Lying in Wait Ann Rule's Crime Files Vol.17

by Ann Rule

  The deceased female had physical characteristics reasonably consistent with the descriptions from those who had known Kathie in life, although it would be impossible to identify her absolutely until dental and DNA comparisons could be made.

  Even for experienced homicide investigators, it was appalling to confront what the postmortem exam indicated; the woman before them had a single crushing wound to her head, a circular hole that penetrated through the skull into the brain.

  Investigators had found a ball-peen hammer at the Silver Cloud residence, and evidence technician Phil Farr determined that it was the murder weapon. Blood was detected on the flat surface of the hammer, and there were strands of short blond hair caught in the blood. The striking force of the hammer fit precisely into the hole in the victim’s skull.

  Al Baker had probably attacked Kathie as she slept, bringing the ball-peen hammer crashing down on her head and doing terrible damage to her skull and brain. One would hope that she never wakened to see her killer—the man she trusted so completely, as he struck her.

  Perhaps she did not see him. There was, after all, only that single blunt force injury from the weapon, and no defense wounds at all on her hands and arms. Dr. Menchel told Kathie’s family that he tended to believe that was the case.

  It was a small comfort in their profound time of grief. None of the people who loved her could stand to think of her waking in that last horrific moment.

  Her attacker had circled Kathie’s neck with some kind of ligature. She had distinctive creases around her neck.

  “She’d been dead at least seventy-two hours before they found her yesterday,” Dr. Bishop said. “Rigor mortis has come and gone. Her cause of death is blunt force trauma with strangulation by ligature. It’s impossible to tell which injury came first.”

  Because Kathie had been dead for several days, the exact time of her death could not be determined. Tests were negative for any sexual assault.

  Two days later, Kathie Baker’s dentist confirmed that there was a positive match between the X-rays he had on file for her and those taken during the victim’s postmortem exam.

  The WSP criminalists continued processing the house and outbuildings. They found blood that would prove to be Kathie’s in the master bedroom, throughout the house, in the garage, and just about everywhere they looked. Mixed with the female DNA were occasional samples of male DNA that would later be traced to Al.

  The consensus was that after he was sure she was dead, Al Baker had, quite literally, dragged the body of the wife who’d loved him devotedly out of the house on Silver Cloud Lane, wrapped it in a tarp, and tossed it into the ravine. Just in time—because only hours later he escorted the next woman he coveted through his front door.

  The calculated cruelty of it all was hard to imagine.

  * * *

  Kathie Baker’s two corgi dogs were turned over to Animal Control officer Carol Barnes. Kathie’s stepsister, Char, flew up to get the dogs. Her whole family knew how she’d loved them, and it was one of the few things they could do for her. The older dog had fallen ill and was too sick to save, and had to be put to sleep, but as of this writing, the younger dog still lives with Kathie’s relatives.

  Detective Mark Plumberg attempted to speak with Baker at the jail, but the suspect said he didn’t want to answer any more questions. He asked for an attorney.

  On June 11, Plumberg contacted authorities at the Washington State Ferries, asking for help locating any extant videos of the red Nissan pickup. He hoped to find images that show the truck and license plate.

  Two days later, he received a call from Cadet Andrew Durr of the Washington State Patrol. Durr said they had located videos of traffic on June 3. Drivers who took the ferry from South Whidbey Island to the mainland were quite visible.

  “That truck departed the island on the Clinton Ferry at about sixteen hundred hours [four P.M.] on June third,” Durr reported.

  The driver—who was alone—appeared to be Al Baker. He had paid for two trips. Leaving Whidbey Island, he bought a driver and vehicle ticket, but he added a passenger on his return ticket. Videos of the return trip showed Al and a woman sitting beside him.

  That woman was Trudi Gerhart.

  * * *

  If the Bakers’ story was a television episode of a show like Who the (Bleep) Did I Marry? or Deadly Vows, screenwriters could—and probably would—take shortcuts to make it all fit, and it would be over. The credits would start to roll. But this was real life. Island County detective Mark Plumberg’s team still had many puzzle slots to fill in.

  At the same time, Kathie Hill’s family wanted to find out more about the man she had married. Jami Hill stepped into the role of private investigator and tried to find answers.

  Meanwhile, the official investigation was ongoing.

  Working with stacks of telephone records, emails, and Southwest Airlines and Alaska Airlines rosters, and examining Al Baker’s own braggadocio about the many degrees he held, Plumberg began to unravel the life of a man with a penchant for deceit. It would take the Island County detective months to follow the paper trails.

  It was a challenge for Plumberg to put together a timeline of the Bakers’ actions in the spring of 2012. Some of the puzzle pieces came together in the form of credit card receipts. Kathie and Al had several credit cards, with slightly different end numbers that showed which charges were made by Kathie and which by Al. Al was authorized to access all of Kathie’s bank accounts and credit cards.

  It was Al who had purchased round-trip tickets to Anchorage, Alaska, at least three times, and Kathie who made the quarterly Colorado Southwest Airlines reservations and also purchased female clothing and makeup. Mark Plumberg found no round-trip plane tickets to Washington, D.C. The story Al had told his wife about flying to D.C. was bogus. An unsuspecting Kathie had been hard at work in Colorado in late March of 2012, while Al was in Alaska. He had been romancing Trudi Gerhart, trying to entice her into an affair.

  Quite possibly, Baker had felt there was no need for him to go to D.C. or to be hired for another season in Anarctica. With Kathie gone, he would have their house and business as well as any insurance on her life, rumored to be a considerable amount.

  Plumberg talked with Trudi Gerhart in Seward, Alaska. He learned that she and Al had looked at a restaurant for sale. Al had been interested in buying run-down businesses and improving them.

  “He told me that he wanted to be ‘The King of Whidbey Island’ as far as owning businesses,” Trudi said and recalled, “He had his eye on a pie shop, and some other small businesses he wanted to buy and remodel.”

  Out of the hundreds of phone numbers Mark Plumberg had checked with the Bakers’ phones via a search warrant for Verizon, he’d noticed several calls from Al Baker’s phone to someone called “PAUL WORK” and “PAUL CELL.” Plumberg found the same numbers on Kathie’s phone, with the name “Paul Sullivan” listed.

  Plumberg left messages for Paul Sullivan, asking him to call. Finally, Sullivan called him back.

  “I got your voice mail. Figured it was only a matter of time before I was contacted—”

  “Why is that?” Plumberg asked.

  “I’m Al Baker’s boss—have been for years, and I have frequent contact with him.”

  Sullivan and Al Baker had worked on the budgets for Raytheon the first week of June. This explained the flurry of phone calls from Baker on June 1, June 5, and June 7.

  Since Kathie, Al, and Trudi Gerhart had frequently been Poleys down on the ice together, Plumberg asked if Sullivan had ever noticed a romantic connection between Al and Trudi. Sullivan wasn’t sure but pointed out that it would be hard to keep something like that a secret since they all lived so close together at the South Pole.

  “Come to think of it now,” Sullivan mused, “Al and Trudi did seem to be together a lot this last year.”

  * * *

  As he pored over possible sources, Detective Plumberg discovered that Al Baker’s trail led only a short way back; he h
ad reinvented himself continually until his life prior to marrying Kathie Hill was as hard to untangle as a rope soaked in salt water and allowed to dry. He focused, always, on his future, not his past. He usually maintained a façade of success, although he neglected financial matters that a truly competent businessman would never allow to slide.

  Far from Al’s being a success, in the time before Kathie’s murder, the Bakers were having trouble with their IRS quarterly reports and tax payments. Their payroll deductions for their employees were also overdue. Al just hadn’t paid any taxes owed on his employees. He had blithely ignored the IRS, an agency it isn’t wise to ignore.

  Now the IRS had given them a final deadline to pay what they owed before liens were placed on their property. Kathie tried her best to get things that Al had brushed aside into some kind of order. In an email to her husband in late fall 2011, she’d tried to explain to him how much they owed.

  Hi Sweetie,

  Tammy, our tax girl completed her work on quarters 1,2,3 for IRS (Federal and FICA.)

  Basically, here’s the scoop. To get caught up with the IRS, we need to come up with $19,563.27 at a minimum, as this doesn’t include late charges and penalties.

  One had the feeling that Kathie was trying to cushion the unsettling news to keep Al from worrying. She might have been afraid that he would blame her for the tax mistakes. She may have only attempted to smooth out his life for him—just as she had always done. She kept assuring him that they would somehow find a way to come up with the money:

  So we’re making progress to get ourselves legal.

  Now, I just need to figure out where we’ll get our money and such.

  That’s all that’s fit to tell for the moment.

  I love you, Baby.

  There is little doubt that she did. But, sadly, it appeared that Kathie had become an inconvenience for Al.

  Things weren’t going smoothly at the pizzeria, either. Al’s shabby approach to finances had finally caught up with him.

  The amorous pizza man was in deep debt.

  * * *

  Jami Hill was the executor of Kathie’s estate. She was determined that Al would not get one red cent of Kathie’s assets—not because the Hill family was eager to inherit, but because a heartless killer should not profit from his crime. By Washington State law, killers cannot, in fact, profit from their crimes. But Al Baker would have to be convicted of Kathie’s murder before he could be prohibited from making a claim against his wife’s estate.

  Jami found that Kathie’s record-keeping was impeccable, with everything stored in a neat file cabinet. But Al had taken out huge loans—one for $28,000 and another for $35,000—from their joint bank accounts, and Jami couldn’t find what they were for.

  In late June 2012, Jami was sorting out things in the house at Silver Cloud Lane. There were stacks of documents to go through. One of those was a twenty-five-page document that outlined Al Baker’s personal financial analysis as of June 28, 2006.

  Jami looked through the pages, and she was shocked to see that Kathie’s and Al’s insurance coverage was far from balanced. In case Al should die, Kathie would have gotten $50,000. But Kathie’s insurance payout, with Al as her beneficiary, would be $275,000!

  Jami took the financial analysis to Mark Plumberg. He studied it and instantly saw the disproportion. The detective suspected that Kathie was the irreplaceable officer in the Bakers’ businesses and made much more than Al did. Still, the insurance coverage between the two of them was vastly different: over a quarter million dollars on her life and a relative pittance of $50,000 on his. According to actuaries, this hadn’t changed in the six years since the insurance went into effect.

  Kathie had barely managed to hold on to her beautiful home in Aurora, Colorado, by renting it out. And she had really wanted to keep it; it meant she still had a pied-à-terre close to her family. Still, she was willing to sell it to raise money to help Al in his projects and with his debts, and it was listed with a Realtor. Whatever he needed, she tried to supply, believing always that they were a team who had each other’s backs.

  Beyond his scientific work at the South Pole, Al felt that his pizzeria promised to make money—given enough time and an infusion of funds. Al considered himself an accomplished contractor, and he taught himself to play the piano—and well. In late December 2011, one of his business cards read:

  R. ALLEN BAKER

  Raytheon Polar Services

  Science Support Coordinator, South Pole Station

  He had other business cards—to use in whatever fit his current projects.

  A check of any rap sheets showing Baker’s criminal background drew forth the information that he had been charged with lewd and lascivious sexual abuse of a child in California. The victim was his own stepdaughter!

  He was convicted of that crime and served five years in prison.

  If Kathie had known that when she met him down on the ice, she would never have married him. But she didn’t know. There were so many things about Al Baker that she didn’t know.

  * * *

  Now locked in jail and awaiting his trial on murder charges, Al Baker realized he had waited too long to get off Whidbey Island. He had apparently been prepared to leave; investigators had located his backpack with $10,000 in cash inside it. He had broached the subject with Trudi, urging her to flee with him to New Zealand. He’d been there once on a vacation, liked it, and figured it was a country where they could get swallowed up, far from anyone in America who might be tracking them.

  Trudi was horrified to learn what had happened to Kathie Baker. When she was informed that Kathie’s body had been found, she broke into tears and seemed to be genuinely grieving. The last person Trudi wanted to go anyplace with was Al Baker.

  Initially, the Island County investigators had wondered if Trudi might have been part of Al’s plan to kill his wife, or at least had guilty knowledge of the crime. But further probing made that dubious. The consensus was that she had been duped—just like so many other women in Baker’s life. Whether their relationship was platonic or sexual was another question.

  Lieutenant Evan Tingstad got an interesting piece of evidence from the Harbor Inn, where Al Baker stayed the night before his arrest. It was a man’s coat—apparently Al’s—left behind when he had so hastily checked out. In the pocket, Tingstad found a receipt from the Elkhorn Trading Company on the Island, dated only the day before—on Friday—for the amount of $279.36.

  Tingstad visited the Elkhorn Trading Company and found that someone had sold a complete set of Golden Glow Patrician Depression Glass, vintage 1933, on June 8. He looked in the box holding the newspaper-wrapped antique glassware, and he recognized it as one of the boxes in Al Baker’s red truck’s bed the day before: evidently, Baker had attempted to glean as much money as he could before the arrest he knew was imminent. He was getting rid of Kathie’s treasures—or trying to.

  (Golden Glow pink, blue, and green glass was given away to moviegoers during the Depression. It was cheap then but it has become an expensive antique some eighty years later.)

  Kathie’s husband had discarded her as if she were a piece of trash. And he had wasted no time in cashing in on the things that were dear to her.

  * * *

  Even though he was safely locked in the Island County Jail awaiting trial, Trudi Gerhart had a restraining order against Al Baker. He was not to phone, write, email, or contact her in any way. In late September 2012, she called and left a message at the Island County Sheriff’s Office.

  “Alan’s violated his court order.”

  Mark Plumberg called her back. She told him that she usually picked up her mail about twice a week. She had just received two letters from Al Baker. One had instructions about mailing a $10,000 check to his attorney, and the other held the check itself.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Trudi said.

  Plumberg arranged for Detective Doreen Valdez of the Seward, Alaska, police department to pick up the two letters from Trudi.
And Plumberg made reservations to fly to Alaska himself.

  When he read the contents of the two letters Al had sent to Trudi, Plumberg saw he still believed he could control others—especially women—with his charisma. One held just the $10,000 check, the attorney’s address, and a short note: “I apologize for being a pest [please] send that check to my attorneys.”

  The other was more personal: “You’re the only person I trust with this. There are people who believe I did this horrible heinous thing. Most know otherwise. What a nightmare . . . Smile.”

  “He always signs his letters like that,” Trudi said. “And he puts ‘Smile’ on the envelopes instead of his return address.”

  That may have been a habit Al Baker learned in prison. Most convicts use “Smile” and draw smiley faces on their correspondence.

  Now that she had no more allegiance to Al Baker, it was time to interview Trudi Gerhart in depth.

  Mark Plumberg flew to Seward, Alaska, on October 9, 2012, to speak with Trudi and to take DNA samples. She had been pretty much excluded as a suspect, but her DNA still needed to be tested. The investigators were thorough and left nothing to chance.

  DNA testing must be very precise, and is perhaps the most important element in a chain of evidence. Plumberg opened new sterile swabs, and then swabbed the insides of both of Trudi’s cheeks. The four swabs were then inserted into plastic tips specifically designed to protect the cotton end of each swab, and then they were placed in separate boxes, which were sealed with evidence tape with the case number and subject’s name. Plumberg kept the exemplars with him until he returned to Whidbey Island and gave them directly to evidence technician Phil Farr.

  Mark Plumberg showed Trudi pictures that had been developed from film in a camera found at the Silver Cloud Lane property. It had been in the bed of Kathie’s SUV.

  There were six photos taken on the “pickle fork” of a ship—The Eau-de-Vie—(“Water of Life” in French) in Alaska. They showed a male and a female framed in the doorway that led from the pickle fork into the main passenger area of the ferry. They appeared to be a romantic couple. Trudi identified the couple as herself and Al Baker.