Kari Baker: Murder or Suicide? The Murdering Minister Case

Kari Baker, a 31-year-old Texas mother and teacher, was murdered by her husband, Baptist minister Matt Baker, on the night of April 7, 2006, at their home near Hewitt, Texas. Matt Baker drugged Kari with Ambien, smothered her with a pillow, and staged the scene to look like a suicide by sleeping pill overdose, complete with a typed, unsigned note. Authorities initially accepted the suicide story. Kari’s parents did not, and their four-year push for answers led to a murder indictment, a January 2010 conviction, and a 65-year prison sentence. The Kari Baker murder case remains one of the most closely followed staged-suicide prosecutions in Texas.¹

Who Kari and Matt Baker Were

Matt Baker and Kari Dulin met at Baylor University in Waco. Matt went on to Truett Theological Seminary and by 2006 was pastoring Crossroads Baptist Church in Hewitt while also working as a chaplain at the Waco Center for Youth. The couple had two daughters together, and a third, Kassidy, who was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died at sixteen months old in 1999. Kari never fully recovered from that loss. She wrote about Kassidy in her Bible, saw a therapist, and had been planning to start a support group for other bereaved mothers.¹ That grief would later be used, first by Matt Baker to sell a suicide story, and then by his defense at trial.

The Night of April 7, 2006

Matt Baker told police he left the house around 11:15 p.m. to rent a movie and buy gas, leaving Kari asleep after she had complained of feeling ill and drunk two wine coolers. He said he came back roughly 45 to 50 minutes later, found the bedroom door locked, got inside, and dialed 911 shortly after midnight. “I think my wife just committed suicide,” he told the dispatcher.² On the nightstand were a bottle of Unisom and a typed, unsigned note that referenced Kassidy.

A McLennan County justice of the peace ruled the death a suicide by phone, without visiting the scene and without ordering an autopsy. Kari was embalmed and buried within two days.¹

How Kari’s Parents Reopened the Case

Jim and Linda Dulin did not believe their daughter had killed herself. Linda discovered that Matt had made roughly 180 calls to Kari’s cell phone after her death, and that he had given the phone to a fellow church member named Vanessa Bulls.¹ The Dulins hired former federal prosecutor Bill Johnston and two former lawmen, Mike McNamara and John Bennett, to investigate.

Their inquiry turned up a pattern. Matt Baker had a history of making sexual advances toward young women, regularly accessed pornography on church and workplace computers, and had run internet searches in the weeks before Kari’s death for phrases like “overdose by sleeping pills,” along with visits to pharmaceutical websites.¹

In July 2006, the Dulins filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Matt Baker. The civil case gave them a tool the criminal system had not used: sworn discovery, including a videotaped deposition. That same month, Justice of the Peace Billy Martin reopened the case, and Kari’s body was exhumed. Texas Ranger Matt Cawthon helped drive the criminal investigation forward.³

The Evidence That Pointed to Murder

The autopsy at the Southwest Institute of Forensic Sciences in Dallas could not establish a definitive cause of death because of the delay and the embalming. The pathologist called it “undetermined.” But muscle tissue tested positive for Ambien, a drug Kari had no prescription for and one Matt Baker had searched for online and tried to buy from an offshore pharmacy. A toxicology expert retained by the Dulins also pointed out that no pills were found in Kari’s stomach, which made an oral overdose unlikely.⁴

Crime scene photographs gave investigators more. Dr. Sridhar Natarajan identified a mark on Kari’s nose consistent with a pillow being pressed over her face and found that the lividity in the photos contradicted Matt Baker’s account of how he said he had found her.¹

Kari’s own words worked against the suicide theory. In her Bible, on a page dated April 2, 2006, five days before her death, she had written: “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.”⁵ Her therapist, JoAnn Bristol, testified she did not believe Kari was suicidal. Kari had a job interview scheduled for the day she died and had been planning that support group for mothers who had lost children.⁶

In August 2007, the justice of the peace held an inquest and changed the manner of death from suicide to undetermined.¹

Vanessa Bulls Breaks the Case

The case turned when prosecutors subpoenaed Vanessa Bulls to a grand jury and granted her testimonial immunity. Bulls had denied an affair with Matt Baker. Under oath, she admitted it had started in March 2006, about a month before Kari died, while Baker was counseling her about her own failed marriage.⁷

Bulls testified that Baker told her he wanted to kill Kari and make it look like suicide. He had discussed several methods with her, including poisoning a milkshake, cutting the car brakes, staging an overdose, and a drive-by shooting. He settled on Ambien-filled capsules disguised as sexual stimulants, followed by smothering with a pillow. After the killing, she said, Baker told her: “I killed her for you.”⁸ He kept her quiet, she testified, with the warning: “Don’t tell anyone or you’ll be just another regret.”³

Within weeks of Kari’s death, Bulls and Baker had been seen at a jewelry store looking at engagement rings, and photographs of Bulls had replaced pictures of Kari inside the Baker home.⁷ Bulls’s grand jury testimony led to Baker’s indictment the same day. She was never charged.⁸

The Trial and Verdict

Baker had been arrested on a murder charge back in September 2007, but prosecutors could not secure an indictment within 180 days and his bond was refunded. He was re-arrested in March 2009 after the Bulls testimony and formally indicted in October 2009 in McLennan County.⁹

Trial opened in early January 2010 in the 54th District Court before Judge Matt Johnson. Assistant District Attorneys Crawford Long and Susan Shafer walked jurors through a reconstruction of the murder: Baker gave Kari Ambien-filled capsules under the pretense of a “date night,” handcuffed her to the bed once the drug took hold, smothered her with a pillow, then removed the cuffs, typed a suicide note on the home computer, pressed Kari’s fingers to the paper, and set a bottle of Unisom on the nightstand. Only then did he leave for the video store and gas station, building an alibi window before calling 911.¹

Prosecutors also picked apart the 911 call. In four and a half minutes, Baker claimed he had dressed Kari, moved her to the floor, and started CPR while speaking to a dispatcher on a cordless phone. Prosecutors argued this was physically impossible in the time available and used a courtroom demonstration with a dummy to show the jury. Experts noted that Baker had described Kari’s body as “cold to the touch” only about 40 minutes after he said he had left her sleeping, a timeline inconsistent with normal body cooling.⁴

Defense attorney Guy James Gray argued there was no direct physical evidence of murder and pointed jurors to Kari’s Bible entries about grief and wanting to be with Kassidy. Gray later said his defense collapsed when Baker admitted in a civil deposition to the affair with Bulls, something he had previously denied to his own lawyer.⁹

On January 20, 2010, the jury convicted Matt Baker of murder after about seven and a half hours of deliberation. During the punishment phase, several women testified to sexual advances Baker had made over an 18-year period, and a computer examiner detailed pornography and affair-site activity on his church-issued laptop and a computer at the youth center where he worked.¹⁰ The next day, jurors sentenced Baker to 65 years in prison after roughly two hours.¹¹

Baker appealed, raising ineffective assistance of counsel, insufficient evidence, and judicial bias. On June 8, 2011, the Texas Tenth Court of Appeals overruled every argument and affirmed the conviction.⁷

Where Matt Baker Is Now

Matt Baker is incarcerated at the Michael Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. His earliest parole eligibility date is December 19, 2039, and his maximum sentence date is December 11, 2074. He has not yet been reviewed for parole.¹² Baker still maintains he did not kill his wife. In a 2025 ABC “20/20” interview, he admitted publicly for the first time to the affair with Vanessa Bulls but continued to deny the murder.³

Crawford Long, one of the prosecutors, credited Kari’s family for the outcome: “If the Dulins hadn’t pursued him, he certainly would have” gotten away with murder.⁸

1
Texas District & County Attorneys Association. The Murdering Minister
2
Texas Monthly. The Valley of the Shadow of Death
3
ABC News. Waco’s Beloved Minister
4
CBS News. Murder or Suicide: The Death of the Preacher’s Wife
5
Oxygen. Texas Minister Matt Baker Murdered Wife Kari Baker
6
ABC13. Kari Baker Bible Entries
7
Justia. Baker v. State, Tenth Court of Appeals
8
CBS News. Dirty Little Secrets Revealed in Preacher Matt Baker’s Murder Trial
9
CBS News. 48 Hours Mystery: Dirty Little Secrets
10
NewsChannel 10. Women Say Convicted Texas Ex-Pastor Made Advances
11
NBC News. Ex-Pastor Convicted of Killing Wife
12
TDCJ. Inmate Detail: Matt Dee Baker