Matthew Baker Murder Case Forensics

Matthew Baker Murder Case

In Waco, Texas former pastor Matthew Baker was convicted of the murder of his wife in early 2010. In 2006, Baker's wife Kari was found dead in what looked like a suicide. However, it soon became apparent that Baker's accounts of his and Kari's movements during the day of her death were inconsistent with the forensic evidence discovered at the scene. It took some time before prosecutors had enough evidence to reach an indictment. Once the trial finally commenced, it became obvious that if nothing else Baker had been inconsistent with his various explanations for discrepancies and had outright lied about certain aspects of the case. One of the things Baker was found to have lied about was the object of his potential reason for committing the crime. The motive according to prosecutors was that Baker was having an affair with a Vanessa Bulls and wanted out of his cumbersome marriage. Prosecutors argued that a man in Mr. Baker's profession, a Baptist minister, could not have divorced and still kept his livelihood. His murdering his wife was therefore the only means to the life Matt Baker desired. It was proved in court that Baker drugged and then suffocated his wife and staged the scene to make it seem that she took her own life on August 8, 2006.

McLennan County, where the crime took place, had no medical examiner and so without reason for major suspicion, the police ruled the death a suicide. However, the family of the deceased did not agree with the verdict of the coroner and demanded further investigation. When the matter was turned over to the medical examiner of the adjoining county, he was able to determine that Mrs. Baker had not, in fact committed suicide. Instead, he stated, the victim had been drugged and then while unconscious or at the very least under the influence of the drugs, had been suffocated to death, most likely with a pillow. Although death by smothering is very difficult to detect during an autopsy, one of the medical examiners who reviewed the case stated that he saw a bruise on Kari Baker's nose. This type of bruising, he testified, was consistent with being smothered by a pillow. The attacker's hands would most likely be in a position where pressure would be placed on the nose, leaving an abrasion.

A partial palm print was found on the suicide note. It was not a match for either Baker or any of the technicians or officers on the scene. The attorney for the defense, Guy James Gray, argued that the print could have been Kari's because by the time her body was exhumed, three months after her death, the skin had deteriorated and accurate prints could not be retrieved (Former 2010). However, this is inconsistent with a suicide. Kari Baker's body was found completely naked. She was not wearing any clothes, let alone gloves. Therefore, the logical conclusion would be that had she indeed committed suicide, her fingerprints would have been on the note. She would have had to remove the page from the printer and leave it in the desired location. There were no fingerprints; only the partial palm print.

One of the first things that made the police officers of McLennan County suspicious was the alleged suicide note left by Kari Baker. Most suicides are done in the heat of a moment. Usually the person is depressed for a long period of time and they may plan out the suicide. However, the note that is left will almost always be one of the last things done before the actual attempt. Yet, in the Baker case the supposed suicide note was typed. This indicates not only planning for a period before the event, but that the individual also had time to type it out and print it before the attempt. It also indicates an impersonality that is seldom seen with suicides. In most instances, the note is a way of explaining the action to people who the suicidal person feels will care and be hurt by the action (Opfer 2011). The Baker note read "Matt, I am so sorry…Please forgive me…I want to give Kassidy a hug." Kassidy was the couple's daughter who had died of a brain tumor. Besides the delivery of the note being typed rather than hand-written, another suspicious item is the content of the note. When a grieving parent takes their life, they often say they want to be with their child, but the only thing that the person here says is they want to hug the deceased child. It is not a permanent reunion that is indicated, but a temporary one.

The case against Baker was by no means a clear-cut example of murder. When medical examiners were finally able to perform an autopsy on Kari Baker's body, they could not determine a definitive cause of death. This meant that the prosecution would have to mostly rely on witness testimony and circumstantial evidence to prove their case. However, they were most fortunate to be able to utilize the expert scientific work of the police department's forensic computer team.

The police were aided by the use of computer forensics. After discovering that Kari Baker had been afraid of her husband shortly before her death, even confiding to her counselor that she had found crushed pills in her husband's briefcase and feared he was trying to harm her, police had enough to get a warrant to access his computers both at work and at home. The computer technicians were able to find out that Baker had done extensive research into sleeping pill overdoses (Opfer 2011). These searches had been conducted on both the home and work computers, meaning that he and not his wife must have been the one who did the research.

On the computers, the forensic scientists were also able to obtain e-mails which were sent by Kari Baker to other people in the days up until her death. In those e-mails, Mrs. Baker's tone is upbeat and hopeful. She made frequent mentions of a new job opportunity and a hope for a better future (Former 2010). This attitude belies Mr. Baker's assertion that his wife was heavily and deeply depressed. He stated that she was so despondent that she would go about planning her suicide, even typing out her suicide note ahead of time. Yet, these e-mails tend to disprove rather than corroborate his statements.

This was a mostly circumstantial case and much of the reason for the guilty verdict was due not to forensics, but to the key witness testimony of Baker's mistress, Vanessa Bulls. The woman testified under oath that Baker had told her intricate details about the death of Kari Baker. In her testimony, Bulls said that "Baker told her he slipped his wife the prescription sleep aid Ambien, handcuffed her to the bed under the guise of spicing up their marriage and smothered her with a pillow after she fell asleep" (Former 2010). If Bulls statements are true, then not only did Baker kill his wife with malice aforethought, he did so in a way in which she had absolutely no means of defending herself from her husband's machinations.