(March 25, 2009)—A year to the day after a murder complaint against him was dropped, the McLennan County Grand Jury Wednesday indicted former Waco-area pastor Matt Baker for murder Wednesday in the 2006 death of his wife, Kari.

The indictment alleges Baker drugged his wife and then suffocated her with a pillow.

Baker’s attorney, Richard Ellison, said he was shocked and dismayed by the indictment.

“There is no different evidence from the last time they arrested him,” Ellison said, “There is no case against him.”

“He is totally innocent,” Ellison said.

“This whole thing is the result of political pressure.”

Ellison said Baker will turn himself in within the next few days.

On March 25, 2008, McLennan County Justice of the Peace Billy Martin signed an order dismissing the original murder charge against Baker at the request of Baker’s attorney because the McLennan County District Attorney’s Office had not sought an indictment within the required 180 days of Baker’s arrest.

Martin said it was the first such writ he’s signed in his more than ten years as justice of the peace.

The original arrest warrant for Baker was issued in September 2007.

When Texas Rangers went to arrest him at a school in Kerrville where he was working, he apparently fled.

But several hours after Rangers said they considered him a fugitive, he turned himself in.

One of the officers involved in the 2007 arrest said Rangers couldn’t comment on the indictment because Rangers didn’t play a role in the subsequent investigation.

The affidavit submitted for the arrest warrant in 2007 indicated that authorities thought Kari Baker was suffocated with a pillow or similar object after she was “rendered defenseless” by a combination of alcohol and Unisom.

It said investigators found an abrasion on her nose and bruising to her lips, which would be consistent with suffocation.

Kari Baker, the affidavit says, confided in a counselor several days before she died that “she believed (her husband) was going to kill her.”

She told the counselor, the affidavit says, that she had found a bottle of crushed up pills in her husband’s briefcase and suspected he “was having an illicit affair with another woman.”

The death as initially ruled a suicide.

Martin issued the preliminary ruling on April 8, 2006 after consulting with police, and concluding that the area elementary schoolteacher died from an overdose of sleeping pills in her home in the Waco suburb of Hewitt.

Police found a typed, unsigned suicide note at the scene.

Three months later, at the request of the woman’s parents, Martin ordered that her body be exhumed for an autopsy after questions surfaced about whether Baker took her own life.

Pathologists found traces of Ambien and Unisom in her system, but could not accurately determine the concentration of the drugs.

But an expert cited in the affidavit says if Kari Baker ingested enough of either drug to cause her death, then she could not have died in the time frame provided by her husband, who told investigators that he left around 11:15 p.m. on April 7 2006 to buy gas and rent movies, and returned home to find his wife nude on the bed and cold to the touch.

Paramedics arrived at the house at 12:15 a.m. on April 8, 2006, by which time she was already dead.

Kari Baker’s parents, who dropped a wrongful death suit against their daughter’s husband in October 2007, filed a new suit in March 2008 on behalf of Kari Baker’s mother, Linda Dulin.

Baker was a former pastor at several area Baptist churches and once served as chaplain at the Waco Center for Youth.