KERRVILLE — Matt Baker was shopping for pierced earrings for his two daughters, not looking for an engagement ring for another woman days after his wife died, Baker told the Tribune-Herald this week.

Baker, a 36-year-old Baptist minister and former chaplain at the Waco Center for Youth, did not kill his wife, Kari, and was not having an affair with a woman who attended his church near Lorena, he said.

Baker and his attorney, Guy James Gray, are taking their case public, saying that the evidence to support his arrest in September in his wife’s death is built on rumor, innuendo and shaky assumptions.

“All that is in the public right now is the affidavit that went with the arrest warrant,” Gray said. “Anyone who just reads that affidavit forms the inescapable conclusion that he is guilty and should be locked up for life. We either sit back on our haunches and let that be the only thing out there, or bring Matt forward and let him talk, and our choice is to be wide open.”

Baker was arrested in September in the April 7, 2006, death of his wife, a Hewitt teacher whose death initially was ruled suicide by sleeping pill overdose.

After spending a few weeks in the McLennan County Jail, Baker returned to his hometown of Kerrville, changed lawyers and is going on the offensive to answer the charges that he and his attorney say are akin to a house of cards.

Besides sitting down for interviews with the Waco Tribune-Herald and San Antonio Express-News, Baker talked this week to network news magazine shows “48 Hours” and “20/20.”

At Baker’s side is Gray. No stranger to publicity, Gray is the 58-year-old former district attorney in Jasper who prosecuted three men for dragging James Byrd Jr. to his death in June 1998, a case that generated international headlines, books and a movie.

Gray moved to Kerrville three years ago after serving as district attorney in Jasper for 25 years and making an unsuccessful run for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in 2004.

Gray is pushing the Baker media tour, saying no questions are off-limits. Baker is not guilty, and people shouldn’t jump to the wrong conclusions about him, Gray says. Baker dodges no questions and has quick and ready answers.

“The officer who filled out this arrest affidavit took a lot of unrelated facts and weaved them into a story,” Gray said. “I think if you ask about each individual fact that he weaved in there, I think you will find that there is a different version. He (Baker) is answering the allegations that are put in that affidavit.”

Sitting a murder defendant down with the news media is unusual enough. However, Gray said Baker also is willing to take a law enforcement- administered polygraph test, appear on the record before a grand jury or talk to any police officer or prosecutor.

“I won’t defend a guy who won’t talk,” Gray said. “If we ever get into the courthouse either civilly or criminally, he will be on the witness stand or get another lawyer.”

Baker was teaching at Kerrville Tivy High School and living with his two daughters, Kensi, 11, and Grace, 7, when he was arrested. He has since lost his job and moved in with his parents in Kerrville.

As a small-town boy who grew up to be a preacher, Baker says he can’t find a ready explanation for why in the past two decades a man of God has lost a wife and a young child, been arrested for murder, suspected of having an affair, accused but later cleared of sexually assaulting a young woman while a Baylor student, downloading porn on church computers and sexually harassing others in the workplace.

Baker says his wife never fully recovered from the death in 1999 of their second daughter, Kassidy, who had a brain tumor but was said to be improving after surgery. He said his wife was depressed but hid it well. She abused sleeping pills through the years, but he didn’t think she would kill herself, he said.

Kari’s friends and family members say she had turned the corner in her grief over Kassidy’s death and was always looking and planning ahead. They say she was excited about a job interview she had the day of her death but had told her counselor that she thought Baker was having an affair and was going to kill her after she found crushed pills in his briefcase.

According to the arrest affidavit, Baker told Kari that kids at the Waco Center for Youth sometimes spit out their medicine, and that’s where the pills came from. The center has a strict medication policy, and Baker was not there when the students took their pills, the records state.

Baker had the only key to his office door, according to the affidavit, and reportedly told Hewitt police a different story, saying that the pills his wife saw in the briefcase were Kari’s and that she must have hidden them there.

During the interview in his lawyer’s office, Baker said Kari was grading papers less than a week before she died and came out of the bedroom with a toothpick container in her hand. The small container contained a powdery substance and she said she found it in his briefcase while searching for a pen.

He said she asked if the kids at the youth center could have put it in his bag. He said no but offered to take it to the Hewitt Police Department to have it analyzed. Instead, Baker said, she washed it down the sink and threw away the bottle.

Kari told her counselor, Joanne Bristol, on April 4, 2006, that she found the pills and thought Baker was going to kill her. She also told the therapist that she thought Baker was having an affair, according to the arrest affidavit. Baker said his wife never accused him of an affair.

“I don’t know what she said to the counselor,” Baker said. “It was curious to me that my wife didn’t tell me she said that. The first time I heard (that Kari thought he was going to kill her) was when the counselor told me at the (funeral home) viewing. She came to the viewing, hugged my neck and said, ‘I am so sorry, so sorry. I didn’t see this coming. I knew Kari was depressed but I didn’t push the issue because if I had told Kari that she was depressed she wouldn’t have come back to see me.’ “

Baker said he knows no reason why his wife would say that. He acknowledges that he gave his wife’s cell phone to a woman at his church shortly after Kari’s death.

They were friends only, Baker said, adding that she was going through a tough divorce and they talked regularly on the phone as friends.

“It was stupid,” he said. “It really was stupid for me to do that. But she was a friend, and she was one of the few people at that point in time who didn’t accuse and who didn’t look at me strange, if that makes sense.”

He and Kari met when they both worked at a summer camp for children at First Baptist Church in Waco. Their first date was dinner and a movie, When a Man Loves a Woman. He said they held hands after he asked permission.

They married in August 1994, and Kensi was born in 1996. Kassidy was born November 1997 and was not sick a day of her young life until her first birthday, when she threw up, Baker said.

She underwent surgery for a brain tumor and was undergoing chemotherapy, he said. She died at home, found late at night by Baker, who had checked on her just minutes before, he said.

“Kassidy’s death was tragic, and Kari never did fully move beyond the death of Kassidy, couldn’t let go of Kassidy,” Baker said. “It consumed a lot of who she was. She had the ability to go to work and put on a face at work but acted differently at home. I guess to my fault I protected her in that. I guarded that in her, to not let that be evident.”

Baker and Gray display writings from a book Baker calls his wife’s journal and scribblings in her family Bible. Some written soon after Kassidy’s death indicate Kari wanted to die and join her daughter.

Kari’s mother, Linda Dulin, a communications instructor at McLennan Community College, said the writings were nothing more than symbols of the normal grieving process. They were written more than eight years ago and didn’t reflect Kari’s thoughts or frame of mind at the time of her death.

“Eight years ago, her grief was raw and she was grieving like any mother would,” Dulin said. “If she wrote that — I have never seen it — it was written in missing her daughter while showing her faith, because Kari believed that one day she would see Kassidy again in eternity. But she was not planning to go there until natural causes sent her. Is that all they’ve got? A grieving mother, eight years ago? Come on.”

Dulin and her husband, Jim, convinced the Hewitt police to reopen the investigation into Kari’s death and filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Baker. Kari’s body was exhumed, and an autopsy was performed for the first time.

While the pathologist detected sleeping pills in her system, the results came back with an unknown cause of death, which won’t help potential prosecution in Baker’s case. After Baker’s arrest, the Dulins dropped their civil lawsuit, and Baker’s case is now pending in the McLennan County district attorney’s office.

“I want very badly to give you the evidence refuting what Matt Baker and his attorney are saying, and we do have it,” Dulin said. “However, a touche in the paper is not what is in the best interest of this case. I want justice. That means I am going to let Crawford Long, the prosecutor in the McLennan County DA’s office, do his job. Matt will be indicted and there will be a trial. That will be the time to respond to Mr. Gray and expose Matt’s lies and crime.”

Long declined comment on the pending case.

The tragedy may have driven a wedge between the Dulins and their granddaughters. Baker says they don’t want to come to Waco to visit their grandparents but have been ordered by a court to do so.

Baker said he, his parents and the girls were driving home from church last week and talking about Baker’s upcoming media interviews when his older daughter spoke up.

“She said, ‘When the truth comes out and everybody knows the truth, will Jim and Linda (Dulin) go to jail?’ We all looked at each other and said, ‘No, that is not something that will happen.’ That kind of tells you how the girls feel.”

On the night Kari died, Baker said they both drank a pre-mixed bottled drink, a Fuzzy Navel, then went to the Waco Family Y for Kensi’s swim lesson. Kari threw up at the Y and said she needed to get some air. When they got home, she threw up again, he said.

After the girls got ready for bed, Kari took a bath and went to sleep in the tub, he said. Later, she asked him to get a movie and some M&Ms and to fill up the car with gas because they had errands the next day. She also drank another Fuzzy Navel, he said, agreeing that some might consider that strange since she had thrown up twice that night.

“It was kind of odd, but she was exhausted and a lot of Kari was anxiety,” he said. “She suffered tremendously from anxiety, the highs and the lows. She could go high and go very, very low, high stress. That was a very stressful day. If you have a job interview, it is stressful. I thought more from that standpoint.”

He left the house at 11:11 p.m., saying he remembers because he has an uncanny sense for numbers and time.

When he got home, the bedroom door was locked, he said, adding that he knocked and got no response before he picked it open with a small screwdriver.

He said when he got inside, he saw his wife’s nude body lying on the bed.

“I remember the eerie feeling when I walked in the room and found Kassidy. That same eerie feeling filled that room when I unlocked the door and took that first step in, that something’s not right, this is not right,” Baker said.

He said he didn’t think immediately that she killed herself.

“I never really thought that she would kill herself. I never went that far in my thought process. She had taken medicine that scared me a little bit, but never did I think she would do it deliberately to hurt herself.”

He said he called for help while putting his wife’s clothes on her.

“I did not want them to see her naked,” he said. “She would not have wanted them to see her naked, so I protected her in that.”

The arrest affidavit alleges that a crime-scene expert hired by the Dulins in their civil lawsuit believes Kari was not nude at the time of her death. Authorities say Baker may have told that story to explain why her body was cold to the touch.

The expert reported that it would take longer than the scenario described in Baker’s story for the body to become cold and for lividity, or pooling of blood in the body, to set in.

Officials also say that an abrasion on Kari’s nose and bruising on her lips reportedly seen on crime-scene photos are consistent with someone pressing a pillow down on her face to suffocate her after she fell unconscious.

Gray counters that he has seen no photos or paramedic reports to indicate abrasions. Baker said he saw none, but both men say they could have come from paramedics’ attempts to resuscitate her.

Gray also said there likely would be fibers in her throat from the pillow or her blood or saliva on a pillow. He knows of no evidence to support that, he said.

Baker said he saw a bottle of Unisom — an over-the-counter sleeping aid — and a note near the phone, but he didn’t take the time to read it.

Only later, he said, did he realize that officials found an unsigned, typewritten note.

Officials — and Gray, the grizzled former prosecutor — say it is extremely unusual for a suicide victim to leave a typewritten note with no signature.

“At that point in time, I didn’t really process that,” Baker said. “I don’t know where she would have typed it, when she typed it, how long she had it in her possession.”

twitherspoon@wacotrib.com

757-5737

—— TIMELINE OF EVENTS ——

* July 31, 1995: Matt and Kari Baker are married.

* April 8, 2006: Kari Baker, 31, is found dead at the couple’s Hewitt home. Justice of the Peace Billy Martin rules her death a suicide after consulting with the Hewitt police. No autopsy is ordered.

* July 10, 2006: At the request of Kari Baker’s parents and Hewitt police, Martin orders her body exhumed for autopsy.

* July 31, 2006: Kari Baker’s parents, James and Linda Dulin, file a wrongful death lawsuit against Matt Baker, alleging he killed their daughter.

* Aug. 29, 2007: Martin conducts an inquest into Baker’s death.

* Sept. 18: Martin changes his ruling in the death from suicide to undetermined, matching the autopsy results.

* Sept. 21: Matt Baker is arrested in his wife’s death.