The parents of a Hewitt teacher who allege their Baptist minister son-in-law killed their daughter will get to spend more time with their two granddaughters, a judge ruled Thursday.

James and Linda Dulin now can have overnight visits with their granddaughters the second weekend of each month, beginning today, 170th State District Judge Jim Meyer ruled, modifying previous visitation orders. The Dulins claim that their son-in-law, Matt Baker, has tried to cut them out of his daughters’ lives since the April death of the children’s mother, Kari Baker.

The Dulins filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Baker in July, alleging that their 31-year-old daughter did not commit suicide, as local officials ruled at the time without ordering an autopsy. The suit alleges she was killed by her husband, who made her death appear to be suicide by overdose of sleeping pills.

The Dulins testified during Thursday’s two-hour hearing that they find it increasingly difficult to maintain contact with their granddaughters, ages 10 and 6, since Baker moved with them to his hometown of Kerrville to be closer to his family. They said their close relationship with the girls is threatened because of the distance and Baker’s influence.

“They love their father and he has poisoned them against us,” Linda Dulin said. “We have very limited contact now and our relationship has changed.”

The Dulins have been allowed to visit the girls during six-hour stretches in Kerrville on certain weekends, but had no overnight stay privileges. They testified Baker has not informed them of the girls’ school functions and other activities that want to share in.

“He was excluding them from our lives. I want them to be a part of their mother’s family,” Linda Dulin told the judge.

Linda Dulin said she discovered that Baker had given Kari’s cell phone to another woman within a week of her death. Dulin said she learned this when she called her daughter’s number to hear her voice again.

The cell phone was in the Dulins’ names, so Dulin said she could access billing information. Baker and the woman logged 6,000 minutes, talking to each other on the phone within the first 25 days after Kari Baker’s death, Linda Dulin said.

“Within a week of Kari’s death, Matt told me that the girls were doing very well and that Gracie had already moved on and was looking for a new mother,” Linda Dulin said.

Hewitt police reopened the investigation into Kari Baker’s death in July at the Dulins’ request. Authorities exhumed Baker’s body for autopsy and wrote in an affidavit to support the exhumation that “suspicious circumstances before and after” Kari Baker’s death led to renewed interest in the case.

The autopsy report said that the cause and manner of Baker’s death remain “undetermined.” Pathologists found traces of a diet pill, an antihistamine and a sleep aid in her system. However, because of embalming, accurate blood concentration levels of the drugs could not be determined, the reports said.

In other testimony Thursday, Kari Baker’s cousin, Lindsey Pick, said she visited Matt Baker and the girls at their home in Hewitt about a month after her cousin died. She said she was shocked to find that every photo of Kari Baker, Matt Baker’s wedding ring and anything in that house reminiscent of the girls’ mother had been put away in a box.

However, Pick said, there was a photo on the refrigerator of “the woman Matt was having an affair with.”

“There was nothing there to remind the children of their mother at all,” she said.

She asked how the girls were doing and Baker reportedly replied, “Some of us aren’t able to move on, right Kensi?”

Baker, who teaches in Kerrville schools, testified that the girls are aware of the lawsuit their grandparents filed against him because a story about it ran in the Kerrville paper and some of their classmates told them about it.

Baker, former chaplain at the Waco Center for Youth, said the girls don’t want to spend the night with their grandparents because they fear them.

“I have not shut them out,” Baker said. “But when my children look me in the face and say, ‘Please don’t make us spend the night,’ that affects me.”

Baker looked to his attorneys, Gerald Villarrial and Spring Thummel, for objections when the Dulins’ attorney, Darren Obenoskey, asked about his alleged mistress and if he gave her his wife’s cell phone. Meyer sustained the objections.

Obenoskey, who charged that Baker turned his daughters against the Dulins, showed him a copy of a school paper the older girl wrote in December 2005 in which she said her favorite place to visit is her grandparents’ house.

“Now, less than a year after your wife’s death, what you are saying is that they are afraid to go to that very same house?” Obenoskey asked. “And you didn’t have anything to do with that?”

Lee Carter, a Waco psychologist hired by the Dulins to develop a psychological profile of Baker for their civil suit, told the judge that he senses that Baker has waged a “rather aggressive campaign” to alienate the girls from their mother’s side of the family.

No trial date has been set in the civil wrongful death suit, which is pending in Waco’s 19th State District Court.

twitherspoon@wacotrib.com

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