A Window of Time

Summary

Dateline NBC – "A Window of Time" (May 5, 2026)

Overview

This episode of Dateline NBC tells the story of the 2001 murder of Tara Baker, a promising young law student at the University of Georgia. Through interviews with family, friends, investigators, and the media, "A Window of Time" follows the heartbreaking and decades-long search for justice in her case. The episode explores the original investigation's missteps, the impact on Tara's loved ones, the emerging role of citizen advocacy (through podcasting and legislative action), and finally, the breakthrough achieved through advancements in forensic science, leading to an arrest and conviction over 25 years later.

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Main Discussion Points & Segments

Tara Baker: Portrait of a Victim (01:00–04:23)

• Family and friends remember Tara as vibrant, driven, and compassionate.
  • Virginia Baker (Tara’s mother): "She was the light of our family. I can't tell you the pride I had in her." (01:00)
  • Meredith Baker (sister): Tara was "everything" to their family. (03:03)
  • Tara’s daily life as a law student—diligent, hopeful, and always looking out for loved ones.
  • Katie Lonstein (friend): "She had this sort of jump to her walk, almost a lilt, as if she were bouncing through her day, very happy." (02:46)

The Murder and Crime Scene (04:23–12:13)

• On January 18, 2001, Tara was last seen studying late at the law library.
• The next morning, firefighters found her home on Fawn Drive ablaze; her body in her bedroom, which showed evidence of a violent attack and arson.
  • Firefighter Doug Whitehead: "All four of those electric eyes were on high... the burners were on high and the knobs pulled off and placed on the countertop." (05:05–05:10)
  • She appeared to have just showered; there was an electrical cord around her neck.
  • Crime scene technician David Lidahl notes: “It was a crime scene investigator’s nightmare... insulation everywhere... difficult to get trace evidence.” (10:17)
• The attack was brutal: Tara had been raped, stabbed, strangled, and beaten, with efforts made to cover the crime by setting a fire.

The Investigation: Early Suspicions and Missteps (12:13–38:42)

• Immediate focus was on the people closest to Tara: roommate (alibied), boyfriend Chris Melton (subjected to repeated questioning and suspicion), and even her estranged biological father.
  • Chris Melton: "I remember yelling that I love Tara, that I would never hurt Tara." (09:33)
  • Virginia Baker describes police reinacting the murder in her living room, then later "walked it back, said, no, that's not what happened." (31:31)
• Lack of forensic evidence; investigation regularly stalled and changed hands, causing ongoing frustration and distrust between family and authorities.
  • Wayne Ford (reporter): "The killer didn’t leave behind anything. He came in and killed Tara. Then he left." (29:32)
  • Cases of mishandled communication and incomplete follow-ups, including missed opportunities with alternate suspects, such as the maintenance man who had access to Tara’s apartment but was not initially interviewed.

Re-examination, Advocacy, and the Power of Podcasts (38:42–56:33)

• David Griffith, a crime analyst, re-investigates the case years later; confirms Chris’s alibi via timestamped bank security footage.
  • Agent David Griffith: "He would have had to have been able to bend space and time..." (40:38)
• The maintenance man (William Bryant Barrett), previously overlooked, becomes a leading person of interest for years due to suspicious knowledge, but no evidence can link him to the crime.
  • Agent David Griffith: “He demonstrates how to open one of the windows with a knife blade… police never interview him?” (41:10–42:09)
• Enter Cameron J. Harrelson, a true-crime fan and eventual podcast host, who launches "Classic City Crime," investigating Tara’s case and rallying support/awareness.
  • “People were sending you tips… hundreds of tips a week.” (50:33–50:40)
  • The podcast brings family and Chris Melton back into dialogue, and helps spur legislative advocacy.

A New Push for Justice: The Coleman-Baker Act (54:35–56:33)

• Inspired by Tara’s case and others, Cameron and both the Baker and Coleman families help pass the Coleman-Baker Act, funding a $5 million cold case unit in Georgia to review unsolved murders.

Breakthrough: Modern Science Meets Old Evidence (56:33–66:09)

• The GBI (Georgia Bureau of Investigation) reopens the case in 2024, with agents Liz Bigham and Jeremy Howell using new DNA technologies unavailable in 2001.
  • Old evidence, especially the sexual assault kit, is re-tested with contemporary methods for male DNA.
  • After almost 25 years, male DNA (not Chris Melton’s) is detected, then matched to Edric Fost, a convicted felon who lived 585 feet from Tara in 2001.
    • Agent Jeremy Howell: "Liz called me and said, we have a name." (67:27)
  • No direct connection between Fost and Tara could be found, no reasonable explanation for his DNA at the scene.

Arrest, Trial, and Verdict (69:07–86:33)

• Edric Fost is arrested in May 2024; denies knowing Tara.

  • “He ended it with, yeah, you can go ahead and take me to jail.” — Agent Liz Bigham (70:51)

• The long-awaited trial occurs in early 2026.

  • Chris Melton, long suspected, is put on the stand and aggressively questioned by the defense, who tries to shift suspicion due to his past relationship and minor inconsistencies in his statements.
    • Defense repeatedly asks: "Why didn't you cry?" (77:23)
    • Chris Melton: "It just seemed like I was the one on trial." (77:03)
  • The prosecution establishes Chris’s solid alibi (including timestamped bank video), and forensic evidence (hair in Tara’s hand) is shown to belong to Tara herself.
  • Emotional toll is high for Tara’s family, Chris, and the community, complicated further by social media attacks and public rhetoric.

• After 25 years, the jury finds Edric Fost guilty of murder, rape, and arson.

  • Meredith Baker: "Guilty on all counts." (84:17)
  • Virginia Baker: "My heart leapt, but I couldn’t show any emotion. I did not want to make it any harder on his family by showing joy..." (84:23)

Aftermath and Reflections (86:33–88:05)

• Fost is sentenced to two consecutive life terms plus 45 years.
• Tara’s family and Chris Melton reckon with decades of trauma, suspicion, and loss.
  • Adam Baker, Tara’s brother, at sentencing: "I have forgiven you. I harbor no hate in my heart." (86:16)
• Meredith meets with Chris Melton to apologize for years of silence and suspicion.
  • Chris Melton: "It's painful, but there's no animosity whatsoever." (87:29)
• Tara’s legacy as a force for justice and kindness, remembered by all who knew her.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• "She could tell you to go straight to hell and make you look forward for the trip because she would say it in such a nice way." – Virginia Baker (15:21)
• “You would have had to bend space and time to have killed Tara Baker.” – Agent David Griffith (40:38)
• "I want Edric Fost to walk free... He lied because he had not seen her in 10 days." – Protester/family of accused, during trial (82:07)
• “The number one rule is you don’t lie to a jury.” – Meredith Baker, on the defense’s misleading claim about the hair evidence (80:52)
• "I have never had my life changed so much by someone that I've never met. And Tara Baker did that for me." – Cameron J. Harrelson (87:58)
• "She always wanted to see everybody succeed." – Kevin Baker (15:27)

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• 01:00–04:23: Introduction to Tara Baker, her life, and relationships.
• 04:23–12:13: The discovery of Tara's body and initial crime scene investigation.
• 12:13–38:42: Family grief, police suspicion, and missteps; early suspect lines.
• 38:42–56:33: Case stagnation, new investigators, and the podcast’s impact.
• 54:35–56:33: Coleman-Baker Act and renewed hope for cold case families.
• 56:33–66:09: Forensic breakthroughs, GBI involvement, and DNA testing.
• 66:09–69:07: Discovery and arrest of Edric Fost.
• 69:07–86:33: Trial, defense strategy, verdict, and reactions.
• 86:33–88:05: Aftermath, forgiveness, and Tara’s enduring legacy.

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Conclusion

Dateline’s "A Window of Time" is a powerful exploration of grief, persistence, and the drive for justice across generations. It highlights the painful consequences of investigative failures, the promise of scientific progress, the healing role of transparency, and the unexpected power of advocacy—whether through individual citizens, podcasts, or state lawmaking. Tara Baker’s life and tragic death continue to inspire change, advocacy, and remembrance in her community and beyond.

Transcript

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[Lester Holt]

tonight on Dateline.

[Virginia Baker]

She was the light of our family. I can't tell you the pride I had in her. Why would anybody harm her?

[Interviewer/Reporter]

You just hear there's a house fire, There's a body.

[David Lidahl]

Yes. Went into the bedroom and she was laying on her back. I could smell the shampoo in her hair.

[Virginia Baker]

They said, we're considering this a homicide.

[Meredith Baker]

I'm just sobbing, saying, no, Tara, no. It was unbelievable that somebody did this on purpose.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

You all roommates. You were close. Who were they asking you about?

[Meredith Baker]

Just the people in her life.

[Valerie Lowe]

At the law school, at work.

[Meredith Baker]

Then of course, her boyfriend.

[Chris Melton]

They take pictures of my body. They take pictures of my hands. I just lost it.

[Cameron J. Harrelson]

Five or six persons of interest and nothing quite fit

[Narrator/Reporter]

more than two decades.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Finally you have a name.

[Agent Liz Bigham]

Like everybody get to headquarters.

[Chris Melton]

It's painful. I felt like I was the one on trial.

[Lester Holt]

A young law student found dead in a fire. Evidence burned in the flames. But the drive for justice burned far stronger. I'm Lester Holt and this is Dateline. Here's Blaine Alexander with a window of time.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Can't you just imagine her rushing off to class or somewhere to study or heading to a football game here at the University of Georgia, always pushing herself as far and as fast as she could go.

[Katie Lonstein]

She had this sort of jump to her walk, almost a lilt, as if she were bouncing through her day, very happy.

[Virginia Baker]

She was a brilliant person. She wanted to do the best she could in everything she did.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

What did she mean to you guys?

[Meredith Baker]

Everything.

[Narrator/Reporter]

She was a girl in a hurry. But her family would need patience and perseverance if they would ever find justice. Thursday night is party night in Athens, Georgia. Just like it was 25 years ago. But on Thursday night, January 18, 2001, Tara Baker wasn't bar hopping. She was studying. This was her first year at UGA's law school, and she was buckled down at the law library with her friend Katie Lonstein.

[Katie Lonstein]

I don't remember what we were working on. I think it was probably a paper. She turned on her computer. It made all of its very loud noise because it had a big fan. And then she leaned in and she went, shh. Like this, with her little crinkly nose.

[Narrator/Reporter]

They worked for a couple of hours,

[Katie Lonstein]

and then I hit 9, 9:30, something like that. I'd had enough. I wanted to go home for the day. So I packed up. And I knew she was staying until at least 10, because that was her grand plan. And she told me to come when I got home because she always worried about me when I walked home.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Katie made it home safely, but she forgot to call.

[Katie Lonstein]

So Tara called me at about 9:40, 9:45. And she said, ma', am, you did not call me. And I said, I know. I'm so sorry, Tara.

[Virginia Baker]

I'm home.

[Katie Lonstein]

I'm fine. Everything's okay.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Then Tara went home herself around 10. Katie's sure of it, because her friend always stuck to her plan. For Tara, this was home. A little place on Fawn Drive on the outskirts of Athens. Rain clouds were gathering the next morning as the call came into Firehouse 5. That little house on Fawn Drive was on fire. Firefighters arrived on the scene, kicked in the door, and found a living room full of smoke.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

What do you see when you come over here?

[Doug Whitehead]

See a red glow around this corner of this wall.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Firefighter Doug Whitehead remembers this house like it was yesterday. And what he saw in the kitchen.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

What is it?

[Doug Whitehead]

All four of those electric eyes were on high.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

The burners were turned on.

[Doug Whitehead]

The burners were on high and the knobs pulled off and placed on the countertop.

[Narrator/Reporter]

He then saw a locked bedroom and knew something was burning behind that door.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

You come inside this room. What do you see when you walk in?

[Doug Whitehead]

Smoke. Fire. And I see where the fire had broken through the roof, and you could see daylight through the hole.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

What else did you see in here?

[Doug Whitehead]

We found a body on the floor.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

A body on the floor?

[Doug Whitehead]

Yes.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

What could you tell about this person?

[Doug Whitehead]

It appeared she maybe had just gotten out of the shower and a comb had been run through her hair and an electrical cord around her neck.

[Narrator/Reporter]

This was no longer just a fire. They doused the flames, backed out and called police.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

What was it that stood out to you when you got to the scene,

[Detective Jerry Salters]

there was a lot of fire still there. A lot of police officers, detectives and media was starting to show up.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Jerry Salters was a young patrolman back then. He was asked to stand guard in the kitchen.

[Detective Jerry Salters]

I had looked on the refrigerator and I seen a bunch of pictures and it was college aged females. Just looked like they were having a good time. Basically just friends. And really touched me that, you know, this is, this is going to be bad.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Police learned three young women lived in that house. Valerie, Ashley and Tara. Officers had no way of knowing who lay dead in the bedroom, so they ran the plates on the only car parked in the driveway. The owner, Tara Baker. An officer called her mother, Virginia, and

[Virginia Baker]

she said, Ms. Baker, there's been a fire in Athens at Tara's house. And I said, oh, my goodness. I said, we'll be right there. Because I thought shooting Tara was going to be upset and I wanted to

[Interviewer/Reporter]

go comfort her because she lost her things. You're thinking, yes.

[Virginia Baker]

And so I said, we'll be down there very soon. She said, you need to come right now. We have a body.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Virginia lived some 80 miles away. She called Tara's boyfriend, Chris Melton.

[Chris Melton]

She asked me, is Tara with you? I said, no, Terry's not with me.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Virginia told him what she had just heard.

[Chris Melton]

I remember all the noise in the room stopped and then I recall someone saying my name and bringing me back around.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Chris left his plumbing job and a co worker drove him to Athens, about an hour away.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

So when you guys get to Athens, your first stop is the police department?

[Chris Melton]

That's correct.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

What do they tell you?

[Chris Melton]

When I walk in, they started informing me that, yes, indeed, there was a fire and that there was a body found in the fire and they need help to identify and they're asking you. And I recall at first saying, I can't, I can't do this. And he says, you know, if, if you don't do this, her family's gonna have to identify her.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

And that convinced you?

[Chris Melton]

That convinced me.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Police took Chris to the crime scene where someone brought him a photo of the victim inside.

[Chris Melton]

I could not make her out. It was horrible. And I could not positively say, yes, this is her. And then it did come to me that I had previously given her for an anniversary gift. I had given her diamond studded earrings for our two year, and she always wore them. And I told them, I said, if this is Tara, she's wearing diamond studded earrings.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Moments later, one of those emergency workers came back with proof, delicate, heartbreaking proof.

[Chris Melton]

And he Came up to me with a closed hand. And when he opened his hand, there's one of the diamond stud earrings, the

[Interviewer/Reporter]

earring you gave her.

[Chris Melton]

And that's when I knew. That's when I knew it was her.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Now investigators had a name and a case that would become an Athens legend.

[David Lidahl]

I could smell the shampoo in her hair, and I can smell it to this day.

[Narrator/Reporter]

But the search for a killer would be tainted by mistrust and lingering suspicion.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

This was a friend of yours?

[Meredith Baker]

Yes. I think we were all in shock.

[Chris Melton]

I remember yelling that I love Tara, that I would never hurt Tara.

[Narrator/Reporter]

It would take a new generation to bridge the divide.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

People were sending you tips, like, week after week.

[Cameron J. Harrelson]

Yes, hundreds of tips a week.

[Meredith Baker]

I was just staring at the ceiling. Utter shock and disbelief.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

You couldn't even process it.

[Meredith Baker]

No.

[Narrator/Reporter]

If Tara Baker's bedroom held any clues about what happened to her, crime scene technician David Lidall knew getting them would not be easy. What was the condition of the room?

[David Lidahl]

Well, it was a crime scene investigators nightmare, because when that ceiling fell, all that insulation everywhere, it was about 2 or 3 inches deep and covered most of the room. So it became real difficult to try to get trace evidence, like hairs and fibers, things of that nature.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Was it immediately clear to you that she didn't die in the fire?

[David Lidahl]

Once I moved some of the insulation away, I could see the stab mark in the neck. And she also had other injuries to. Her eyes were black and blue, swollen a little bit.

[Narrator/Reporter]

They found a knife by her body and signs of blunt force trauma to her head. The cord around her neck came from her printer.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

At the time, did you know anything else about her other injuries?

[David Lidahl]

Sexual assault, we suspected, yes. She had no clothing on in the position that she was in.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Later, at Tara's autopsy, the medical examiner determined she had been raped, But a sexual assault kit did not provide any useful evidence. As the crime scene technicians worked, detectives wanted to talk to anyone close to Tara, including her boyfriend, Chris.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

When you were in there, they were asking you questions. But there were more than just questions. They asked you for your fingerprints.

[Chris Melton]

That's true. That's true.

[Narrator/Reporter]

At the time, had they told you

[Interviewer/Reporter]

much about what had happened to Tara?

[Chris Melton]

No. Nothing.

[Narrator/Reporter]

As Tara's family headed to the police station in Athens, they knew even less.

[Virginia Baker]

I'm thinking to myself, maybe somehow she fell asleep and one of her candles caught things on fire. But it can't be her. She can't be gone. That's can't. I kept telling myself, there's no way it could be her.

[Meredith Baker]

I'M just sobbing. I was using my sweater as a tissue, and I'm just laying in my uncle's arms, just absolutely sobbing. I was like, this is not real. It's a mistake. It's not her.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Meredith Schroeder is Tara's sister. She was 15 years old at the time.

[Meredith Baker]

So we pulled up, there was some folks waiting for us outside. We walk in there, they lead us to this conference room.

[Virginia Baker]

And we went in and we sat down and we waited for a while. And then this detective came in and he said, well, I'm going to talk to y' all in just a minute, but you're going to have to excuse me. I got to go get a cup of coffee because I've been out in the rain all day.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

That's what he said to you?

[Virginia Baker]

That's exactly what he said to me.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

At this point, has anyone officially confirmed to you.

[Virginia Baker]

No.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

What's happened? That she's.

[Virginia Baker]

No. And when he left the room to get his coffee, that young woman that had called me was in the room. And she said, well, we've determined that it is Tara, and we're considering this a homicide at this time. And I. I think all of us let out screams almost. And I remember going in. I guess it was shock. I was just couldn't. The nausea was incredible. And we kept asking, what happened? What happened? They wouldn't tell us what happened. They just said, she's gone.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Tara's roommates, Valerie Lowe and Ashley hall, were away that Friday morning. They rushed back to Athens.

[Valerie Lowe]

We were just trying to make sense of it. It was just. It was horrible.

[Virginia Baker]

Yeah.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

And you're young students at the time and then have something like this.

[Virginia Baker]

Yeah.

[Meredith Baker]

Well, you just didn't think anything like that could. Could happen to you.

[Narrator/Reporter]

The next day, Tara was supposed to have been celebrating her 24th birthday. Instead, her grandparents were bringing her 10 year old brother Kevin to Athens.

[Kevin Baker]

And my dad sat on the bed and he said there was a fire at Tara's apartment. My first reaction is, is she okay? Is she in the hospital? I want to go see her. And he said, no, she didn't make it.

[Meredith Baker]

I walked in there and his little fists were balled up. He was just screaming, no, Tara, no. I just. His world was shattered.

[Virginia Baker]

Meredith always referred to her as the North Star, that they would sit there, you know, kind of follow her path.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Tara was the oldest of four, and she had her own special bond with each of her siblings. Adam was the oldest boy.

[Virginia Baker]

Adam and Tara were so close.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Meredith was next in line.

[Meredith Baker]

She was Very doting and protective of me. I had very low self esteem growing up and she would always be like, oh, isn't my sister so pretty? She would do my hair. Tell me. You know, it's okay.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Kevin was the youngest. Tara called him her baby. Darlin.

[Kevin Baker]

Tara was my person. If I knew she was coming home, I would pace the door, looking outside like a lost puppy, waiting for her to drive up.

[Narrator/Reporter]

The people close to Tara say she had a strong sense of justice and an even bigger sense of humor.

[Katie Lonstein]

She was one of the funniest people I know, and she just didn't try.

[Virginia Baker]

Tara could tell you to go straight to hell and make you look forward for the trip because she would say it in such a nice way.

[Kevin Baker]

She definitely was very much the person that would come and talk to the kid at the lunch table that was sitting by themselves. She always wanted to see everybody succeed.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Tara met her boyfriend Chris in undergrad and they stayed together when she went off to law school at her top choice, uga.

[Valerie Lowe]

It was an honor for her to be here.

[Meredith Baker]

She took it seriously. This was her dream, and she had

[Interviewer/Reporter]

her eyes on the future.

[Narrator/Reporter]

She knew what she wanted to do.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

She knew where she wanted to go.

[Virginia Baker]

She definitely did. She definitely did. I never have known a person who loved life as much as she did.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

When you say that she loved life,

[Narrator/Reporter]

what did that look like?

[Virginia Baker]

She got up every morning, excited. Sometimes she would call me and just say, mama, look up. Look at the sky. It's beautiful. It's a terror day. The blue sky and the white clouds. God made it just for me.

[Narrator/Reporter]

But now, on this dreary day in Athens, Georgia, there wasn't an ounce of beauty to be found. Nothing made sense. A murder, an arson, Just out of the blue. Or maybe not.

[Doug Whitehead]

A few weeks earlier, two of those buildings were on fire.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Both of them.

[Doug Whitehead]

Two of them.

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[Interviewer/Reporter]

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[Agent David Griffith]

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[Virginia Baker]

I've written you.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

What does that mean? He was a big city cop with a small jurisdiction. Boomers are so cute when they flirt.

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[Narrator/Reporter]

It wasn't long before the killing on Fawn Drive became front page news in the Athens Banner Herald. Crime scene tech David Lidahl was on the scene until late into the night, combing through the charred remains of Tara Baker's bedroom. He'll never forget it.

[David Lidahl]

I could smell the shampoo in her hair and I can smell it to this day. Never. It never left.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

A lot of times, of course, investigators talk about different moments from a scene or a particularly disturbing scene that just kind of really drives home how brutal this was.

[David Lidahl]

Yes.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

This was that moment.

[David Lidahl]

Yeah.

[Narrator/Reporter]

It also told him something important. Tara was most certainly killed after she got out of the shower. Her roommates helped police develop a timeline of the crime.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Tara was very much a creature of habit.

[Meredith Baker]

She was.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

She had a very specific morning routine.

[Meredith Baker]

Yes.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Walk me through that.

[Meredith Baker]

She'd get up at like 6:30, shower and then make her cheese grits.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

That was her breakfast.

[Meredith Baker]

That was her breakfast, Yep.

[Valerie Lowe]

Every day.

[Meredith Baker]

Yep. And then go back and get ready.

[Narrator/Reporter]

In fact, patrolman Jerry Salters saw Tara's bowl in the sink.

[Detective Jerry Salters]

Seeing that bowl sitting there and going about her day and just being in there and seeing that was pretty hard.

[Narrator/Reporter]

After her last breakfast, she would have gone to blow dry her hair in her bedroom like she always did.

[Meredith Baker]

Her hair is very thick, so she would sit usually at the foot of her bed, flip her head over and just sit there and just blow dry it.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Investigators noticed another detail sealed in by the fire itself.

[David Lidahl]

She had a clock in her bedroom and the clock quit at 9:32.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Because of the heat.

[David Lidahl]

Because of the heat, yeah.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

So that helps you kind of narrow down a window of time of death.

[David Lidahl]

Yes. Yes.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Sometime between 7:30 and 9:30.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

They figured initially, as you're walking through, you don't see any evidence that, you

[Narrator/Reporter]

know, somebody had gone through drawers or

[Interviewer/Reporter]

tried to take anything.

[David Lidahl]

None at all. It was later on we discovered that her laptop was taken.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Truth was, the entire home felt violated. Tara's collection of memories, Photos of all those people she loved, Were charred, Almost lost in the ruin. And when investigators saw melted fabric on the kitchen burners, they knew exactly how the killer started the fire.

[David Lidahl]

The suspect had taken a blanket and put it on the stove in the kitchen. And when he went back into the bedroom, he took the burning blanket and threw it on the bed.

[Meredith Baker]

It was my blanket, so they used my blanket to do that.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

You know, I mean, that detail is just so chilling to me, because blankets are just. They're comforting.

[Meredith Baker]

Yeah.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

When you got to the stove and you realized what had happened, what the blanket had been used for, Someone had

[Meredith Baker]

to really think this through.

[Valerie Lowe]

You know, it's almost like a switch flipped. You know, at that moment, we weren't college students anymore.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Wayne Ford has been a reporter for the Athens banner Herald since 1982.

[Wayne Ford]

In the community at the time, there were some arson fires. So there was speculation, is it an arsonist? That he actually come into the house, maybe surprise Tara and kill her, and then go about setting the place on fire?

[Narrator/Reporter]

And those previous fires were within a stone's throw of Tara's home.

[Doug Whitehead]

A few weeks earlier, Two of those buildings were on fire.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Both of them?

[Doug Whitehead]

Two of them.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Just after the murder. Police also got specific tips about a man walking alone in the rain around the time of the killing.

[Wayne Ford]

And from what I was told back then, they reached out to their sources, you know, might have been involved in different criminal activities. And a name never came up.

[Narrator/Reporter]

One of the first things investigators wanted to know, of course, was how did the killer get inside? The doors were locked when firefighters arrived, But Doug whitehead noticed something.

[Doug Whitehead]

I can't tell you for 100%, but that screen was out of that window,

[Interviewer/Reporter]

the window screen right here, this window

[Doug Whitehead]

screen, and was propped against the side of the building.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

So you're thinking maybe whoever did this came in and out through this window.

[Doug Whitehead]

Maybe so.

[Narrator/Reporter]

But the killing was so violent, so up close, it looked like a crime of passion, not a random act. Could you get a sense in those

[Interviewer/Reporter]

early days maybe, of what direction police were going by the questions they were asking you at the time?

[Meredith Baker]

They were just asking about any male

[Valerie Lowe]

in her life, Whether it be at the law school or at work or, you know, in her personal life.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Police heard about one law school classmate who had gotten himself a nickname.

[Katie Lonstein]

One day, one of the police people asked me if I knew who suit boy was, and I said, yes, he was called suit boy because on Fridays he would dress in a suit in order to ask women out on dates. I knew that he. That suit boy had asked Tara out at least once, probably just the one time. But she was with Chris, so she definitely said no.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Asking girls out was one thing. What Katie told police next sounded much more suspicious.

[Katie Lonstein]

The Friday morning that Tara died, he had come in and he had an

[Interviewer/Reporter]

injury on his head, an injury the

[Narrator/Reporter]

morning of the murder that would get police looking in suit boy's direction. But he wasn't the only one they needed to talk to. Tara's mother had an idea, one disturbingly close to home.

[Virginia Baker]

It at one point occurred to me. What if it could have been her biological father?

[Narrator/Reporter]

On behalf of the University of Georgia Law School, three weeks after Tara Baker was killed, her family joined faculty and students for a memorial at her beloved law school. Tara's stepfather, Lindsey Baker, told them Tara had been living her dream.

[Agent David Griffith]

I never met anybody in my life more confident in who they were, what they were doing, and where they were going in my little Tara.

[Narrator/Reporter]

In the end, she never even got to finish her second semester.

[Agent David Griffith]

As you go through your lives practicing law, remember that was Tara's dream. That's what her dream was. As you do it, Tara will practice law.

[Virginia Baker]

To see him standing there and talking about his little girl and trying to choke back tears was just. It was tough.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Everything was tough for the Bakers in those early weeks, especially the not knowing. As she grieved, Virginia asked herself repeatedly, who. Who could have done this? She started to wonder about someone who was no stranger to the family. Her first husband, Tara's father.

[Virginia Baker]

He threatened me when I divorced him a lot, and his threats to me were hitting me in the head to the point that you couldn't recognize my face.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Tara's family had been told few details about what had happened to her, nothing about the rape or stabbing. But they did know she'd suffered blunt force trauma to the head. Tara was 8 years old when her parents divorced. Growing up, she thought of Lindsay as her dad and wanted no contact with her biological father.

[Virginia Baker]

She refused to answer his phone calls. She just didn't want anything to do.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

They didn't have a relationship.

[Virginia Baker]

Absolutely not.

[Narrator/Reporter]

And she made that clear when she changed her last name, taking her stepdad's name and dropping her biological father's. But just days before she was killed, Tara got a letter from him.

[Katie Lonstein]

She was very upset that he had found her. She had been withholding her address from him. I don't know how he got it

[Virginia Baker]

apparently they had a conversation and he said that he did learn that she had changed her name. That was in the letter also. And the letter was forwarded from her previous address to this address. And she was a little concerned.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Now the wheels were turning in Virginia's mind. Did the name change set him off?

[Virginia Baker]

He had a tremendous ego and he was. Didn't like being rejected.

[Narrator/Reporter]

She urged investigators to look into him

[Virginia Baker]

and they checked him out. They called him in at my request.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Police spoke to him at least twice. They examined his alibi and could find no evidence he was in Athens at the time of the murder. By then they were increasingly focused on someone else. Someone Tara did have a relationship with. Her boyfriend, Chris Melton.

[Wayne Ford]

With Chris because he was the boyfriend. You know, if these other factors were true in emotional killing, had access to the house, then you know Chris is a suspect.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Police had done more than just take Chris's fingerprints. Two days after the murder, they had him back at the police station where they took blood and hair samples along with pictures of his body.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

What were police telling you about him?

[Meredith Baker]

They didn't say anything at first, but then they were saying that he is a suspect.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

They told you that? Yeah.

[Narrator/Reporter]

And they went a step further. They urged Tara's friends to steer clear of Chris.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

This was a friend of yours?

[Meredith Baker]

Yeah.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

I mean, you all had known each other since undergrad. Was that jarring for you to hear, stay away from this guy?

[Meredith Baker]

Everything was jarring back then, though. I mean, I think we were all in shock still and like we didn't know who we were targeted. We didn't know, you know, so you're just scared.

[Valerie Lowe]

When we wanted to respect the process. So if that would been a part of the process, then we were going to do whatever we were told to do because we wanted an answer.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Tara's family got the same warning from police and the Bakers stopped talking to Chris.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Was your dad thinking that Chris was possibly in some way responsible?

[Meredith Baker]

I think that he was, but he didn't flat out sit me down and say he did this. I just think that he was trying to make sense of it and if that was what the police were telling him and pointing in that direction, then he thought so too and he was gonna pursue it.

[Kevin Baker]

My dad was so protective of his kids and he was devastated as a 6 foot 3, nearly 400 pound man that he couldn't protect his daughter from the evil that happened. He said, if you've got something on him, I want to know if you've got. If he was tying his shoe down the street. I want to know. He did that with more than just Chris.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Nothing was recovered from the crime scene to rule Chris in or out. No fingerprints, no DNA. Forensic investigators did find hair in Tara's hand, but testing determined it was her own.

[Wayne Ford]

The killer didn't leave behind anything. He came in and killed Tara. Then he left.

[Narrator/Reporter]

With so little evidence, the investigation was stuck. And police would return again and again to the same place.

[Chris Melton]

I was yelling in the phone. I felt like they had nothing. Not on me, but just for the case.

[Narrator/Reporter]

The months were slipping by. In January 2002, the one year anniversary of Tara's death came and went with no arrest. For the Baker family, the unanswered questions were agonizing. They knew police had to hold back details about the investigation, but they wondered if they were even getting basic facts.

[Virginia Baker]

I was getting it very sporadically. Oh, this happened. Oh, well, this also happened. And then this happened.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Every so often, the Bakers would pile into the car and drive the 80 odd miles to the Athens Clarke County PD.

[Meredith Baker]

I was in the car with them when they would drive up there to make the police talk to them. And I would just be, you know, sitting out in the lobby, twiddling my thumbs.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

So you remember this from a teen perspective of your parents. Just the frustration.

[Meredith Baker]

The frustration, the anger, the feeling of helplessness that they couldn't do anything for Tara anymore. This is all that they could do.

[Narrator/Reporter]

The investigation was constantly changing hands, and to the family no one seemed to be in charge of. Kevin went from a little boy to a young teen, watching investigators come and go.

[Kevin Baker]

You hit a wall. And then a new team starts over and said, okay, well, we'll figure it out. Well, we're gonna start at the beginning.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Virginia says some of the information they did get in those first few years was bizarre and flat out wrong.

[Virginia Baker]

The police came to my house and demonstrated how somebody had snuck up behind her, and one pretended to be Tara and the other was, you know, the culprit and pretended how she was. Her throat was cut from behind, so she died quickly.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

They demonstrated this.

[Virginia Baker]

They demonstrated that in my living room.

[Meredith Baker]

It was a twisted game of charades.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

So officers were acting out for your family what they believe happened. Mm.

[Meredith Baker]

To my mother. And then later walked it back, said, no, that's not what happened.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Later admitted that was wrong.

[Meredith Baker]

Yeah.

[Narrator/Reporter]

With every restart came renewed focus on the boyfriend, Chris.

[Meredith Baker]

For the longest time, we were told this is who did it. Whether or not we believed it, we were told. And so naturally, you don't reach out. You don't talk to that person.

[Narrator/Reporter]

But police had repeatedly. His answer never changed.

[Chris Melton]

I loved her so much. It was so deep. It's painful to lose her, and then it's painful to be looked at that way.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Chris says each time he talked to police, he gave them his alibi. He had not seen Tara in days. The night before the murder, he slept over at his parents house almost an hour from the crime scene. That morning, he went to work, stopping at a few places along the way.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

When they question you again, are they asking you different questions, new questions?

[Chris Melton]

Most of the time, it's the same questions. It's like it landed on somebody else's desk and now they're starting over.

[Narrator/Reporter]

It happened again and again. The phone would ring and the questions

[Chris Melton]

would start Wednesday would reach out and talk to me. They would ask me questions, and I would return, ask questions myself. What about this or what about that? You know, and they wouldn't give me answers.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Did anyone ever come out and just tell you that you were a suspect?

[Chris Melton]

You know, as far as actually saying that, I don't recall them actually saying that. Suspect. It was just in the actions.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Chris says it was excruciating because all he ever wanted to do was spend the rest of his life with Tara. He says he knew she was special. Just a few weeks after their first date, they ran into each other at a crowded college bar.

[Chris Melton]

We end up back to back, and I feel her hand reach around, like, tickle my arm, fingernails. And then I reach back and I hold her hand. And it's kind of silly to say this, but I remember I gotta go to the restroom so bad.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

But you're holding her hand.

[Chris Melton]

Yes.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

And you don't want to let it

[Chris Melton]

go, and I'm not letting go. You could not have dragged me away.

[Narrator/Reporter]

They never got their happy ending. Instead, Chris says he tried to go on with his life. He built up a small business as a plumber and did his best to put the pain behind him. But one time, when yet another investigator made yet another call, Chris didn't hold back.

[Chris Melton]

She asked me a question, and I had to take time to consider, you know, just, I need to answer the question. And then she aggressively flipped things around a little bit and said, well, didn't you say this or that or something? And then that's when I just kind of lost it.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Do you remember what you said?

[Chris Melton]

I remember yelling that I love Tara, that I would never hurt Tara, and I needed her to know this. And I was yelling in the phone. I felt like they had nothing, not on me. But just for the case.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Still, Chris says he always picked up the phone when investigators called because maybe it would find finally be the call that mattered.

[Chris Melton]

I'm waiting on the phone call that says Chris. We. We have somebody. We've got the person. We have this information. We can share this with you now. And then the next phone call I get is another question.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Then four years after the murder, someone new took over the case. Would he see something everyone else had missed?

[Interviewer/Reporter]

So let me make sure I have that straight. This is one of the very few people who has a key to this apartment. He was there at the crime scene, and police never interview him.

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[Meredith Baker]

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[Narrator/Reporter]

It became a cruel ritual. Year after year, Tara's close friends came together to mark the anniversary of her death.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

You graduated, you moved on with your lives. And still there were no answers.

[Meredith Baker]

That was tough.

[Valerie Lowe]

It's been very difficult, you know, all these years not knowing, you know, the why and what truly happened.

[Narrator/Reporter]

As the years passed, the relationship between the Athens Clarke County PD and the Baker family deteriorated.

[Agent David Griffith]

One of the most egregious things we did was miscommunicate with the Baker family. Early on, there were some investigators that told them things about the case file that were just not true.

[Narrator/Reporter]

David Griffith, a civilian crime analyst with the Athens pd, began looking into Tara's case four Years after she was murdered,

[Agent David Griffith]

I'll never forget meeting Meredith Baker for the first time, introducing myself. And she's dismissive and she tells me to my face, you're just another face in this long, drawn out investigation. And next year, you probably won't be here.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Wow. They felt burned.

[Agent David Griffith]

They felt burned, yeah.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Griffith resolved to turn the situation around.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

What was different about the way David Griffith handled this?

[Virginia Baker]

Well, for the first thing, he was patient enough to listen to me yell at him.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

That's saying a lot.

[Chris Melton]

It does.

[Virginia Baker]

And he kept his cool.

[Narrator/Reporter]

By the time he got his hands on the Tara Baker case file, it was thousands of pages thick. Griffith hit reset. He started in a familiar place in my mind.

[Agent David Griffith]

Initially, it lent itself more to a domestic violence type scenario. So I think that made me personally suspect Chris Melton initially. Maybe it was a lover's quarrel that went really sideways.

[Narrator/Reporter]

A crime of passion supported by the fact that Tara's killer didn't arrive armed with a murder weapon. The knife came from a knife block in the kitchen.

[Agent David Griffith]

Disorganized is how we classified it. All of the tools that were used to commit the crime are sourced right there from the scene of the crime.

[Narrator/Reporter]

What does that tell you about the

[Interviewer/Reporter]

type of person who could have done this?

[Agent David Griffith]

What it told me is that we weren't dealing with a criminal mastermind.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Griffith re examined Chris alibi in a

[Agent David Griffith]

new round of interviews, the police interviewed Chris Melton's parents. His parents see him go to bed in his bed at their house. His father gets up at 5:30 in the morning and sees Chris's truck out in the driveway, so believes he's at home.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Chris's assistant told police he picked Chris up for work at 7:15am so he has a pretty good alibi.

[Agent David Griffith]

Got a pretty good alibi. And the best piece of his alibi is at the 9am hour he's caught on camera making a withdrawal at a bank over by his parents house. At that point, he's an hour away from the crime scene.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Notes in the file indicated police saw the video of him making that withdrawal.

[Agent David Griffith]

They're allowed to view the video, but the bank employees won't give them the videotape and ask them to go through Wachovia's legal department to get a copy of the security footage.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Did they follow up?

[Agent David Griffith]

Evidently there was no follow up because there's no mention of that videotape after that in the case file.

[Narrator/Reporter]

So Griffith sent a detective back to the bank to get a timestamped receipt for Chris's transaction.

[Agent David Griffith]

We were confident in the timeline that we had put together for Chris Melton, and we felt like he would have had to have been able to bend space and time to have killed Tara Baker.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Griffith reinvestigated other possible suspects. Tara's biological father and that awkward law student they called suit boy who gave police an alibi. Griffith ruled them both out, but as he was digging through the file, a name caught his eye. Someone who had easy access to Tara's home. The maintenance man at her development, William

[Agent David Griffith]

Bryant Barrett, has a master key. And that really makes us wonder, is William Bryant Barrett possibly the killer? When we start looking at his time on, we know that he shows up on the crime scene at some point the day that her body's found. And local affiliates filming outside the crime scene actually capture him on video.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

What's he doing?

[Agent David Griffith]

He's watching from outside the crime tank as the firefighters work.

[Narrator/Reporter]

And there was more. The night after Tara's murder, police asked him to help secure the building.

[Agent David Griffith]

He gets to talking with investigators about, theoretically, how somebody could have made entry. And he demonstrates how to open one of the windows with a knife blade.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

So let me make sure I have that straight. This is one of the very few people who has a key to this apartment. He was there at the crime scene. He shows investigators how to open and close the window with a knife blade. And police never interview him?

[Agent David Griffith]

No.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

How does that happen?

[Agent David Griffith]

I don't know the answer to that, Blaine. It was just one of the lapses in investigative effort that happened in this case. And in my mind, it's probably the biggest lapse.

[Narrator/Reporter]

By the time police finally sat Barrett down for an interview, Jerry Salters had gone from patrolman to detective. He conducted the interview.

[Detective Jerry Salters]

There were some discrepancies on what time he was where. And did he have time to commit this? I did move into more of an interrogation where I became accusatory with him just to really to gain a response.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

And how did he respond?

[Detective Jerry Salters]

He didn't ask to leave. He stayed there.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

What did that tell you?

[Detective Jerry Salters]

Tells me either one, he's being honest, or two, he's pretty good at lying.

[Narrator/Reporter]

The maintenance man did give them something highly suspicious, something he shouldn't have known. What police call hold back information.

[Agent David Griffith]

It's details of the crime scene that only the killer would know and investigators would know.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

What does he say?

[Agent David Griffith]

He tells us about the ligature that was used and that she's badly beaten. And that's not information that's been publicly released, at least we believe so in the moment, as we're conducting this interview,

[Interviewer/Reporter]

did he volunteer this hold back information?

[Agent David Griffith]

He did during the course of the interview. But he disavows having anything to do with Tara Baker's death and sticks to his story.

[Narrator/Reporter]

And again, there was no forensic evidence to link the maintenance man or anyone else to Tara's brutal death.

[Agent David Griffith]

Still, William Brian Barrett becomes person of interest number one.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

And what do you do?

[Agent David Griffith]

We flail for years believing that William Bryant Barrett's involved in the death of Tara Baker and just not having enough to get a warrant for his arrest.

[Narrator/Reporter]

So the infuriating cycle continued. Questions, no answers. Something would have to change. And when it did, somebody new was asking the questions.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

You are getting new information?

[Cameron J. Harrelson]

Absolutely.

[Agent Jeremy Howell]

Liz called me and said, we have a name.

[Agent Liz Bigham]

I was just freaking out, and I'm like, everybody get to headquarters.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Tara was never far from Meredith's mind. Eighteen years after her sister's murder, Meredith was 33 years old with children of her own.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

What were those years like for you?

[Meredith Baker]

My wedding day was difficult. She should have been my maid of honor. Having my children was difficult. Explaining to my children they had an Aunt Tara that would have absolutely adored them.

[Narrator/Reporter]

For much of that time, Tara was never far from David Griffith's mind either. He had analyzed and agonized over the case, but it never led to an arrest. In 2019, as Griffith was preparing to leave the Athens Clarke County Police Department, he decided Tara's family should know what he knew. So he called Meredith, who had become the family point person.

[Agent David Griffith]

There were things in the case file that we had not divulged to the family. I proposed that we divulge everything we knew about the case file to Meredith.

[Meredith Baker]

He sits me down with a whole host of other folks, and he walks me through the whole timeline.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Huh.

[Meredith Baker]

Like, this is when your sister got up. This is when she ate breakfast. This is when she went to go blow dry her hair. This is when we believe the attack began.

[Narrator/Reporter]

He told her the horrific details. The cord found around Tara's neck and how she was stabbed, beaten, raped.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

And all of this is new information to you,

[Meredith Baker]

being presented in a chronological. Yes, was all new because I still did not have confirmation as to whether or not she was sexually assaulted.

[Narrator/Reporter]

The facts, almost two decades later, were hard to face, but still better than not knowing. Virginia realized the absence of facts had sent her suspicions in the wrong direction. Like her ex husband, she says she never would have insisted police investigate him if she'd known the whole story.

[Virginia Baker]

We didn't even know about, you know, the sexual assault at the time. Keep that in mind. We didn't know about the stabbing.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Griffith told Meredith about his number one person of interest.

[Meredith Baker]

He gave me the. The maintenance man theory, but it was still a theory at that point.

[Narrator/Reporter]

He also shared something else, something no previous investigator had ever said.

[Meredith Baker]

He told me absolutely Chris didn't do it.

[Narrator/Reporter]

That was huge news. For years, their family had shot, shunned Chris.

[Meredith Baker]

I felt guilty knowing that he suffered in silence and that we never reached back out, and knowing what all he had gone through.

[Narrator/Reporter]

By now, any student who knew Tara Baker firsthand had long left. With each new class, her murder became more like a memory passed down through campus memorials or newspaper articles. That's how a young freshman named Cameron J. Harrelson first heard her name.

[Cameron J. Harrelson]

It was an anniversary piece like that the red and Black newspaper had done on her death.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

At the time, you were a true crime fan yourself.

[Cameron J. Harrelson]

Yes. A fan of Dateline, a fan of podcasts.

[Narrator/Reporter]

A few years later, Cameron decided he wanted to launch his own podcast. And Tara Baker's case, he thought, was the perfect place to start. But first he had to convince Virginia Baker.

[Cameron J. Harrelson]

A random guy like me calling Ms. Virginia Baker for the first time. I believe her first response to me was, who are you and who are you with?

[Virginia Baker]

I said, I don't even know what a podcast is, so you're gonna have to explain some of this to me. And why would I even want to talk to you?

[Cameron J. Harrelson]

And at the time, I had no podcast name, had no idea what I was doing, and said, I'm just me, and I want to learn about your daughter.

[Virginia Baker]

He convinced me that he cared about Tara and wanted to tell her story, and that's all I've ever wanted, is to tell her story.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Yeah.

[Virginia Baker]

And he said, maybe we can bring in, you know, some. Some clues. Maybe we can bring in, you know, some tips, maybe.

[Narrator/Reporter]

The podcast also opened a door that Chris Melton thought was closed for good.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

How did you find out that there was a podcast about Tara's case?

[Chris Melton]

Meredith had actually reached out via email.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

What did you think?

[Chris Melton]

It was an emotional moment because there's so much time had gone by since I'd heard from the family.

[Narrator/Reporter]

The email led to a phone, and

[Chris Melton]

that conversation was pretty, you know, pretty

[Interviewer/Reporter]

emotional, you know, and she was trying to urge you to. To talk, to talk on this podcast.

[Chris Melton]

She's like, would you participate and help us move forward and. Absolutely.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

You would?

[Chris Melton]

I would.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Cameron launched the podcast in July of 2020. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

[Cameron J. Harrelson]

The story of Tara Louise Baker will be the focus of season one of Classic City Crime.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Family and friends told Cameron all about Tara and also vented their frustration and anger at the investigation.

[Cameron J. Harrelson]

What would you say to the police department?

[Virginia Baker]

Don't ever do this to anybody else. And if you don't know what you're doing, get help.

[Cameron J. Harrelson]

My goal is to remind people of her life, tell people what happened, show them the investigation, and then hopefully, as a result of that, law enforcement could solve it. It's not my job. It's theirs.

[Narrator/Reporter]

He interviewed Chris about the years he spent under suspicion.

[Cameron J. Harrelson]

Did police continue to follow up with you and interrogate you, or.

[Chris Melton]

They did come after me. I would go and get hair samples, blood samples, tissue.

[Narrator/Reporter]

And Cameron asked about his feelings for Tara.

[Chris Melton]

She was just such a beautiful person on the inside. When she smiled, she bit the tip of her tongue. And it just.

[Narrator/Reporter]

I thought that was the best. And people were listening. Over two years, the podcast audience grew to hundreds of thousands.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

It wasn't just people listening.

[Narrator/Reporter]

People were calling in.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

People were sending you tips.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Like week after week.

[Cameron J. Harrelson]

Yes, hundreds of tips a week. And vetted a lot of that. And the things that we believe were vetted enough, we took to the air.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Still, after dozens of episodes and all those tips, no new leads for police. Two years in, Cameron ended it without any real ending.

[Cameron J. Harrelson]

And I did not think it would be ethical for me to continue producing content with Tara's family just for the heck of it.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Without answers.

[Cameron J. Harrelson]

Without answers.

[Narrator/Reporter]

But then he had another idea, one that would put Tara's case in an even bigger spotlight.

[Cameron J. Harrelson]

This is not just a law. This was appropriations. We're talking money.

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Nope, I'm making dinner tonight.

You don't have time Josh has practice.

Oh, that's right.

[Narrator/Reporter]

I'll just get a salad and fries.

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[Narrator/Reporter]

By the spring of 2022, the Athens Clarke County Police Department had a new leader.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

You're the police chief now. You're at the very top.

[David Lidahl]

Yes.

[Narrator/Reporter]

In 2001, he was that rookie cop standing in Tara Baker's kitchen. By 2006, he was a detective interviewing potential suspects. Now he was Chief Jerry Salters. He'd always carried Tara's case with him.

[Detective Jerry Salters]

As the chief, I want the community to feel safe and know that they have a police department that cares about this community and will do anything to solve the case.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Still, to Tara's mom, it all felt like deja vu. Even with a new chief, there was no movement in the case.

[Virginia Baker]

And I called the station and asked to speak to him.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

How was that conversation?

[Virginia Baker]

Oh, that poor man.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

You gave him an earful.

[Virginia Baker]

Oh, I did. And it was not all kind.

[Detective Jerry Salters]

I don't think you can unhurt someone. But I do believe that letting the family gain trust in the police department and our intentions with the case, I think it went a long way.

[Narrator/Reporter]

But good intentions only go so far. And Tara's family was becoming resigned. They might never find Tara's killer. But while Cameron J. Had stopped reporting on Tara's case, he still still had a few ideas.

[Cameron J. Harrelson]

I said, well, Tara was such a fierce advocate for justice that wouldn't it be amazing if we could make sure that she affected change for others?

[Narrator/Reporter]

He wanted to find a way to get more resources dedicated to cold cases.

[Cameron J. Harrelson]

And so I started researching. In the process of doing that, I'm googling online and just so happen to see that there's another unsolved murder in the town next door to where I grew up. And their family's kind of sort of advocating for the same thing. So I called that family, the Coleman family.

[Narrator/Reporter]

18 year old Rhonda Coleman was found murdered in 1990, and her case was never solved.

[Cameron J. Harrelson]

And so we united forces then.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Together, Cameron helped the Coleman and Baker families push for a new law, one that would create and crucially fund a brand new cold case unit in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

At what point did this go from okay, we're doing a podcast to. Hey. We're pushing for new legislation to be passed.

[Meredith Baker]

It was a shock. I never envisioned doing anything like that. I thought we were just going to do this podcast and that would be the end of it.

[Virginia Baker]

And I went with Cameron and my children to the Capitol, and we lobbied with congressmen and some of the senators from the state.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

So you're going into the Gold Dome. You're shaking hands, you're talking to people?

[Virginia Baker]

Yes, absolutely.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Telling Tara's story.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Yes, the campaign worked. In the spring of 2023, the Coleman Baker act passed, and Georgia's governor, Brian Kemp, signed it into law. Today. We're helping to restore hope for those still grieving. Hope for justice and hope for closure.

[Cameron J. Harrelson]

And so what did the Coleman Baker act do? It, number one, funded a cold case unit at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to the tune of $5 million.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

And that's big because this did not exist before.

[Cameron J. Harrelson]

No, there really was not just a law. This was appropriations. We're talking money.

[Narrator/Reporter]

What was your hope with this bill?

[Virginia Baker]

That it would solve cases for other families. I felt like Tara's case had gone on so long, there was no hope for that, but I wanted to see it help someone else, and I wanted to see it be part of her legacy.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Still, Tara's family applied for her case to get a second look under the new law, just in case. And soon, Meredith found herself walking into the office of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to meet yet another team of investigators.

[Meredith Baker]

I'm like, okay, I guess we're doing this. This is just kind of our last Hail Mary. See if anything comes of this. If not, you know. We tried, yeah.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

So you were assigned two agents?

[Meredith Baker]

Yes.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

What were their names?

[Meredith Baker]

Liz and Jeremy.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Special Agents Liz Bigham and Jeremy Howell.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

So what are you thinking when you get this assignment?

[Agent Liz Bigham]

I better solve this. I mean, it was a privilege that I was trusted enough and they had enough confidence in me to be assigned the case in the first place.

[Agent Jeremy Howell]

Honestly, the case has always had this mythology here in Athens, so it was exciting to have an opportunity to see the evidence, to see the case file, to read it and go through it.

[Agent Liz Bigham]

I can remember the file drawer that it sat in. It was the bottom file drawer in the hallway, and it took up the entire file drawer. It was such a large case.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Tell me about that first meeting, your first conversation with them.

[Meredith Baker]

I was shocked by. They were professional, but the amount of empathy that they expressed. You felt something in that meeting, like. I believed the words that they were

[Narrator/Reporter]

saying, But Meredith and her family had Seen this movie before.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

So you're thinking, okay, great, they're sincere, they're kind, they care, but what are

[Meredith Baker]

they going to do? Right?

[Narrator/Reporter]

What were they going to do? Well, they were about to take a new look at an old piece of evidence and it would change everything.

[Agent Liz Bigham]

We were all obviously really excited about the fact that we had a lead.

[Narrator/Reporter]

It had been 22 years in the making the case that just couldn't be solved. Now, Georgia Bureau of Investigation special agents Liz Bigham and Jeremy Howell were stepping up to the plate, determined to do what their predecessors could not.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

This is a case that has been examined, reexamined, looked at any number of different ways since 2001. Why might this time be different?

[Agent Jeremy Howell]

I think what makes it different is that we're given the gifts of time, resources, and a supervision structure that allows us pretty much uninterrupted to be able to start this process and see it through.

[Cameron J. Harrelson]

I knew something was happening when they started calling me asking for information that I had, files that I had. Finally, a law enforcement agency was asking to see six years worth of work.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

And not just local, but the state law enforcement.

[Cameron J. Harrelson]

State agency, yes. It was huge.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Were you optimistic going into this?

[Agent Jeremy Howell]

I'm wildly optimistic about cases such as this.

[Narrator/Reporter]

The agents also had the advantage of modern, modern day science and a cutting edge crime lab.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

There's a big difference between 2001 and 2024.

[Chris Melton]

Yeah.

[Agent Jeremy Howell]

There's new and modernized techniques that we can utilize in order to reexamine certain things.

[Agent Liz Bigham]

We knew there was a ton of evidence that was kept at the Athens Clarke County Police Department. So we wanted to make sure that if there was anything that could be done with that at the lab that we got that process rolling. We came to the conclusion that call it maybe 10 or so pieces of evidence could go back to the lab for additional testing or re examination evidence.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Like that cord around Tara's neck. Along with the knife and knife block from the kitchen, there was also a power block connected to the printer. The hope that forensic science had evolved enough to reveal fingerprints investigators couldn't Detect.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Back in 2001, Liz called me and

[Meredith Baker]

told me that they were going to be resubmitting thanks to the GBI crime lab. And I was like, oh. She said that they were resubmitting the knife block, that they were resubmitting the knife, that they were resubmitting the transformer power block.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

I was like, okay, you send those items off.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Any luck?

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Did you get anything?

[Kevin Baker]

No.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Nothing new?

[Kevin Baker]

No, no.

[Agent Jeremy Howell]

And I'm not surprised with that given the dynamics of this scene.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

You mean the fire?

[Agent Jeremy Howell]

The fact that you want fire, exposure to water. Everything that you don't want to have happen in a crime scene happened in this crime scene.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

So it made it difficult to get those. Anything from those items.

[Agent Jeremy Howell]

Absolutely.

[Meredith Baker]

We started getting notifications that, all right, there's nothing on this. There's nothing on that. Like, okay, all right, that's fine. I suspected that would be the case.

[Narrator/Reporter]

The agents then turned to another piece of old evidence, Tara's sexual assault kit. Back in 2001, that kit yielded no clues.

[Agent Liz Bigham]

And then it's just kind of sat there since 2001.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Now, two decades later, the agents wondered whether DNA science had caught up with the evidence.

[Agent Liz Bigham]

Our DNA manager had been exposed to some training and had some experience with a different way to test a sexual assault kit. And it was essentially testing for male DNA. And he just said, hey, you know, this has never been tested for male DNA. Let's. Let's try it.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

That's something that wasn't available back in 2001.

[Agent Jeremy Howell]

That was not available. These techniques were not available back then.

[Meredith Baker]

She said that they were resubmitting the rape kit. And I went, huh?

[Interviewer/Reporter]

You didn't even know that existed.

[Meredith Baker]

I didn't know that it was still there. I told her, I said, I thought that all the evidence, DNA evidence, had been exhausted. And she said, I don't think they knew what they had.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

So she's laying this out for you, and it's like this treasure trove of new information.

[Meredith Baker]

I was just in display, and I'm at work. I'm standing in the conference room with the door closed, listening to her, and I'm like, okay. I think that's the first time that I had a glimmer of hope like this could happen. There might be something there.

[Narrator/Reporter]

It could be a long process. The agents warned likely nine months before they had any results.

[Meredith Baker]

So I was like, okay, all right. But what's nine months to 25 years?

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Yeah. What is the waiting period like for you? Each waiting for that result to come back?

[Agent Liz Bigham]

I mean, of course, we were on pins and needles in the sense that we were really hoping we would get something from it, and we were just kind of waiting for that phone call.

[Narrator/Reporter]

In a case where months had turned to years, then decades, finally something happened in record time. Just two and a half months later,

[Interviewer/Reporter]

the results of that test come back. What do they show?

[Agent Liz Bigham]

I mean, essentially, it was that we had male DNA. We were all obviously really excited about the fact that we had a lead,

[Narrator/Reporter]

a lead at long last. And there was something else. Something that would bring these agents back to the beginning.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Do you all re interview Chris Melton?

[Meredith Baker]

We do.

[Agent Jeremy Howell]

If there was ever a time to be 100% on the record, it is now.

[Chris Melton]

I was thinking. Here we go again.

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Take the exit turn right into the drive thru.

Nope. I'm making dinner tonight.

[Narrator/Reporter]

You don't have time.

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Josh has practice.

Oh, that's right.

[Narrator/Reporter]

I'll just get a salad and fries.

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[Interviewer/Reporter]

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[Narrator/Reporter]

Finally, a break in the Tara Baker cold case. And it was big. DNA from an unknown male recovered from Tara's sexual assault kit. While investigators were looking into that, the lab called back. They'd also detected Chris Melton's DNA. Given that Chris was Tara's boyfriend, his wasn't that surprising. But the agents still wanted to talk to him.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Do you remember what you thought when you got a call from the gbi?

[Chris Melton]

I was thinking, here we go again.

[Agent Liz Bigham]

We've gotten some information back from her sexual assault kit. So there's been some DNA that's come back to you.

[Narrator/Reporter]

The DNA raised questions about the timeline, questions Chris had been asked before. Specifically, when was the last time he saw Tara before she was murdered?

[Agent Liz Bigham]

We've got lots of questions. Some of them are kind of invasive.

[Chris Melton]

They wanted verification of when the last time we had seen each other or been intimate. It was almost two weeks. What I can recall, like 10 days.

[Narrator/Reporter]

10 days was not the answer agents were expecting.

[Chris Melton]

They were like, well, hang on, that doesn't work out.

[Detective Jerry Salters]

Right.

[Narrator/Reporter]

That was a problem for two reasons. It's highly unlikely DNA would still be detected 10 days after a sexual encounter.

[Agent Jeremy Howell]

This evidence is. It doesn't last long where it was.

[Narrator/Reporter]

And even more confusing, back in 2001, Chris told police they had seen each other five days before she was killed.

[Agent Liz Bigham]

Was it five days? Ten days? You know, originally you said that you hadn't seen her in five days, and then it changes to 10 days.

[Chris Melton]

I just remember 10 days. I don't know why I say that.

[Agent Jeremy Howell]

If there was ever a time to be 100% on the record, it is now.

[Chris Melton]

Time. Time had gone by, so many decades had gone by, and I was confused. I genuinely didn't do anything to her.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Were you concerned about that discrepancy?

[Agent Liz Bigham]

Not necessarily, because it's been 24 years and memories change and fade.

[Narrator/Reporter]

They weren't concerned because they knew Chris had a solid alibi. What's more, they had explosive new information about that other DNA profile from the unknown male. The lab ran it through the FBI database and got a hit.

[Agent Jeremy Howell]

Liz called me and said, we have a name.

[Agent Liz Bigham]

I was just super excited. I was just freaking out and calling my boss, calling Jeremy, called our analyst, and I'm like, everybody, get to headquarters.

[Meredith Baker]

And she was like, we have a match. And I was just staring at the ceiling in utter shock and disbelief.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

You couldn't even process.

[Virginia Baker]

No.

[Narrator/Reporter]

His name? Edric Fost.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Had you heard it before?

[Agent Liz Bigham]

No.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Seen it before?

[Meredith Baker]

No.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

What's your next step?

[Agent Liz Bigham]

We just wanted to learn everything we could about Edric.

[Narrator/Reporter]

They learned Edric Fost had a rap sheet. Convictions for criminal trespassing, aggravated assault, battery, attempted robbery, and carrying a concealed weapon.

[Agent Liz Bigham]

The biggest thing that we were kind of taken aback by is that he lived 585ft from Tara's residence.

[Virginia Baker]

Wow.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Very close.

[Katie Lonstein]

Very close.

[Agent Liz Bigham]

You could essentially stand in Edric's front yard and see the back door of Tara's residence.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Now, they needed to figure out if Foss and Tara knew each other.

[Agent Jeremy Howell]

You want to establish if there's any sort of known relationship, any known connection, any chance meeting between the two.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

You're kind of cross referencing their daily routines to see where they might have overlapped, where they might have intersected.

[Agent Jeremy Howell]

Absolutely.

[Agent Liz Bigham]

Naturally, we could find no connection or relationship between Edric and Tara.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Meaning no reasonable explanation why his DNA would have been present?

[Agent Liz Bigham]

Absolutely no reasonable explanation whatsoever.

[Narrator/Reporter]

And if Faust was Tara's rapist, they believed he was also her killer.

[Agent Liz Bigham]

At that point, we felt comfortable arresting him.

[Narrator/Reporter]

So in May of 2024, more than two decades after her murder, officers arrested Edric Faast in a Walmart parking lot. They took him to the Athens Clarke county pd, where Agents Bigham and Howell sat down to talk to him.

[Agent Jeremy Howell]

Hey.

[Agent Liz Bigham]

How are you?

[Virginia Baker]

Good. Mr. Faust.

[Agent Liz Bigham]

He was cordial. He answered our questions, you know, for a while.

[Virginia Baker]

How old are you, Ms. Faust?

[Narrator/Reporter]

I am 48.

[Virginia Baker]

Are you sure?

[Narrator/Reporter]

Okay.

[Agent Liz Bigham]

And what's a good home address for you?

[Narrator/Reporter]

Having dispatched with the pleasantries, Bigham turned up the heat, and Foss's demeanor changed.

[Virginia Baker]

We've got these warrants. They are for a myriad of charges that range from question to murder.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

What?

[Narrator/Reporter]

The agents held off on telling Foss about the DNA evidence.

[Agent Jeremy Howell]

Our game plan going in was to visit if there was any known relationship

[Interviewer/Reporter]

between the two, and so he wanted to see what he would say.

[Agent Jeremy Howell]

Yes.

[Chris Melton]

Did you know her? No connection to her.

[Virginia Baker]

No.

[Narrator/Reporter]

No. That's when they told Faust they had his DNA.

[Chris Melton]

My DNA.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Man, it's been a long time.

[Chris Melton]

We've made so many advancements and things. If you can help us understand why your DNA is in that house, help us.

[Narrator/Reporter]

He never gave them an explanation. Instead, he said he needed a lawyer.

[Agent Liz Bigham]

He ended it with, yeah, you can go ahead and take me to jail.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

And did you, in fact, take him to jail?

[Agent Jeremy Howell]

We obliged.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Authorities charged Edric Fost with Tara's murder, rape, and arson. That cleared the maintenance man, who for years had been the number one person of interest.

[Virginia Baker]

When they came and said we made an arrest, I didn't know how to breathe. I was like, how do I react to this?

[Detective Jerry Salters]

For over two decades, investigators have worked

[Doug Whitehead]

tirelessly to find answers for the family and friends of Tara Louise Baker and

[Narrator/Reporter]

bring some amount of closure and healing

[Detective Jerry Salters]

to this horrific event.

[Chris Melton]

I was elated. I was shocked. I was emotional.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Then you hear the name Edric Faust?

[Chris Melton]

Yes.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

What did you think?

[Chris Melton]

Who's this guy? Who is Edric Fost?

[Meredith Baker]

I was like, I don't know who this person is. I've never seen this person before in my life. Just the fact that this person was in my peripheral the whole time was terrifying.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

He was close by. Mm.

[Narrator/Reporter]

This is somebody who had been living just right by your house.

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Yeah.

[Meredith Baker]

I'm like, did I see him?

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Like, is this somebody I passed in the street?

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[Narrator/Reporter]

Maybe waved hello to at some point?

[Virginia Baker]

Oh, yeah.

[Valerie Lowe]

We certainly wouldn't have thought that anyone would have been stalking us or watching us. We were in a safe college town.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Meredith learned about Faust's criminal past. Including that he'd stabbed someone in the neck just two weeks after Tara's murder.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

What are you thinking as you're reading this?

[Meredith Baker]

How is this person still around? Tara's gone. She was denied a life. And this Guy has lived 25 years of wreaking havoc and ruining other people's lives. Like why?

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[Narrator/Reporter]

Tara's loved ones hoped their questions would be answered at trial.

[Chris Melton]

I was ready to see the person who created and caused all this to have to face its consequences. I figured that I was going to have to be involved somehow, because I was her boyfriend.

[District Attorney Kalki Yalomonchile]

Have a seat.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Little did he know just how involved he would be.

[Defense Attorney Ahmad Cruz]

Chris Melton's DNA. Chris Melton told law enforcement. Chris Melton's actions.

[Chris Melton]

It just seemed like I was the one on trial.

[Defense Attorney Ahmad Cruz]

Why didn't you cry?

[Agent Liz Bigham]

Welcome back. Ladies and gentlemen.

[Narrator/Reporter]

We are about ready to begin the

[Agent Liz Bigham]

trial of the State of Georgia v. Edrick foust.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

For 25 years, you all were wondering and waiting, and now you're in the same room as this person.

[Virginia Baker]

I can't even explain the feeling. I tried not to look at him most of the time. Other times, I felt like my glance was burning through the back of his head.

[Narrator/Reporter]

When the trial of Edric Fost began in early February of 2026, Tara Baker's family and many of her friends were there in court. Katie Lonstein had envisioned this moment for years.

[Katie Lonstein]

25 years of this. I wanted a monster, and I got a boring man in a tan shirt.

[Narrator/Reporter]

District Attorney Kalki Yalomonchile led the prosecution.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

What is the key thing that you need to drive home to the jury?

[District Attorney Kalki Yalomonchile]

The DNA. The DNA and the lack of any type of connection between Tara Baker and Edric Fost.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Assistant DA Chris Bolden handled the opening statement. Who killed Tara Baker, ladies and gentlemen, Edric Foust killed Tara Baker. And now the final chapter begins today. Remember how neighbors told police they saw a man walking near Tara's house the morning of the murder?

[Agent Liz Bigham]

To see somebody walking?

[Narrator/Reporter]

Those witnesses took the stand.

[Agent David Griffith]

The person had on an orange shirt of some sort.

[Narrator/Reporter]

It's the memory that stands out.

[Detective Jerry Salters]

Male, Female.

[Chris Melton]

Yeah. Male, young, male, white.

[Detective Jerry Salters]

African American.

[Narrator/Reporter]

African American. The prosecution explained to the jury how Fast's DNA was found on Tara's body. And then the jury heard FA tell the GBI he never met Tara. No connection to her.

[Chris Melton]

No.

[Narrator/Reporter]

No. I don't really find.

[Doug Whitehead]

No.

[Narrator/Reporter]

I mean, the only time I see that, the only time I seen it was. It was in the newspaper.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

You need to make it clear to the jury that there's no reason that his DNA would have been within proximity of Tara Baker.

[Lester Holt]

That's correct.

[Narrator/Reporter]

It seemed like a fairly straightforward case until it wasn't. The prosecutor knew Chris's DNA was also detected and knew the defense was planning to make Chris the center of its case. So the prosecutor addressed that head on. Let's talk about what Chris was doing on January 19th of 2001.

[District Attorney Kalki Yalomonchile]

Chris was investigated so thoroughly at the beginning of this case. We felt like all of that evidence was really strong for us to show Chris's alibi and that in fact, it was not possible for him to have been the individual who murdered Tara.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Witnesses testified they saw Chris throughout that early morning and on bank security video timestamped around 9am this witness was the branch manager in 2001.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

We watched Chris entering the bank, coming

[Meredith Baker]

in and filling out the withdrawal slip,

[Interviewer/Reporter]

and then going to the teller and getting the cash.

[Narrator/Reporter]

The prosecutors knew they had to put Chris on the stand. He told the jury about every place he went that morning and answered questions about himself and Tara.

[District Attorney Kalki Yalomonchile]

How was the state of you and Tara's relationship, you know, in those months leading up to her murder?

[Chris Melton]

Everything was wonderful. It was difficult for us not to see as much. See each other as much as we would have liked. But we were both in the understanding that we were pursuing future paths for us to have a better future together.

[Narrator/Reporter]

And then it was the defense's turn. Anyone listening to false attorney Ahmad Cruz?

[Defense Attorney Ahmad Cruz]

This is Chris Melton might have thought

[Narrator/Reporter]

it was Chris Melton.

[Defense Attorney Ahmad Cruz]

On trial, Chris Melton stated Chris Melton's behavior, Chris Melton's DNA, Chris Melton's actions.

[Narrator/Reporter]

In his opening statement, Cruise said Chris Melton's name nearly a hundred times.

[Wayne Ford]

I found out more about Chris Miller than I did Edric Fous.

[Narrator/Reporter]

And in Cruz cross examination of Chris, this was his first question.

[Defense Attorney Ahmad Cruz]

Why didn't you cry?

[Chris Melton]

When?

[Defense Attorney Ahmad Cruz]

Just now. Why didn't any tears fall out of your eyes?

[Chris Melton]

They are falling out.

[Narrator/Reporter]

During trial, the defense attorney barely challenged the DNA evidence against his client. Instead, he focused on Chris Melton's emotions, his alibi, and his changing story about when he last saw Tara.

[Defense Attorney Ahmad Cruz]

Did you have sex with Ms. Baker the day of her death?

[Chris Melton]

No, sir.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Chris was now sure he last saw Tara on Sunday, five days before the murder.

[Chris Melton]

From the beginning, I said I saw her the weekend prior.

[Defense Attorney Ahmad Cruz]

From the beginning you've said that?

[Chris Melton]

Yes, sir.

[Defense Attorney Ahmad Cruz]

That you've seen her the weekend. And that has always been what you said.

[Chris Melton]

There was a time that I was confused and it was 20 plus years later.

[Defense Attorney Ahmad Cruz]

Mm.

[Narrator/Reporter]

The defense asked Chris to look at a photo of Tara taken after the murder.

[Defense Attorney Ahmad Cruz]

This is a photo that you were shown to ask to identify Ms. Baker. No, this was not the photo.

[Chris Melton]

I don't believe that was the photo.

[Narrator/Reporter]

It was a photo Chris had never seen before.

[Chris Melton]

He must have cherry picked some of the. The worst picture that I have ever

[Interviewer/Reporter]

seen from the crime scene.

[Chris Melton]

It seemed to be more of an autopsy picture. I just. I had never seen something so bad.

[Defense Attorney Ahmad Cruz]

Mr. Mellon, you're just shown photograph newspapers deceased, and you have not shed a tear.

[Chris Melton]

Come on, now. I felt like I was being tortured.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

And you felt like that crossed the line?

[Chris Melton]

Yes.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Attorney Cruz showed the jury a few pictures as well. Photos of Chris's hands taken during his second police interview two days after Tara's death.

[Defense Attorney Ahmad Cruz]

These are Chris melton's hands after Ms. Baker's death.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Chris Melton said he punched a wall in anger and frustration two days after the murder.

[Chris Melton]

My injuries came from punch in the wall.

[Narrator/Reporter]

And a detective backed him up, telling the jury that on the day of the murder, Chris's hands showed no signs of injury.

[District Attorney Kalki Yalomonchile]

Were those marks on his hands on January 19th of 2001, when you interviewed him and then fingerprinted him?

[Detective Jerry Salters]

They were not.

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Okay.

[District Attorney Kalki Yalomonchile]

If they had been, would you have taken pictures of them the way you did on January 21st?

[Chris Melton]

Yes. Okay.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Then. The defense homed in on the hair found in Tara's hand.

[Defense Attorney Ahmad Cruz]

You will hear evidence in this case that there is not a shred of evidence that puts Mr. Foss, let alone a Black person, in Ms. Baker's home. All of the evidence, including the gift Ms. Baker left in her hand for police. It screws.

[Chris Melton]

It's.

[Defense Attorney Ahmad Cruz]

It's Caucasian hair.

[Narrator/Reporter]

The defense attorney told the jury that

[Interviewer/Reporter]

the Caucasian hair found in Tara Baker's hand was a gift for police. What was he trying to do there?

[District Attorney Kalki Yalomonchile]

He was trying to convince the jury that Mr. Melton was the perpetrator of the crime.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Because it was Caucasian hair.

[Lester Holt]

That's correct.

[Narrator/Reporter]

But prosecutors made sure the jury knew what investigators had known for years, that

[District Attorney Kalki Yalomonchile]

the hairs in Ms. Baker's hands were her own hairs.

[Meredith Baker]

The number one rule is you don't lie to a jury. You don't over promise. And the moment he said that, I wrote down on my pad, they're hers. That's her hair. So either he doesn't know that, or he is intentionally misleading the jury.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Tara's family thought the whole defense was a weak attempt at smoke and mirrors. But with the case headed for the jury, not everyone agreed this Is just shocking. And then, like I say it so unbelievable. For those with eyes on the Athens Clark county courtroom, the trial trial of Edric Fost had seemingly taken a detour.

[Chris Melton]

It just seemed like I was the one on trial.

[Meredith Baker]

I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it. It was maddening.

[Narrator/Reporter]

But outside the court, the defense's words appeared to be landing. We met protesters, including some of Faust's family members, who believe he was wrongly accused. This is just shocking. And then, like I say, it's so unbelievable.

[Virginia Baker]

Yeah.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Justice for Edric Foss. I want Edric Foss to walk free. And like Faust's defense attorney, they pointed the finger at Chris Melton. He lied. He lied. He lied because he had not seen her in 10 days.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Chris, there are some people who may be watching this who believe that you killed Tara Baker. What do you want to say to those people?

[Chris Melton]

I would say that I did not kill Tara Baker. I did not kill her. I loved her.

[Agent Liz Bigham]

Ladies and gentlemen, the state has rested.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Back inside the courtroom.

[Defense Attorney Ahmad Cruz]

Defense rest.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Defense rests almost immediately.

[David Lidahl]

Yeah.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

No witnesses. Was that a shock to you?

[District Attorney Kalki Yalomonchile]

Yes. Yeah, absolutely.

[Narrator/Reporter]

For closing arguments, both sides gave it their all.

[Defense Attorney Ahmad Cruz]

They falsely accused him and that tried mightily, mightily to bury the truth.

[District Attorney Kalki Yalomonchile]

There is not one shred of evidence, not one single shred of evidence that indicates that Chris Melton was angry with Tara, would hurt Tara, or wanted her dead.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Then the jurors had the case. They asked to review testimony, DNA reports. Twelve hours later,

[Agent Liz Bigham]

to the judge, the

[Narrator/Reporter]

jury is ready to deliver the verdict.

[Katie Lonstein]

I was so terrified, so terrified that we were going to come out the other side. No different.

[Narrator/Reporter]

As he waited in the courtroom, Kevin Baker was suddenly the heartbroken little boy of 25 years ago.

[Kevin Baker]

That person that is a grown man, that is married, that has a family, those layers peeled off and that 10 year old boy was left sitting there. And inside it was that 10 year old boy crying in that same hotel room.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

The jury finds the defendant on the following counts. Count one, malice murder.

[Virginia Baker]

Guilty.

[Katie Lonstein]

That first guilty just rocked everything back, rocked us all back.

[Meredith Baker]

I was writing it down as they were like, count one, guilty. Count two, guilty.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Guilty on all counts, murder, rape and arson.

[Virginia Baker]

When they read the verdict and said, guilty to all 12 counts, my heart leapt, but I couldn't show any emotion. I did not want to make it any harder on his family by showing joy or, you know, because I know how hard it would have to be to think that somebody in your own family could to be capable of this type of thing.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Police warned Chris to Stay away from the courthouse for the verdict. He heard it hunched over a cell

[Chris Melton]

phone, and it was a hallelujah moment and a release. And we just celebrated amongst us that they had come to the right decision.

[Narrator/Reporter]

But for Tara Baker's family, Family, still no peace. The trial had triggered a social media storm, and the verdict only made it worse. With Chris, Tara's family, even Tara herself, all under attack.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

There was a lot of online social

[Virginia Baker]

media commentary, which made everything so much worse.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

I mean, some of it got bad. Some of it was horrible at times.

[Virginia Baker]

I can't believe people can be that cruel.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

Did that almost kind of cast a shadow of sorts over this. This moment that you'd waited so long for?

[Virginia Baker]

More than a shadow, a blanket of pain.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Chris's life and business were upended. The anger on social media forced him to take down his company's website. My beloved sister. At Fost sentencing, Tara's brother Adam spoke directly to his sister's convicted killer. Tara and I were more than siblings.

[Detective Jerry Salters]

We were best friends.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Today, sitting in this courtroom face to face, I can honestly say I have forgiven you.

[Detective Jerry Salters]

I harbor no hate in my heart.

[Narrator/Reporter]

I've given that all to God.

[Meredith Baker]

I mean, Tara's been gone for 25 years. It doesn't change that 25 years. It doesn't change the 25 years that are to come. She's still gone. But to know that we finally got justice, I can't describe that feeling.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Faust was sentenced to two consecutive life terms, plus 45 years in prison. We asked Faust and his defense attorney for interviews. Faust did not respond. His attorney declined. Free agent Faust. Free agent faults. Faust is appealing his conviction, and his supporters are raising money for him. The chief of police hopes the community can move forward.

[Detective Jerry Salters]

As a chief, I'm responsible for the safety of this community and also building meaningful relationships. And during times like this, when you have a verdict where people think one thing or the other, I think you just have to trust in the courts.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Not long after sentencing, Meredith had dinner with Chris and met his wife, Jenny. They talked for hours.

[Meredith Baker]

I've had multiple conversations where I apologized for. For the silence.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

What did he say to you?

[Meredith Baker]

Don't apologize.

[Chris Melton]

It's painful, but there's no animosity whatsoever.

[Narrator/Reporter]

At uga, posing at the arch is a graduation rite of passage. It's where Tara's friends come to remember her.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

What do you think about Tara now as you stand here by this arch?

[Virginia Baker]

One, she.

[Meredith Baker]

She's thrilled that this case has been solved. But two, she's probably mad at us

[Virginia Baker]

because it took 25 years.

[Cameron J. Harrelson]

I have never had my life changed so much by someone that I've never met. And Tara Baker did that for me

[Narrator/Reporter]

and for so many people. That is Tara's legacy.

[Kevin Baker]

What made Tara special was the ability to connect with every single person she could comes in contact with.

[Interviewer/Reporter]

That's one thing that I keep hearing is that she made so many people feel special.

[Virginia Baker]

Yes. I've heard so many people tell me that when if they hadn't seen her in a long time, when they saw her again, she would make them feel like it was the happiest day of her life.

[Lester Holt]

That's all for this edition of dateline. And don't forget to check out our Talking DATELINE podcast, in which we'll go behind the scenes of tonight's episode, available Wednesday in the DATELINE feed. Wherever you get your podcasts, we'll see you again next Friday at 9, 8 Central. I'm Lester Holt. For all of us at NBC News, good night.

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