by Ann Rule
“Do you remember today that you told Matthew that you were sorry and that you loved him?”
“No sir.”
“You don’t recall Matthew asking you, ‘Why?’ ”
Freeland’s voice was full of doubt.
“No sir.”
Even when she looked at her initials on the statement to Chris Carpenter, Mary denied that Matthew had asked her why she had shot him.
“Do you recall that Patricia came to the hallway, and you told her Daddy was hurt?”
Mary did not remember that, or that she had said Matthew was groaning.
She did not agree with her own daughter’s testimony.
Either Mary Winkler had blanked out her own memory or she was conveniently recalling only those things that served her defense best. She felt that she had been “beaten down” by her life by the time she got to Orange Beach, even though she had managed to drive there without having an accident and had been aware enough to register in hotels—even looking until she found one where there was a swimming pool.
Freeland suggested that her foggy spots came and went.
“When you’re so beaten down,” Mary testified, “you just don’t understand and you don’t think you’ve got a way up. At that time, I was led to feel like I didn’t have a family. I never would have imagined I would have been able to have any kind of attorney. I just—if I got into talking about anything—why did I even want to talk to him [Carpenter] that morning? I was going to have to talk about how he [Matthew] was—and I didn’t want to get into that.”
“Well, why in the world would it have smeared Matthew if you said it was an accident? Why would you have to talk about the way he was? What would that have to do with anything if the gun just accidentally went off ?”
“Because what led me to get in that position.”
Why had that led to an accident? Mary insisted she had only wanted to talk to Matthew.
“It wasn’t an accident, was it?” Freeland asked quietly.
“Yes sir.”
“You just wanted to talk to him and he wouldn’t listen. So you shot him in the middle of the back while he was asleep. Now has that memory come back to you, Ms. Winkler?”
She denied any such memory.
Walt Freeland returned to the testimony of the woman who said she had once been Mary’s best friend: Brandy Jones. Brandy was far from being a layperson; she worked at the Carl Perkins Center in Jackson, an agency dedicated to protecting abused children and working with dysfunctional families.
At any time, Mary could have gone to Brandy with her anxieties about her marriage—but she hadn’t done that. Nor, Freeland pointed out, had she ever gone to Department of Health Services (DHS) and their child protective services or to her church for counsel or help. If, as her attorneys had pointed out, her life was a “living hell,” there had been many counselors who could have helped her and kept her problems private.
Mary Winkler had once told investigators that she slid on decorative pillows on the master bedroom floor just before the shotgun boomed. But now that awful morning had faded into smoky, blurred places in her mind with only bits and pieces of memory floating there.
And finally her testimony was over and she stepped down.
It had become a battle of titans; both the prosecution and the defense teams had raised serious questions in a case where Mary Winkler’s motivation—if any—would certainly be the deciding factor for the jury.
And the jurors had an awesome task ahead of them.
Steve Farese and Leslie Ballin had presented Mary as an abused wife, frightened, desperate, and trying to protect her children.
There were some physical evidence problems, however, that drew the attention of experts and made portions of her testimony unbelievable.
Why had Mary unplugged the phone line before she left her critically injured husband lying on the floor? The shotgun blast with its seventy-seven pellets ripping through his body had done horrible damage to a large percentage of Matthew Winkler’s internal organs and it would have taken a miracle for him to survive. Even so, there was something disturbing about her removing the last possible avenue he would have had to call for help.
Patricia had testified that the phone was not unplugged when she first looked into her parents’ bedroom, but later it was—and the phone had been moved far out of her father’s reach. He had been alive and groaning as he lay on his stomach when Patricia first saw him. He was, of course, on his back when his worried church friends found him.
There was a second, more complicated finding that had surfaced during Matthew Winkler’s autopsy. His bladder still held an entire liter of urine. Dr. Turner had testified about how humans reacted to varying amounts of urine. With a whole liter in his bladder, Matthew wouldn’t have gotten up, “suffocated” his baby daughter, smacked the doorjamb in frustration, and then gone back to bed, without going to the bathroom! He would have had a tremendous urge to void and been almost in pain with a bladder stretched to its capacity. More than likely, he would have ducked into the bathroom five feet from their bed even before he walked to Brianna’s room.
All of these discrepancies made Mary’s story about the morning Matthew was killed either a partial lie or the result of a buried memory.
The jurors in Mary Winkler’s trial listened attentively to the final remarks made by Walt Freeland and Steve Farese, and then retired to deliberate on Thursday, April 19, 2007. They deliberated for only eight hours. When they returned, their foreman, Bill Berry, announced their verdict.
Guilty.
But it was a gentle guilty. They had gone over Judge McCraw’s instructions, weighed the evidence and testimony, and found Mary guilty only of voluntary manslaughter.
Mary still clutched her attorneys’ hands. She didn’t understand what that meant. They spoke to her, explaining, until she broke into a half smile of relief. She had escaped spending fifty-one years in prison. In fact, she might be locked up for only three to six years. But that wasn’t clear-cut at this moment.
Circuit Court judge Weber McCraw could, at his discretion, consider alternatives to incarceration. It was possible that she might only get probation. But Mary wouldn’t know what her future held until her sentencing date: May 18. Until then, she would return to McMinnville and her life there, back to working at the dry cleaner’s.
Public opinion hadn’t changed a great deal during the trial. Now, a little over half of those polled felt the verdict was fair. Others said they thought Mary Winkler had gotten away with murder.
Whatever her sentence would be on May 18, she would have a long series of obstacles. The Reverend Dan and Dianne Winkler filed a $2 million wrongful death suit against Mary on behalf of Patricia, Allie, and Brianna. They also petitioned to adopt their three granddaughters.
There could be no happy ending to the Winkler murder case, almost always referred to as “the Preacher’s Wife Murder.” Mary’s sentencing was delayed to June 8, 2007.
Both Mary herself and Matthew’s family were given the opportunity to speak before Judge McCraw handed down his sentence.
Matthew’s mother, Diane, had not found forgiveness in her heart, she said. She chastised Mary because she had never apologized to Patricia, Allie, and Brianna for robbing them of their father, saying, “You’ve never told your girls you’re sorry. Don’t you think you at least owe them that?”
Dianne Winkler said that the girls had nightmares, and that Patricia often sat next to her father’s grave and wept.
Matthew’s brother Daniel spoke of the pain to his family and to Mary’s family.
Mary told those in the courtroom that she thought of Matthew every day and would always miss him and love him. She turned to his family and said she was “so sorry this has happened.”
She said she knew that they were angry with her and assured them that she prayed each night for them that they would find peace.
Somehow, none of it seemed real.
Now Judge Weber McCraw spoke. The standard sente
ncing range for voluntary manslaughter in Tennessee is three to six years in prison, but Judge McCraw had some discretion over the time he deduced Mary should serve.
He sentenced Mary Winkler to only seven months’ incarceration—310 days. Ironically, that penciled out to ten days for every year Matthew Winkler had lived. Since Mary had already served five months while she waited for a bail agreement to be worked out, she owed the state of Tennessee just sixty-seven days.
She was taken into custody after the sentencing on Friday, June 8, and served twelve days in the McNairy County Jail.
Judge McCraw ordered that she spend the remaining fifty-five days in a mental health facility, and that location was to be kept secret.
On August 16, 2007, Mary walked out of the still-unnamed mental facility a free woman.
Mary Winkler will be on probation for three years. For the rest of her life, people will remember her and wonder about her. Seven months in jail is a remarkably short sentence for shooting a man, perhaps a sleeping man, in the back.
Angry comments vied with sympathetic responses as people wrote to the Tennessean, discussing her release, and there is no indication that the heated debate will soon end.
It may be true that Mary suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. However, it seems unlikely that she still suffered acutely twenty years after the death of her handicapped sister. The most obvious explanation for the final violent act in her marriage is that she had given up little pieces of herself to Matthew’s more powerful personality, bit by bit, over ten years of an increasingly confining marriage. Each time she capitulated, she probably felt frustrated, weak, and a little angry, but as she had learned from the time she was a child, her church said that the husband is the unchallenged person in charge in a marriage. The wife is to be a helpmate and a subordinate.
It was that way in her parents’ marriage, and it was even more true in her own. Matthew Winkler was not only her husband; he was a minister. Although he never had a chance to defend his reputation, he probably wasn’t nearly as abusive as he was portrayed to be in Mary’s trial. Had she found her self-esteem early in their marriage, he probably would have backed down on his demands about her weight and the small things she did that annoyed him. Had they realized how skewed the power was in their marriage, they should have sought counseling.
Marriage counseling, even within the church, could have defused the danger emerging. Their differing sexual preferences didn’t mark them as such an unusual couple; that was something that might have been dealt with in counseling. Did Matthew demand that Mary wear shoes like those in the pornographic images found in his computer? No one really knows where the white platform heels that Steve Farese showed to Mary came from. They apparently weren’t listed in the evidence removed from the Winklers’ home. Mary identified them, and the jurors believed that.
For most mothers, if there was a deal breaker in the Winklers’ marriage, it would have been Matthew’s alleged practice of “suffocating” their baby daughters to make them stop crying. Did he really do that? If Allie and Brianna already had breathing problems and their father pinched their noses closed, most mothers would understand that Mary Winkler would do anything to stop him. There are very few things more powerful than maternal instinct in both animal and human mothers. They will literally die to save their young.
Mary Winkler probably repressed her emotions many times over the length of her marriage. And perhaps she could do nothing right in her husband’s eyes. That, we will never know, because Matthew Winkler isn’t alive to tell his side of the story. He may have been an unpleasant and demanding husband—but that is no just cause for murder. It is only cause for divorce, and church or not, Mary could have found a way to leave.
But she didn’t leave, and I think she became involved in the Internet con game without Matthew’s knowledge. She became more and more entangled in an illegal operation, and on Tuesday night, March 21, 2006, she probably confessed that to Matthew. Although she claimed to be confused about check kiting and NSF checks, I think she knew what she had done. Maybe she had only been trying to please Matthew by coming up with a lot of money—if she was truly naïve enough to believe that she could collect oil profits due to a Canadian firm.
But I’m sure he was very angry when she had to confess they were due at the Regions Bank early the next morning. That surely was what they had fought about, even though she claimed not to remember. During that raging argument, Brianna may have cried, and Matthew may have silenced her by pinching her nose closed.
Not in the early morning, but sometime on Tuesday night. I don’t think Mary had planned to kill him over a long period of time. She hadn’t set up a prepared scenario for weeks or months beforehand, telling friends and family that he was abusing her and the children. Nor did she attempt to blame anyone else for Matthew’s murder. There were no stories of bushy-haired strangers or burglars who forced their way into her home. This was not, in my mind, a premeditated act.
But Mary Winkler had backed herself into a corner where she had no hope for the future, where she feared what was going to happen at the bank, feared being separated from her children, and, most of all, where she could no longer stand by and let Matthew “suffocate” her baby.
And so she shot him in the back as he lay sleeping—without thinking of the future or punishment. Or even that she was taking another human being’s life.
As Mary told the court and those at her sentencing, she has lost almost everything that mattered to her and she cannot really be punished further. She has no husband. She has no children.
Since the verdict, she has filed many motions to have her children returned to her. But her in-laws are also moving through tedious court processes, seeking to have Mary’s maternal rights terminated so that they can adopt her three daughters. Their opposing goals seem only to make a tragic situation more tragic.
Whatever the outcome, it seems likely that Mary Winkler will spend the rest of her life going over and over what she did in a moment that even she cannot explain.
In a sense, she did get a life sentence.
Afterword
MARY AND OPRAH
September 12, 2007
Mary Winkler hadn’t been out of the mental health facility even four weeks when a startling announcement came from The Oprah Winfrey Show. As Oprah’s new fall season began, Mary was slated to be one of the first week’s guests. Whether Reverend Daniel Winkler and his wife, Dianne, would join the show was a question, but in the end, they declined.
It was only Mary who met with Oprah, and she was not a live guest on camera but an image on film as she met privately with Oprah sometime before September 12, the date the show aired. This was probably one of the oddest interviews Oprah Winfrey has ever conducted, even though she has questioned thousands of people, from movie stars to criminals. Having been on the set with Oprah when she talked with Diane Downs, who was with us by satellite in 1985, I believe that was the last time I’ve seen Oprah so bemused by her subject. Mary was in her own world and she didn’t let Oprah in.
Diane Downs, convicted of shooting her three young children two years earlier, denied that she had done so, and her affect was animated and inappropriately cheerful. She actually enjoyed her moment in the spotlight on Oprah.
Mary Winkler, having admitted shooting her husband, was certainly not animated and seemed hesitant to speak at all. Although it could not be more different, her affect was just as peculiar as Diane’s. Many times during their conversation, Oprah did a subdued double take as if she could not believe what she had just heard, and she did her best to coax some kind of response from Mary. Any kind of response.
Mary dressed very much like she had during her trial—a white cardigan jacket cut like the sweater she wore when she testified. Her haircut was the same, and her shy expression and head-ducking pose were almost identical to those shown on news clips during her murder trial. On Oprah’s show, however, Mary rarely—if ever—met Oprah’s eyes, gazing off to the left. It was al
most as if she existed in another dimension, and the questions, however gently probing, never quite penetrated an invisible wall she had built around her.
From time to time, her response was only a quiet “hmmm” that was almost cheerful in an absentminded way. For instance, when she had just mentioned how Matthew had “suffocated” their baby—“to put her to sleep”—Oprah followed up with something like, “What did he do?” her tone reflecting her shock. Mary only “hmmmed.” Yes, Matthew had often “suffocated” their children, and she’d been powerless to stop him.
Never looking into Oprah’s eyes, Mary explained that she had been terrified of Matthew that morning, but at the same time she’d just wanted to talk to him. “I wanted him to be happy, to stop being so mean. Just to enjoy life and [tell him] he didn’t have to be so miserable.”
“Had you ever said that to him before?” Oprah asked.
“He never would have allowed me to say that.”
Some of Mary’s recitation of the facts of the morning of the shooting tracked with the version presented by the defense during her trial, but others were slightly changed. Now, she recalled that Matthew had been sitting on the bed. Months ago, she said he had gone back to bed.
“I just wanted to talk to Matthew,” she explained to Oprah. “And then there was that awful sound…”
She hurried on to a safer subject, but Oprah tugged her back, asking her to explain what that meant.
Mary clearly could not bring herself to say the words “gunshot” or “shotgun shells.”
She explained that she never in a million years would have thought that there was “something” in there. “He always took it out.” She meant the shotgun shells, but she could not say the words.
She showed no emotion at all as she explained that she thought something had hit the ceiling or one of the windows. Instinctively, she had run away, and then realized that Matthew wasn’t chasing her.