lower portion of her buttocks & down her leg. Connie Mirfakhraie told the court that when she was 12 Oscar French-kissed. Another child, Millie Van Steenburg, accused Oscar of sexually abusing her beginning when she was 7-years-old.
Barbara & Oscar denied these accusations & no criminal charges of abuse had ever been filed against them although at one point, Betsy prompted an investigation when she complained to counselors about her treatment in the home, but they were cleared of any wrongdoing.
When Matt was 10-years-old, the Bakers stopped running their foster home, indicating that their two biological children, Matt & Stacie, were unhappy with the arrangement. However, during an interview with Matt in 2007, he described the years with foster children as the happiest of his life which contradicted this reason.
Some wonder if Matt Baker, who was also accused of inappropriate behavior while working as a youth minister & chaplain, learned this behavior from his childhood.
15-year-old Kensi Baker testified that she wanted to stay with the Bakers, but 10 of the 12 jurors voted to transfer custody of her & her little sister to their maternal grandparents. They were also ordered to have no contact with their father.
During a 2013 interview with Linda & Jim, two years after they were awarded custody, they indicated that their home is the girls’ home. A then 12-year-old Grace loved the arts, participated in the band & played the piano & was a joy to be around while Kensi, who at the time, was nearly 17, was excited about college & was a hoot to be around.
Jim feels great joy when he sees & hears his wife & granddaughters laughing together, he sees Kari in them every day & he knows she would be relishing in what they were experiencing.
References:
- NBC News: ‘Murdering minister’ sentenced to 65 years
- TDCAA: The murdering minister
- CBS News: Dirty little secrets revealed in preacher Matt Baker’s murder trial
- CBS News: Genesis of a killer?
- TexasMonthly: Witness for the prosecution
- Find a Grave: Kassidy Lynn Baker
- Find a Grave: Kari Lynn Dulin Baker
- YouTube: Sommer Sanchez: Cheater, predator, killer, minister – Matt Baker
- Oxygen True Crime: Baptist minister with a dark secret accused of murdering his wife, staging as a suicide
- Osmosis: Lividity
- Wikipedia: When a Man Loves a Woman
