Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  None of this helped to paint Mary Winkler as a vulnerable little woman, cowed by her abusive husband and desperate enough to snap and shoot him. It would have taken a top political spin doctor to erase public reaction to the image of Mary sitting at a bar.

  Maybe if the Winkler case were taking place outside the Bible Belt, there wouldn’t have been so many cries of outrage. But this was small-town Tennessee, where people believed that women about to go on trial for husband killing shouldn’t be sitting in bars smoking and drinking.

  There were man-on-the-street interviews where perfect strangers commented on Mary Winkler’s morals. Predictably there were those who thought she had betrayed her Christian faith by even being in a bar, those who saw no harm in it, and those whose opinions fell somewhere in between.

  Mary’s attorneys said they would not dignify the coverage by commenting on it, beyond saying that they hoped it would not become open season on Mary as a target for camera stalkers who hoped to get pictures they could sell.

  Steve Farese said that the beer in the photos wasn’t even Mary’s drink. The cigarette in her hand, of course, was her own.

  Mary’s pretrial supervision order did not forbid her to drink, but only stipulated she must not imbibe alcohol “to excess.” No one had even suggested that she was intoxicated on New Year’s Eve. At least she didn’t have to go back to jail for violating her probation.

  Staff writer Russell Ingle of the Independent Appeal in Selmer had his fingers firmly on the pulse of anyone concerned with Matthew Winkler’s murder, and he regularly wrote thoughtful pieces on the progression toward trial. He quoted a beauty shop customer who doubted Mary’s faith, saying, “Because she confesses [sic; she probably meant “professes”] to be a Christian, she ain’t got no business being in there [the bar] whether she killed her husband or not.”

  A local man was more forgiving: “I wouldn’t condemn her if she stayed drunk all the time, going through a psychological thing like shooting your husband.”

  And still, no one outside the case knew what had happened to provoke Mary to shoot Matthew. The State had charged her with premeditated first-degree murder, and a conviction might bring her the death penalty. On the other hand, her defense team felt that under Tennessee law, she should be allowed to walk free. The rumors that circulated only brought more questions with no answers.

  But west Tennessee and the rest of America would soon hear the fine points of both sides. McNairy County Circuit Court judge Weber McCraw set Mary Winkler’s murder trial for April 9, 2007.

  As Mary Winkler’s trial approached, even spring in McNairy County turned bleak. Crape myrtles and azaleas bloomed right on time, and farmers watched the first green sprouts of their early wheat plantings burst from the soil, only to lose their crops to a killing frost. Flowering shrubs froze, too, and the whole area seemed blighted.

  But by the next week, the weather had turned warm and sunny. The Winkler trial was to be held at the McNairy County Justice Complex in a courtroom that can hold about a hundred spectators, and interest ran high, of course. A few local restaurants showed their entrepreneurial spirit by offering hot lunches and sandwiches, delivered to the Justice Complex so that the media army and trial attendees wouldn’t have to leave to eat.

  The complex was built in 1994, and Judge McCraw’s courtroom was far more modern than many of Tennessee’s county justice hubs. Although the wood was the ubiquitous oak of most courtrooms, the room was carpeted in blue, the walls were a light mauve, and the jury sat in comfortably padded rose-covered chairs that swiveled when they turned to look at the defense table, on the right, or the prosecution, closer to where they sat. Unfortunately, the acoustics were poor, and those in the gallery had to strain to hear testimony.

  No one would want to miss a single word in this trial.

  District Attorney General Michael Dunavant and Assistant District Attorney General Walt Freeland were representing the State, and Mary’s dream team of Steve Farese and Leslie Ballin was there to fight for her freedom. Before the trial began, Dunavant announced that the State would not seek the death penalty. This seemed to set well with everyone; during man-on-the-street interviews in McNairy County, not even her detractors said they wanted to see Mary die for what she had done.

  Jurors had several choices. They could find her guilty of first-degree murder, which meant fifty-one years in prison, and that Mary Winkler would be eighty-four years old before she was eligible for parole. But there were lesser included offenses that would mean far shorter prison terms: second-degree murder, carrying at least a twenty-year sentence; voluntary manslaughter with three to six years in prison; reckless homicide, with two to four years; or criminally negligent homicide, for which the sentence would be only one to three years behind bars.

  It took three days for a jury to be winnowed out from a pool of 160 possibles—not so long considering the massive amount of pretrial publicity. Of the twelve jurors and two alternates, a dozen were women. Some people think that women jurors will go easier on a female defendant, but that isn’t necessarily true. Women tend to think, “What would I have done if it happened to me?” And the vast majority of women—albeit not all—don’t turn to violence in domestic disputes. Male jurors are not as likely to see themselves as victims, but may often view a tiny, vulnerable defendant as pitiable.

  Only time would tell. The jurors ranged in age from twenty to sixty-two, and eleven of them were churchgoers, although none stipulated the Church of Christ. Most were Baptists, two were Catholics. The majority were Caucasian; two were African American.

  The jurors chosen were a fair representation of the citizens of McNairy County. They would be sequestered, although after so much publicity it seemed a little like locking the barn door after the horse has run away.

  One potential juror was excused quickly when she said that the Winklers had been her neighbors and that Matthew had once threatened to kill her dog if it came in his yard again.

  Steve Farese and Leslie Ballin submitted a list of forty-four potential witnesses, while DA Walt Freeland listed only thirteen.

  The woman on trial scarcely resembled the image of Mary Winkler at her arraignment thirteen months earlier. Then, she had seemed a timid child; now she held her head up, carried a briefcase, and often strode into court ahead of Farese and Ballin. She had had dozens of hours of therapy, received many, many letters of support from around the country, and was bolstered by her attorneys.

  In opening statements on April 12, Walt Freeland characterized Mary as a cold-blooded woman who had intentionally shot her husband in the back as he lay in bed early in the morning of March 22, 2006. He said she had deliberately unplugged the cord from their phone so that Matthew could not call for help after she left. He noted the financial catastrophe that was about to descend on the Winklers because Mary had been carrying out a check-kiting scheme since November 2005, depositing phony checks in several bank accounts.

  “The house of cards she set up was falling down,” Freeland said. “The defense will not produce any evidence of any good reason Matthew Winkler was murdered by Mary Winkler—because there is no good reason.”

  Steve Farese described the Winklers’ marriage as “a living hell behind closed doors.” He told the jurors that Matthew’s demands made Mary tiptoe on eggshells, and even then everything she did seemed to displease him. “He would destroy objects that she loved,” Farese said dramatically. “He would isolate her from her family, and he would abuse her. He would tell her she couldn’t eat lunch because she was too fat. Not only did she have to be perfect, her children had to be perfect.”

  The battle lines were drawn, and they were almost diametrically opposed. Local residents who were polled were fifty-fifty in support of Mary or in their allegiance to Matthew.

  Mary’s attorneys said that she had done everything for her children in a desperate effort to protect them from their punitive and unbendable father. They clearly intended to show her as a woman beaten down by domestic abuse, almost
a heroine who stepped forward to save her three little girls.

  Mary had seen her daughters only twice since her arrest, and she had explained that she didn’t want to upset them. That may have been true, but it also had become a difficult process for her to have visitation with them. Her in-laws were no longer supportive as they had been in the beginning, and they weren’t anxious to expose Patricia, Allie, and Brianna to the woman who had shot their son.

  The usual parade of patrolmen and investigators took the witness stand, told of the bloody crime scene, the frantic search for Mary and her daughters, her arrest, her statement in Alabama, and her second statement to TBI agent Chris Carpenter. Photographs of Matthew’s wound were introduced as his autopsy was explained.

  Mary glanced away; she didn’t look when photos of the shotgun wadding and the seventy-seven pellets of birdshot that had penetrated her husband’s body were introduced into evidence.

  Walt Freeland questioned Stan Stabler about Mary’s statements in Orange Beach, and the taped interview was played for the jurors. Mary’s voice was very soft and vulnerable as she came almost to the point of admitting that she had shot Matthew.

  Asked if the Winklers’ shotgun could have gone off accidentally, Stabler said, “I don’t know.”

  TBI ballistics expert Steve Scott testified that it would have taken 3 to 3¾ pounds of pressure to pull the trigger on the shotgun. The defense clearly wanted to show that it might well have gone off accidentally. There were discussions and testimony about how easy it might have been for the barrel to be “racked,” and the suggestion that it might have been stored high on the master bedroom closet shelf already racked and that it would have taken only a light touch on the trigger to fire the gun.

  On the third day of trial, courthouse security was mysteriously beefed up. An anonymous man had phoned Ronnie Brooks, the court clerk, three times, complaining that the district attorneys weren’t doing their job “properly.”

  Extra court guards appeared and they used handheld metal detectors to check any potential spectator trying to gain entry to the courtroom, something that is done routinely from the start of trials in most courtrooms today.

  Mary Winkler no longer rode in her lawyer’s sports car but arrived in a heavy-paneled SUV. She clearly hated the media attention, but she no longer seemed terrified of either reporters or curious crowds.

  Some of the witness testimony disturbed her, and she sometimes appeared to be crying. On closer observation, it was more that she blew her nose vigorously when difficult issues came up.

  One aspect of her demeanor troubled some of those in the gallery: Mary didn’t seem to make eye contact with anyone—not even her own attorneys. She no longer gazed at the ground the way she had when she was first arraigned, but she focused her eyes obliquely as if she existed in some other dimension far away from her trial.

  Her clothing was probably decreed by her attorneys; defense attorneys are experts in “staging” the look of their clients. Mary’s clothes were matronly and plain. She often wore the same white cotton cardigan over rather drab dresses.

  Clark Freeman, Mary’s father, barred from the courtroom until he testified, sat behind her thereafter, as did close friends from McMinnville. She had her supporters in the rows behind the defense table.

  Spectators knew there had been many rumors about a bank scandal involving the Winklers. Now, finally, Jana Hawkins, representing Regions Bank, took the stand to explain what had happened. She said she had called Mary on March 21 to tell her that the Winklers’ account was $5,000 overdrawn. Mary said she was aware of that, and asked if she could remove Matthew’s name from the account. Told that wasn’t possible, Mary asked to meet with Hawkins, saying, “I know I’ve made a bad situation worse and I can’t fit $5,000 into my budget.”

  Leslie Ballin cross-examined Hawkins.

  Amy Hollingsworth, a drive-in teller at the bank, had also spoken to Mary by phone that day, suggesting she come in and talk to the branch manager, and told her that things weren’t “impossible” to fix.

  Hollingsworth testified that she hadn’t questioned Mary when she’d earlier deposited a check from Canada for $6,445 because she knew her so well.

  Mary Paulette Guest, a Fourth Street Church of Christ member who worked at the Regions Bank, testified that she had informed Mary that she was guilty of check kiting and could face criminal charges.

  When Guest was cross-examined by Leslie Ballin, she said that Mary didn’t seem to understand what she tried to explain, not even when she was told that her accounts had been frozen. That frustrating conversation had occurred at 4:15 on Tuesday afternoon.

  Mary and Matthew were supposed to come into the Regions Bank at 8:30 on Wednesday morning.

  Mary had talked to her letter carrier about changing her address, and Walt Freeland suggested that she planned to do this to hide her financial predicament from Matthew.

  But Mary Winkler had been in way too deep, and it was little wonder she had spent her day at Selmer Elementary School on March 21 pacing the school halls as she spoke on her cell phone.

  April Brown, a fraud investigator for Regions Bank, took the witness stand next. She said that Mary had deposited certain checks at an ATM. Brown explained that these funds went into the Winklers’ Regions account. However, the bank had had no way of knowing there were insufficient funds until the check was returned from the bank it was written on.

  Mary had written four checks totaling $17,000 on a new account she opened at the First State Bank in the neighboring town of Henderson. Then she deposited them in a personal account in only her name—one she had set up at Regions Bank. They were deposited in an ATM between February 17 and March 20, 2006. All of the checks bounced. Regions Bank had lost almost $4,000 in the shady transactions.

  Apparently, Mary had deposited two fraudulent checks sent by the Canadian con artist into the First State Bank. Those—for $4,880 and $4,900—went into an account she had opened with only $100. The Henderson bank returned the fake checks and lost no money.

  Running frantically between two banks and their ATMs, Mary Winkler had to have known that it would all fall apart within days. That happened on March 21 when she and Matthew had been summoned to the bank the next morning.

  Only, Matthew couldn’t go because he was dead by then.

  The prosecution had made the difficult decision to bring nine-year-old Patricia Winkler into the courtroom. There would be no cameras, no audiotaping, but Patricia would see her mother for only the third time in more than a year. With the first few questions from Walt Freeland, Patricia began to sob. Judge McCraw comforted her, and she was finally able to continue.

  Patricia testified that she had been awakened on March 22 by the sound of a big boom, and she also heard someone falling. When she hurried to her parents’ bedroom, she saw her father lying facedown on the floor, and her mother walking around. She heard her father groaning. Her little sister Allie had followed her to the doorway. When her mother saw them, she had closed the door.

  “We were scared,” she testified. Frightened, she and Allie had sat on the floor right outside the master bedroom. Her mother came out and told them that an ambulance was on the way to take their father to the hospital.

  But they didn’t wait for that.

  Patricia said their mother had gathered them all up and taken them to their van, telling them that they were going “someplace special.”

  When Freeland asked her if she had ever seen her father being mean or bad to her mother, she said, “No.”

  Rather than stand to question the witness as he usually did, Steve Farese sat at the table next to Mary Winkler as he cross-examined Patricia. That forced her to look at her mother as she answered his questions.

  She said she was happy to see her mother when Mary got out of jail, and that they had hugged and kissed. They hadn’t talked about the bad time when her father died.

  “Did you want to see your mother again?” Farese asked her.

  “…I don’t k
now.”

  “Why didn’t you see her again after that?”

  It was too much for a little girl. Patricia broke into tears again. “Because I didn’t want to see her. Well, I mean, I still love her.”

  It was one of the saddest moments of the trial.

  Prosecutor Walt Freeland summoned Dr. Staci Turner to the witness stand. She had performed the postmortem examination of Matthew’s body. The most horrifying findings from the autopsy had already been covered. Now Dr. Turner discussed something that, on the surface, didn’t seem so important. But it was.

  A layman would probably not even notice the significance of the contents of Winkler’s bladder at the time of autopsy. Freeland set out to explain what it meant.

  “You have indicated that you weighed the kidneys and indicated that the bladder contained approximately a thousand milliliters of urine,” Freeland began. “Is that correct?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Now, not knowing much about the metric system, obviously, a thousand milliliters is the same as one liter?”

  “Yes.”

  “That would be the same way to describe the amount of urine you found in the bladder?”

  “Yes.”

  Freeland held up a large liter bottle filled with water. “Now, for demonstrative purposes, do you have any problem��if this is a liter—with this being the amount of fluid or urine that was found in the bladder?”

  Dr. Turner indicated that it was.

  “Are you familiar with any studies that determine when the urgency to urinate first comes about—and when it becomes intense? Or when it becomes urgent?”

  Dr. Turner said she had read several such studies. “Generally,” she testified, “a person can feel the urine between a hundred and two hundred milliliters, with an urge to urinate around four hundred. And a pretty severe urge around five to six hundred.”