Debra Jan Masters Baker

Case background and investigation

Debra Jan Masters Baker was born in San Angelo, Texas, on May 19, 1953, and died on January 13, 1988, at age 34, according to her burial record. She was married to Phillip Baker, and the couple had two children, Jesse and Caitlin, according to KUT and the Texas Tribune. The Austin Chronicle reported that Caitlin was three years old at the time.

According to KUT and the Texas Tribune, Baker was beaten to death in her bed in the early morning hours by an intruder at her home in Austin. Prosecutors later told jurors she had been killed during a burglary, CBS Austin reported. No viable suspect was identified at the time, and the case remained open for more than 20 years.

The case was reopened through work on another Austin-area killing. Christine Morton had been beaten to death in her bed in 1986, and her husband, Michael Morton, was wrongly convicted of that crime. According to the Texas Tribune, researchers working for Michael Morton's lawyers looked for similar unsolved crimes in places where Mark Alan Norwood had lived, found the Baker case on the Austin Police Department's website, and alerted Travis County officials. A DNA profile from a blue bandana found about 100 yards from the Morton home was matched to a pubic hair recovered at the scene of Baker's murder, KUT reported. Both women were killed on the 13th of the month, and Norwood had lived a few blocks from the Bakers in the 1980s, according to the Tribune.

A Travis County grand jury indicted Norwood, then a 58-year-old dishwasher living in Bastrop, for Baker's murder on November 9, 2012. His attorney said at the time that Norwood maintained his innocence in both cases, according to KUT. Norwood was convicted in 2013 of Christine Morton's murder and was serving a life sentence for it when the Baker case came to trial.

The trial began on September 12, 2016, in Judge Julie Kocurek's court. On September 23, 2016, after deliberating for less than two hours, a jury found Norwood, then 62, guilty, according to the Austin Chronicle. CBS Austin described the charge as capital murder. He was sentenced to life in prison. The Chronicle noted that the prosecution's case was circumstantial and rested largely on the single hair carrying his DNA.