On this, evil stepmonster Elisa Baker and I agree. Adam Baker, her husband, got away with the murder of his daughter, Zahra. Or being an accessory to murder. Or at a minimum attempting to thwart the investigation into her murder. Or some combination of the three.
Elisa Baker, Zahra’s stepmother, recently pled guilty in her death. She gave the Charlotte Observer her first public interview, which ran Sunday.
In it, she puts most of the blame on Adam Baker. Authorities apparently had a hard time tying him to the murder of 10-year-old Zahra Baker because it was Elisa’s cell phone that was in the areas where parts of the body were dumped according to cell phone records. Adam’s cell phone was in Burke County area at the time. There’s no doubt that Elisa Baker is guilty. And you can’t believe most of what she says, as her own family members have cautioned. But what if she isn’t lying or isn’t totally lying about her husband’s involvement?
What drives me nuts is the glaring discrepancies in Adam Baker’s stories that have never been adequately explained by investigators. While laughing on the 911 call, Adam Baker claimed this:
ADAM BAKER: The police were out here last night. They found a ransom note for my bosses daughter… um… I got up a little while ago… and it appears they took my daughter instead of my bosses daughter.
DISPATCHER: How old is your daughter?
ADAM BAKER: She is 10. She’s handicapped.. she has a prosthetic leg… so that…
DISPATCHER: How long has seen been missing?
ADAM BAKER: Ummm. We checked in there last night about 2:30 and she was there… and all this happened last night around 5 …so I don’t know if they set a fire in the yard to distract us to go out and then they snuck in the door… or.. I don’t know.
… DISPATCHER: OK, so.. No one has seen your daughter since 2:30 this morning…? [It is now after 2 pm that day]
ADAM BAKER: No.. like I said we, uh, had all that drama last night and we… me and my wife went back to bed. And my daughter is I think’s coming into puberty.. cause she is hitting that brooding stage (laughter) so we only see her when she comes out when she wants something. And that’s about it
Adam Baker was smack in the middle of the plot to throw police off the trail, and yet his wife was the only one who faced charges of faking the ransom note and interfering with the investigation. How could that be? Authorities wasted valuable time debunking those claims.
And he and the authorities have never fully explained lie number two, how Baker could claim on the 911 call to have checked in on his daughter in bed “and she was there” and then later tell everyone who would listen that he hadn’t seen her at all in the few weeks before she disappeared.
You’ve got to listen to the 911 call to fully appreciate how little Baker gives a rip about his daughter being missing. I’ve been more frantic over the loss of a wallet.
What I do think we’ll one day find out is that local authorities were in way over their heads and badly botched this investigation. Nothing else explains this.
