Jury deliberate punishment for Texas minister convicted of killing wife, faking her suicide

Jury deliberates penalty for ‘murdering minister’

WACO, Texas — Jurors on Thursday started deliberating the punishment for a former Texas minister convicted of killing his wife and trying to cover it up as a suicide.

Matt Baker, 38, faces up to life in prison for slipping his wife sleeping pills and suffocating her in 2006.

The case almost never went to trial. Her death was deemed a suicide after a note and sleeping pills were found by the bed, and Baker said she was depressed over their 16-month-old daughter’s cancer death in 1999. But authorities reopened the case several months later after her parents shared evidence obtained for their wrongful death lawsuit against Baker.

During closing arguments, prosecutor Crawford Long — who dubbed Baker a “murdering minister” — said he killed his wife in “cold-blooded cruelty” and seemed to take pleasure in getting away with it.

“Folks, I can look every one of you in the eye and say Matt Baker deserves the maximum sentence, and Matt Baker, I can look you in the eye and say because of your heartless, soulless conduct, you do deserve a maximum sentence,” Long said, glaring and pointing at Baker.

Defense attorney Harold Danford urged jurors to consider Baker’s entire life and activities such as youth mission trips and his work as a pastor.

Danford said Baker “did some things he’s not proud of” but reminded jurors that Baker is eligible for probation because he had not previously been convicted of a felony.

Prosecutor Susan Shafer said Baker was dangerous because he still could fool people into believing he was a good person. She said the “best of Matt” was his two daughters, who were asleep in the house when he killed his wife.

“He thought no more of them than to murder their mother and then erase her legacy with them by convincing them that she didn’t love them enough to stay and raise them, that she committed suicide,” Shafer told jurors.

Earlier, jurors who convicted Baker late Wednesday heard testimony from four women who said he made unwanted sexual advances toward them in the 1990s — including one family friend who said Baker hit on her while his wife was in the hospital with their dying daughter.

Another woman who was a student athletic trainer with Baker at Baylor University testified that he grabbed her, pinned her arms behind her and tried to kiss her while she was cleaning a locker room. She said he picked her up and put her in a sink, where he groped her as she struggled. She broke free but Baker grabbed and restrained her, touched her thigh and crotch, then finally let her go and said “I’m done,” she told jurors.

She said she told a coach and head athletic trainer, who later arranged a meeting with her and Baker in which he admitted what he did and apologized. She said the Baylor trainer told her that “it was going to be taken care of,” but she later learned that Baker wasn’t really punished.

The woman ended up dropping out of Baylor and kept having nightmares, so six years later she reported it to Waco police. A detective told her he would investigate the incident as an attempted sexual assault, but the statute of limitations on the crime had expired, she testified.

The woman said she was testifying “to face him, to know he didn’t get the best of me, and to do right by Kari.”

Baker also used his church-issued laptop and a computer at a youth center where he worked to look at pornographic Web sites and those for married adults who want to have affairs, Noel Kersh, a computer forensics examiner, testified Thursday.

In his favor, a woman who grew up with Baker, Sharon Rollins, said he never acted inappropriately during their numerous school and church trips. She said he was charming with a sense of humor and sometimes was flirtatious, “but I never took it as an advance.”

Jeanne Lehrmann, a member of a Baptist church in Riesel where Baker was minister several years ago, testified that he was a fine pastor.

“I truly felt that he is a man of God,” Lehrmann said, adding that she still felt that way and did not believe much of the evidence at his trial.