By Erin Quinn Tribune-Herald staff writer
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Barbara Baker spent seven days sitting on a courtroom pew in Waco, listening as witness after witness built a murder case against her son.
Matt Baker, 38, was convicted Wednesday of killing his wife, Kari, in 2006 while their two children slept down the hall. He was sentenced to 65 years in prison.
Barbara Baker’s 72-year-old husband, Oscar, stayed at their Kerrville home caring for those two girls, Kensi, 13, and Grace, 9.
Barbara Baker, a school media specialist, said the girls think that their mother killed herself and that their father is innocent. They did not read details of the testimony, she said.
“They have no question of his innocence,” Barbara Baker said. “No doubt in their minds.”
Matt Baker moved his daughters a couple of months after their mother’s death to his hometown of Kerrville, where the elder Bakers said they have raised 49 foster children along with their two biological children. Now that their father has been found guilty, the girls’ maternal grandparents, Jim and Linda Dulin, have said they will seek custody.
Barbara Baker, 66, said Kensi and Grace don’t like Waco and they don’t like the Dulins because “they don’t know what to do with the girls” and they have “no games to play with.”
The Dulins say the Bakers have been “poisoning” their granddaughters with lies about their mother since her death.
Linda Dulin said Friday that gaining custody would allow the children to “get the help they need from people who love them more than anything on the face of this earth. We want to do everything we can to make them whole and healthy. No poisoning, no trying to destroy people they love. We just want them to heal because they are the most tragic victims.”
‘A surreal situation’
Barbara Baker said that no evidence prosecutors presented against her son surprised her, but it was “surreal” listening to testimony of her son’s infidelity, regular viewing of pornography, and contradictions in the statements he gave police and media of what happened the night of her daughter-in-law’s death.
“It’s just a surreal situation,” she said. “You dig deep for your faith and to your knowledge that he did not do what they are saying. It would have done no good for me to break down. I needed to be strong for him. And he needed me to be strong for the girls.”
She said jurors got it wrong.
“The jury saw sensationalism, drama,” she said. “They saw a soap opera. But they saw no evidence.”
She said her son was never given an option by his lawyers to testify. She said the contradicting statements that her son gave in interviews should not have been taken as evidence of his guilt.
“I think a lot of things were taken out of context by the media,” Barbara Baker said. “And if you walked into your bedroom tonight and saw someone you care about dead, you would not have total recall on everything. It would all be a scramble in your brain.”
Barbara Baker said the testimony of Vanessa Bulls, her son’s former mistress, didn’t surprise her.
The 27-year-old teacher told jurors of how Matt Baker told her he plotted Kari Baker’s death the month before and then how he carried out the act by pressing a pillow over his wife’s face after he had given her sleeping pills.
“I thought (Bulls) had been coached very well,” Baker said. “I think she took bits and pieces and made it into more bits and pieces. All with the state’s circumstantial evidence.”
The mistress
It was her own daughter-in-law, she said, who first told her about Bulls in December 2005. Barbara Baker said Kari Baker was “all excited” about becoming friends with Bulls because her baby looked like Kassidy, Matt and Kari’s middle daughter, who died in March 1999 after having surgery on a brain tumor.
It was Kassidy’s death, the defense argued, that forced Kari Baker into a downward spiral of depression from which she never recovered.
Bulls’ daughter, Lilley, was born in August 2005, four months before her affair with Matt Baker started, according to testimony.
Barbara Baker said that her son told her about the affair with Bulls in the summer after his wife’s death.
Kensi and Grace know that their father and Bulls were close, but Barbara Baker said they don’t know it was a sexual relationship.
“The girls loved Vanessa,” she said. “They absolutely adored her. There was a strong bond there. Grace said, ‘I want our next mommy to be a happy mommy. I don’t want a sad mommy. I want a happy mommy.’ ”
Kari Baker’s friends and family testified that not only did Kari’s daughters come first for her, but they used words like “bubbly” and “vivacious” to describe her personality.
In an hourlong phone interview Friday, Barbara Baker only cried when she was talking about helping her granddaughters with their new reality: life without both their father and their mother.
She said she knows an appeal is a lengthy process, and there are no guarantees a new court will rule another way. She said that she, her husband and Matt have been careful not to give any false hope to Kensi and Grace.
When the jury reached its verdict Wednesday, Barbara Baker talked to Grace from her Waco hotel room.
“Grace was in a state of 9-year-old shock,” Baker said. “I told her, ‘They’re going to make him stay for a long, long, long time. Probably for all of my life. He’s going to be gone.’ ”
The children
As for what other children at their church and school will say about their father, who was dubbed “the murdering minister,” Barbara Baker said Kensi and Grace have learned to be strong.
While Barbara Baker said the community has been supportive, the girls dealt with the whispers and rumors four years ago when their mother died, and again when their father was arrested on a murder charge.
The girls, she said, are happy in their schools in Kerrville. Kensi is in accelerated classes and is on the basketball team, and Grace plays YMCA volleyball and basketball. Before their father left for Waco, the five Bakers regularly attended Trinity Baptist Church in the picturesque Hill Country town of about 20,500.
“They’re strong girls,” Barbara said. “Now we’re fighting uphill without Matt, who is a big part of our strength. He’s the fun one. He’s the energetic one.”
Kensi and Grace want to move into their father’s room. Grace loves the smell of her dad, Barbara Baker said.
“I want to hug them now,” she said. “I want to let them cry. I want to sit down and make decisions we now have to make. We’ve got to make changes that will be permanent, without erasing their daddy.”
Before she and her son went to Waco two weeks ago for the trial, she said the five Bakers all cried.
She said he told his daughters: “I will either be coming home at the end of this week, forever. Or, never.”
equinn@wacotrib.com
757-5748
No comments:
Post a Comment