{"id":690,"date":"2012-08-29T22:31:03","date_gmt":"2012-08-30T04:31:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=690"},"modified":"2016-12-21T17:33:17","modified_gmt":"2016-12-22T01:33:17","slug":"kathryn-casey-deadly-little-secrets-the-minister-his-mistress-and-a-heartless-texas-murder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/kathryn-casey-deadly-little-secrets-the-minister-his-mistress-and-a-heartless-texas-murder\/","title":{"rendered":"Kathryn Casey: Deadly Little Secrets: The Minister, His Mistress, and a Heartless Texas Murder"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Now that we\u2019re in the middle of another political campaign, perhaps it\u2019s time to examine the proposition that ostentatious religious piety is somehow indicative of inner virtue. To all those who boast of how devoted a church (or temple) goer their candidate is, how full of praise and prayer, how supportive of the precepts of their faith, I present Matt Baker, popular hardworking pastor, devoted family man and product of good Christian parents, the very embodiment of those old time Texas Baptist values \u2013 and also, oh yeah, a thoroughly depraved murderer.<\/p>\n

Matt\u2019s the central figure in Kathryn Casey\u2019s great new true crime book\u00a0Deadly Little Secrets<\/em>. There\u2019s no better writer in the genre than Casey and in this effort she\u2019s got an extra juicy case to work with. Pastor Baker\u2019s wife Kari apparently committed suicide via pill overdose one night, with Matt the only witness to the hours surrounding her death, his account of her mental state differing sharply from that of just about everybody else that knew her. But there was a (typed, unsigned) suicide note and Matt was a man of God and Kari his wife, so the local Justice of the Peace, seemingly reluctant to abandon his warm bed in the middle of the night, signed off on a verdict of suicide and ordered no autopsy.<\/p>\n

Of course, due to Casey\u2019s masterful scene setting, the reader has strong suspicions to the contrary. Kari herself had recorded her fears of Matt in the margins of her bible and asked her therapist if it was crazy to think that her husband could possibly be trying to kill her. These facts and certain troubling things about Matt\u2019s past are quickly uncovered by Kari\u2019s devoted family and friends as they begin a grueling crusade for the truth, opposed not only by the dissembling pastor, but by a police force more intent on defending their disastrous snap decision than seeing justice done. Another degree of difficulty is added by the fact that the assumption of suicide prevented any conclusive forensic evidence from being recovered at the scene of the crime.<\/p>\n

Casey uses the traditional tools of the writer — character, setting, pacing and foreshadowing — to spellbind. It\u2019s true that the juicy raw ingredients were already out there, but a gifted true crime practitioner like Casey digs deep to find the facts, combines them precisely and brings everything to an energetic boil. By the end of the book there are as many memorable characters, unexpected developments and courtroom bombshells as in any Perry Mason yarn, but no one can fault its plausibility because it\u2019s true.<\/p>\n

And the glare of truth in a good true crime book like this one often extends farther than a single crime to cast a cold light on the society in which the crime germinated. Matt\u2019s serial exploitation of women, often reported, but never seriously confronted or even officially recorded was surely made easier by an avowedly patriarchal culture, one where a banner reading\u00a0A Woman Who Fears The Lord Deserves To Be Praised <\/em>hangs proudly next to the altar. In the end, the message of\u00a0Deadly Little Secrets<\/em> isn\u2019t that different from that of a lot of other cautionary tales — things are not always as they seem.\u00a0(Jamie)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now that we\u2019re in the middle of another political campaign, perhaps it\u2019s time to examine the proposition that ostentatious religious piety is somehow indicative of inner virtue. To all those who boast of how devoted a church (or temple) goer their candidate is, how full of praise and prayer, how supportive of the precepts of … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-true-crime"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=690"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2136,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690\/revisions\/2136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}