The Preacher's Wife

This story originally aired on May 10, 2008. It was updated on June 9, 2009.

Ever since Matt Baker's wife Kari died suddenly in April 2006 at the age of 31, the Baptist preacher has lived under a cloud of suspicion. Is he an innocent man unfairly accused as his followers and friends believe? Or is he hiding a terrible dark secret? Correspondent Erin Moriarty reports.

"I would have been 23 and she was 20," Matt remembered. "I met her and I thought 'This is the person for me.'"

Linda and Jim Dulin remember their daughter was instantly smitten with the Baylor University senior. "The thing she kept talking about was, 'Mom, this guy's a really good Christian,'" Linda said.

And just three months after meeting, Matt and Kari suddenly announced they were getting married. By their first anniversary, Kari was pregnant with daughter Kensi; a second daughter, Kassidy, followed a year-and-a-half later.

But right after Kassidy's first birthday, doctors discovered a brain tumor and she was hospitalized. "There'd be days that it looked really good. Prognosis was good. And then turned around and went right back down hill," Matt explained.

In late February 1999, after a 90-day bedside vigil, Kassidy was well enough to go home. But just after midnight on March 22, Kassidy was rushed to the emergency room. This time doctors couldn't save her.

"To sit there and struggle that far. To come what I thought was so far to watch her die. That was devastating. It really was a very hard, hard thing to cope with," Matt told Moriarty.

It was especially hard for Kari. "She lost her child and she grieved hard," Linda remembered.

A grief counselor helped Kari get through the first year. In 2000, a third daughter, Grace, was born. But according to Matt, his wife was never the same. "I don't think it was a split second, all of a sudden she was completely different. It was a gradual changing of the person," he said. "She had almost two personalities in a way. Not negative. But when she went to work she had the ability to put issues behind her and focus on work."

"The other personality was a little bit more withdrawn at home," he added.

The way Matt tells it, he became "Mr. Mom" to Kensi and Grace. And from the time Kassidy died, Matt said his wife relied on pills to sleep.

Matt told Moriarty Kari used Unisom, an over-the-counter sleep medication. But he said she sometimes borrowed something stronger from family and friends.

And the toughest time for Kari was always the March anniversary of Kassidy's death. "It was always two or three weeks leading up to it. 'It's coming, it's coming, I can't do this. I can't make it another year. I can't do this again,'" Matt recalled.

In April 2006, seven years after Kassidy died, Matt said Kari was still struggling with the loss. So he took her to the doctor, who diagnosed her as depressed and prescribed an anti-depressant.

As they left the clinic and headed onto the highway, Matt said Kari had a meltdown. "And I'm at about 45, 50 mph and she is hyperventilating. And she attempts to open the car door," he recalled. "She said she needed to get out, get some air."

According to Matt, he grabbed hold of her waistband until he could pull off the highway. He didn't think it was a suicide attempt. "I thought she just wanted fresh air and wasn't thinking. She lost it for a second," he said.

Later that week, on Friday, April 7, Kari had a crucial interview for a new job at a junior high school; Matt said Kari's mood was "nervous."

And after the interview, Matt said Kari didn't feel well. That evening, despite a queasy stomach, Matt said Kari drank a wine cooler.

At 10:30 p.m., with the kids in bed, Matt said Kari asked him to gas up the car and rent a movie. "And I thought, 'It's late. All right, but I'll do it. If your wife asks you, do what your wife asks.' And so I got dressed and left the house a little after 11:00," he recalls. "It's probably about two miles to the first gas station that I could fill up at. And got out. Pumped the gas. Went up to the movie place. Rented a movie, and drove back home."

When he returned around midnight, Matt said he found the bedroom door locked. "And so I go and I get the little screwdriver that can fit in there and I popped the button. Open the door. And she's naked on the bed," Matt remembered. "And I call her name and she doesn't respond.

At 12:01 a.m. he called for help. "And as I'm calling 911 I'm deciding I don't want them to see her naked. So I put her clothes on her," he told Moriarty.

Matt said at the same time he was on the phone, he was also moving Kari to the floor where he began CPR. Paramedics arrived within minutes, but it was too late. Kari was dead.

Police found an empty bottle of Unisom next to a note. "I am so sorry," it read, "I love you Matt … I want to give Kassidy a hug. I need to feel her again." It was all the evidence the small town police needed.

"The detective that night pulled me into the kitchen. He goes, 'Well, she took her own life. There's a note. There's pills. There's no signs of struggle. It's pretty obvious what happened.' And that point my heart sunk. I couldn't believe it. That was the first time for sure that's what they claimed it to be," Matt said.

The county doesn't have a medical examiner, so police described the scene over the phone to a justice of the peace, who determined that Kari died from an "overdose of Unisom." No autopsy needed. Two days later, she was buried.

As out of character as suicide seemed, Kari's parents Jim and Linda said they had no choice but to believe it. "We kept trying to convince ourselves. What other alternative was there? The idea that Matt could have taken her life was more horrible," Linda explains.

But that's exactly what Linda's family thought. "He killed her," Linda's sister Nancy said. "Kari loved her life. She loved her family. She would never have left those girls."

From the start, Nancy, as well as Linda's other two sisters Kay and Jennifer, and niece Lindsey, tried to convince Linda that Kari's death needed to be investigated.

According to Nancy, Matt's story about Kari's last day simply didn't match anyone else's. "He had said that that day Kari was sick," she explained.

But she wasn't buying it. "People that saw her said she wasn't."

And Nancy said it doesn't make sense that a sick, tired Kari would ask Matt to put gas in the car and rent a movie.

And they certainly didn't believe that if Kari did commit suicide she would ever want to be found in the nude. Nothing seemed to make sense-not even the choice of the sleeping aid Unisom.

"She actually took a generic brand," Linda explained.

They also said that Kari's unhappiness in the last weeks of her life wasn't about Kassidy. According to her former grief counselor, Kari was worried about herself. "And she said, 'I saw Kari in therapy … And she was afraid that her husband was having an affair and afraid that he was trying to kill her,'" Kay explained.

That was just three days before Kari died.

Linda's sisters began sharing secrets they'd kept from her all these years. They told Linda about Matt's odd, and even boorish, behavior.

"He had come up behind my daughter and made some, just really inappropriate sexual comment to her," Kay said.

There were several unsettling incidents, like in 1996, when Kari lived with Matt in a complex. DeeAnn Avalos said the preacher tried to pick up her 16-year-old daughter. "He asked, 'Have you ever been kissed by a boy?' She said, 'Yes,' and he just suddenly grabbed her and kissed her right on the lips," Avalos claimed.

At one church youth center, Matt was warned about his behavior with young women. He never seemed to stay long at any ministry.

Lora Wilson met Matt in 1992, when they were both student athletic trainers at Baylor University. According to Lora, they were cleaning an empty locker room when he suddenly grabbed her.

"He lifts me up off the floor and he sits on one of the benches with me on his lap. And that's when he begins running his hand up my thigh and between my legs," Lora said.

Matt denied ever touching Lora. Instead, he told Moriarty he inadvertently scared her that day, by turning out the lights.

Lora reported the incident, but said school authorities did nothing. "I dropped out of school. Everything derailed."

The incident haunted her, but by the time she went to the Waco police six years later the statute of limitations had run out.

Matt denies ever assaulting or harassing anyone.

Linda finally began to see Matt through her sister's eyes. But persuading the local police to re-open the investigation into Kari's death was going to be far more difficult.

Police had concluded that Kari committed suicide. Only a few photographs were taken at the scene, and the only evidence collected was the Unisom bottle, the remaining pills, and the typed suicide note.

So the women began their own investigation. Calling themselves "Charlie's Angels," they began making phone calls, following every lead, and retracing Matt's movements the night Kari died.

Their biggest discovery came unexpectedly, when Linda took a look at Matt and Kari's cell phone records. The records showed that ten days after Kari died someone began using her cell phone.

Linda said Matt had given the phone to Vanessa Bulls, a young woman who attended Matt's church.

Matt admitted he often talked to Vanessa, but said he wasn't interested in her. "I never thought of a relationship with her at all. That never was anything in the back of my mind."

But phone records showed almost 1,700 minutes of calls between Matt and Vanessa in just ten days. "It looked like he got on the phone as soon as he took the girls to school and stayed on the phone with her most of the day. It was crazy," Linda said.

Matt said he needed a friend. "I needed somebody to look me in the face and say, I'm sorry you lost your wife."

But the records show Matt began calling Vanessa before Kari died. He denied he was having an affair. "There was never any relationship at all other than a friendship."

Vanessa told the police she began dating Matt after Kari's death.

Armed with a possible motive, Linda hired Bill Johnston, a dogged former federal prosecutor, and his team of investigators. And three months after Kari was laid to rest, her parents requested to have her body removed from the grave and autopsied.

Linda suspected that her daughter died at the hands of her husband. Convinced that the police did not do their job, she filed a wrongful death suit against Matt.

Johnston and his investigators looked for evidence. "We never heard of a typed suicide note," he said. "And on the table next to the note were pens. Rather convenient, you know, if someone wanted to sign it."

They found more evidence in the computer network that serves the youth center where Matt worked as a chaplain. One month before Kari died, he began conducting online searches for "overdose on sleeping pills" and on the prescription drug Ambien, even though Kari didn't have a prescription for that drug. Matt's explanation?

"It scared me that she was taking that much sleeping medicine to get sleep at night. It took a lot to wake her up in the morning sometimes," he said.

Asked why he didn't mention it to the doctor, Matt said, "At that point, I didn't think it was necessary to tell the doctor because I thought she was getting it under control."

When investigators asked to examine the actual computer that was on Matt's desk, they discovered that it wasn't his. Sometime in mid-June, when the search for evidence got underway, someone had replaced Matt's desktop computer with his secretary's, and Matt's had vanished.

Matt said he had no clue why someone would want to take that computer and that there was nothing on the computer that he didn't want anyone to see.

Investigators also have no idea whether there was anything incriminating on Matt's home computer; Matt said the hard drive crashed and was no longer working.

The more Bill Johnston heard, the more he was convinced that Linda's suspicions about her son-in-law might be right.

Asked if he thinks Matt is a dangerous man, Johnston said, "Oh sure. You bet. He's dangerous."

Johnston believes that because when Kari told her grief counselor that she thought Matt was trying to kill her, Kari confided that she found a mysterious bottle of crushed pills in Matt's briefcase. "He gave her a story, 'Oh, that's from the kids at the center. The kids don't take their meds and they spit 'em out. That must be what that is,'" Johnston said.

Matt told 48 Hours a very different story. He said there were pills, but that they were Kari's, and had never been in his briefcase. "She comes out with a bottle of pills. And she looks at me and she says, I found these in there," Matt said. "I don't know where she found it. I never saw it before she had it in her hands."

The pills are now gone. Matt said Kari threw out the crushed pills, but Johnston doesn't believe it.

In September 2007, the autopsy results came in, but without many answers. No remnants of pills were found in Kari's stomach, but there was evidence of Ambien in her muscle tissue, the same sleeping drug Matt researched on the Internet. And Johnston points to the photos, which show discoloration around Kari's nose and lips, an indication, he said, that she may have been suffocated.

Five months after Kari died, the justice of the peace declared her death was no longer classified as "suicide;" instead it was labeled "undetermined."

The police now had a possible homicide on their hands, and there was only one viable suspect: on Sept. 21, 2007, Matt was arrested and charged with murder.

Linda dropped her wrongful death suit, believing Matt would now face a day in criminal court.

Matt posted bond and returned home to his daughters. He told Moriarty he was the victim of insidious innuendo and wild speculation.

But Matt found a powerful ally: Guy James Gray. Like Bill Johnston, Gray was once a high-powered prosecutor.

He said Kari's despair was spelled out in her own heartbreaking entries she wrote in her Bible after her daughter died. "Here's a paragraph about how good Heaven is and I want to go to Kassidy," Gray pointed out.

He said that if Kari had been suffocated with a pillow or a similar object, there would be some evidence. "Some of that fiber is sucked into your lungs or nasal cavity or whatever. In the autopsy, they did not find any types of fiber," Gray said.

Asked about the abrasion on her nose, Gray said, "The first thing the emergency people did when they got there was put one of these artificial CPR deals over her mouth."

But Johnston said that the abrasion had to have been left there before Kari died and that Matt is the one who caused it.

Facing murder charges in Waco, Matt retreated to his childhood home in Kerrville, Texas. His old friends there were outraged at the accusations.

"Matt is a sweet loving caring, tender hearted person," one friend explained.

That's also how Jill Hotz, Kari's best friend, once felt about Matt. But today, she no longer believes in Matt, nor the story he tells about Kari. "I know she didn't take her own life," Jill said. "Someone with that kind of a zest for life, that kind of fight for life, she's not gonna take her own life. And she didn't do that."

Why does Jill suspect Matt? Because of a conversation Jill had with Kari just days before her death. "She was very, very upset," Jill remembered. "Crying extremely hard on the phone. And I said, 'Kari, what's wrong?' And she said, 'I think Matt is seeing someone else.' And you know how you have those moments in your life that you wish that you could just redo the whole thing? I tried to reassure her that Matt loved her. And he wouldn't do that."

And Kari told Jill that her preacher husband did something far worse - he blamed her for their child's death. "She said that Matt accused her of praying for Kassidy not to have to suffer anymore," Jill said. "And he said that God answered Kari's prayer instead of his prayer, which was for Kassidy to live to be an old lady and to have a full life."

But Matt said he never blamed Kari for Kassidy's death. "She misunderstood what I had said. I said that it hurt me that she felt her prayer was answered and mine wasn't."

But Matt had sent Kari this e-mail just days before she spoke with Jill: "I know deep down I hold a grudge against God and you for Him answering your prayer and not mine," he wrote. "In some ways, I do hold you…to blame for her death."

The day after Kari confided in Jill was the day Kari told her counselor she thought Matt was trying to kill her. The counselor confronted Matt at Kari's funeral.

Matt's reaction? "And I said, what? Well, wait, wait. And I'm like, 'What's going on here?'"

Matt denied he had any reason to kill Kari, denied cheating on her, and he insisted that the woman he spent so much time with, Vanessa Bulls, was only a friend. But he admitted that later in the summer he did want to date Vanessa.

According to Matt, Kari was suffering from severe anxiety that was apparent to everyone who saw her in the days before her death.

But 48 Hours could not find anyone who confirms that. On the contrary, even Jill said that when she last spoke to Kari, Kari said things had improved. "The day before she died, she was completely elated. And she said, 'We're trying to get everything patched back together.' She was very hopeful. Very future oriented," Jill recalled.

Those who saw Kari on her last day say her spirits were much higher than earlier in the week. Her friend Todd Monsey said she looked forward to the prospect of a new job. "She told me she had a great interview. She was excited," he recalled.

But according to Bill Johnston, there are serious inconsistencies in Matt's story about the night Kari died. "Unfortunately for Matt Baker, he didn't buy enough time for himself. He should have painted a couple of hours of alibi," he said.

Matt was very specific about the time he left Kari to put gas in the car and get movies. Yet he seemed unclear about Kari's state when he left.

"We talked about everything that I was supposed to get and I left," he said. "We had a conversation. I leaned down and kissed her on the forehead before I left."

But when asked two months later if she was talking or said goodbye to him, Matt told Moriarty, "She had rolled back over and gone back to sleep. So
when I left, she was asleep."

And remember how Matt said he first found out that Kari killed herself? "The police officer brings me the note. And that was the first thought at that point in time, she took her own life."

Yet, he had clearly read the note when he called the 911 operator. "I think my wife just committed suicide. …And her lips are blue, hands are cold, and there's a note that says 'I'm sorry,' basically," he told the operator.

But Matt said he had not read the full note. "I saw the note, but as I picked up the phone, I saw it there, but I did not take the time to read the note."

It was all too obvious, Johnston said. "Here's some wine coolers to match the story they were drinking a wine cooler. And the note then is, I'll just have to say self-serving. 'Matt, I'm sorry. Oh, Matt. Take care of the kids.' You know, not critical of him in any way," he said.

Johnston also pointed out signs of lividity on Kari's body, the pooling of blood that happens after death. It's an indication, he said, that Kari had been dead far longer than the 40 or so minutes that Matt claimed he was away. "She had to ingest something that made her sleepy, then unconscious, then killed her. And she had to quit breathing, her heart had to stop. And then lividity had to begin," Johnston said.

And he is not the only one who questions Matt's story. Steven Karch, a toxicologist 48 Hours consulted, said that if Kari were alive when Matt said he left the house, her body would not be cold to the touch-as both Matt and a paramedic reported. "Being cold in an hour is non-existent. Unless you're killed in the Arctic or in an icebox," he said.

But Karch cautions there simply isn't enough evidence to say how and why Kari died. Asked if he believes this is a suicide, he said, "No. But I cannot determine the cause of death. I wouldn't certify it as anything but undetermined."

Matt denied he had anything to do with Kari's death. "Was I the perfect person? Did I do everything correct? No. But I didn't hurt my wife. I loved my wife. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her."

While Matt had been charged, the D.A. has not yet brought the case to a grand jury, which is a requirement under Texas law for a murder case to go to trial.

Matt's attorney Guy James Gray said it's extremely difficult take someone to trial for murder when even the coroner can't determine that a murder occurred. Gray wanted the charges dropped.

As the second anniversary of Kari's death approaches, Matt and his daughters are still living with his parents in Kerrville. His relationship with Vanessa Bulls was long over. And his life is in limbo.

Matt said he doesn't know if he will be indicted, "I don't know where I go from here. There is such an unknown of what tomorrow holds."

Matt Baker was charged with murder, but in Texas, the district attorney also had to get a grand jury indictment within 180 days.

Linda says she is not worried about not having enough evidence to take him to trial.

But time runs out and on March 25, 2008, all criminal charges against matt were dropped. "It is a tremendous relief," he says. "The criminal part is - is in the past… And that's a tremendous blessing."

Bill Johnston said he's not frustrated or worried. "Sooner or later, I think the criminal justice system will deal with Matt Baker. I just believe it's gonna happen."

Linda refused to wait for the district attorney. She decided to re-file her civil case against Matt Baker, hoping to prove he was responsible for Kari's death. Her private investigator, Mike McNamara filed the papers.

"We are going to continue to do what we have been doing. And that is, we are going to seek justice. And I believe with every fiber in my being that we will have it," she says.

But the civil case doesn't make it to court, because exactly one year later, there's a shocking development for Kari Baker's family.

On March 25, 2009, after a surprise witness comes forward and testifies, the grand jury finally indicts Matt Baker for murder. The surprise witness was Vanessa Bulls.

Matt Baker is once again arrested and pleads "not guilty." He goes on trial in September.

When asked about the toll this has taken on Kari's mom, Lindsey says of Linda, "She's been strong. She's the strongest person I know. No matter how hard it gets, she doesn't give up."

Nancy describes her sister as "an extraordinary woman and mother."

"We loved her. We still love her. We miss her. She should be here with us. She should be here with her children. She should be with her mom and her dad," Nancy says.

"She was such an inspiration to so many people," says Lindsey.

Adds Nancy, "We miss her. We miss her a lot."

By court order, Kari's parents, Linda and Jim Dulin, see their granddaughters one weekend a month.

Produced by Lisa Freed and Gail Zimmerman