What is it about a pudgy former minister that could attract a beautiful woman like Vanessa Bull? This isn’t a rhetorical question by any measure, but the answer is obvious anyway: most women have incredibly low self-esteem.

CNN’s In Session is covering the January trial of a former Texas minister named Matt Baker in which he faced charges of murdering his wife and trying—inexpertly—to stage it as a suicide. As I understand it, Mrs. Baker—who was herself very pretty, although older than Ms. Bull—had been depressed over the death of one of her children when she learned of her husband’s affair. As a result, allegedly, she became suicidal.

Whether or not Matt Baker really killed her, Mrs. Baker’s response to discovering the affair is what tells me how it can be that a pudgy, middle-aged man can attract two such attractive women is: women generally have very low self-esteem.

The Suicide Note

In this case, what interests me the most, though, is the supposed suicide note. If I were a juror on this case, much would alert me to the lack of reasonable doubt in this case, but the single most telling piece of evidence is that note.

Several aspects of the document stand out: 1) it was written on a computer and printed; 2) it was an apology to her surviving children and husband; and 3) the prosecution’s fingerprint expert’s testimony was excellent—I can’t praise her too much (and I almost never like prosecution witnesses).

1) Who takes the time to print out a suicide note when you’re suicidal and have taken or plan to take an overdose of drugs? No one. It’s too impersonal. You want your final words to be in your voice, and your handwriting is a personal expression, while a print-out is not.

2) I have a theory that anger is the essence of depression, and suicide is the ultimate angry act. I’m not saying that the people a suicide leaves behind are guilty of something that incites the anger—not at all. But I do think that depression comes from an inability to express anger, and it turns inward. So, I can’t believe most suicidal people write apologetic notes.

Sidebar: A simple Google search on “studies of suicide notes” turns up an interesting list of academic work on the content of suicide notes. I recommend you try it. I knew that suicide notes are relatively uncommon, but I was surprised to find 750,000 results in the listing. I suppose I should have expected there to be a huge number of studies of suicide notes, as a former English teacher. Everything that’s ever been written has been analyzed, dissected, interpreted endlessly by all us English majors. Really, there’s nothing left for literary critics to write about.

3) The prosecution’s fingerprint expert used exactly the right rhetoric, in my opinion. She was clear, thorough, and genuine (as opposed to artificial, as are most investigative witnesses). The prosecutor attempted to get her to cite bogus statistics as a way of proving the defendant could have handled the note even though his fingerprints weren’t found on the note.

Specifically, the expert said she could eliminate several reference prints from having contributed to a smudge on the paper. Apparently she had 19 reference prints to work with, including the defendant’s and the police officers’ who responded to the 911 call. All but one of these could be eliminated as having made the smudge because of a single distinctive feature of the smudge. Clearly, the defendant’s sample could not be eliminated, but the expert refused to say—as the prosecutor tried to lead her to do—that the defendant could have been the person who made the smudge. The expert said she only had 19 samples. She had no way of knowing who made the smudge. Essentially what this expert did was refuse to use that ghastly phrase, “The defendant’s prints could not be excluded.” Bless her!

Computer Forensics

The fact that the note was printed from a computer clearly suggests that computer forensics might have been used effectively to prove or disprove the deceased woman wrote the note. Apparently, though, the investigators accidentally turned on a laptop before the data was collected from the hard drive.

More investigative idiocy: the investigator didn’t realize you can start up a laptop just by opening up its screen. And the prosecutor—not unexpectedly—couldn’t understand what’s wrong with this, namely, that every time you start up a computer you write new information to the hard drive and can overwrite old data that might be relevant.

Let’s face it: all lawyers, not only prosecutors, need to go back to school and learn something about math, statistics, technology, and the scientific method.