THREE MURDERS & A KILLER ON THE RUN Pilot Gerald Michael Bullinger’s gruesome double life exposed
Mike Bullinger had a wife in Utah and a girlfriend in Idaho. Then his two worlds collided, and three people wound up dead
For single mum Nadja Medley, a widow who had found new love with pilot Gerald Michael “Mike” Bullinger, her new Idaho home with him was perfect. Narrating a video tour of the property for her Facebook friends in May 2017, she scanned an expansive backyard— where she and her daughter Payton, 14, could keep their menagerie of chickens, rabbits and dogs—and fields overgrown with wildflowers. “You can’t even see the house because of all the trees,” Medley, 48, gushed. “Yep, baby, we’re loving it!”
But there was a deadly darkness she didn’t see. Six weeks later, worried friends who hadn’t heard from Medley asked the Canyon County sheriff’s office to check on her and Payton at the house. There, an officer following a “foul odour” found mother and daughter dead in the backyard shed, covered by a tarp and lying beside just one of the secrets Bullinger had kept from them: his wife, Cheryl Baker, 56. The trio had been killed, each with a single gunshot to the head, 10 to 12 days earlier, Sheriff Kieran Donahue says. Medley’s three dogs were also found dead. “It was a horrific scene.” And Bullinger? “He had a 10-day head start to get away.”
More than a year later Bullinger’s fate remains a mystery—hundreds of tips and sightings around Idaho and Utah proved dead ends; his car was found deep in Bridger-teton National Forest in Wyoming, and a search of those 3.4 million acres found no trace of him—but his guilt, as far as Donahue is concerned, is not in doubt. “Critical evidence” was found in the car and at his homes in Caldwell, Idaho, and Ogden, Utah, the sheriff says, and “priority No. 1” is to find him. “Mr Bullinger committed this crime, and yes, we can prove that in court.” But is Bullinger still alive to face capture, let alone a trial? Though the outdoorsy 60-year-old taught survival training, he couldn’t have survived winter in Bridger-teton, Donahue says. “It’s my belief he took his life in the forest or died by exposure. But he could be out there, and that’s why we work it every day. He’s a danger to society.”
Those who knew him as either Baker’s husband of 10 years—or Medley’s white knight of almost two—say Bullinger showed no sign of a double life. “He was a pilot, so it could have been easy. But there was nothing secretive ... he seemed great,” says Medley’s friend Rebecca Lorenz. For Medley, a massage therapist who had lost a baby in 2011 and her husband, Todd Medley, to a heart attack in 2014, meeting Bullinger when he walked into the spa where she worked had seemed like a dream come true. “Mike was the first time I saw Nadja smile. He was a new start,” says Lorenz. Friends say she had no idea that when she moved to Idaho to live with Bullinger that he was also living with Baker in Ogden. And Baker—who retired from a 33-year teaching career, mostly with blind and deaf students, just a week before she was killed—seemed to have no idea her husband was having an affair. “She just thought her marriage was perfect,” says her brother Lyle Baker. But in June 2017, when Baker decided to surprise her husband at the Idaho house they’d bought together, Bullinger’s two worlds crashed into each other. “She shows up unexpected, and there’s a confrontation,” Donahue surmises, based on the evidence. “It was a spur-of-the-moment crime.” Baker’s other brother Byron still doesn’t understand. “Just pick one and tell the other to go home,” he says. “You don’t kill them. He didn’t show any signs of being a mass murderer.”
But Bullinger’s first wife, Jacqui Garcia, with whom he has two grown sons and a granddaughter, saw a darker side. Her marriage ended after years of infidelity, she told the Idaho Statesman. And his second marriage ended when he started the relationship with Baker. Throughout, she says, he was a master manipulator: Mormon when he met Garcia in college, he later attended a Hindu temple with Baker and told Medley he was an atheist, as she was. As Garcia told the Statesman, “He was whatever somebody needed him to be.”
Which is exactly what haunts the sheriff, who believes Bullinger could still be alive. “This guy was slick,” says Donahue. “He obviously had charisma ... It’s very possible he could’ve reinvented himself again, and some compassionate people [took] him in. It keeps me up at night. I want this guy to be found.”
“Maybe they both felt betrayed and were both going to leave him” —Byron Baker, Cheryl’s brother