I started seeing blood on the ground on the other side of the pool table.
I ripped off my son's blanket.
It was everywhere.
That's when I figured I needed help.
I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.
I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation.
Discovery's True Conviction.
And this is Anatomy of Murph.
We always make sure to warn our listeners when an episode contains disturbing descriptions of extreme violence.
And today we have to issue a very strong warning, because the case not only depicts graphic violence, but violence that's directed at children.
Two brothers from Melrose, Florida, who were just 12 and 14 years old.
And while this story centers on these two young victims, it is also a story about three mothers whose lives were forever changed by what transpired on that night in August of 2022.
The young mother of the three, who woke up to any mom's worst nightmare.
The bewildered mother of the suspect accused of the crime.
And the expectant mother who would eventually prosecute the case.
And that expecting prosecutor was Assistant State Attorney Jennifer Dunton.
So I started, as most prosecutors do, in our county court system.
And then, as I gained experience, I gravitated towards sex crimes, crimes against children, both online and hands-on offenders.
And so I spent a lot of time doing child exploitation cases.
And then in 2014, I was promoted to the Homicide Unit.
Over the course of her career, Jennifer prosecuted countless cases, many of which involved the child victims of physical abuse, sexual assault and even murder.
But nothing had quite prepared her for the case that she was about to encounter.
So I had six years in the homicide unit.
I did not have another homicide case that was similar in nature at all.
Melrose Florida, is a pretty small town of about 3500 located in the northwest part of the state, about 17 miles east of Gainesville.
Far from Florida's famous beaches and big city nightlife.
This is a quiet rural community on the banks of Lake Santa Fe, the perfect place for Sarah Baker and her husband Chad, to raise their three kids.
The Bakers moved to their new home in the summer of 2022 and already the coming school year held exciting promise for Sarah's two young boys, 13-year-old Robert and 14-year-old Tayton.
Tayton was the older boy.
He was 14.
And then his younger brother, Robert.
They were apparently very different.
Tayton was known as the outgoing social butterfly of the family.
He was large in stature, happy, a lucky kid.
He loved to eat.
He loved to cook when he was home with his family.
And he also loved to look out for his little brother Robert, who was a bit more introverted than his older brother.
He was very shy.
But as he got older, they noticed something pretty special about him as far as like, how intelligent he was and how well he thrived academically at school.
In fact, Robert had even received scholarship offers to several prestigious high schools, but had chosen to stay in school with Tatum, his brother, his protector and his best friend.
I learned they were very different.
They liked to fish and do things, swim with their families.
But as far as school and personality, they were very different boys.
But despite their differences, the two boys were nearly inseparable, which is probably why, on the night of August 25th, the young teenagers had both fallen asleep in the family's game room after a late night of playing pool and messing around on their phones.
It was a scene probably familiar to any parent with teenage kids.
And when the sun came up the next morning, it revealed a scene out of any parent's worst nightmare.
On the morning of August 26th, a frantic, Sarah Baker, holding her four-year-old child, showed up on the doorstep of her father's home, which was located just a few blocks away from the Baker's new home.
She was saying that she thought her boys were dead and there was blood everywhere.
Kind of sounded confused.
Sarah's stepmother and her father, Andrew, immediately called 911.
Just a reminder, what you're about to hear is graphic and disturbing.
911, do you have an emergency?
I need an ambulance.
What's going on?
She just came to my house.
She said her kids are in the pool room.
There's blood everywhere.
She thinks they're dead.
Can you go over there?
I'm not there.
I'm going there right now.
Police rushed to Sarah's house to investigate.
Their call to Putnam County 911, which was still recording, allows us to hear what they witnessed as police entered the Baker's home.
Oh, my God.
Okay, tell me what's going on.
I see... Okay...
Oh, it looks like a, I have no idea, a dog.
Oh my God, I think he is dead.
And Sarah had been right.
The first thing obvious to police was the blood.
And on the floor, the motionless body of 14-year-old Tayton.
Can you hear me?
When Sarah's stepmother saw the boy's body, her first thought was that he had been mauled by one of the family's large dogs.
But then she discovered Tayton's 12-year-old brother, Robert, also dead.
Where is the good child?
Oh!
The 911 dispatcher urgently told the boy's grandparents to get out of the house and wait for deputies who had arrived at the home just a few minutes later.
When deputies enter the home, they're obviously entering and clearing, making sure the home is safe, looking for other people or suspects.
Upon entering the home, they made note of the fact that there appeared to be no signs of forced entry, nor was there any evidence of a struggle or robbery.
But there was clear evidence of a horrific crime.
They discover Robert, who is the 12-year-old, and he was leaned up against a wall in like the living room area.
Clear sharp force trauma to his neck at that point, they noticed.
And then they enter what is referred to as the pool room.
It was sort of like a back game room on the back of this house.
And they can see blood everywhere.
There was, like, blood tracks where Taton is found face down in a pool of blood near his cell phone.
Obvious trauma about his neck and head.
The traumatic injuries suffered by both boys appeared deliberate and merciless.
It was clear to responding officers they had been murdered.
Officers secured the crime scene and homicide investigators hurried to the location.
Assistant State Attorney Jennifer Dutton was at home when she got the call about the horror that had just transpired in her own hometown.
It was COVID.
So I was home.
I was six months pregnant.
I actually had some complications at that point in my pregnancy.
And my supervisor was kind of begging me or just saying no, I'll call your partner or I'll come handle this.
You don't need to go do this.
But I don't think anybody was going to stop me at that point from going.
I've worked in this community 20 years.
And Putnam County is a very special place and that does not happen every day.
And yeah, I was going to go.
Even for a seasoned prosecutor, the crime scene was deeply disturbing.
The scene was gruesome.
It was obvious that both boys had their throats slashed.
And I walked that crime scene with my baby in my belly.
I remember thinking that it didn't look real, especially Robert, because he was more exposed.
I remember thinking, this must look like what a video game looks like.
I don't know.
I think your brain's trying to protect you.
I certainly knew they were children.
It's bizarre.
It's a bizarre experience.
It's solemn.
Some of us who do this job walk into a crime scene and feel the weight of every moment.
Jennifer was no exception.
Her rare blend of calm and clarity is the kind of strength Anastasia, that you and I wholeheartedly believe is critical to remain focused at the job at hand.
You know, we're all human and we can all obviously feel emotion.
And in my conversation with Jennifer about what the specific scene meant, the fact that she was pregnant at the time.
It was a high risk pregnancy.
And this just add the fact that it was COVID.
Yet she looked down the road at a possible potential prosecution and knew that it was important that she had eyes on the crime scene herself.
And as difficult as it was, Anasika, I have huge respect for her for what she did that day.
I mean, look, I think all of us that do this job, homicide, we're all built for different things.
And people that have done homicides for a long time.
Like we have to be able to compartmentalize right.
And that's exactly some of what Jennifer was saying, you know, but when it comes to child victims myself, it was always the cases that I shied away from unless I absolutely had to.
And I did do them at times because they were just that much more difficult, right?
Because kids are obviously the most vulnerable and innocent of our population.
But But it's also what gives us that added drive.
So absolutely kudos to those that handle them.
And in this case with Jennifer, absolutely.
She put her head down, knew that she had work to do.
And then, just on the back end, we will have to sort out whatever feelings that we have down the road as a result of doing this work.
I had learned a few things through therapy about like how to cope with stuff like this, like secondary trauma stuff.
And I remember enacting those that day when I left.
There's some things you can do to sort of take your mind off what you've just seen.
The first step in the investigation would be one of the hardest, speaking to the boy's mother.
Detectives needed to pinpoint the last time Sarah saw her two sons alive and have her recount anything she may have witnessed that could help police figure out who could be responsible for these unspeakable acts of violence.
She said the night before she had gotten up around 12, 31 a.m. to make a bowl of cereal.
She peeked in the living room area and she saw Robert up awake.
She described him in that same corner where he was located and by the bookshelf on his phone.
She told deputies that that's where he got the best service.
They didn't even have their Wi-Fi hooked up yet.
So the boys were kind of just sleeping, not in their rooms but where they could find cell phone service, as teenage boys were wanted to do.
She told him to go to bed.
He was awake.
She didn't recall seeing Tatum.
She went back to her room.
She thinks she fell asleep around 2 a.m.
According to Sarah, she didn't hear anything suspicious no sounds of a break-in, screams or any kind of struggle during the night, and that she had no reason to suspect anything was wrong when she woke up about 9 o'clock the next morning.
She walked right through that living room into the pool room, didn't notice anything about Robert because of the blanket over him.
And that wasn't abnormal to her.
That's when she finds Tatum. first in a pool of blood with all the blood all over that pool room.
Also according to Sarah, the boy's father Chad, was a long haul trucker and was out of town on a job.
But she and her children were not the only ones on the property.
Sarah had invited her sister Cindy and her boyfriend Mark to move into a small cottage behind the main house.
And so after discovering her son's body, she immediately ran to their door to get help.
There was an exterior door in that room where she could go right out to the outbuilding where her sister and Mark lived.
And she recalls kicking on the door, knocking on the door, asking for help and the door being locked which she said was abnormal and then nobody answering.
So she went back in the house.
Her four-year-old is in tow this whole time running beside her.
Then she realizes she didn't know where Robert was and she goes right to where Robert had been and pulled the blanket off and saw him.
No one wants to imagine the kind of shock she must have been in.
She had just found the bodies of her two sons, but she also had her four-year-old in her arms, who she wanted to protect from any potential danger.
Because at that point, she didn't know what happened or who might still be in the house.
She recalls, you know, screaming.
She can't find her keys.
She can't find her phone.
And she doesn't want to go back near Taton to try to get the phone or find it.
So she uses a spare key for her husband's vehicle and grabs her four-year-old.
It was the stick shift.
She couldn't.
It took her a while to get out of there because she couldn't figure out how to drive the car.
That's how upset she was.
Minutes later is when she showed up at her father's home and the call to 911 was made to police.
Thanks to Sarah's account, investigators had the beginnings of a timeline of the double murder.
They also had the names of two other potential witnesses Sarah's sister Cindy and her boyfriend Mark Wilson.
We found out they were at a doctor's appointment nearby in the community.
They had a one-year-old and then that morning of this homicide, she was at the doctor confirming that she was pregnant again.
Now as a matter of procedure.
When Cindy and Mark returned to the home, investigators immediately separated them to get their independent statements.
Which actually serves two purposes.
First, it's typically easier to speak with someone to get a calm, clear statement from one person at a time rather than multiple witnesses altogether.
But it's also important to see if each one of their accounts, especially during those last 12 hours, are consistent.
Because if there are differences or at least glaring ones, well, that could raise suspicions.
And at the time a deputy makes contact with Mark Wilson asking if he wants to come talk and tell him what he recalls of the morning.
He's holding his one-year-old daughter.
And the deputy kind of comments, you know, it's really hot.
He was wearing jeans, nothing else.
He was barefoot.
He was holding his one-year-old daughter.
And it's August in Florida.
So he invites him.
He's like, hey, we can go sit in my patrol car.
Do you want to give your daughter, you know, to someone so we can go talk?
And he makes the statement, I just want to spend as much time with her as possible.
Okay, so you can bring her.
And so they go into his patrol car and talk.
In the air-conditioned confines of the deputy squad car, 28-year-old Mark Wilson replayed his version of events of what happened that morning.
And his story at that point was that he had left the house at 630 am to run to a store to get donuts and coffee.
He'd come back, stayed with Cindy and the daughter until approximately 9 am, when they left to go to a doctor's appointment together.
And then he recalls, as we were leaving the doctor's office, Cindy got a call telling her what was going on.
Mark told police he didn't hear anything unusual the previous night or that morning.
When Sarah's sister Cindy, was interviewed at the scene, she also claimed to have heard nothing out of the ordinary.
At that point she had given initial statements that were similar to Mark's, except she had indicated she went to the gas station with him that morning to get coffee and donuts, that they had come back, been there until they went to the doctor's appointment.
It seemed that if detectives were going to learn anything about what happened to the Baker brothers, it might have come from any physical evidence found at the scene.
So, while investigators were conducting their interviews, the house and surrounding property were scoured for any potential clues.
That scene was massive.
And so the processing of just the actual crime scene where the boys were took some time.
And some of the most telling details from the crime scene came from an examination of the victims themselves.
So both boys were severely, severely injured.
It appears Robert perhaps, you know, died quicker than Tatum did.
It was very clear from the blood trail and all of the marks in the pool room.
He was crawling away during the attack.
There was a bloody palm print found on the wall near his phone where his phone was plugged in charging, or his mom's phone.
That turned out to be his.
So he was alive.
Unfortunately he suffered and he was dead, seeking to probably call for help when he was trying to get to his phone.
The medical examiner would later determine that the boys were not just repeatedly stabbed, but they were also beaten with some type of blunt instrument.
Taton, who was the 14-year-old found in the pool room.
He had three large, what we call sharp force wounds to his neck.
The level of violence against the young teens was almost unthinkable.
The attacks appeared unprovoked, yet personal and merciless.
And so the question for investigators was who could have been capable of unleashing that level of violence?
I mean, there wasn't signs of force entry.
At that point, it's pretty clear that it is somebody on that property involved.
And so was the boy's killer already among them at the crime scene?
And if so, who had a motive to kill two young innocent teens in cold blood?
Detectives in Putnam County Florida, were in the early stages investigating the brutal slayings of two teenage brothers, 14-year-old Tayton and 12-year-old Robert Baker, both of whom appeared to have been attacked while they slept just a few feet from their mother and four-year-old brother.
Assistant State Attorney Jennifer Dunton, had learned that there were no signs of forced entry into the house, suggesting something truly terrifying — that the killer may have been someone who had access to the family home.
Crimes like this are usually committed by people we know and sometimes love.
It can be the stranger situation, but it's not always.
So looking at everyone who had access and would be the most obvious is something we do.
And we know we have to rule those people out in case it is effectively, if it is not them.
I think everybody in the beginning hours were fair game, especially from my point of view.
I'm trying to be very neutral and see where the evidence takes us.
Even the boy's mother Sarah, fell under scrutiny, because she was in the house at the time of what was likely a loud struggle, yet claimed to have heard nothing.
We all initially could not understand.
You know, even if it wasn't Sarah, how did she not hear what had happened?
And so we kind of did this noise test where a bunch of the crime scene analysts and detectives stood in that pool room and then another section of them went into Sarah's bedroom.
The house is a very strange layout.
It had been added on to.
And sure enough, you could scream, you could stomp and jump around and nobody could hear anything.
So we were like, OK.
So I think our suspicions around Sarah and just everything to that point with her were low.
Sarah had told police that the boy's trucker, father Chad, was away on a long haul, something investigators had to confirm to eliminate him as a potential suspect.
His employer quickly got him on GPS for us and confirmed he was in and out of the state at the time.
The boy's father was now rushing back to be with his wife.
That left two other adults who lived on the property and had access to the house.
Sarah's sister Cindy and her boyfriend Mark.
By their own admission, Cindy and Mark had been experiencing some financial difficulties and substance abuse issues.
So Sarah had invited them and their newborn child to live in the Baker's back house.
So when they spoke to police, Cindy and Mark claimed to have not noticed anything out of the ordinary in the night that the boys were killed.
And they said that they were out of the house at a doctor's appointment in the early hours before the bodies had been discovered.
Nevertheless, the search for any potential evidence included the back house where Cindy and Mark were living, where detectives turned up some very disturbing evidence.
The scene was processed for two days and eventually I believe it was on day two a number of things were located.
A hammer and a knife were located wrapped in some placemats under the sink in the outbuilding that Mark and Cindy lived in.
That obviously, at that point, I mean, it had red stains that tested presumptive blood.
And with the discovery of that hammer and knife, detectives were pretty sure that they had found the murder weapons used to kill the boys.
We had known by that point, based on autopsies, that both blunt force and sharp force injuries were their cause of death.
And I think we should just pause here and think about what the discovery of these weapons tell us about the murder of these two boys.
That perhaps there were two people involved, potentially, each holding a deadly weapon.
Or there was a single killer wielding two different weapons, one in each hand, ready and willing to take the most extreme measures, leaving no doubt about their intention to kill.
And by this point, investigators were focused on Cindy and Mark.
Certainly the location of those weapons in that room that was locked upon law enforcement's arrival kind of, was leaning towards those two.
But it turned out that the hammer and the knife were not the only incriminating evidence that investigators discovered.
They also found something else, a note.
There was a note from Mark to Cindy found in their room.
He was discussing that he can't lose the two of them and promised me that our daughter will always know that her daddy is a soldier which is sort of weird and that he loved you both very much, almost like he's not going to be around forever.
So I'm just thinking, you know, they have yet to forensically tie anybody to the weapons.
But you know, if you step back for a moment and you know you have to ask the question, who had access to the portion of the house that Mark and Cindy were in?
You know, more needed to be confirmed, including potential DNA on the hammer and, of course, the knife.
But I'm not just talking about the victim's DNA.
I'm talking about potential DNA on the weapons.
And, you know, of course, it doesn't look good finding this letter, right?
It's going to have investigators looking at Mark and or Mark and Cindy even more closely.
But again, you have to look at the other possibilities.
Like, you know, we talk about, Scott, was evidence planted in their home?
You know, jumping to an arrest before investigators are ready isn't going to help anyone.
Like.
Yes, of course it's important to get a potential murderer off the street as quickly as possible to keep the public safe.
But you have to also be thorough before you charge someone with anything like, let alone such a significant charge as murder.
And so we, as both investigators and prosecutors, have to do our best to ensure that we've got it right first.
And Cindy and Mark are obviously raising big red flags here, for sure.
So, in an effort to learn more about Cindy and Mark, detectives sought to interview the boy's mother again.
She was later brought into the Putnam County Sheriff's Office for a more thorough conversation when she was able to calm down.
Sarah explained that she had a long history of taking in her sister because of an ongoing substance abuse problem, which mostly involved alcohol, but also methamphetamine.
And Sarah even acknowledged to law enforcement.
You know that people think I enable her because you know I'm always taking her in when she has issues with substance abuse.
She knew, but she's like I'm not gonna let my sister live in conditions I don't agree with or go through stuff without support.
So she knew her sister had a problem.
I think they were very close.
She had tried to get her help before and was willing to take her in.
But by everybody's account, it was a good relationship.
Sarah also agreed to allow Mark Wilson to move in, with the agreement that the couple get their act together and stop using drugs while under the same roof as their baby daughter.
As part of her tough love approach, Sarah had even told the young couple she would report them to Florida's Department of Children and Family if their behavior didn't change.
And for Sarah, the overriding concern was to make sure that Cindy and Mark's one-year-old daughter had a safe, clean and stable environment.
She knew her sister had a drug problem, but she did comment that her being with Mark Wilson was making it worse.
But she tolerated him and allowed him into her home.
And I know her boys even went fishing with him.
She was tolerating him with her sister.
When investigators dug into Mark Wilson's background, they discovered he had a pretty extensive rap sheet with more than a dozen convictions for things like grand theft, auto dealing in stolen property and drug possession.
He had even served two prison terms, one nearly four years long.
But, and this is important, there was nothing in his record to indicate he was capable of murder.
He didn't have any what we would call prior violent felonies.
And this crime was so extreme, you'd almost expect to see some signs of the potential in someone's past.
But as we've said before, that definitely isn't always the case.
And so it would take some time to square this suspect with the disturbing details of the murder themselves.
But just as investigators were preparing to confront Mark Wilson about the knife and the hammer found on the property,
They caught a shocking break, and it came from Mark Wilson's own mother.
Mark Wilson's mother contacted law enforcement and said that she needed to talk to them because Mark had essentially admitted to her that he had hurt the boys.
According to Wilson's mother, Mark and Cindy asked to stay at her house the first night after the boys' bodies had been discovered.
She was hearing Cindy and Mark kind of talk about that they had both talked to the police.
Cindy seemed mad because Mark was not cooperating and wouldn't talk to the police anymore.
And so his mom heard this and she became concerned.
She took him in the back room, was asking him, why aren't you cooperating with the police?
Like you need to take a lie detector test.
If you didn't have anything to do with this, why wouldn't you cooperate?
And he told his mom he couldn't take a lie detector test.
And she said, did you hurt those boys?
And his response was, I just lost it.
I just lost it.
I mean, even his mother had to admit this was an astonishing acknowledgement of guilt.
And even more disturbing.
According to Wilson's mom, her son had been planning something even more than the murder of the two boys.
And then he told his mom of a plan that he said was for him and Cindy to kill the whole family.
Cindy was supposed to kill her sister and the young child and he was to take care of the older boys, all because they were worried that Sarah was going to call DCF on them because of their drug use around their baby.
So that's what mom knew when she went to law enforcement to tell them.
Which means that, according to Wilson, the boy's own aunt, his girlfriend Cindy, was complicit in the plan.
Their deviation from that plan and whether or not Wilson acted alone was still a mystery.
But obviously, this was incredibly damning evidence against Mark Wilson and potentially Cindy, too.
But was it enough?
The fact was that prosecutors would likely need more than just the mother's recollection of a conversation with her troubled son.
They wanted additional corroboration before they would be ready to put it in front of a jury.
So detectives devised a daring plan, a plan that would require Mark Wilson's mother to go one step further.
They asked if she would wear a wire so they could record her son speaking to her and potentially as he had before, about the murder.
And she agreed.
That was such a hard thing to do.
But she also thought it was the right thing to do for the boys and that the truth needed to be known.
And so she was outfitted with recording devices and sent back to the house.
Investigators asked Wilson's mother to find a reason to get Wilson into her car and to drive around.
She was told, I think, to just drive around and talk to him and try to get him to talk about it again.
Law enforcement's obviously in close proximity listening.
And so eventually...
You know, she gets him to talk about it again.
And obviously it was recorded.
Yes.
With their conversation being recorded, Wilson and his mom again spoke.
And he again talked about what he'd done and why.
Wilson told his mother he was worried.
Sarah was going to report his drug use to DCF, which is the Department of Children and Family.
He got it in his mind, for whatever reason, that this family Sarah in particular, who was really a lending helping hand to him, and Cindy was somehow going to, you know try to take his kids away.
With Wilson again admitting to the murders, police had what they needed to make an arrest.
But it was a mother's protective instinct that dictated how it would happen.
You know, obviously, I think she knew of her son was going to be taken in.
She wanted it to be done in a controlled setting and didn't want him to be able to hurt himself before they got to him.
She purposely got him away from Cindy and the baby and out driving in the car.
I think that was the plan that law enforcement wanted.
So as the mom was driving Mark Wilson around, deputies pulled over her car, ostensibly for a traffic violation.
It's a ruse.
So he doesn't immediately know that his mom's doing anything right.
So they're both kind of removed from the car and detained.
She, you know, sort of fakely detained until they can get him out of there.
And they take him back to the sheriff's office to see if he will give a statement.
When detectives sat Mark Wilson down for an interview, he still didn't know that his mom had reported their conversation and had now worn a wire to capture it again.
And information from that hidden recording was damning evidence against Wilson.
But they were really hoping that he would tell them the same thing.
Detectives setting the tone from the beginning.
I worked these for a living.
You're not fooling everything.
So I want to understand the why.
I know what happened.
I want to understand why it happened.
Initially, he sticks to some of the same statements he made to the deputies on scene.
Initially, Wilson didn't say very much.
But when detectives revealed that they had everything that he had said to his mother on tape, he became resigned to his fate and proceeded with a startling confession.
He was left alone for a while to think in the room and then we went back in and he eventually admitted to killing both of the boys.
He acknowledged that the knife and the hammer we had found were the murder weapons.
But when Wilson was pressed for the details of the murder, he was cagey.
The detectives spent a decent amount of time one trying to get details out of him which he never would give.
He would never really go into, you know... who did you kill first?
And, you know, we want those details, right?
And he wouldn't, when it got to the details, he refused to give them that, but he would still talk.
Just tell me in a nutshell what happened.
Like from the time you walked in which one you killed first, which one the second, and then what happened, and then we'll be done.
In the end, Wilson put himself at the scene of the crime.
You know, obviously they want to know the why.
He didn't want to get into the details.
And then he was inconsistent on the why.
He gave several reasons throughout.
He thought the boys might have done something to his one-year-old daughter.
Then he gave another one that he thought the boys were sleeping with Cindy.
But of course he had no evidence or no even, he couldn't even articulate why he thought that.
But eventually Wilson admitted the same details he told his mother in the car which was captured on audio.
And it kind of always came back to this fear that he was going to lose his family, that Sarah was going to somehow kick them out or call DCF which is so ironic looking back, because Sarah was never going to do that.
Probably, you know, and probably should have.
But she was so loyal to Cindy and was trying to handle that situation herself, protect that.
And I'm sure she threatened it.
But when you talk to her later, she was not ready yet.
She wasn't going to call a DCF in the near future.
So that was sort of what he stuck to in the end.
So the question is really it makes no sense that Wilson would kill the two boys just somehow to avoid being reported to DCF.
Even if Sarah and her youngest son were also targets of this murder plot, that would be an extreme way to keep her from reporting him and Cindy to the DCF.
I mean, it defies all common sense, right?
But there is an X factor in all of this.
His reported.
You know the alleged methamphetamine use, which is known to cause some people to become extremely violent and, in some instances, to commit inexplicably violent acts.
And you did mention that he was on meth.
Storda started trying to introduce that as maybe a reason towards the end, but never said he didn't know what he was doing or anything like that.
Finally, there was one issue police still needed to figure out.
Was Cindy involved in the murders or wasn't she?
Wilson now confessed she had nothing to do with it.
He said that Cindy never told him to do it, but he felt like she wanted him to do it to protect their family.
Detectives did not find any evidence that Cindy had been involved in the murder of her nephews.
And there was also no evidence that she had helped Wilson try and cover up what he'd done.
Mark Wilson alone was charged.
He was charged with two counts of first-degree murder for each of the boys.
And then he was charged with a burglary with assault or battery and a burglary while armed.
Wilson was held without bail while he awaited trial.
Three months after the murders, it was decided that prosecutors would seek the death penalty.
Which, despite the evidence of his guilt, raised a new element of uncertainty in the prosecution, especially when Mark Wilson finds himself at the mercy of an all-female jury.
In November of 2020, 28-year-old Mark Wilson was facing the death penalty for the brutal murders of the two young teens, the brothers Taton and Robert Baker.
Mark Wilson's trial for double capital murder began in October of 2022, a little more than two years after the killings.
The first order of business was selecting a jury.
Prosecutors obviously had to talk to jurors about the type of case and what it would entail.
When the jury was finally seated, there was something unusual about its makeup.
The jurors were all women.
I have never had a all-female jury, let alone 12, for a death case.
All of our alternates were female.
I can tell you we were worried about that because we knew the mom factor that was going to come in.
So would the mom factor be this double-edged sword?
On the one hand, would it play more to emotion than it legally should?
And if so, could it go the other way?
One, would it push towards the death penalty, or two towards compassion?
You know, even for the killer, there are some considerations that at least were being thought about, certainly when it came to the finality of the death penalty.
Speaking of the mom factor Anastasia, two moms played a critical role on the stand during the trial, starting with Sarah Baker, the mother of Tatum, and Robert.
Sitting on the witness stand, Sarah had to relive the horror of finding her 14-year-old son Tatum, first dead.
You walk into the courtroom, game room, what do you see?
I started seeing blood on the ground on the other side of the pool table.
So then I started getting closer and closer and seeing more blood and I ripped off my son's blanket.
It was everywhere.
It was covered in blood.
I did try to flip him to see where the blood was coming from.
His head at the time was facing one way and I know I faced him the other way, trying to feel for a pulse.
Sarah testified that after finding Tatum, she went to find his 12-year-old brother Robert, who was in the adjoining room, not knowing he was already dead.
I ran up the steps next to the den game room to the living room, because there was two set of steps right there.
And I ran over to Robert and I'm screaming at him to call 911 and I ripped his blanket off.
The other mom who gave key testimony during the trial was Mark Wilson's mother, who told the jury about how her son admitted to the murders during two conversations with her.
Not all mothers could do that.
I can think of some other cases where the exact opposite happened.
And I prosecuted mothers for covering up for their children.
It was a very brave thing that she did.
While powerful, obviously the testimony of Wilson's own mother would also weigh on the jurors.
And would it lead them to find compassion for her son, for the sake of this mom who had bravely given evidence against him?
My concern was that there would be so much sympathy or empathy for that mom that people would not be able to vote to give him the ultimate punishment.
On day three of the trial, the prosecution delivered its closing argument to the jury.
I had to catch myself from getting emotional.
It's so hard, but we have to be so careful because it could really screw up the whole case.
I just remember that whole thing about the 12 women was just in my mind that whole time.
And it's 12 women that will hold him accountable for the worst possible horrendous, heinous crime to two completely innocent children.
So that was what was going through my mind.
And I think the verdict came back relatively quick. the jury found Mark Wilson guilty on all counts.
We ultimately were able to interview him after the verdict, but before the penalty phase, with our psychologist.
You know, he could recall every detail of that morning leading up to.
He described driving vehicles several times, functioning, going to the doctor, pumping gas, doing all these things.
Yet he claimed he couldn't remember the murder and then he remembered everything after.
So he just refused to answer those questions.
The trial now advanced to the penalty phase.
The question now was, would Mark Wilson receive the death penalty or not?
My concerns in securing a death penalty sentence were twofold.
One, when you can't answer the why, jurors are going to try to fill it in.
And then we know, through mitigation, they're going to kind of come up with the reasons which, in this case, was likely going to be this drug binge, and blame it on that.
The defense had the opportunity to present mitigating factors to the jury, things that might cause them to spare Wilson's life.
But obviously he had what ended up coming out in the penalty phase just a general substance abuse problem, since he was younger, started with marijuana and ran the gamut.
But methamphetamines, I think was what he claimed he had been on for like two days prior to the murder.
The defense put a doctor on the stand who explained that methamphetamine intoxication can cause paranoia and delusions.
But the prosecution countered with investigators who testified that Wilson did not seem intoxicated when they questioned him several times in the immediate aftermath of the murders.
The jury weighed the evidence presented and then made their recommendation to the judge unanimous all-female jury and voted to recommend the death penalty, which obviously isn't.
That is not the end in Florida.
Two months later, Wilson was formally sentenced by the judge.
He received two death sentences for the murder of Tatum and Robert Baker.
Wilson also received a life sentence for the lesser charge of burglary and assault while armed.
It's not a happy thing.
It's hard to explain as a prosecutor.
You're happy for the family that you've brought.
The only sense of justice you can give them.
But I don't like to use the word happy when it comes to the death penalty.
But yeah, relief.
And you feel like you've done your job for that family.
Mark Wilson's appeal was rejected in March of 2025.
As of this recording, he is one of 260 inmates on Florida's death row.
There is currently no execution date set.
It's so senseless to this day.
There's literally no reason why these boys were taken.
None.
Not that there would ever be a good reason, but there's not even a remote reason given that makes any sense at all.
Just when that type of innocent life is taken for completely no reason, in the manner in which it was done, and their children, I mean.
I'll never forget this case.
At the core of this tragedy was a simple act of love.
Sarah Baker offered her sister and Mark Wilson a place to stay so they wouldn't be homeless.
But that kindness turned deadly.
On Anatomy of Murder, we faithfully believe how we tell these stories truly matters.
Telling them with great care, especially when it involves children like Tayden and Robert.
These are the types of cases that are especially hard to discuss and think about.
But they happen.
This happened to Robert and Tate and Baker, and that is why we chose to cover it.
A GoFundMe campaign was set up by the family to help pay for burial expenses.
The goal set was easily reached and exceeded because of an outpouring of support from the community.
Here are some of the words written about the boys and I quote And that is how we will remember Tatum and Robert.
So close to each other.
As you'll remember, one even refused a scholarship from a prep school so he could grow up under the roof as his brother.
It is that thought of the beautiful closeness between two brothers that we will end on.
Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder.
Anatomy of Murder is an AudioChuck original produced and created by Weinberger Media and Fresetti Media.
Ashley Flowers is executive producer.
This episode was written and produced by Walker Lamond, researched by Kate Cooper, edited by Ali Sirwa and Philjean Grande.
I think Chuck would approve.
