In July 2011, in a family courtroom in Kerrville, Texas, a fifteen-year-old girl took the stand to testify about where she wanted to live.
Her name was Kensi Baker. Her mother, Kari, had been dead for five years. Her father, Matt, was serving a 65-year sentence for drugging Kari with sleeping pills, handcuffing her to the bed, and suffocating her with a pillow while Kensi and her younger sister, Grace, slept down the hall. A jury in Waco had convicted him of murder eighteen months earlier.
Matt Baker, photographed at Trinity Baptist Church in Kerrville on January 10, 2008.
Kensi told the court she wanted to stay with her paternal grandparents in Kerrville. She did not hold her father responsible for her mother’s death. She did not believe it was murder. She attributed it to an accidental drug overdose.
Not suicide, which was her father’s original story. Not murder, which was the jury’s verdict. An accidental overdose. A third version of events that appears nowhere in the investigative record, nowhere in the trial testimony, nowhere in the autopsy report. It exists only in the world that was built for Kensi in the five years after her mother was killed.
Her maternal grandparents, Jim and Linda Dulin, were in the courtroom that day. They were the ones who had hired the private investigators. They were the ones who had pushed to reopen the case after Hewitt police ruled Kari’s death a suicide and moved on. They were the ones who had spent their savings and their health and four years of their lives fighting to prove that their son-in-law had murdered their daughter.
Kensi believed they were the enemy. She believed Linda and Jim had manipulated the legal system to persecute her innocent father. She believed her maternal grandparents were evil.
She was fifteen years old.
During the nine-day custody trial, the Dulins’ attorney asked the jury a question. Had they heard any testimony, any evidence, that reflected anything good about the girls’ mother coming from the Baker home?
The answer was no.
A court-appointed adviser who had conducted home studies on both households had already filed her report. She recommended that the girls be removed from the paternal grandparents and placed with the Dulins. The reason she gave was the “unhealthy emotional environment” in the Baker home. The adviser said that Matt Baker and his parents continued to blame the Dulins for Matt’s incarceration. They maintained his innocence. They had taught the girls to maintain it, too.
The jury voted ten to two to transfer custody to Linda and Jim Dulin. The judge denied Matt Baker any contact with his daughters. Kensi cried when the verdict was read.
She was being separated from the only family she trusted. She did not understand that the family she trusted had spent five years teaching her a version of her mother’s death that her mother’s killer had authored.
This is a story about what happens after a man murders his wife and gets away with it long enough to control what his children thought of her.
April 2, 2006
On April 2, 2006, five days before she died, Kari Baker wrote in the margins of her Bible. She did this regularly. Her Bible was part diary, part prayer journal, a place where she processed what she could not say out loud. On that day, she wrote: “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.”
31-year-old Kari Lynn Baker
Kari’s therapist would later tell the family that Kari suspected Matt was having an affair. She was right. Matt Baker had been sleeping with Vanessa Bulls, the 23-year-old daughter of the music minister at his church, since late February. The affair took place in the Baker home while Kari was out.
On the evening of April 7, a Friday, Matt told Kari to take a pill that he said would enhance their sexual experience. According to the testimony Bulls later gave at trial, it was a capsule filled with a sleeping medication. Matt had spent weeks preparing for this night. He had discussed multiple methods of killing Kari with the Bulls. A drive-by shooting. Tampering with the car brakes. Hanging her and staging it as a suicide. He’d tried once before, slipping drugs into a milkshake, but Kari complained it tasted funny and didn’t drink it. He had searched pharmaceutical websites from the family computer. He had obtained Ambien from Linda Dulin’s house. He had ordered chloroform online. He had settled on an overdose staged as a suicide, timed to the anniversary of their daughter Kassidy’s death, because he knew nobody would be surprised.
Kassidy had been diagnosed with a brain tumor before her first birthday. She died four months later, in March 1999. Kari grieved deeply and openly for years. Matt would later use that grief as the cover story. A woman who mourned her dead child became a woman who was too broken to live.
As Kari grew drowsy from the pill, Matt handcuffed her to the bed. He waited until she was asleep. Then he placed a pillow over her face.
She struggled. She moved her head back and forth. Between the medication and the handcuffs, she could not fight him off. When Matt lifted the pillow, believing she was dead, her eyes flew open. She took a gasping breath. He put the pillow back.
He held it there until he was sure.
Afterward, Matt Baker removed the handcuffs. He typed a suicide note on the computer. He rubbed Kari’s lifeless hand across the paper in case anyone checked for fingerprints. He arranged sleeping pills and wine coolers on the nightstand. He left the house, bought gas, rented a video.
At midnight, he called 911.
He told the dispatcher he had come home and found his wife unconscious. He said the bedroom door was locked and he’d pried it open with a screwdriver. He said he’d dressed her body and tried CPR.
Paramedics who arrived noticed lividity, the pooling of blood that occurs after death. The degree of discoloration meant Kari could not have been alive 45 minutes earlier. But the Hewitt police department did not pursue it. The justice of the peace ruled the death a suicide over the phone without seeing the body. No autopsy was ordered.
Kensi and Grace were asleep in the house when their father killed their mother. Kensi was ten. Grace was five.
The funeral was on Monday. Standing room only.
Erasing Kari
Matt Baker did not wait long. Within days of the funeral, the campaign began.
He called Kari’s cell phone. He called it again the next day. And the next. In the weeks following her death, he made approximately 180 calls to her number, as many as 17 in a single day. Everyone was answered.
He had given Kari’s phone to Vanessa Bulls.
He removed Kari’s photographs from the house. Pictures of Kari with the girls, the family shots that had hung in the hallways. He took them down. In their place, he put up photographs of the Bulls posing with Kensi and Grace. Within weeks. Before the headstone was set.
He boxed up Kari’s clothes. He took the Bulls to a jewelry store to look at engagement rings. According to the Dulins’ attorney, Bill Johnston, the girls told their grandparents that Matt had said they were “ready for a new mother.”
And he told anyone who would listen the story of who Kari had been.
To his congregation at Crossroads Baptist Church, he was the shattered widower. A man of God who had held his family together while his wife slowly fell apart. Kari had never recovered from Kassidy’s death, he said. She was always depressed. She was always struggling. He had tried everything. He had been the strong one.
To Vanessa Bulls, in private, he offered a version with sharper edges. Kari was lazy. She wasn’t a good minister’s wife. Their daughters didn’t even like their mother. He was the primary caretaker, the real parent, the one the girls depended on. He framed his marriage as a burden and Kari’s death as something close to relief.
To Kensi and Grace, he delivered the version that would do the most damage. Their mother had killed herself because she never stopped grieving for their dead sister, Kassidy. She had loved a child who was gone more than the children who were still here. She didn’t love them enough to stay and raise them.
Three audiences. Three versions, each replacing the actual Kari Baker, a woman who was praying for her safety five days before she was killed, with a character Matt had authored. A woman who was unstable. Neglectful. A woman whose death made a kind of sense.
In 2023, Australian criminologists Claire Ferguson and Freya McLachlan published a paper in Feminist Criminology that gave a name to what Matt Baker was doing. They called it continuing coercive control after intimate partner femicide. Their argument was that for perpetrators who were already practiced controllers during the relationship, staging a homicide is not just about avoiding prison. It allows the killer to maintain dominance over the victim’s legacy, her children, her family, and her property after she is dead. The conventional assumption is that a man who stages his wife’s murder as a suicide is trying to get away with it. Ferguson and McLachlan showed that he is also trying to win.
Consider the calculation. Divorce means the perpetrator loses control over his partner, his children, his assets, and his public image. A successfully staged suicide means he regains all of it. He keeps the house. He keeps the children. He collects the sympathy. He controls the life insurance. And he acquires something he never had while his partner was alive: the uncontested right to define who she was. Her supposed suicide becomes retroactive proof that she was troubled all along, that she made up complaints about him, that he was the stable one. As Ferguson put it, once the victim has no voice, the perpetrator can retell the story of their relationship and use the manner of her death as evidence that his version was true all along.
That is not a cover-up. That is a continuation. The same man who controlled Kari’s access to money, to friends, to autonomy during the marriage continued to control her access to her own children after her death. The instrument changed. The dynamic did not.
He moved the girls to Kerrville that summer, six hours from Waco, six hours from the Dulins, into his parents’ home, Oscar and Barbara Baker. Before his trial, he transferred custody to them. A preemptive move. If the jury convicted him, the girls would already be where he wanted them, with people who would keep his story alive.
From prison, after the conviction, Matt gave an interview to the Waco Tribune-Herald. He expressed no remorse. He blamed his attorney, his mistress, the judge, the Dulins. He maintained his innocence. And he characterized the Dulins’ fight for custody as an attack on him. “As soon as they used them as pawns in a game to hurt me,” he said, “that brought out the protectiveness in me.”
The protectiveness. From a man serving 65 years for smothering the children’s mother with a pillow.
180 Calls
Linda Dulin is a speech communications instructor at McLennan Community College. Her husband Jim was a quiet man, a churchgoer, a grandfather. They are not the kind of people who hire private investigators and file wrongful death suits and call press conferences. They became those people because no one else was going to do it.
About ten days after Kari’s funeral, Linda’s three sisters told her something they had kept secret during Kari’s marriage. Matt had made sexual advances toward young women over the years. Multiple women. Multiple congregations. The sisters had said nothing while Kari was alive. Now they told Linda everything.
Then the phone bills arrived. Matt and Kari were on the Dulins’ family plan. Linda saw the calls to Kari’s number. One hundred and eighty calls after her death. Seventeen in a single day. All answered. Investigation revealed that the person answering was Vanessa Bulls. Matt had given his dead wife’s phone to the woman he’d been sleeping with before her body was cold.
The Dulins hired Bill Johnston, a former federal prosecutor, and two retired investigators. Johnston’s team began pulling at the threads Hewitt police had never touched. They talked to women in congregations where Matt had served over the years. A pattern of predation emerged. They found out about the Bulls. They learned that a jewelry store clerk had seen Matt and a young woman looking at rings weeks after the funeral.
Johnston filed a wrongful death lawsuit on behalf of the Dulins. The lawsuit forced open the case that Hewitt police had sealed. Texas Ranger Matt Cawthon joined the investigation. In September 2006, five months after Kari’s death, her body was exhumed.
The autopsy was limited by decomposition. The cause of death was changed from suicide to undetermined. But toxicology found Ambien in her muscle tissue. Kari had no prescription for Ambien. The family computer showed Matt had searched for the drug online.
Bulls was interviewed repeatedly over the next three years. She lied every time. She denied the affair. She denied knowing anything about Kari’s death. She told police she had only started dating Matt after Kari died, that there was nothing wrong with that. She lied in 2006. She lied again in January 2009. She lied because Matt had sent her the lyrics to a song called “Dirty Little Secret” with the line: “Don’t tell anyone or you will just be another regret.” She lied because she was afraid of him.
It was not until prosecutors subpoenaed her before a grand jury and granted her testimonial immunity that she finally broke. Prosecutor Crawford Long asked the question nobody had asked her in exactly the right way before: “Did Matt ever tell you anything about Kari’s death?”
“Yes,” she said. “He said, ‘I killed her for you.’”
Long would later describe her testimony as “a nuclear bomb.”
At trial, Bulls testified to everything. The planning. The chloroform. The Ambien taken from Linda Dulin’s house. The handcuffs. The pillow. Matt’s description of Kari’s eyes opening. She said he told her the details once, shortly after the murder, and said he never wanted to speak of it again. He recounted it, she testified, as casually as if he were telling a story around a campfire. And this, from when the Bulls tried to break up with him afterward: “He became irate. He said, ‘I killed my wife for you, and now you’re leaving?’”
When she told him to turn himself in, he called a month later, his voice completely normal. “I miss you,” he said. She told him again. He said, “God has forgiven me.”
The jury convicted Matt Baker of murder in January 2010. Seven days of testimony. Seven and a half hours of deliberation. Baker showed no emotion when the verdict was read. He was sentenced to 65 years.
At sentencing, prosecutor Susan Shafer told the jury something that stayed with everyone in the courtroom. It was not about the murder. It was about what came after. Baker’s daughters, she said, were asleep in the house the night he killed their mother. And afterward, he thought no more of them than to erase Kari’s legacy by convincing them she didn’t love them enough to stay and raise them. That she committed suicide.
Linda Dulin addressed her former son-in-law directly. “You took her from us, Matt. You discarded her like she was yesterday’s trash. And you left so many other victims.”
As deputies led him out, Baker turned to his mother. “Love you, Mom,” he said. “Take care of Kensi and Grace.”
By then, he had been taking care of them for nearly four years.
The Inheritance
Here is what Kensi and Grace Baker inherited from their father after his conviction.
They inherited a dead mother whose photographs had been removed from the walls of her own home within weeks of her funeral. They inherited a version of that mother in which she was lazy, depressed, incapable, a woman who chose to leave her children. They inherited paternal grandparents who told them their father was innocent and their maternal grandparents were evil. They inherited monthly visits to a maximum-security prison, four hours on Saturdays and Sundays, where their father talked about funny things that happened on his cellblock, and they ate candy bars and drank Cokes and kept it light.
They inherited a worldview in which a jury verdict, a murder conviction, an exhaustive investigation, an exhumed body, and a toxicology report that found drugs their mother had never been prescribed were all part of a conspiracy orchestrated by Linda and Jim Dulin.
Grace was five when Kari died. She had no independent memory of her mother. Everything she knew about Kari Baker, she learned from the man who killed her and the family that shielded him.
Kensi was ten. She had memories. But for five years, every adult in Kensi’s daily life told her the same story: your mother was troubled, your father is innocent, the people trying to take you away from us are the real threat. By the time Kensi testified at the custody hearing, she was brainwashed by what she had been taught. She described her mother’s death as an accidental overdose with the certainty of someone who has heard the story so many times it seems like something she remembers.
Ferguson and McLachlan found this pattern across every case they examined. They called it “dominating the death narrative.” The perpetrator does not just deceive the police. He captures the household, the children’s understanding of reality, and the victim’s memory. The control tactics he used during the relationship, isolation, discrediting, narrative manipulation, continue after her death. The only difference is that she is no longer present to contradict him.
The court-appointed adviser who studied both homes documented what she found. Matt Baker and his parents continued to blame the Dulins for his incarceration. There was no acknowledgment of Kari as a victim. There was no space in the household for the girls to grieve their mother as a murdered woman. The adviser described the environment as “unhealthy.” She recommended that the girls be moved.
At the custody trial, the attorney representing the children urged the jury not to disrupt the girls’ lives. “If these kids aren’t broken,” she said, “you don’t have to fix them. Don’t break it. Don’t fix it.”
The Dulins’ attorney asked the question that cut through everything else. Where, in this household, was Kari? Where was the evidence that anyone in this home had ever said anything good about their mother?
Silence.
Ten of twelve jurors voted to transfer custody to the Dulins. The girls were ordered to have no contact with their father. Kensi cried. She was being taken from the only reality she knew.
In the months that followed, the Dulins family participated in an intensive reunification therapy program. They did not try to replace the Bakers. They did not try to erase Kensi’s memories or force a narrative. Linda Dulin told a reporter that all she wanted was for the girls to be teenagers. “We never, ever want them to feel like they have to choose who to love,” she said.
Months later, Jim Dulin sat in his living room in Woodway and listened to Kensi and Grace laughing in another room with Linda. He had spent five years in court, first fighting to prove his daughter was murdered, then fighting to get his granddaughters back from the family of the man who did it.
He described the sound of his granddaughters laughing as a symphony.
The Pattern
The Baker case is not unusual.
In Jacksonville, Florida, in January 1993, a 23-year-old computer analyst named Bonnie Haim failed to show up for work. Her husband, Michael, told police they had argued the previous night, and Bonnie had driven away, leaving behind their three-year-old son, Aaron. He placed her purse in a dumpster. He parked her car in a long-term lot at the Jacksonville airport. He told people she had been “sad lately.” For twenty-two years, that was the story. The system treated Bonnie as a missing person, not a murder victim, because Michael had given them a narrative that fit what a missing person looked like.
Aaron, the three-year-old, told investigators something different. He told them his daddy shot his mommy and threw the gun in a river. He said it consistently, to multiple adults, over several years. He was three. Nobody treated his account as evidence.
In 1999, a judge terminated Michael’s parental rights, ruling that Aaron was at “serious risk of abuse” because he was the only witness. But without a body, no criminal charges came. Michael moved to North Carolina and lived as a free man for another decade. Aaron was adopted and changed his name.
In 2005, Aaron won a $26.3 million wrongful death judgment against his father. He eventually acquired the family home on Dolphin Avenue. In December 2014, while excavating an old swimming pool in the backyard, he discovered a human skull. DNA confirmed it was Bonnie’s.
She had been buried in the yard the entire time. Michael Haim was arrested and charged with murder in 2015, twenty-two years after he told police his wife had driven away.
In Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, Julie Jensen died in December 1998 from ethylene glycol poisoning and suffocation. Her husband Mark told their sons, ages eight and three, that she had committed suicide. Julie had anticipated her own death. She had given her neighbor a sealed letter with instructions to deliver it to the police if anything happened to her. In it, she wrote that she was not suicidal, that she loved her boys, and that Mark should be the first suspect.
Mark Jensen’s defense, maintained for more than a decade through multiple trials and appeals and a trip to the U.S. Supreme Court, was that Julie had killed herself and crafted the letter to frame him as an act of revenge. His family launched a website calling Julie a “bad mother and a crazed lunatic.” The prosecutor noted that during the period when Julie was slowly being poisoned, Mark would prop her up in bed while she could barely breathe so that the children would see her sick and unstable.
At sentencing, Jensen’s sons wrote letters defending their father. They described him as supportive and loyal. They had spent their entire adolescence inside a narrative in which their mother had tried to destroy their father from beyond the grave.
In Bolingbrook, Illinois, police sergeant Drew Peterson told investigators in 2004 that his third wife, Kathleen Savio, had accidentally drowned in a dry bathtub. Savio had filed orders of protection. She had told family members she feared Peterson would kill her and make it look like an accident. A coroner’s jury ruled the death accidental. Peterson’s colleagues in the Bolingbrook police department, the same officers who responded to domestic calls at his home, rarely filed reports. His second wife later testified that police came to the house but never documented anything because they were friends with Drew.
It took three years and the disappearance of Peterson’s fourth wife, Stacy, to force a reexamination. A second autopsy found injuries consistent with a struggle and signs that Savio had been held underwater.
Four cases, including Baker’s. Four dead women. Four perpetrators who maintained a false narrative for years, in some cases decades. Four sets of children who grew up inside a story that was designed, from the first hour after the murder, to protect their father and erase their mother.
Each case illustrates a different mechanism of postmortem control. Haim used the abandonment script: she left. Jensen used narrative reversal: he took his wife’s own protective measures, her letter, her warnings, and recast them as evidence of her pathology. Peterson used institutional capture: his professional identity as a police officer ensured that the people investigating his wife’s death were his friends.
Matt Baker used all three. He told his daughters their mother had abandoned them through suicide. He weaponized Kari’s genuine grief over Kassidy as proof of her instability. And he used his position as a minister, a moral authority in a close-knit religious community, to ensure that the people around him took his version of events on faith.
What It Steals
The question that matters most in the Baker case is not whether justice was done. Matt Baker is in prison. The jury got it right. The Dulins won custody. Linda Dulin forgave her son-in-law at sentencing, not for his sake but for her granddaughters’.
The question that matters is what was taken from Kensi and Grace Baker in the five years between their mother’s murder and the custody verdict, and whether it can ever be fully returned.
Grace was five when Kari died. She has no narrative memory of her mother that was not supplied by someone else. For five years, someone else was her father and his parents. The mother Grace was given was a woman who chose to leave. A woman too damaged to stay. A woman who loved a dead baby more than the living children standing in front of her.
That is not a memory. It is a script. And it was written by the man who made sure Kari could never offer a competing version.
Kensi, who was ten, had real memories. But for five years, those memories existed inside an environment where every adult in her life insisted that her mother’s death was not a murder. Where her maternal grandparents were described as persecutors. Where photographs of her mother had been removed from the walls and replaced with photographs of another woman, before the flowers on the grave had wilted. By the time Kensi testified at the custody hearing, she described her mother’s death as an accidental overdose with the certainty of someone who has heard the story so many times it has become indistinguishable from what she remembers.
For a child, postmortem coercive control means growing up without an accurate picture of who you really lost. How much they loved you. What was special about them, and what the two of you have in common.
It means grieving a fiction. And it means that the eventual arrival of the truth does not feel like liberation. It feels like a second loss. The mother you were mourning, the depressed woman who left, didn’t exist. The mother who did exist loved you and was murdered for trying to hold your family together. You have to grieve her all over again, this time without the story you had been given to make sense of her absence.
This is what it steals. Not just a life. A memory. Not just a mother. The possibility of knowing who she was.
Five days before she was killed, Kari Baker wrote a prayer in her Bible asking God to protect her from harm. Her daughters did not read those words for years. By the time they did, they had spent half their lives believing she chose to leave them.
Matt Baker is serving a 65-year sentence at the Michael Unit in Anderson County, Texas. He will be eligible for parole in December 2039. He maintains his innocence.
Kensi and Grace Baker were raised by their maternal grandparents. Jim Dulin died in November 2014. Linda Dulin remains close to both granddaughters.
In 2019, Kari’s brother Adam and his wife Becky named their daughter Evelyn Kari Dulin.
References
Ferguson, C., & McLachlan, F. (2023). Continuing coercive control after intimate partner femicide: The role of detection avoidance and concealment. Feminist Criminology, 18(4), 495-521. https://doi.org/10.1177/15570851231189531
McLachlan, F., & Ferguson, C. (2024). Rates and features of detection avoidance in intimate partner femicide in Australia. Homicide Studies. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/10887679241233980
Stark, E., & Hester, M. (2019). Coercive control: Update and review. Violence Against Women, 25(1), 81-104. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801218816191
Stark, E. (2007). Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life. Oxford University Press.
If you or someone you know is in danger, please get in touch with the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, available 24 hours a day.
As always, thank you for reading this issue of The Mind Detective. If you enjoyed it, please pass it along to a true-crime-following friend! See you next week.
Joni E. Johnston, Psy.D., is a forensic psychologist, licensed private investigator, and author of Serial Killers: 101 Questions True Crime Fans Ask. She writes about crime, psychology, and the legal system at The Mind Detective.
This tragic story is a devastatingly reflection of our culture.