James Baker's 'mixed emotions'

CHIPLEY — James Baker answers so many hard questions the same way: He doesn’t know, can’t remember, won’t speculate.

The disappearance of his 3-year-old son, Paul, is a hazy mystery he hopes someone else can solve. The discovery of another missing child, an infant boxed under a spare bed in his Chipley mobile home, is something only his wife can explain.

Much of James Baker’s story is about oblivion.

“You just don’t know the emotional turmoil I’m going through right now, anyway,” Baker said Thursday in an interview with The News Herald, his first conversation with the same newspaper that interviewed his wife, Susan, before she was exposed as a suspect in 7-month-old baby Shannon Dedrick’s disappearance.

“Do I trust her? Well, that’s… I got mixed emotions about this right now.”

The 51-year-old former Marine Corps sergeant was detained Nov. 4 when Washington County sheriff’s investigators found Shannon hidden in the cedar box in his home. He was released without charges shortly afterward, as authorities said they believed the case centered on wife Susan Baker and the baby’s mother, Crystina Mercer, who allegedly agreed to give up her daughter.

Investigators described it as a secret exchange. Susan Baker, who also was identified as the baby’s step-aunt, wanted the little girl for herself, they said.

As detailed in an exclusive News Herald interview with Susan Baker before her arrest, she was very involved in the baby’s life.

James Baker, meanwhile, was not. He was oblivious to the baby under the bed, a hiding spot in Susan’s “little room, her office,” a place the husband rarely went.

“It took them two hours to find the baby, and they had dogs in there,” Baker said of the search in his home. Shannon, lying quietly beneath a latched wooden lid, was boxed with baking soda to mask the smell of her diapers.

“I wasn’t looking for the baby, and I was at work probably about 95 percent of the time,” he said. “The baby didn’t cry that loud, either.”

He remains free of charges in the case. But recycled questions persist about the 22-year-old disappearance of Paul, who vanished in March 1987 and left investigators in Beaufort, S.C., suspecting his father, James, and stepmother, Susan.

Authorities never had enough evidence to close the case.

“I’m not going to discuss anything about my son being missing other than I’m glad it’s gone to the forelight, so if somebody does know something, maybe someone else will remember something,” Baker said flatly in the interview Thursday.

He did discuss some of it, though, including his initial suspicion toward his wife (he once told investigators he thought she killed Paul and threw him in a river, but later recanted) and his hope that somewhere, Paul has survived the past two decades. The “couple times” he approached his wife about his son, she denied knowing what happened to him, he said.

“For many years, I believed in my heart he was still alive and he’d come back in my life and say, ‘Hey, Dad, I’m here,’ ” he said. “But right now, because he’d be in his twenties now, and other things, I really don’t know anymore.”

Meanwhile Thursday at the Bay County Jail, Susan Baker again declined an interview request. She momentarily agreed to one several days ago, but changed her mind at the last minute.

James Baker’s interview Thursday ended abruptly as his cell phone cut out. He didn’t return a message after that.