EDITOR’S NOTE: On Thursday, Dec. 6, 2007, veteran Tribune-Herald staff writer Tommy Witherspoon sat down for an interview with Matt Baker in the Kerrville office of his noted attorney, Guy James Gray, to discuss charges that Baker killed his wife, Kari, at their Hewitt home on April 7, 2006.

Gray made it clear at the outset that no questions were off-limits.

Baker was arrested in September in the death of his wife, a Hewitt educator whose death initially was ruled suicide by sleeping pill overdose. In the interview below, Baker discusses what he says was his wife’s continuing depression over the death of their daughter Kassidy, dismisses allegations he was having an adulterous affair and questions the arrest affidavit, evidence cited in it and the forces behind efforts to convict him of murder, including his in-laws, Jim and Linda Dulin.

In this slightly abridged interview, Baker and Gray also discuss allegations concerning computers, pornography and overdoses, as well as questions concerning why Baker was seen in a jewelry store shortly after his wife’s death and whether he gave his late wife’s cell phone to a woman friend from church.

Q: Is there anything you wanted to say before we get started?

Baker: I appreciate you coming down to talk to me.

Q: I guess that is one of my questions. Why are you talking to me?

Gray: All that is in the public right now is the affidavit that went with the arrest warrant. Anyone who just reads that affidavit reaches the inescapable conclusion that he is guilty and should be locked up. We either sit back on our haunches and let that be the only thing out there, or bring Matt forward and let him talk. Our choice is to be wide open. There are no restrictions on your interview. You ask whatever questions you feel like are appropriate and we are wide open to you and all the other media too.

Q: Who have you talked to so far? Is “48 Hours” one?

Gray: “20/20” has been down. “48 Hours” has been down. The San Antonio Express, and you’re the next one.

Q: You talked about that Friday embargo. Are they running something this Friday? Is that why they embargoed it?

Gray: No, I promised “20/20” that I wouldn’t let anything loose until after the seventh. I don’t think they’re running anything on the seventh. It’s going to be the 21st or something, but I didn’t promise them anything after the seventh. On the San Antonio (paper) and the “48,” I’ve given my word that we wouldn’t talk about anything until the seventh. By Saturday that’s over with.

Q: Are you working since your arrest?

Baker: I am not working.

Q: Are you living with your parents?

Baker: I have moved in recently with my parents.

Q: And obviously the girls?

Baker: Yes, the girls.

Q: How old are they now?

Baker: They’re 7 and 11.

Q: Can I get their names?

Baker: Grace is 7. Kensi is 11.

Q: How are they? Talk about the girls a little bit.

Baker: Struggling. They understand part of it, don’t understand all of it. Worried. Stressed.

Q: What do they understand?

Baker: Well, when the arrest took place, they knew a lot beforehand, but when the arrest took place a little more had to be shared. You can’t hide it from sixth-graders. Everybody knows. Then entire town knows. They know what’s going on enough to, you know, at this point.

Q: You were dropped from the teacher list (in Kerrville)?

Baker: Correct.

Q: Would you be teaching if you could right now?

Baker: Uh, well, I don’t know. If none of this was going on, I would probably be teaching.

Q: Since all this started with the wrongful death lawsuit and the custody hearing, how are the girls with the Dulins now when they go visiting?

Baker: It’s interesting. Truly, the girls don’t want to go. They cry every time, “Please don’t make us.” But it’s a court-ordered visitation. They’re seeing counseling. They see a counselor before they go. They see the same counselor when they come back so they can talk about events, what was said, what was implied. One of the last things one did say to Kensi was — and this was hurtful to me — was Linda said, “I know you have hatred in your heart because I have hatred in my heart.” And that’s not good.

Q: So she says she knows she has hatred, but who does she know it’s toward?

Baker: Toward me. On Sunday morning on the way home from church, my parents and I all go to the same church. On our way home this last week, Kensi was asking, “48 Hours” was coming and all the interviewing was going on, she asked, “When the truth comes out and everybody knows the truth, will Jim and Linda have to go to jail?” And we all looked at each other and said, “No that’s not something that will happen.” That tells you how they feel.

Q: What church are you going to now?

Baker: Trinity Baptist Church here. It’s the church I grew up in.

Q: What do your parents do?

Baker: My dad’s retired and my mom worked at Tivy High School. She teaches media and technology. My dad was a contractor.

Q: Obviously you’re worried about the long-term effects on the girls. Do you think there’s any way it’s going to be fixed?

Baker: I really don’t know five years from now or 15 years from now what effect it will have on their lives. That’s hard. That’s why they’re in counseling. That’s why we’ve been in from the very beginning, why the counselor has been vital in this. But there’s no way it doesn’t have some effect on them, but I can’t tell you long-term.

Q: Go back and tell me how you met Kari and walk me through your relationship.

Baker: We met when we worked at a summer camp at First Baptist Waco. We were both on staff there. It was my second year, her first year. The first week of summer camp before the kids come, when you’re just going through training, we met then. Our first date was on May 19. We went to a movie and went out to eat. We went to see “When a Man Loves a Woman.” It was our movie. And we held hands that first date. I asked her if I could. We started dating after that, got engaged during that summer and got married Aug. 20 of that year.

Q: Were you in Baylor at that time?

Baker: I was at Baylor.

Q: And was she at Baylor too?

Baker: She was not at Baylor. She had been attending Texas Tech, but then stayed down here after that.

Q: What year was that?

Baker: ‘94. Aug. 20, 1994.

Q: So then obviously you have a baby?

Baker: Yes, Kensi is our first-born. We find out we’re pregnant around Christmastime. So Kensi’s our first and oldest. Kassidy was born in November ‘97.

Q: What was wrong with her?

Baker: Her first birthday, we had her party and she threw up that day. That was her first sign of even being sick up to that point. These are my wife’s journals she wrote to Kassidy. At her first birthday, she got sick that week. We went to the doctor I believe Monday and then finally Friday she was getting lethargic, wasn’t eating, wasn’t drinking. On that Friday we put her in the hospital, Hillcrest, for impending dehydration. That was what they put her in for. My mom was in the hospital with her and actually Jim Dulin was there when Kassidy had a seizure in my mom’s arms. And they did a spinal tap on her and they pulled out to see if she had meningitis, that was their first thought, I think. There was no fluid in her spinal tap and they knew something was wrong. They went to an MRI and found out she had a brain tumor. We went to Cook’s hospital in Fort Worth, had surgery a few days later. She almost died that night in pediatric ICU at Cook. They removed the tumor. As she came out of the surgical room, we got a chance to see her, to touch her. She held her hand up to us. We went to supper and came back and that was the start of a tremendous ordeal for us all night long. Her lungs and heart, the cavity for that was filling with fluid, so it was making the heart and lungs not work properly, so they were in that cycle of trying to get ahead of what was going on in her body. So she almost passed away a few times that night, and they kept saving her. She ends up 45 days in pediatric ICU. We transition from there for 45 more days in the transitional care unit because she had a trachea. So 45 days in transitional care, still at Cook, then we got to bring her home. We brought her home in February. She started chemotherapy at that time. We had nursing care that came in and helped us eight hours a day, so that was a tremendous help. We were doing chemotherapy during that time. We were home that weekend. It would have been March 22. That was the night the Academy Awards was on. I remember staying up that night to watch that. It was the Italian director that won for best director. I don’t remember what picture, but he stood on chairs and cheered. It was a Holocaust movie. I remember staying up to watch that. We had gone in to see Kassidy. She had had diarrhea that night, so my wife and I cleaned her up. My wife and I went to bed. I went up to check on them again. Both were doing fine at about 12 o’clock. Something didn’t let me go to sleep and at 12:09 I knew I needed to check again. I went in and checked on Kassidy and she wasn’t breathing. And so I immediately yelled for my wife to get up. I took her out of her bed and started CPR. We had the bag that fitted on top of the trachea so you could pump the oxygen in. I started CPR while my wife called 9-1-1. She passed away in our house that night.

Q: Did she have monitors on her?

Baker: She did not have monitors on her.

Q: Had she before?

Baker: We never really had monitors on her all the time. There were times in the hospital they had monitors on her, but she didn’t have to have them all the time. There was never a moment, even when the nursing care was there, that we had monitors on her all the time.

Q: Have you stopped to try to think as a man of God or as a thinking person why any of this has happened to you?

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

Q: So she was depressed from that day forward?

Baker: Well, it wasn’t all of a sudden, and it’s not depression as in what a lot of people think you have to be so solemn, asleep all the time. It wasn’t that. There were good moments and there were moments of “I want to be by myself, be left alone.”

Q: So you’re saying she was able to put on a face at work and with her friends? Because her friends are telling a different story. You’re aware of that.

Baker: Right. And I guess part of it is that truly Kari didn’t have very many deep friends. She really was a family person. And even her co-workers — I’ve heard them say, and this is the truth about them — they would invite her to go places and she wouldn’t go. She didn’t like to go out with other people. So there was never a deep friendship with them. There’s a couple of good friendships she had for a few years, but not a tremendous number.

Q: What about her mother?

Baker: She and her mother — the best description I could give there was co-dependence on each other. There’s a very strong co-dependence. Have to talk four, five, six times a day on the phone. Kari would have to get basically permission of where we could spend money, clothes to wear at age 30, 31. We would go shopping and she would try things on and I’d give her my opinion. She would keep tags on until Mom saw it. And then would keep it or take it back. So there was never a moment where she was out of the wings of her mom. And nothing she ever did satisfied her mom.

Q: Can you walk me through the night that she died now? Start with the day and then walk me through the evening.

Baker: That’s fine. I thought it was a typical morning. She had a job interview that day. It’s my day off from work. It’s my day to clean house, do laundry, do the dishes, all of that, and do grocery shopping.

Q: Let me stop you right there before I forget. Were you at Crossroads at this time??

Baker: I was at Crossroads Baptist Church.

Q: Full-time minister?

Baker: It’s bi-vocational, they call it. I was the senior pastor but it’s not a full-time salary. So I had a full-time chaplaincy job at Waco Center for Youth.

Q: Can you walk me through where you were at other churches?

Baker: I was at North Lake Baptist Church in Dallas. Before that I was at First Baptist Church Riesel. And that, I guess it’s considered full-time. And I was at Williams Creek Baptist Church in Axtell and Pecan Grove Baptist Church in Gatesville.

Q: All the time you had other jobs?

Baker: No, typically when I was preaching there I wouldn’t have other jobs. I was a full-time seminary student.

Q: And you went where to seminary?

Baker: Truett at Baylor.

Q: And when did you get out of that?

Baker: Um, 2000? Yeah, 2000.

Q: So you said Kari had a job interview (the day of her death). That’s another thing your adversaries, for lack of a better term, say she was looking forward to.

Baker: Looking forward to the future. Yeah, I’ve heard that.

Q: What do you want to say about that?

Baker: Well, she enjoyed teaching. We were preparing for her job interview and she had some ideas of what to present in the job interview. This would have been Midway Intermediate or Junior High. I think it was the junior high position. It was reading specialist, I believe that is what the position was. And we prepared this packet. We went to Kinko’s and prepared this color packet of all the stuff she could present and she didn’t present it. She came home with it, never handed it out. And I didn’t understand at that point why she wouldn’t have handed it out. We’d worked for about three weeks on it for the presentation and had spent $50 or $60 to have it in a notebook and have it all. And she brought it home and said, “I just really didn’t want to share it.” That was her comment. That was kind of weird for me.

Q: This was her idea of how to do the job?

Baker: How to do the job. She never presented it to them. And I don’t know if they were going to offer the job to her. I don’t know if she was truly ... I don’t know. We never had a chance to talk about it after that job interview.

Q: But apparently she told some people she felt good about it?

Baker: I don’t know who she talked to and said that to. She came home that day for lunch and changed clothes to get ready for the job interview, so we had lunch together that day. She heads out to the job interview and when she heads out I’m going to H-E-B to go grocery shopping. She is done with the interview and calls me on my cell phone to tell me she’s done. And, “Oh, great. How’d it go?” “It went well.” “What do you think?” And she says, “I don’t know. Until they call me, you don’t know on job interviews.” And I asked her where she was and she was on her way to Wal-Mart. And I told her, “I’m at H-E-B, what do you need me to get?” And she says, “I have to get something for myself. It’s personal.” And I thought, “Well, I’m already here. Why don’t you just let me get it?” And she said, “No, no, I’m already at Wal-Mart.” She said she was in the parking lot. And I said, “OK, I’ll meet you at home.” I’m home 30 or 45 minutes later. Come to find out later she also called her mom on the cell phone the same time, told her about the same thing. She was at Wal-Mart getting something personal.

Q: Did you ever figure out what that was?

Baker: There was never a receipt from Wal-Mart. Her checkbook was never used at Wal-Mart. So if she did buy something, it would have been with cash, if she did go to Wal-Mart.

Q: You have no idea what it was?

Baker: I have no idea where she went. I don’t know where she was. And so I came home, (had) supper at home, (then) I went back and picked up my daughters from school that afternoon. She was at home. Came back from that and Kensi had swim team practice that night at the Y. And we had a Fuzzy Navel drink. We each had one. We drove then to Waco Family Y. When we get there, my wife goes into the restroom. She came out of the restroom and Grace had gone in there with her and she had thrown up in the restroom.

Q: That Fuzzy Navel — was that something you fixed?

Baker: No. That’s a Bartles and Jaymes wine cooler. You know, already mixed. She throws up in the restroom. Comes out. Looks a little flush in the face, and we head in to take Kensi into swim team and, you know, the Waco Family Y, the way it is set up is the indoor pool, it’s stuffy in there. She didn’t want to stay in there. We got practice started. We walked out. We said hi to a few people in there. We walked back out and sat down on a couch in the air-conditioned part. The couch right in front of what was the old entrance. I don’t know if you are familiar where that is. There was a couch right there in the corridor. We sat there and she wasn’t feeling well, and I thought, “Well, let’s not work out, let me get you something to drink.” So I went and got her a 7-Up and I got Grace something to drink and myself something. I got her a Big Red and me a Dr Pepper. And we sat there the rest of the practice. A few people came out that were on the board of the swim team and saw us and talked to us.

Q: Did she stay and talk to a lady for an extended period of time?

Baker: At that point, when we sat out there, there were three different ladies that came out and talked to us at that time, but nothing more than about five minutes or so. I’m not sure of one of the women’s names, who works at one of the other schools as a substitute and said she had a long conversation, which didn’t take place. There was never a long conversation. We sat out there, and one of the ladies that came out said, “Well I looked at Kari and her eyes looked like she wasn’t feeling well.” Now, of course, they’re not saying that anybody would say that, so it’s, you know...

so we sat there throughout the rest of that time. We got back in our car to go home after practice. We stopped by — I don’t remember what the name of the pizza place is right there on the corner of Wal-Mart, on Hewitt Drive. And I went in to get that for supper for us, but that is only a lunch deal. So it was going to be thirty minutes to wait for them to cook us pizza, and I came back out to the car and my wife was asleep in the car. I knocked on the window, she rolled it down and said she wasn’t feeling well, let’s just go to McDonald’s, which made the kids probably happier because they could get a Happy Meal. So we drive across the street to McDonald’s and get Happy Meals. On the way home, my wife eats maybe two french fries. We get to the house, she immediately goes in and throws up in the toilet. At that point, I didn’t think anything other than she got a little carsick, because she gets carsick if she reads or if she does something like that. It didn’t dawn on me anything other than that at that point.

Q: So that was the second time she was throwing up?

Baker: That was her second time to throw up and I cleaned it up. She was going to take a bath. I get the girls in the bath, get their hair washed, get chlorine out of her hair, all those things. So we go through those steps getting ready for bed. Make sure they eat their supper, all of that. I’m in and out of the bedrooms, taking care of the kids, bedtime rituals. Their TVs go off at about 10 o’clock that night. I sing their songs, read their books at that time to them. Come back in the room, Kari wants another drink, so she has another one and I have a second one, another Fuzzy Navel each. She’s tired, she was in the bath, and at one point in time in the bath that night, I went in to check on her and she was asleep in the bathtub. I woke her up. So she was off and on, sleepy, awake, conversation back. TV’s on, you know and all that.

Q: Did you think it was odd that she had thrown up twice already and she wanted another drink?

Baker: Well, it was, and she was exhausted and a lot of Kari was anxiety. She suffered tremendously from anxiety, the highs and the lows. She could go, you know, high and then very, very low.

Q: High stress?

Baker: High stress. And that was a very stressful day. You have a job interview, it’s stressful. Whether you want the job or not. I thought more from that standpoint ... her stomach is a little upset. She has a drink, I have a drink.

Q: If she was all stressed out, would it make sense that she would go to sleep?

Baker: Part of it was that high stress and then that lull. You’re at that high and then (sigh), I can relax. And that’s more of what I thought it was at the time. And so she asked me, after the girls were in bed, we’re in bed, ready to relax, watching TV and she said, “I need you to go gas up the car, we’re on empty and we have a busy day tomorrow.” And I never asked her what we had to do or anything like that, and I’m like “Let me do it in the morning.” “No, no, go ahead and do it tonight. Go get us a movie.” She said to go get the movie “When a Man Loves a Woman,” which was something we periodically would rent and watch, which was the first movie we went to see. So she asked me to get that movie and get some M&M’s and a drink. So I leave the house. I’m a numbers type of a person, I always look at clocks, look at things like that. One of the things I did that night, I remember looking at the clock while I was getting dressed, and it was 11:11. That popped in my mind, I just remembered that.

Q: How can you remember that?

Baker: Times. I remember the time when I went and checked on Kensi. I remember looking at the clock, oh, 11:11. I look at a clock and when it says 12:34, it’s 1-2-3-4. My daughters sometimes do the same thing. For example, last night at 8:48 we’re going to sleep and it is forty-eight hours before you’re interviewing us. And Grace goes, “Oh, look. If you get rid of the eight, it’s 48 hours.” It’s just what we sometimes do. I remember looking at it while I was getting dressed, 11:11. So I remember about the time I left the house, it would have been a few minutes after that. I leave the house, drive past the first one that’s closed, drive past the next, you know drive to the first one that I could get gas, which was near the corner near that same Wal-Mart. I get out, fill up the car, use the card to pay at the pump. Go up to the movie place, get in there. They close at midnight. Get in there before they close. Went straight to the movie, straight to the candy, straight to the drink, went straight out, drove straight home. I get home right at 12 o’clock, about 12:01 I believe it was. I walk in the house, close the garage door and make sure it closes. I go toward the bedroom, and the door’s closed, which is rare. Typically the only time the door is closed is if you want to keep your kids out, if you understand what that means. I knocked on the door. I tried the doorknob. It’s locked. I knock on the door and there’s no answer. I call her name and there’s no answer. I think, “OK, she’s in the bathtub or something like that.” And so I go back, I put the stuff down on the counter and I go get a little screwdriver. It’s the doorknob with the little hole in the middle of it that you can just pop a little button and it unlocks it. I get the screwdriver, pop it in and get it open. I open the door and I see my wife on the bed. On the bed at an angle. She’s naked. I go in and my first thing is I touch her, call her name and I touch her. There’s no response. I call her name and I shake her body and there’s nothing and I realize something’s not right. There’s no pulse, there’s nothing and something’s wrong. So I picked up the phone and called 9-1-1. As I’m on the phone with 9-1-1, I’m putting her clothes on her.

Q: Why’s that?

Baker: I did not want them to see her naked. She would not have wanted them to see her naked. And so I wanted to protect her in that.

Q: They (your accusers) see that as significant. When you could have put a pillow over her face.

Gray: I know they said that. I didn’t see anything in the report from the EMS guys that indicated anything that they saw around her face. I would assume that if there were a noticeable mark, one of the EMS guys would have written it down. They did write down where they saw lividity around the back of her neck and so forth. My understanding is that the officer that filled it out wasn’t at the scene and didn’t see her and I think he said that he observed it from photographs. I haven’t seen those photographs, so I don’t know what he’s talking about.

Q: When did you see the note — or did you ever see the note?

Baker: When I went to the phone, where the phone is located, there’s a paper there and a bottle, but I don’t even pay attention to what was there. I go straight to the phone. I don’t read it, I don’t do anything. I call 9-1-1, kick it to the floor. The first time I saw the note, a police officer brought it out of the bedroom and handed it to me to look at. I’m sitting on the back of my couch, kind of leaning up against it, and he hands it to me and I read like the first sentence and I hand it back to him and say, “I can’t do this right now.”

Q: What did the note say?

Baker: I, um, I’ve had it read to me, and that’s the only (time), I never held it again. I never got to see the note again. Now I do know that night, when Linda Dulin was there, she followed the police officer out and asked him and she got to hold the note and read it there. She came back in and talked about it. I never got to read the full note.

Q: Did it strike you as unusual that it was typewritten or printed out on a computer?

Baker: At that point in time, I didn’t even process that. I never ... it wasn’t something that was in my mind. I don’t know when she would have typed it, where she would have typed it, how long she had had it in her possession. I don’t know.

Gray: That’s an unusual thing.

Q: If it goes to a jury, is that something a jury is going to look askance at?

Gray: It bothers me.

Q: Yeah. What went through your head when you saw her lying there naked on the bed? What was your first thought?

Baker: I remember the eerie feeling when I walked into the room and saw Kassidy. The same eerie feeling filled that room when I unlocked the door and took the first step in. That something’s not right. This is not right.

Q: Did you think, “Oh my God, she’s killed herself”?

Baker: I didn’t think that she killed herself. I went, “Oh my gosh, what’s wrong?”

Q: Did you ever think that she was suicidal?

Baker: I never thought that she would kill herself. It 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 to hurt herself. I never processed that that far.

Q: If you thought she had, would you try to get her help? Talk to her mom?

Baker: Absolutely.

Q: Talk to a counselor?

Baker: Yes.

Q: But she did get counseling, right?

Baker: Correct.

Q: She told the counselor that you were going to kill her?

Baker: Correct.

Q: Why would she say that?

Baker: I don’t know what she said to the counselor. It was curious to me why my wife would tell a counselor that. The first time that I heard that was when the counselor told me. At the (funeral) viewing.

Q: That’s what she said? At the viewing?

Baker: She came to the viewing, hugged my neck and said, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t see it coming.” And her first comment to me was, “I knew Kari was depressed, but I didn’t push the issue. If I had told her she was depressed, she would not have come back to see me. Kari mentioned that she thought you might be having an affair, that you might be trying to kill her.” That was the first time I heard that comment from anybody. When Kari came back from the counselor on that Tuesday, she had an assignment. The assignment was for us to look at why we fell in love with each other, and why we love each other. And we did that. And so it was kind of curious to me that, if she did go to the counselor complaining about all of that, why would that be the homework?

Q: So how would you describe your marriage at that point? Strained? Rocky? Up and down?

Baker: Up and down, absolutely. You know, it’s never a perfect marriage, but I loved her, she loved me, there was never any doubt in the fact that we loved each other. We were a family.

Q: Except she told the counselor that you were trying to kill her.

Baker: I did not know that, though. She did not ever tell me that.

Q: That takes us to the pills in the briefcase.

Baker: OK.

Gray: I have a comment on that. If a woman goes to a counselor and says she thinks her husband is trying t kill her, and the counselor believes that, I think she has a duty to call law enforcement. I think she has a duty to advise her not to go back to the home. If it happened that way, and the counselor truly believed it, she had some obligations.

Q: I think that would be correct. Now, what about the pills in the briefcase?

Baker: I don’t remember when this took place. She came out of the bedroom, she was on the bed grading papers from school. And (she) came out of the bedroom with a little toothpick container with some powder stuff in the bottom of it and said she found it in my briefcase and wanted to know what they were. I told her I had never seen it before and didn’t know what they were. She said she found it in my briefcase. My first thought was if you found it in my bag, show me where you found it. The bag was still snapped shut in its spot by the bed. My thought was if you found something in my bag, why was the bag not open? She said she was looking for a pen in my bag. Which was strange to me because she had been sitting there with pens in her lap grading homework. And in my night stand drawer is a cup that we still use to this day that is full of pens. She says she found them in my briefcase and walks away, you know, snapping in and out. Her comment to me was, “Do you think that someone from Waco Center for Youth could have put these in your bag?” She asked me that question. I said, “No. No one from Waco Center for Youth could have put them in my bag.” The kids are not allowed to be in the offices without staff being present. There’s a very strict policy about how they do pills. I said, “If you want me to, I’ll talk to them about it.” She stormed in a little later and said, “Let’s find out what they are.” And I said, “If you want to, let’s take them to the Hewitt Police Department and have them analyze them. Let’s have them analyzed. Let’s check it out.” And she dumped them down the sink, washed out the bottle and threw it away.

Q: Somewhere I got the idea that it was you who said that the kids might have put them there. Was that in an affidavit?

Gray: I think you’ll find in the affidavit that the counselor said that she, that Kari, told her that he said he found the pills. He says that that is not something that he ever said.

Q: She was obviously mistrustful or searching for something.

Baker: I don’t know. And I don’t know what my wife was thinking. That’s the same as when she tried to jump out of a car. So there’s odd behavior. That was on that Monday.

Q: Where were you?

Baker: We went to Scott & White Hospital and saw Dr. Stern.

Q: Who’s he?

Baker: Family doctor. We went for anxiety issues and we met with Dr. Stern and he prescribed anti-anxiety and antidepressant medicine for her. And as we left, my wife’s anxiety hit the roof and as we were driving, she opened the door and said, “I need some air. I need some air.” And she opened the door and tried to jump out. I reached over and grabbed the waist of her pants to try to hold on to her. And luckily we’re driving fast enough that the wind is blowing against the door. I drove home about five miles an hour to make sure she wasn’t going to try to hurt herself.

Q: What was she trying to do?

Baker: I don’t know what she wanted to do.

Q: Did it get to the point when she accused you of having an affair?

Baker: She never accused me of having an affair.

Q: Did you have an affair?

Baker: I did not.

Q: The cell phone calls. What’s that all about?

Baker: She was a friend. She was a member of our church. She was a friend of my wife’s, she was one of my friends. There was never anything inappropriate. She had been going through a horrible divorce at the time and some child custody issues, and I was a friend and she was a friend and it was never anything more than that.

Q: Did you ever want it to be anything more than that?

Baker: I never wanted it to be anything more than that.

Q: What about the jewelry store. You were seen walking into a jewelry store with her.

Baker: That summer my wife and I had made a deal with our daughters that when they turn 6 years old, if they choose to, they can have earrings, pierced ears. Grace was turning 6 that summer. We had stopped in at Kay’s Jewelry store and they could look at all the big dangly earrings. And then you go down to Claire’s and get the ones you can afford and get them pierced.

Q: So you were at the mall?

Baker: At the mall. At Richland Mall.

Q: So you were there with your girls?

Baker: Yes. Another thing that was important with jewelry was when Kassidy was still alive, my wife had a ring that had some topaz on it, on the sides. We had created that just for her, and some of the prongs broke. And so I still have the bag of jewelry that has Kensi and Kassidy’s name on it that we agreed when they turn 16, they could have some of those stones made into jewelry. I had my wife’s wedding ring that I wanted to do the same thing now for Grace and Kensi. So there’s a combination of things because I purchased it at Kay’s and, if you return the jewelry there, then you get discounts on other jewelry, so there were those issues going on at the same time.

Q: Was (this friend from church) there with you in the store?

Baker: She was in there a couple times, yes. At least I know of one time.

Q: But you weren’t looking at engagement rings?

Baker: No. We never shopped for engagement rings.

Q: So if that’s what the lady in the store said, then she’s mistaken?

Baker: Yes. We never shopped for engagement rings. We never tried on engagement rings. We weren’t shopping together.

Q: So if she gets up and testifies in front of a jury, that’s not going to look too good.

Baker: We never looked at engagement rings. We were not shopping for engagement rings. We were not thinking about getting married.

Q: Did you give her Kari’s cell phone?

Baker: I did.

Q: Why?

Baker: At that time, I was truly at a point where I... It was stupid. It was really stupid for me to do that. But it was a friend, and that was one of the few people at that point in time that didn’t accuse, that wasn’t looking at me strange, if that makes sense.

Q: Were people looking at you strange then?

Baker: Oh, the family was. They had already started.

Q: And this would have been right after Kari’s death?

Baker: No this would have been about three weeks later.

Q: The jewelry store, that was when?

Baker: I don’t remember when that took place. That was months later. I couldn’t even put a date on it.

Gray: My memory is that the officer indicated it was very shortly after the death. I think he’s telling you it was quite a while after the death. They went into the shopping mall and wound up going into the jewelry store.

Q: It says within days.

Baker: Within days?

Q: The affidavit says it happened within days.

Gray: That’s what the cop said.

Baker: I will say this. Within days, my mom is at my house. And staying with me and my girls, so that didn’t take place within days.

Q: So this was just a friend. One of the ones who wasn’t looking at you like you killed your wife.

Baker: Right. It was a friendship. It was purely just a person that I trusted. She trusted me. I trusted her family, trusted her parents, and it was mutual relationship. He was minister at a church that I was serving in at the time and we were friends.

Q: Her father?

Baker: Her father was.

Q: Let’s go to the computer stuff at the Waco Center for Youth. A cynical person would sit here and say that you’ve got an answer for everything. Maybe I’m too cynical.

Gray: I don’t think you are. I think this is my thought process. The officer that filled the affidavit took a lot of unrelated facts and weaved them into a story. I think if you ask about each of the individual facts that he weaved in there, you will find out there is a different version, different circumstance. He (Matt Baker) is answering the allegations that have been put in there.

Q: Have you ever seen an affidavit like this before?

Gray: No, I have not.

Q: Why do you think that is?

Gray: I think personally from my years as DA that there’s one particular glitch in the criminal justice system. That glitch is that officer or anyone else can go down and fill out an affidavit and present it to a magistrate who is typically not a lawyer, and if they’re friends or if that magistrate is law enforcement-oriented, an arrest warrant can be issued for somebody for a major crime without any prosecutor reviewing it, without any judge that’s a lawyer or anybody who knows this business reviewing it. And this affidavit falls in that glitch. You have many, many statements in it that are prejudicial and do not appear to me to be backed up by any substance at all.

Q: What do you think about the way this happened? You have no autopsy, then the family comes in, you have an exhumation, and then you have the same justice of the peace who didn’t order the autopsy now having an inquest. Would you comment on that for me?

Gray: I think political is not the right word, but you have a lot of pressure being applied by (Kari’s) family. You have the father of Kari who is a deacon in the church (Crossroads Baptist Church). Another deacon is Mr. Montey Toombs who is the father of the (police) detective who issued the affidavit. Matt tells me after the (Dulin) family openly accused him of murdering the girl, that the one who fired him from the church is Mr. Toombs and that is his son who is filling out the affidavit. I’m guessing the magistrate’s not a lawyer. If you look at the affidavit, it makes a bunch of assumptions. It says that somehow Matt administered sleeping pills to sedate her. It doesn’t say how. In an indictment, you have to say how he did these things: Mix them in water, force them down her throat. It didn’t say how. It says that he suffocated her with a pillow, and the only evidenciary fact for that is a scratch on her nose which I haven’t seen which is probably just as consistent with the efforts to resuscitate her as anything else. Besides that, he refers to a heavily woven pillow or something of that nature. Well, if you attempt to suffocate somebody with a pillow, there will be saliva or blood or something that will give you a DNA sample on the pillow. If it’s a heavily woven pillow, the efforts of the person to breathe will suck in fiber from that pillow into the nose, into the lungs somewhere. In the autopsy, they found no fiber from any pillow like this, and I’m unaware of any DNA samples on any pillow like this.

Q: So if you’re unconscious, will you still have a struggle? Would you still have those fibers sucked in?

Gray: If you suffocate somebody, you’re trying to stop their breathing. So, obviously they’re still breathing, or else suffocation wouldn’t be the cause of death. The medical examiner doesn’t say cause of death. So my point is the affidavit reaches conclusions without any supporting facts to substantiate the accusations. That’s not proper in a murder case.

Q: Who brought her those Fuzzy Navels? Did she get them herself? Did you bring them to her?

Baker: They had the paper tops on them, and they have screw lids, so I bring them to her and she opens her own and drinks it.

Q: So it wasn’t like you mixed it up in the kitchen?

Baker: Right.

Q: So she opened it herself?

Baker: Absolutely.

Q: What about swapping out the computers?

Baker: I’m not for sure the date in which it took place. It was a Sunday afternoon chapel service that my supervisor came to me and said that he went into the other office and found that he couldn’t find the computer. So I said take me, show me. So we went in on a Sunday afternoon into her office and couldn’t find the computer, so I told him, “OK, I need you to fill out an incident report. I’ll fill one out and turn it in and let security start looking into this.”

Q: The only thing that was missing in the whole place was your computer?

Baker: At this point in time, it wouldn’t have been my office. It was my secretary’s office. Which was in another room next door, adjacent to mine.

Q: But you had switched your computer out with hers before that.

Baker: That’s what they’re assuming. That’s what they claimed took place. And now, the affidavit says they had a search warrant issued. I was never presented with a search warrant. I never knew they were looking at computers. They were free to. I never turned anything down. One of the police officers, Cooper, was in my office at one time. They had free range. There was never a search warrant. Look it up. I don’t think they ever issued one, but they said they issued one, therefore I had to change it.

Q: They could have issued it to the school.

Baker: They could have looked at the school. They could have come to our house and gotten our computer.

Q: I mean, you were an employee of the center, so they didn’t have to serve you.

Baker: Right. As far as I know, there was never one served to look for the computer. But anyway, that computer. We turned it in, I told the security director and our computer person and we began looking. We went into her office and looked, we went into my office and looked. They could tell because all of our computers are networked, and you can tell when you log onto anybody’s computer. And it was about two to three weeks prior to that time frame that I had logged on, but I was logged onto her computer, but it was located in my office. But every computer has the exact same style. Every computer looks identical. There was no way of knowing it wasn’t yours.

Q: Why was hers in your office?

Baker: I have no clue. I don’t know why. I don’t know where the other one ever was. I don’t know if they ever found it. When we turned it in, they came in and searched. I know the affidavit said the identification thing had been removed from it, which was another false statement. The identification thing had a corner that had been poked up a little bit. We all know that it doesn’t do anything. It’s the internal identification that tells you what computer it is. They searched on there and found that that was hers, mine’s missing, they don’t know where it is. I never switched it, I didn’t have a reason to switch it. There’s no reason for me to switch that computer.

Q: Is this the computer where they supposedly found the searches for Ambien, suicide by overdose and all that?

Baker: Yes, because it’s all networked. Everything is on the network, so you don’t have to have the computer to do the network search.

Q: You didn’t do those searches?

Baker: Well, no, I did. My wife. After Kassidy passed away, my wife started taking sleeping pills. She had started taking sleeping pills after Kassidy passed away and took one every night. She would get to the point where some nights she would take three, four, even five at a time.

Q: For five years in a row?

Baker: No, four or five months in a row. I mean, she had been taking sleeping pills, yes, since Kassidy had passed away every night. And that was something she always did, but she slowly began needing more than one. Typically two, sometimes three, four, five at a time. And that worried me, that can this cause damage? So I looked it up on the Internet. Can someone die from using too (many) sleeping pills?

Q: So she needed more and more to work, she built up a tolerance?

Baker: She built up a tolerance to it.

Q: So you were worried she would hurt herself?

Baker: I was more afraid of her hurting herself — not purposefully, but could you hurt yourself with over-the-counter sleeping pills? So I did look up that. But she was also borrowing, taking without knowledge, I don’t know, Ambien from the grandmother, her mom Linda. Sleeping pills. So there’d be some nights where she would take one or two over-the-counter plus an Ambien.

Q: And Ambien requires a prescription?

Baker: You have to have a prescription for that, and we never had a prescription for it.

Q: So the bottle that was there the night you found her, that was Unisom? That’s over-the-counter? That’s what she had been taking?

Baker: That’s what she had been taking for eight years.

Q: In addition to borrowing Ambien from her mother?

Baker: Right. And that’s where... I don’t know where my wife went that day because there’s no sign she went to Wal-Mart. I don’t know. She had a key to her mom’s house, and I believe her mom was not there at that time so I don’t know if that’s where my wife went for a few minutes to get medicine.

Gray: My understanding is that any Internet searches go through the central system. Not the individual computer, so if that’s correct, then whatever he searched for would be recorded in the central system and what unit it was from would be completely irrelevant. I’m not 100 percent sure of that, but I think it is. And if that’s the case, then this switching issue has no relevance at all.

Q: You’re talking about the server at the Waco Center for Youth.

Gray: I’m not sure I’m correct.

Q: It will show the search history of what you looked up. You’re saying if someone in the whole system looked up something three offices down, it will show up on Baker’s computer?

Gray: No, it will show up in the system.

Q: Are there some allegations that your home computer was gone, missing or that you took it away?

Baker: My dad has that computer.

Q: Your dad does.

Baker: He’s had it the entire time.

Q: Would that be the one that the so-called note was typed on?

Baker: Yes, it could have been that would have been.

Q: So your dad had the computer and the printer?

Baker: No, no, the printer was not. I tried to keep the printer to use with a laptop, but it was not compatible with the laptop. So we had to get a new one.

Q: So you gave your dad the computer, you kept the printer, it wouldn’t work with your laptop...

Baker: He had his own printer, and now you can buy new printers cheaper than you can buy ink and stuff for other printers, so...

Q: So what did you do with that?

Baker: That one was donated to the Salvation Army. We had like four or five printers in a box. Actually, my mom did that, and that would have been when we were getting ready to move, which would have been the last part of July. There was a laptop computer that my wife and I purchased on the Internet that was my wife’s computer. She let her younger brother borrow it. I never used it. It wasn’t mine. Her brother Adam used it. He was in college at the time. He used it, working on term paper and doing all of that. He kept it, then gave it to his father to use. So my father-in-law had it. And when my father-in-law had it, supposedly that’s when it was running slow and he had a buddy of his clean it out. And the buddy supposedly said, “Oh, it’s running slow. Oh, your college-aged kid had it. Must have porn on it.” I don’t think they found anything. That was what was said at the time. He was serving in the military. He was called up for a year and stationed in San Antonio, Lackland Air Force Base.

Q: Her brother?

Baker: No, the dad was.

Q: What about the one at Crossroads?

Baker: That was a laptop they had that they were letting me use, and that was the one the printer was not compatible with. I was using it as my home computer at that time. When they asked me to resign, I turned it back over to them. I didn’t hear about it until a couple of months later that they had supposedly found something on it. I don’t know what they found. All I heard was that they possibly found something.

Q: The theory was you were hesitant to give it back because your kids had their games on it.

Baker: That was our home computer at the time. I offered to buy it. They said they wanted it back. So I said, “Let me take the games off it.” I gave it to them in a couple of days.

Q: If they did find porn on it, where did that come from?

Baker: I have no idea. In fact, my mom was the one who actually hooked it up to the Internet that summer. I hadn’t even been on the Internet in a while.

Q: Just because you access those doesn’t make you a killer. But have you ever accessed those porn sites on a church computer?

Baker: No, I did not.

Q: Never in your life have you looked at porn on a computer?

Baker: No, not on a church computer.

Q: Not on a church computer?

Baker: That was your question, right.

Q: Have you ever looked at porn on a computer?

Baker: My wife and I have.

Q: But not on a church computer.

Baker: No way. (Pause) My wife and I had looked for things to spice up our love life.

Q: Did they take a deposition in that (wrongful death) civil case (filed by the Dulins)? On that part we’re taking the fifth, right? You weren’t around then, right?

Gray: I wasn’t his lawyer then.

Q: What would you have said?

Gray: You can answer the question.

Q: You were advised I guess at that point. What about now if Mr. Long (the likely prosecutor) wants to ...

Gray: We’ll be in his office.

Q: What about taking a DPS polygraph?

Gray: We’ll do it.

Q: What about talking to the grand jury?

Gray: We’ll do it. If they’ll let me in there.

Q: Really, with you in there, of course, with him. What about talking to a Texas Ranger on the record, talking to law enforcement.

Gray: Yeah.

Q: Has anybody tried to come since all this busted out?

Gray: No.

Q: And you would say yes (to talk freely about the case)?

Gray: I won’t defend a guy that won’t talk. He’ll be on the witness stand if we ever get into the courthouse civilly or criminally. He’ll be on the witness stand or have a different lawyer.

Q: You will not defend someone who invokes their Fifth Amendment right?

Gray: I never have. I’m an old prosecutor.

Q: But since you’ve been in private practice, you’ve never had a case where a guy wouldn’t testify?

Gray: No. In the cases I’ve tried before a jury, my client has gotten on the stand. I’ve tried four or five since I’ve been in private practice.

Q: There would be, once again I’ll say, the cynical people who would say, you’ve lost a baby, you’ve lost your wife. People are going to accuse you of bad things at Baylor. We haven’t talked about that. What happened with that girl at Baylor?

Baker: The incident took place, there was a group of us cleaning. We were student trainers. I was a sophomore, she was a freshman.

Q: What year would this have been?

Baker: Fall of ‘91. Yeah, late fall of ‘91. After football games, there was a group of five or six of us who would clean the facility the visitors would use after football games.

Q: At Floyd Casey Stadium?

Baker: Yeah, at Floyd Casey Stadium. It’s underneath. It used to be where the home team and visitors shared, but then they built their new one, so it’s different. A group of us were down there cleaning. We’re on our way out. I’ve got the key to lock the door, so I’m turning the lights out. There’s like master lights for the whole facility. So I’m turning the lights out and I did not know she was back in one of the rooms. She comes running out from the dark screaming. I open the door and she runs past me, runs past the rest of the group, runs and keeps going. Never thought anything of it. The lights are off. I lock the door. We keep going. I never heard anything of it at all until I was registering for the following semester for classes. You get to the point where you’re paying your final bill, what meal plan are you going to have, all those things. There was a hold on my account. Go see one of the vice presidents. I don’t remember what his name was. I had to go see him. I went into his office, went over there immediately, and sat down. He told me at that point that I had been accused. And I read her statement that she gave to the Dulins’ private investigators which does not coincide with what was said to me that day. He told me that I was accused of sitting on her lap and she bit me on my back to get me off her and then ran and screamed and all that. Then in the investigator’s I know she says something that I put her on a sink and she had to bite me on my chest to get away. Anyway, the vice president told me they had done some investigating and it was his opinion that when they investigated they went back to her high school and talked to people in her high school administration and that she had falsely accused at least one or two football players in their school with sexual harassment.

Q: Did you ever get bit?

Baker: I did not get bit.

Q: You didn’t show anybody a bite mark?

Baker: I never showed anybody a bite mark.

Q: So you were falsely accused there?

Baker: Correct.

Q: What about, did you ever work at the Waco Family Y?

Baker: I did work at the Y.

Q: Did you get accused of something there too?

Baker: Now I’ve read statements, but, no, when I was released from my position there, there was a young lady who — I had a parent of a child who came to me and said their 9- or 10-year-old son at day camp overheard the conversation with one of the counselors talking with one of the other counselors about her exploits with her new boyfriend. And the two or three boys who were 9 or 10 were sitting there listening to 19- and 20-year-old girls talk about their sexual relations. And the mom thought that was inappropriate for her son to hear. And I told her I would mention something. I told my supervisor and I said I need to tell her not to have those conversations at the facility. I went and told her it was inappropriate, a parent did complain, “Watch what you say, talk about it out of hours but you can’t do it here at work.”

Q: This was a girl, a young woman?

Baker: She was 19, 20, 21, 22. I don’t know how old she was.

Q: You were working at the Y at the time?

Baker: Yeah, I was supervisor for the day camp.

Q: She didn’t accuse you of anything inappropriate?

Baker: What they said was, at that point I did not hear any accusation that I did anything other that she said I inappropriately talked to her about sexual conversations. And that was what was told to me. The director at that time, their point to me in that meeting was we looked for you the other day and we didn’t find you out in the building where the kid’s camp was. And I said I was out behind. That was the morning I had the conversation with the mom. I was standing outside with the mom. Here’s the mom’s name. You can go talk to her. But they never went and talked to her. They said the next morning they looked for me and gave me a time and I said I was in the gym refereeing a kickball game. “Did you look for me in the gym?” “Well, no we didn’t look there.” So they never told me I was accused of anything. They just said, “Well, we need to let you go.” They said, “Well, we think you leave work to go pick up your wife, because she worked there at the same time.” She was pregnant at the time. I said, “No, I walk in to work in the morning. She drives in later.”

Q: So it wasn’t that you were trying to hit on people, grope people or ask them out?

Baker: No, I did not.

Q: You lost your baby, you lost your wife, they’re accusing you of all these terrible things. Have you just got some bad karma going on?

Baker: It’s a nightmare. The loss of Kassidy was due to chemotherapy and cancer. The chemotherapy they gave her, one of them reduces breathing ability and one of Kassidy’s problems was her vocal chords and her breathing were inadequate and that was one of the medicines they gave her. They also gave her her last chemo when her white blood count was under 10.

Q: What’s it supposed to be?

Baker: In the thousands, 10,000, so I think her count was nine and they gave her the chemo anyway and said, “Just be careful.” So no way or chance of fighting anything. After that my wife was devastated, struggled through it. We both struggled through it differently, but we both struggled after the loss of Kassidy. She never got to be beyond that and slowly withdrew more and more.

Q: I was raised Christian in the Methodist church all my life and one thing I heard, and I’m talking to a preacher, was everybody says, “It’s God’s will.” Why is it God’s will that a little baby suffers and dies? Can you explain that?

Baker: I don’t believe, I’m not of the mindset, and I hear people say this all the time, that that happens. I believe we live in a fallen world where bad things happen, where there is disease, there is illness, there are people who make mistakes. I believe that’s the world we live in. I don’t know why Kassidy passed away. I don’t know why she fought for 90 days in the hospital to make it through that and then passed away in our home. There was no reason for her to live that long. But she did, you know. Did her body just stop fighting more? She’s 16 months old and has no reserve anymore. There’s no reason. I don’t blame God. I never blamed God. I asked God why, but it was never his fault.

Gray: We’re about to run out of time, so let me make a few critical points. One of them is the affidavit from the (Hewitt police) officer suggests that Matt went on the Internet and purchased some pills from a pharmaceutical supply company. Matt did go on the Internet and purchase an over-the-counter little blue vial of “Love Potion Number 9,” (which is) supposed to increase you and your wife’s desire.

Q: Is that what it’s really called?

Baker: No, I don’t know what it’s called.

Gray: It’s not a prescription thing. It’s just something you can order.

Q: And it’s expected to do what?

Baker: It’s supposed to (enhance) your sex life.

Q: Liquid Viagra?

Gray: Yeah, but it’s not prescription.

Baker: You both take it. It’s supposed to increase your (sexual appetite).

Gray: I have his bank records for six months. Anything that’s ordered over the Internet, you’d have to use some type of credit card to order it. There’s nothing in any of those bank records that indicates any prescription drug was ordered from any pharmacy or anything of that nature. I know they imply that in the affidavit but I don’t see any factual basis to substantiate that.

Q: But there is a debit card account for that liquid you’re talking about.

Gray: If it’s on there, it doesn’t show up as pharmacy. It’s like a product you can buy.

Q: You don’t remember the name of the web site?

Baker: No.

Gray: But there’s no purchase of any sleeping pills, Unisom, or Ambien. It’s not on his account. And to my knowledge they never subpoenaed those records, but I have them. They’re from the bank.

Q: So if Mr. (Crawford) Long (of the district attorney’s office) says I’m meeting with the grand jury on Wednesday and I want you there with all your records...

Gray: We’re there. Well, not Wednesday because I’m in court. The other thing I want to mention is she had a Bible that was her private Bible and she had some journal entries that were her private journal entries that, after her death, Matt and the rest of the family looked at those. And I gave you a copy of one of the journal entries. It’s back in ‘99 and you can see it was quite a ways back, but he took a picture of it. You can read from that her thought process and at least back in ‘99.

Q: This was after the death?

Baker: After Kassidy passed away, I believe.

Q: But these were her (Kari’s) private thoughts.

Baker: This would have been August ‘99, yes.

Q: Did you know she had journals?

Baker: I knew she had journals, but I never read them. They were private, and I didn’t want to invade that privacy for her.

Gray: You don’t have to be very smart to see when you get to the bottom of that the suicide thoughts were in her head at that time. I’m not implying that she thought this way for five or six years, but every year at the time of the death it would go back into this. In the Bible, the Bible extends over a longer period of time. Baptists write in their Bible all the time and make lots of notes in different colored ink, red, blue and all through there. There are a number of entries. Kassidy’s name comes up nearly 20 times in this Bible. You will see three or four entries that will be like this where there’s a passage in the Bible that’s talking about heaven or how it is and she will write, “Kassidy, I will go to her.” And several places, I don’t need to get into a lot of detail about this kind of stuff, but there are several places here where it’s the same thing: “I want to go to Kassidy.” There’s one of them, “Kingdom of Heaven. I want to go to Kassidy.” From her own writing, she has considered taking her own life in that way, and I believe pretty clearly from her own writings she had these constant struggles between staying with her two girls that she had and her husband and this life and the pain and getting away from that pain and going to heaven to be with the girl that she lost.

Q: What kind of mother was she?

Baker: I think she loved kids. There’s no doubt she loved her kids, but she became a very — I guess I was more of the mothering person. I did most of the cooking, the household chores, I did the shopping. I played the games. I did the nighttime ritual with the girls — naptime, singing.

Q: Where was she?

Baker: Um, usually in bed or in a bath.

Q: Do you attribute that to Kassidy’s death?

Baker: Yes, she completely changed after Kassidy died. There was a difference in her after Kassidy, a slow spiraling. And it wasn’t like immediate. It was over the years. It built to where I was doing more and more and more, but I enjoy doing more, so it wasn’t ever a problem for me.

Q: Do the girls ever talk about their mom?

Baker: They do. I think this is probably one of the worst parts about a lot of this is that they have supplanted a lot of their memories of their mom with what they’re seeing in Linda.

Q: Do you have a girlfriend now?

Baker: I do not.

Q: So these supplanted memories ...

Baker: Of their mom. I guess in some weird way they have put their grandmother Linda and their mom Kari into one person because they were similar in a lot of their actions and a lot of their attitudes. Kari had to do everything Linda said.

Q: So when your wife dies, how old were the girls?

Baker: Kensi was just about to turn 10. And five. Nine and five.

Q: There was a statement kind of troubling to me, attributed to you again, that you said something to someone that Kensi said she was ready for a new mommy, or maybe the younger girl.

Baker: Grace said that one time.

Q: She was ready to move on?

Baker: She was ready to move on. It was just a few days later. Her comment was ... we were sitting on the floor. This was a week removed. We were sitting on the floor watching a TV show and it happened to show a mom playing with her child. And she looked at me and said, “I miss mommy.” I said “I do too.” And she said, “She’s not coming back?” And I said, “No, she’s not coming back, but we’ll see her one day.” And her next comment was “Are you ever going to get married again?” And I said, “No, not right now.” And the comment then was, “Well, I want a new mommy.” And I said, “Well, we just can’t go get one.” And she said, “It’s OK. I want a happy mommy this time.” So it was never — “Oh, good, she’s gone.” It was at 5 years old she saw on TV a kid playing with her mom and that was not her experience with her mom.

Q: So , (your friend from church) — do you still see her? Does she ever come here and visit?

Baker: We have not talked in over a year.

Q: Why not?

Baker: It was we were friends, we dated, and the only dates we ever had were with our kids. When we moved, it was really the end of it.

Q: I thought you were just friends?

Baker: Well that summer we spent time together, but every time we would go our kids were always with us. There was never a time we two were alone.

Q: She was divorced and had some kids too.

Baker: She has one daughter.