by Ann Rule
Mary said she would check on her husband when he hadn’t come to bed at night, and find him at the computer. “He would click the screen blank,” she testified. She didn’t explain why he sometimes hid what he was watching online, and at other times forced her to watch it with him.
Steve Farese showed her one of the still photos. “Do those shoes look familiar in any way?”
“They’re the same as my shoes, but they’re black.”
Almost shuddering, Mary looked through Exhibit #72, following her lawyer’s suggestion that she save herself by glancing only at every fifth photo. She acknowledged that she recognized them as those her husband had downloaded and that he had urged her to look at so that she would “become aroused.”
The images were passed on for the jury to look at. In some other town, some other place, the recent testimony and the proliferation of “dirty pictures” might not have had the shocking impact they did in McNairy County. But this wasn’t some other town. This was the Bible Belt, and these had come, reportedly, from a minister’s computer.
Suddenly, Mary Winkler’s future didn’t seem so forbidding, given what she had suffered in the past.
And Matthew Winkler still could not speak about his side of the marital battles. Nor could he ever.
Mary was holding up fairly well as her hours on the witness stand progressed. Matthew’s reputation was trailing in tatters. She recalled that he had threatened her with the shotgun many times, pointing it at her face or heaving it toward her. “He told me if I ever talked back to him he would cut me into a million pieces.”
She said she had been “scared.”
Asked about her own knowledge in operating a shotgun, Mary said she had none at all. She had never loaded one or shot one. She had no idea how a shotgun worked. Indeed, she didn’t believe that she had ever pulled the trigger—Matthew’s gun had simply gone off by itself.
Now she answered Farese’s questions about how Matthew had treated Allie when she was small.
“If she was crying when she was told to go to bed, he would suffocate her to get her quiet and go to sleep.”
“What do you mean, he suffocated her?”
“He’d pinch her nose and hold her nose.”
“Would you let him do that to your child?” Farese asked, incredulous.
“I just couldn’t stop him. I physically couldn’t do anything.”
The questioning moved on to the financial problems that had ensued with the fake checks that came to Mary from Canada. Mary insisted that these, too, had been Matthew’s idea. He had asked her to fill out every contest form, every lottery—Publishers Clearing House, anything like that—that came in their mail. Her husband had urged her, she said, to pursue any avenue that might help their shaky finances.
She testified that she didn’t really understand about the problem with the banks, and that they wouldn’t tell her what was wrong unless she and Matthew came in. Matthew hadn’t understood it either, she said. It had all been very confusing to both of them.
Farese hurried quickly over this line of questioning.
But now they had moved up to the night before Matthew died. Mary said they had ordered takeout from Pizza Hut, watched Chicken Little with the girls, and then put them to bed. When Matthew put on a movie, Mary had tried to watch with him, but, exhausted, she had fallen asleep. When they went to bed together later, they had “relations.”
“Were they ordinary—normal?” Farese asked.
“Ordinary for us,” she said, not explaining what she meant.
The girls were sound asleep, even Brianna. Brianna was named after her father—his middle name was Brian—even though he had been very disappointed when the ultrasound showed that they were having another girl. Matthew came from a family of three boys, and he wanted sons, Mary told the jurors.
Matthew’s alleged displeasure over the sex of his unborn baby seemed to be one more nail in the coffin of his reputation.
Mary Winkler’s testimony had progressed to the morning of the murder, and the courtroom was hushed as she responded to Steve Farese’s questions.
After they had marital relations on Tuesday night, the next thing Mary remembered was it was early Wednesday morning. She heard Brianna crying, and she said that Matthew had placed his foot on her lower back and literally kicked her out of bed so that she would go and quiet the baby.
But then he had changed his mind—and suddenly gotten out of bed and walked into the living room, heading for Brianna’s room. When Mary caught up to him, she said he was already “suffocating Brianna—pinching her nose.”
“I said, ‘Could I please have her?’ ”
“Did you get her?”
“Yeah. He just threw up his arms and walked out—walked away from the crib…He just said he was tired of hearing it and when he walked through the door, he slammed the door frame with his open hand. I picked Brianna up and calmed her down and then I changed her diaper and [found her] pacifier somewhere and just put her back down and put music on.”
Mary testified that Brianna had gone back down easily, and she had gone to the kitchen to make coffee. She wanted to talk to Matthew. “I just wanted him to stop being so mean.”
He had gone back to the bedroom by then, back to bed. “He liked to sleep as long as possible,” she added.
“Did you go back in the bedroom to talk to Matthew?”
“Yes sir.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“No. I couldn’t. I was just so scared.”
“Scared of what?”
“Scared of Matthew.”
That dark Wednesday dawn had been the start of a day she already dreaded: whether Mary Winkler understood the fine points or not, she and Matthew were due at the bank. Did he know she was $5,000 overdrawn?
She had testified that he did, but if he didn’t, she had good reason to be frightened. Almost any husband would be angry and embarrassed to have such news sprung on him. If, as Mary had said repeatedly, he blamed her for everything, she was going to be in really big trouble.
“Do you remember getting a gun?” Farese asked her.
“No sir.”
“Do you remember having a gun—holding a gun?”
“Yes sir.”
“Do you remember pulling a trigger?”
“No sir.”
“Did you pull the trigger?”
“No sir.”
“How do we know that, Mary?”
“Because I’m telling you.”
Mary Winkler said she recalled that “something went off,” but she didn’t know what it was. She had heard a “boom!” and smelled an awful smell she could not identify. All she could think of was getting her children out of the house.
She knew that Matthew would be mad at her for shooting him, she said. “ ’Cause he would think I wanted to do that.”
And she hadn’t wanted to shoot him. Mary recalled running out to the carport, and then returning to waken her daughters. She looked in the living room, but nobody was there. She thought she remembered that Patricia might have come out of her room and asked what was happening.
“I went back to the bedroom…Matthew was laying there on his back.”
“How did he look? Did you see blood or anything?” Farese asked quietly.
“Yes sir. In his nose and the back of his ears.”
“Did you do anything or say anything to him?”
“I wiped his mouth. I don’t remember saying anything. I don’t know.”
“What were you thinking then, Mary?”
“Something terrible had happened. That it was just an accident and that I’d lose my girls—”
“Did you know what had happened?”
“Not for a fact, but—”
“What did you do?”
“I just ran away. I just put the girls in the van and I just drove.”
As direct examination of Mary Winkler came to an end, she denied that she had intentionally or purposely killed her husband. She had loved him.
“Do you still love him?” Steve Farese asked.
“Yes sir.”
“Even through all that?”
“Yes sir.”
Mary testified that she had tried to protect Matthew’s good name when she was first questioned by police in Alabama. She hadn’t cared about herself. All she cared about was “Patricia, Allie, and Brianna.”
Judge McCraw called for a break in the proceedings. And everyone in the courtroom needed that. It was as if those who had listened so intensely were suddenly able to breathe again. As they walked outside into the April spring air, they found their voices.
Was Mary Winkler telling the truth, or was she only playing the part of an abused wife who had suddenly snapped and shot her husband in a kind of fugue state in which she had no awareness of what she was doing?
Prosecutor Walt Freeland rose to cross-examine Mary Winkler. He would now bear down on those areas that Steve Farese had skimmed over. Mary denied having been coached prior to her testimony, even though there is no rule against defense attorneys preparing their clients for trial. It was obvious that Farese and Leslie Ballin had told her what to expect, and that she had probably under-gone a test run. Any good defense attorney would have done that.
Mary grudgingly agreed with Freeland that she had praised Matthew in the Orange Beach police station.
“You stated that he was so good—or something to that nature. What did Matthew Winkler do to deserve the death penalty?”
“Nothing. Nobody made that decision,” she answered, warily.
“Matthew Winkler, in fact, did not deserve to die—did he?”
“No.”
Freeland switched to the tangled money transfers and checks from the swindlers in Canada. Mary repeated that it was Matthew who had urged her to enter all the lotteries and sweepstakes that came in the mail. “Any dollar amounts, vehicles, TVs…”
“And it would have been a big thing for you and Matthew financially if you had, in fact, won a sweepstakes?”
“Yes sir.”
And yet, Freeland pointed out, the Winklers hadn’t told their families about the big checks coming in from Canada—for $6,900, $4,900, $6,455. Mary said that she didn’t understand just how the transactions were to be handled—she had left that all up to Matthew. They hadn’t celebrated.
“Matthew said it wasn’t a million—but it was something.”
Mary said they had simply put the checks in the bank, and hadn’t told the elder Winklers because nobody knew of the overwhelming credit card debt they had.
Her answers were very vague about all of the bank problems—she maintained that she just didn’t understand them.
Freeland moved on, questioning Mary about almost everything she had testified to on direct examination. In Pegram—on the night Matthew had flipped over his recliner—she admitted that she had laughed when Brandy and Glenn Jones had come over to see to Matthew.
“Were you laughing on the inside or just on the outside?”
“Just on the outside.”
“You were able to convince your friends of something that was not true?”
“Yes.”
She acknowledged that Matthew had scared her so much that night that both his brother Jacob and Glenn Jones had spent the night at her house because of that.
But still, she had laughed. Later, she and Brandy Jones had ended their friendship. So, apparently, no one had been witness to her desire for a divorce from Matthew.
Freeland pointed out that Mary had lied again when she denied having a bruise from being hit in the face by a softball. She shook her head. “The reason I went to the doctor was because I had been kicked in the face.”
Yes, she had sent an antidiarrheal prescription to Reverend Tim Parish, the pulpit minister, at the McMinnville Church of Christ, telling him it was for his mouth—but that, too, had been on Matthew’s instructions.
Walt Freeland suggested that Mary hadn’t always been seen as meek and loving. In fact, hadn’t she been advised that she was too stern when she took her little girls out of church services?
“You were the one being counseled for being rough to the kids, weren’t you?”
“It was brought to my attention that my body language was looking stern when I took the children out, and so Tommy [Tommy Hodge, a church elder], as a friend, came to me and said not to frown and to loosen up my body language.”
Mary blamed the way Matthew treated her for her “body language.”
“So Matthew is the reason…that caused concern with the church elders?”
“Yes sir.”
To Freeland’s questions about her accusations against Matthew, Mary insisted that he had threatened to cut her van’s brake lines and shoot her with his shotgun.
When the district attorney reminded her that her children were in danger of being shot as they slept in their bedrooms because of the way their house was designed, she said that had never occurred to her.
Brandy Jones had confided to investigators that Mary told her Matthew had taken her to the gun range to practice using his shotgun if she ever needed it to protect herself. But Mary now said that wasn’t true.
“Brandy Jones—in earlier testimony—has characterized herself as being your best friend?”
“Was…”
“What changed that?”
“She was affected by all this and she chose not to believe in me and not support me through this.”
“Did you tell Brandy Jones…sometime in February 2006, that that was the happiest time you have had in your life?”
“I very well may have said that. That may have been my public statement.”
“So you said things that weren’t true to fool people?”
“To cover up [for] our family. And to cover up the problems we had.”
She wanted to explain further, but Freeland stopped her.
“Now, this is a yes-or-no question. You told stories to people to fool them?”
“Yes sir.”
“Now you can explain,” Freeland offered.
“I was ashamed. I was ashamed about Matthew and I didn’t want anyone to know about it.”
“Well, how would being ashamed lead you to tell your friend that this was a happy time?”
“That’s picking out one comment,” she argued, “where if anyone ever talked to me over ten years, all I would have to say is how happy we were and how great life was.”
Freeland returned to the complicated problems Mary had had with banks. She seemed to remember that in mid-March the Regions Bank’s security officer had told her her overdraft might go to collections.
“Do you recall her telling you that thirty days after a check—an earlier check—you had to do something?
“I think that I had asked her when did it absolutely have to be taken care of ? I couldn’t get Matthew in the bank with me.”
Mary recalled her day of substitute teaching, and that she might have received one call from the bank. The only person she herself had called was Matthew—who was sleeping at home—because she was trying to get him up. She had also seen the number of a credit card company flash on her phone.
She denied worrying about her bank problems. “Matthew could have gone in, and I told Jana Hawkins that Matthew had perfect credit because nothing was in his name. And we [she and Matthew] decided that day that getting a loan would be an option because Matthew had perfect credit.”
Mary denied ever hearing the term “check kiting,” and it appeared that she had blocked the memory of anyone telling her that, or that she wanted to give that impression. She insisted her church friend who worked at the bank had told her, “Don’t worry about it. Y’all can come in.”
Now she testified that while they were eating pizza on Tuesday night, she had mentioned going into the bank to Matthew, that they were supposed to go in the next day, and he hadn’t been at all concerned.
“What did you say?” Freeland asked. “ ‘Oh, by the way, the bank called and says I’m doing illegal stuff’?
”
“No sir. I said he’s got to go in there, but I probably spelled it out—or whispered it to him, because Patricia and Allie were around us.”
“What was his reaction when you said, ‘The bank says what I am doing is illegal’?”
“He said I was misunderstanding them.”
“Was he upset?”
“No. He just thought it was stupid…He just said, what in the world are they talking about? We shared the same opinion, I believe.”
Mary recalled that Matthew had been “ranting and raving” over something that night, but she couldn’t remember what. Maybe it was some church business.
Mary Winkler’s memory came and went. Asked about the statement she had given to the TBI investigator Chris Carpenter in which she had given a much more favorable view of her marriage, she remembered that she hadn’t wanted anyone to think badly about Matthew. Now she couldn’t recall what she had said; she did remember that she had talked to the TBI men.
Asked about the morning Matthew died, Mary said she wasn’t sure what time it was; she only knew that the alarm hadn’t gone off yet.
“Do you remember telling Agent Carpenter that when you got up Matthew was still in bed?”
“I don’t remember those exact words.”
She couldn’t recall going to the closet and getting the gun. Obviously, she had been able to reach it, but she didn’t know how she got it off a high shelf there.
“Do you recall telling Agent Carpenter you heard ‘a loud boom’ and you [said you] remembered thinking that it wasn’t as loud as you thought it would be? Had you thought about how loud a boom from a shotgun would be?”
“I guess just—I never thought of it before. That’s just in reference to movies and TV.”
“You remember saying you heard the boom?”
“Yes sir.”
“And that he rolled out of bed?”
“I just remember that I don’t actually remember saying any of this, but I do remember being there and him [Carpenter] writing this.”
Mary’s direct testimony, led by Steve Farese, had been relatively incisive, but now she was floundering. She wasn’t sure if she had told Chris Carpenter about seeing blood on the floor, or that her husband was bleeding from the mouth. She did recall wiping his mouth with a sheet.