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Valley of the Shadow of Death 8/15/11 5:10 PM Valley of the Shadow of Death 8/15/11 5:10 PM TexasMonthly The Valley of the Shadow of Death By Skip Hollandsworth Texas Monthly March 2008 [Article is excerpted; to read all of it, subscribe at TexasMonthly.com. http://www.texasmonthly.com/2008-03-01/feature-1.php ] Matt and Kari Baker appeared to be the perfect Baptist couple. He was a charismatic minister in Waco; she taught Sunday school and happily raised their children. When she committed suicide after their baby daughter succumbed to brain cancer, everyone in their tight-knit community showered him with love and support. Everyone, that is, except Kari’s family, who accused him of being a sexual predator—and of getting away with murder. On April 10, 2006, the day after Palm Sunday, it was standing room only in Waco for the funeral of Kari Baker, a pretty young Baptist minister’s wife. To accommodate all the mourners, her service was held at one of the city’s larger funeral homes instead of at Crossroads Baptist, the small church where her husband, Matt, preached.... The Pastor who led the service, a lecturer in the religion department at Baylor University named Steve Sadler, read verses of Scripture about God’s unfailing love that he had found underlined in Kari’s Bible.... He didn’t say anything about suicide. He didn’t need to. Just about everyone at the funeral knew what happened to Kari each spring—in late March, to be precise, right around the anniversary of the death of her second child, Kassidy, who had succumbed to brain cancer seven years earlier. Whenever the anniversary came around, Kari would be so overwhelmed that she would stay in her house for at least a day, lying in bed.... This year, apparently, her grief had been too difficult to bear. According to the police, Kari, who was just 31 years old, had left a typed note on her bedside table before she overdosed on sleeping pills. “I want to give Kassidy a hug,” it read. “I need to feel her again.” In his eulogy, Sadler asked the mourners to care for Kari’s other two daughters: Kensi, who was nine, and Grace, who was six. He also asked the mourners to pray for Matt, who was sitting on the front row, seemingly frozen in sorrow, his head in his hands. He was 35 years old, still boyish-looking, his eyes a startling light blue. At the end of the service, he managed to stand by the pulpit, his daughters beside him, hugging all those who came to offer their condolences. He promised them he would be back at Crossroads Baptist the next Sunday—Easter Sunday—to preach the glory of the empty tomb. “God has not abandoned me,” he whispered to one friend. “He will give me the strength to carry on.” In the days to come, people would compare the earnest pastor to Job, the Old Testament figure who had remained true to God despite enduring one trial after another. Baptist ministers sent Matt e-mails and letters, praising him for his devotion. His church members let him know that they would be willing to do anything to help out in his time of need.... But about a month after the funeral, a rather peculiar rumor began making its way through Waco. It seemed that Kari’s mother, Linda Dulin, along with her three sisters and her niece, was conducting her own investigation into Kari’s death. A few weeks later, people began hearing that Linda and her husband, Jim, had hired a Waco lawyer and a team of private investigators. The rumors didn’t make sense. Detectives from the police department in the small suburb of Hewitt, where the Bakers lived, had been so http://www.stopbaptistpredators.org/article08/valley_of_the_shadow_of_death.html Page 1 of 10 Valley of the Shadow of Death 8/15/11 5:10 PM convinced that Kari had taken her own life that they hadn’t requested an autopsy. What could her family possibly be thinking? This past September, everybody got the answer. Based on information provided by the five women—“the Charlie’s Angels of Waco,” their friends were calling them—as well as by the Dulins’ attorney, the Hewitt police announced that they no longer believed that Kari had committed suicide. They arrested Matt for her murder, claiming that he had drugged her with medication and alcohol and then stuck a “pillow or similar item” over her face, holding it there until she slowly suffocated to death. It is a story that has transfixed Baptists throughout Texas, a sordid, sultry tale that is especially riveting because it is set in, of all places, Waco, the city that Baptists themselves call “Jerusalem on the Brazos.” Waco is not only home to Baylor, the largest Baptist university in the world, with more than 13,000 students (“Thee University,” alumni have nicknamed it), but also so chock-full of Baptist churches that you cannot drive more than a few blocks in any direction without running across one. “For us Baptists, Waco really is a special place,” said Paul Stripling, a longtime pastor and the former head of the Waco Baptist Association.... But murder isn’t the only allegation that, in Stripling’s words, “has left all of Waco reeling.” Linda Dulin, a 54-year-old professor of communication studies at McLennan Community College, claims that she and her private investigators have also discovered that Matt Baker spent years in Waco leading what she describes as “a secret life as a sexual predator,” propositioning, harassing, and groping unsuspecting teenage girls and women—and in one instance, when he was a student at Baylor, attempting to commit sexual assault. In her most explosive accusation, Linda says that in the months just before Kari’s death, Matt had set his sights on a new target: a 24-year-old single mother who attended his church and who happened to be the daughter of a minister of music who had once worked at Crossroads Baptist. “Maybe Matt decided to kill my daughter because he had fallen in love with his latest conquest,” Linda told me. “Or maybe he decided to kill Kari because she had found out about his other life and he was afraid she was going to expose him. Whatever the reason, he wanted my daughter dead.” Needless to say, such sensational charges have set off an O. J. Simpson—like media circus in Waco: In the usually sedate Waco Tribune-Herald, one headline about Matt’s alleged role in Kari’s death took up the entire top half of the front page and read “Suicide? Murder? It’s a Mystery.” An enterprising housewife named Shannon Gamble has gone so far as to start a Web site, dontevengetmestarted.blogspot.com, which keeps everyone in Waco up-to-date on all the latest gossip about the case.... “It just seems impossible to believe this is happening,” said Kimberly Berry, a 34-year-old married mother of three who had avoided church for several years before she began attending Crossroads Baptist, largely because she was so moved by Matt’s sermons. “What you have to understand is that he was a truly fine pastor. Whenever he preached, I felt like he was preaching directly to me. Now I just feel sick beyond belief. I keep asking myself, ‘Is it possible that someone who acted like such a man of God could have been someone else altogether?’” Indeed, for so many of Waco’s churchgoers, this is no ordinary story. For them, it’s a story about good and evil that could have come straight out of the Bible itself. Is Matt Baker a truly devoted man of God who has been viciously persecuted by his grief-stricken in-laws? Or is he a murderous deviant cloaked in preacher’s garb? Is he, to use some old-fashioned Baptist phrases, consumed with demons and destined for hell? And if he is, how was he able to last so long in a city like Waco without anyone finding out? **************************** “I have nothing to hide,” Matt said in his gentle voice. “My prayer is that the truth be known.” Until this past year, people in Waco assumed they knew the truth about Matt. They had, for instance, heard him talk nostalgically in his sermons about his childhood in Kerrville. His parents, Oscar and Barbara, a quiet, hardworking couple, ran a group foster home for Buckner Baptist Benevolences. Besides Matt and his sister, the Bakers often had as many as eight foster kids of all ages and races living in their home, many of them victims of abuse or neglect. “That was my first understanding of the love and acceptance of Jesus Christ,” Matt once said about those days. “It does not matter about our past. Jesus takes us into his family.” http://www.stopbaptistpredators.org/article08/valley_of_the_shadow_of_death.html Page 2 of 10 Valley of the Shadow of Death 8/15/11 5:10 PM He was a devout Baptist almost from the day he was born. At the age of six, he was baptized at Kerrville’s Trinity Baptist Church, and he faithfully attended Sunday school, sang in the youth choirs, and participated in mission trips. The summer following his sophomore year of high school, he announced at a youth retreat that he would dedicate his life to the ministry, and like so many other Baptist teenagers in Texas who have heard the call, he said there was only one place for him to go: Baylor University. When he arrived on campus, in 1990, he declared church recreation as his major, saying that his goal was to get a job as a youth minister before moving on to lead a church of his own.
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