In the months after Kari Baker’s death in April 2006, her husband, Matt Baker, focused on moving forward with his mistress, Vanessa Bulls, according to testimony Thursday in his murder trial.

Two weeks after Kari Baker’s death, all of the pictures in the Baker home of Kari and her two daughters had been replaced by pictures of Bulls with the Bakers’ daughters, said Jennifer Monsey, who identified herself as a close friend of the Bakers.

Also, a computer expert testified that two months after his wife’s death, Matt Baker, a former Baptist minister, had e-mailed a travel resort in Fiji to book a vacation for himself and his new fiancee. When making other travel arrangements after his wife’s death, Baker listed his password as “Vanessa,” the expert testified.

Matt Baker, 38, is on trial for murder in Judge Ralph Strother’s 19th State District Court. Prosecutors Crawford Long and Susan Shafer have called 17 witnesses so far. They included law enforcement, autopsy and toxicology personnel, computer experts and friends of the Bakers.

The third day of testimony will begin at 8:30 a.m. today.

Baker is accused of killing his 31-year-old wife with a mixture of alcohol and sleeping pills and smothering her face with a pillow. Baker’s attorney, Guy James Gray, acknowledged to jurors Wednesday that his client was having an affair at the time of Kari Baker’s death.

Matt Baker had previously denied the affair.

Bulls is expected to testify in the trial after Waco’s 54th State District Judge Matt Johnson granted Bulls’ request that she would not be charged with a crime as a result of any information she provides in court. Shafer told jurors Wednesday that Bulls will tell them “exactly” how Matt Baker killed his wife.

The first witness called by the prosecution Thursday was McLennan County sheriff’s deputy Ben Toombs, who was working as a detective with the Hewitt Police Department at the time of Kari Baker’s death.

Toombs testified that he was brought onto the case two months after Kari Baker’s body was buried, when her parents, James and Linda Dulin, had persuaded officials to reopen the investigation.

Kari Baker’s death had originally been ruled a suicide, and an autopsy was not performed until three months after her death.

Toombs told jurors he was reluctant to take the case because his father was, at the time, a deacon at Crossroads Baptist Church in Lorena, where Matt Baker served as pastor. He said he “argued” with his captain about him taking the case.

“I didn’t want to be involved in the case . . . because of my parents’ involvement,” Toombs said. “I knew most everyone at that church, and I had met both Matt and Kari before then, and I just didn’t think it was a good situation.”

Toombs said his captain did not allow him to free himself of the investigation.

Texas Ranger Matt Cawthon testified in a previous hearing that he thought the investigation was mishandled by Hewitt police from the beginning, and a lot of the evidence that officials had to work with was circumstantial.

Later in the afternoon, Noel Kersh, a computer forensics examiner with Houston-based Pathway Forensics, testified that he analyzed images taken from Matt Baker’s computers at Crossroads Baptist Church and Waco Center for Youth, where Baker served as youth chaplain.

Those images, Kersh said, revealed that in March 2006, Matt Baker had visited dozens of prescription drug Web sites. The purpose of some of those sites, Kersh said, was to purchase prescription drugs, and the sites were not set up for a person wanting to do research on medications.

Mark Henry, the CEO of what he called the “Internet pharmacy fulfillment company” Secure.Rx-cart.com, testified that in March 2006 Baker had visited the Web site and had placed a bottle of Ambien, a prescription sleep aid, in the site’s “shopping cart,” which is the step before making a purchase on a Web site.

Because Kersh did not have the computers’ hard drives, he said he did not know whether Matt Baker purchased Ambien from Henry’s site or any of the other purchase-only sites that he visited. Gray said there is no financial record of his client purchasing anything from any of these sites.

Testimony from the Waco Center for Youth’s head of information technology revealed that Baker had switched computers with his secretary shortly after his wife’s death. That computer then went missing three days later.

In his analysis of the computer records, Kersh testified that he found that in March 2006 Baker had run a Google search for “overdose by sleeping pill.”

In December 2007, Baker told the Tribune-Herald that he was researching Ambien and other sleeping pills because he was concerned that his wife was taking too many each night. The defense has said that Kari Baker was depressed at the time of her death and still mourning the loss of the couple’s middle daughter, Kassidy, who died seven years prior to Kari Baker.

Dr. Reade Quinton, the Dallas-based medical examiner who performed the autopsy on Kari Baker’s body, and Dr. Chris Heartsill, a Dallas-based toxicologist, both testified Thursday that they could not determine what killed her because her blood had been replaced with embalming fluid and her body was somewhat decayed.

Drugs that would have been consistent with Ambien and the sleeping pill Unisom were found in her muscles, Heartsill said, but there was no way that he could tell whether the amounts found would have been lethal.

equinn@wacotrib.com

757-5748

RELATED SEARCHES

• Mistress testifies that Matt Baker told her how he killed his wife