Pretty Face, Ugly Crimes: Killer Back Up for Parole

He could have stepped out of a pulp novel: young, rich, dark, exceedingly handsome and very spoiled. First he charmed women. Then he terrified them. Finally, he involved two of them in murder.

On Monday, Mark J. Baker, now 33 and serving life in prison for bludgeoning a friend to death on a Dana Point beach, will have his fifth shot at parole.

His latest ex-wife, whom he wooed and wed while she was working in the prison, says Baker deserves another chance. Not so Baker’s prosecutors, who say he is still manipulative and dangerous.

“Our position is that he’s a sociopath,” said Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. Jay Moseley. “How many guys do you know who’ve been prosecuted for murder on both coasts by the age of 20?”

The scion of a wealthy Indiana family, Baker’s past spans military academy, jewelry theft, a cocaine habit that depleted his trust fund, a girlfriend whom he shot in the head, a fiancee who stood beside him while he testified against the girlfriend, two wives and two murder trials.

Baker was reared in Tipton, Ind., the pampered son of a prosperous interior designer and furniture store owner. According to his second wife, Janet Pekrul, Baker enjoyed the family’s lakeside home, Chicago penthouse, Fort Lauderdale condominium and the Firebird his parents gave him as a high school graduation present.

“He got everything he wanted, and he just thought he could get away with anything. . . ,” Pekrul said. “He got too much, too fast, too young, and he just lost control.”

At 19, Baker, who was already on parole for theft, was charged with the murder of a Ft. Lauderdale doctor’s wife. According to prosecutors and trial testimony, Baker and his girlfriend, Karen Lynn Jensen, went to the home of Marion Pitone, 56, whom Jensen knew, with the intention of robbing Pitone of her jewelry.

Jensen later testified that she talked her way into the home with Baker, and then went to the bathroom. Inside, she heard two shots, and when she emerged, she testified, she saw Baker fire two more shots into Pitone.

But Baker testified that it was he who went into the bathroom and heard the shots. He told the jury that he emerged to find Jensen standing over Pitone and firing.

The Broward County prosecution contended that Baker had wiped prints from the murder scene, dumped the gun in a canal and had his bags packed when police arrived to arrest him--a pattern that he was to repeat in Orange County, Moseley said.

But as the prosecution’s star witness, Jensen was deeply flawed. She had been picked up by police for another burglary, and granted immunity from prosecution in return for testifying against Baker. She also admitted that she had falsely accused another man in the past--because, she said, Baker had told her to do so.

Jensen also testified that Baker had beaten her regularly, giving her two black eyes and several broken bones, and had once shot her in the head. She showed the jury the scar on her head where the bullet grazed her. A police report taken at the time records the shooting as accidental.

Jensen testified that she was afraid of Baker, but that she loved him.

But the jury believed Baker, and acquitted him of first-degree murder on April 15, 1977.

According to Broward County prosecutors, on the second day of his trial, Baker had offered to plead guilty if the state would reduce the charges against him from first- to second-degree murder. The prosecutor refused the plea bargain.

“He killed her and he fooled the jury,” the victim’s husband, Dr. A. Joseph Pitone, said in a telephone interview Friday. Pitone said he believes Baker had carefully planned the murder, checking with his office to see when he would be away and killing Marion Pitone so she would not be able to identify Jensen. “I hope he stays (in prison) for the rest of his life.”

“He was a nice-looking defendant, and that carries a lot of impact,” Moseley said. “People think, ‘What does a murderer look like?’ They may not expect horns and fangs, but they do expect somebody who looks the part. . . . The more horrible the crime, the less likely people are to attribute that to a clean-cut, nice-looking person.”

Baker himself was stunned by his acquittal.

“I feel beautiful,” Baker told reporters at the time. “I didn’t expect it. I have no idea what happened, but by the grace of God, it came through. And now, I’m going home.”

Five months later, Baker eloped to Las Vegas with a Newport Beach heiress, Suzanne Volkman.

On a police form, Suzanne was later to list her occupation as “lives off trust fund.” But the trust fund did not go far enough. Baker told police and family that his new wife had credit card debts, and that he had spent an inheritance “doing a lot of cocaine.” Baker later confessed he stole a $10,000 diamond necklace from his mother-in-law and pawned it to pay his wife’s debts.

On Feb. 11, 1978, Mark and Suzanne Baker and a friend, Karl Marcus Chancellor, 19, who also lived in Newport Beach, drove to what is now Salt Creek Beach Park. While Suzanne waited in the car, Baker bludgeoned Chancellor to death with the butt of a shotgun, and stole money and a vial of LSD from Chancellor’s body, which was found by surfers the next morning, according to police and prosecutors. Then Baker went home, washed the murder weapon and dumped it in a swamp in Garden Grove, where it was later recovered.

According to the victim’s father, Lee Chancellor, Baker threatened to kill Suzanne if she testified against him.

Nevertheless, when Suzanne learned Baker had pawned the necklace, she told her mother about what had happened on the beach. Her mother took her to the police, according to Moseley and Pekrul.

Baker pleaded guilty to first-degree murder as his trial was getting under way, telling the judge, “I don’t want to die in the gas chamber.” He was 21.

Baker was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole, and has been serving his sentence at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville. His marriage to Suzanne was annulled about six months later.

In the fall of 1984, he met Janet Pekrul, then 20 and a clerk in the prison file room, where Baker worked. He had started lifting weights. They had long conversations through the window that separated their work areas.

“He’s very attractive,” said Pekrul, who has since divorced Baker and remarried. “He’s got very nice blue eyes and straight white teeth. He doesn’t have tattoos.”

Pekrul quit her job and began visiting Baker. They were married in the prison chapel on Jan. 19, 1985. Contributing to their decision to marry, Pekrul said, was the policy of conjugal visits every other month for married couples.

Between 1985 and 1988, Moseley said, information damaging to Baker’s chances of parole twice disappeared from his files. Among the missing items: the autopsy pictures of Chancellor, showing a face battered almost beyond recognition; a letter in which Baker confessed to his mother-in-law that he had taken $5,000 from the body, but had told the court he stole only $1,000; and a sheaf of news clippings about Baker’s first murder trial in Florida.

Pekrul insists that she did not tamper with the file. She said she could not have done so since she had left her job long before, and had been ostracized by her former co-workers for marrying an inmate.

“They said, ‘Ooooo, she was taken in and manipulated by an inmate,’ ” Pekrul said. “It’s like, either you’re a cop or a convict. You’re disowned, you’re a scarlet woman, like put a big ‘C’ on my shirt. . . . But I loved him. I really did.”

Pekrul said Baker was widely liked by the prison staff and has never had disciplinary violations. “There’s a lot of gross people in prison, and when you see him, it’s like, ‘What’s this man doing here?’ ”

Moseley, however, charges that “some very curious things have occurred with relationship to him in this facility.” Among other things, Moseley said, “I’ve heard them gush about how good-looking the guy is.” While being admitted to the prison for Baker’s 1988 parole hearing, the prosecutor added, he overheard a female prison guard telling Baker’s defense attorney: “He’s my baby. You better get him out.”

Baker’s parole is opposed by the Orange County sheriff and two other dedicated foes. The first is Moseley, whose job it is to keep career criminals from slipping though the cracks and out the cell door.

“I’m the only guy between him and the end zone,” Moseley said. “If he gets past me, he’s out.”

The second foe is Lee Chancellor, who became a crusader for victims’ rights after his son’s murder. Chancellor is a member of the group Citizens for Law and Order, has spent thousands of dollars tracking Baker’s case, and plans to attend Baker’s parole hearing Monday accompanied by the mother of murdered actress Sharon Tate.

“I hesitate to discuss this for fear that this psychopath will somehow get good press,” Chancellor said. “They still refer to this murderer as ‘Mr. Baker.’ I don’t want him referred to as anything but ‘murderer Baker.’ ”

After 13 years, Chancellor acknowledges he is still enraged--at Baker, at Baker’s parents, who have supported their son, and at what he sees as a bankrupt system of justice. Among other things, Chancellor objects to his son’s confessed killer being permitted conjugal visits and being granted his first parole hearing four years after his conviction.

Baker, through a prison spokeswoman, declined to be interviewed. His ex-wife, however, said it is the Chancellors who have kept Baker behind bars.

“He’s done nothing wrong since he’s been there. . . ,” Pekrul said. “People have done such worse things and gotten out. I can’t see why the district attorney has it in for him so bad, except that the victim’s family has been so involved in it. They’re keeping this alive . . . as if he’s a dangerous person, which he’s not.”

In a telephone interview from Indiana, Baker’s father said he believes his son has changed. James Baker said his son has a job waiting if he is released.

“He would be welcomed by his family, friends and peers. They all ask about him to this day. They think it was a tragic situation, but he has their support,” Baker said.

Pekrul said Baker has changed profoundly in the last 13 years, in large part due to “the realization that his father could not get him out of this jam.”

“I think it would have been better had he gotten a second-degree (conviction in Florida) and done some time, ‘cause then he would have learned,” Pekrul said. “ . . . He got in over his head. His father couldn’t help him, the best lawyers couldn’t help him and he is paying for it. And he’s going to keep paying for it because that family is not going to forget.”

Pekrul said she divorced Baker not because she did not love him but because she wanted “a normal life.” Despite her support for her ex-husband’s release, she says she now has more sympathy for the Chancellors.

“I have a baby now. And if anyone ever hurt my baby, I would see them burn in hell,” she said. “They lost their son. It was their baby. So I can understand what they’re doing. I would do the same thing.”