The Pastor's Wife

by Diane Fanning

  “This is not a circus. This is a legal proceeding. It happens all over the free world every day. And all we want is a fair trial for Mary Carol Winkler. We don’t want the field tilted in any way. All we want is a fifty–fifty shot at representing her to the best of our ability.”

  When asked if Mary was on suicide watch, Farese said, “I am concerned about her emotional state. One of those concerns is whether she would harm herself.”

  Ballin added that he had faith in the professionalism and judgment of the McNairy County Sheriff’s Department. The defense team had the utmost faith in the department’s ability to protect Mary from herself, he said.

  That evening, the two attorneys appeared on the Greta Van Susteren show on the Fox News network. Greta asked Ballin, “Leslie, why didn’t you have a preliminary hearing today, which would have required the prosecution to lay out part of its case?”

  “Didn’t need it,” Leslie Ballin said. “We knew what the charges were. We anticipated what the prosecution was going to put on, as far as proof. We talked to the prosecutor about giving us some early discovery, which she graciously agreed to do. Plus, there were some other issues concerning what the proof was going to be.

  “Mr. Winkler has recently been buried. The grieving continues and will continue for a long, long time to come. For that family to hear details of what happened just wasn’t going to do any good, especially for those three young kids.”

  She turned then to Farese. “Steve, if I saw your client in the cellblock today and I had a conversation, what would be my impression of her?”

  “Your impression would be someone that’s, at this point in time, very withdrawn, very reserved, having difficulty understanding your questions contextually, the deer-in-the headlights sort of look.”

  “Leslie, do you agree with that?” she asked Ballin.

  “Yes. And she is at times lost in space. You talk to her, she doesn’t follow a lot of the theme, the subject matter that you’re wanting to talk about. And she’s kind of bewildered at times.”

  Farese said it wasn’t a circus, but to outside observers, it certainly appeared as if the curtain had risen on the first act in the defense of Mary Winkler.

  Chapter 24

  On March 31, McNairy County deputies transported Mary Winkler to the office of clinical psychologist Dr. Lynne Zager in Jackson. When she received the call from the defense team to evaluate Mary’s mental condition and her competency to stand trial, the doctor was excited. She remembered when she listened to the news of Mary’s arrest on the radio in her car. Mary, she thought, might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Dr. Zager would have the opportunity to investigate that possibility first-hand. Even after twenty-four years of forensic evaluation, Zager found this case very interesting. She agreed without hesitation to provide her services pro bono.

  Zager started the first session with Mary by explaining the limits of confidentiality under these circumstances. She informed Mary that she was granting permission to Zager to reveal anything they discussed to the defense team, and if the case went to trial, everything Mary said could be repeated in open court.

  Although cordial, polite and willing to answer questions about her social history, Mary would not look Dr. Zager in the eye when they talked. Zager administered the Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a psychological assessment tool with 567 questions designed to uncover anyone who was either trying to paint a falsely positive picture or appear mentally ill when they are not.

  Zager found significant defensiveness in her client, and determined that Mary was attempting to appear as if she did not have any mental health issues. Beneath that denial, Zager concluded that Mary did have problems in her thinking, trusting and psychological functioning.

  On Sunday, April 2, Mary Winkler greeted more than a dozen visitors at the McNairy County jail, including her father and two of her sisters. Friends from the church brought in cards from members who were unable to come. That day, like every day of her incarceration, Mary wrote a letter to her daughters. She never mentioned the events that led to their separation, but she assured the girls that she loved and missed them.

  For the few days that followed, it seemed as if Steve Farese and Leslie Ballin were everywhere. One or the other—or both—held court on television, doing their best to sway public opinion in their client’s favor.

  On April 3, they appeared on Larry King Live, where Ballin said, “Everything that she is, is inconsistent with the charges.”

  To the amusement of the cosmopolitan host Larry King, Farese brought his folksy flair to the interview: “My father always says, ‘If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, what a merry Christmas it would be.’ And it truly would be a merry Christmas for the prosecution if all the speculation from them was true, but it’s certainly not true.”

  Ballin expanded on his earlier statement, saying, “This is so inconsistent with what twenty-nine years of the practice of law has taught me. Certainly, you have the off-case where a good person commits a crime, but in this particular case, it’s just so unusual. I don’t have a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound, six-foot-five, tattooed, one-eyed defendant sitting behind me. This is just unusual. It isn’t supposed to happen.”

  Another guest on the show, Tennessee’s Chief Medical Examiner Doctor Bruce Levy, snatched the focus away from Mary and put it back on the victim, saying that Matthew essentially bled to death. “A shotgun is full of many small metallic pellets. When they strike the body, it’s like a billiard-ball effect; they go in every direction, and they strike pretty much all the internal organs and cause lots and lots of bleeding, both internally and externally.”

  Steve Farese appeared on the Nancy Grace show on April 6. As a rule, Nancy, a former prosecutor, had little patience with defense attorneys, and Farese was no exception. Her tone was immediately hostile. “When I asked you the other night, ‘Did your client get a chance to visit her husband’s body before he was buried?’ you had not talked to her at that time. Now that you’ve spent a day in court with her, did she get to say goodbye to her husband one last time?”

  “Nancy, I did get to talk to her today, and intentionally did not ask that question.”

  “Why? Why? Why?”

  Mocking her repetition, Farese said, “I thought you might want to know the answer. Know the answer. Know the answer.”

  “Is it because you don’t want people to know that she got out of jail to visit her husband?” she pressed. “I mean, why would you want to keep that a secret?”

  Farese responded with a non-answer. “That doesn’t interest me whether she did or did not get out of jail.”

  “Well, you just said you intentionally didn’t ask, so obviously you’d been thinking about it a lot.”

  “No, I intentionally didn’t ask, because it didn’t enter my mind to ask.”

  “But you just said you intentionally didn’t ask, so obviously you thought about it, so it did enter your mind.”

  “Nancy…”

  The host interrupted. “You’ve been thinking about it, and you’ve been thinking about me a lot.”

  “Guess what?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re right on both accounts.”

  Nancy then moved on to badger McNairy County Sheriff Rick Roten. He wouldn’t comment on the funeral home visit, either, insisting that it was a private matter.

  Farese and Ballin did scores of other interviews including Dateline NBC and People magazine. But of all the inquisitors they faced, the only one they refused to consider for a repeat performance was Nancy Grace. They said that they didn’t think she was “very nice.”

  In another show about the Winkler case, she asked a Baptist minister what he knew about the churches of Christ.

  “It’s, unfortunately, a very legalistic sect, and they tend to use methods of intimidation and pressure,” he said. He added that the churches of Christ believe that they and they alone have the key to heaven’s gate.

  Nancy responded, “You make it sound lik
e a cult.”

  “It’s kind of a borderline cult, unfortunately.”

  Church of Christ adherents across the country were up in arms. Even those who hadn’t seen the show heard about it from friends or read about it in a churches of Christ publication, The Christian Chronicle.

  The editorial board of that periodical expressed their shock at the comments on Nancy’s show, writing:

  The worst of these characterizations and insinuations ranges from charges of being a cult to dismissing us as mindless “fundamentalists” and conservatives. This is not the same church we know and love. It’s painful and frustrating to find our congregations so seriously misunderstood, especially since we recognize the untold labors of love and ministry, teaching, worship and community involvement that go on continually, to say nothing of millions of dollars we donate to the poor and needy around the world. We know these charges to be false, inaccurate stereo-types not based on fact.

  They ended their long opinion piece with an admonition to the flock:

  We must neither be addicted to the approval of the wider culture, nor stubbornly picking fights over doctrinal details. If we love, our difference will be noted. While the church we love is countercultural and always will be, we should show the heart of Christ to our culture in our actions and attitudes.

  As for the media’s recent treatment…Jesus reminds us that such experiences should be cause for joy: “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven.”

  Fair or not, it was clear that the church would be on trial as well as Mary Winkler when the court convened in McNairy County.

  Back at the jail, a different kind of media excitement was underway. Nearby Hardeman County resident Robert King, an employee of New York–based Polaris Images, had an assignment to shoot pictures for People magazine.

  According to the sheriff’s department, King came into the jail with Mary’s attorneys. He signed in as an investigator. Once inside, he took photographs of Mary. No one is certain if the lawyers knew about this ruse or not.

  There had to have been a lot of legal wrangling in the prosecutor’s office, because an indictment charging him with impersonation of a private investigator was not handed down for ten months. Once it was, an arrest warrant was issued by the sheriff’s department, and Robert King faced a potential prison sentence of one to two years.

  Chapter 25

  In the midst of all the media frenzy, Bio-Recovery Solutions went unnoticed as they slipped a team into the house on Mollie Drive. The business of the Murfreesboro, Tennessee, company involved traveling to locations where dead or injured victims left behind blood, body fluids and other contaminants. Following the guidelines set by the Centers for Disease Control and OSHA, they cleaned up the stains and bacteria, saving the family members of the victim the horrible anguish of doing it on their own.

  On May 8, Patricia met with her new counselor, Diana Crawford, for the first time. After that visit, Crawford sent the Winklers a note telling them to start giving the girls the letters from their mother a few at a time right before their next appointment. She also urged them to explore all the details of their first visit with their mother in advance to prepare the girls and reduce the possible trauma.

  Behind bars, Cynthia Gibbs, supervisor of the women’s section of the jail, signed a letter of disciplinary action against Mary Winkler. Gibbs spotted another inmate passing a prescription drug to Mary, who accepted it. She confiscated the pill before Mary could ingest it. Mary lost her rights to visitation on Sunday, May 7. Unaware of this restriction, some of Mary’s family traveled from Knoxville to Selmer to see her. They were turned away.

  The next Sunday, Mother’s Day, her visitation privileges resumed. Inmate and mother Mary Winkler did not greet the day showered with hugs, kisses and happy greetings from her three little daughters. She didn’t even want them to come and visit her—not while she was in jail wearing the orange prison uniform, trapped on the other side of a sturdy piece of Plexiglas.

  It was just an ordinary day for Mary. The lights came on, as usual, at 5:30 in the morning, the cell door opened about half an hour later. She made her way to a breakfast of sausage, toast and scrambled eggs. Then, she went to church service.

  Mary’s life had settled into a dull routine with the twenty or so other women in the jail. By May, the volume of mail had dropped since its peak of fifty to sixty letters a day right after her arrest. But she still got a plentiful supply—a daily delivery of fifteen to twenty. Mary often passed out correspondence to female inmates at mail call, a privilege that made her the target of jealousy from some of the others.

  Prisoners—burglars and drug offenders for the most part—often harassed her for being a murderer. Whenever one of them asked Mary about killing her husband, she turned away and walked back to her cell.

  Television reception in the recreation room was limited to one local channel. Mary sometimes joined the others to watch soap operas, Oprah and Doctor Phil. When the latest on her case aired, some inmates pounded on windows and walls, hollering, “Mary Winkler, you’re on TV!” Mary ignored them; she never watched the news coverage.

  She spent most of her time writing letters, playing cards and talking on the telephone when she could. Although silent when she initially arrived, she now talked and laughed frequently with the less judgmental inmates. She spoke of her children constantly, but Matthew’s name rarely crossed her lips.

  In Huntingdon, three little girls struggled to cope with the loss of both their mother and father. Only 8-year-old Patricia was mature enough to grasp the gravity of the situation. Questions about the pivotal events of March 22, 2006, tormented her days and haunted her dreams. She did not understand how her mother could not have realized the consequences of her actions before she pulled the trigger.

  Dan and Diane Winkler tried to focus on relearning their parenting skills and changing their lifestyle to accommodate three young children—it had been decades since their sons were small boys. And their children never faced the extreme trauma that now lay heavy on their granddaughters.

  The couple tried to ignore the innuendo and hints of spousal abuse, the excuse of self-defense and the smearing of their son’s reputation that seeped out from the defense team, but it was impossible. They dreaded the upcoming days in the courtroom.

  In legal circles, McNairy County had earned a dubious reputation, dating back to the days of Sheriff Buford Pusser. Of all the counties in southwestern Tennessee, the jurors there were more likely than others to side with the defense if the attorneys could paint a portrait of the deceased as being someone who “needed killin’.”

  This proclivity was not lost on Mary’s defense team, who would certainly want to take advantage of that mind-set if they could.

  Beneath the pleasant, backwoods demeanor of Steve Farese was a keen legal mind and a man capable of being a shrewd courtroom performer. He demonstrated for years that he had inherited the skills of his father, Big John Farese, a legendary court performer in Mississippi.

  Steve Farese defended a white law enforcement officer charged with the execution-style murder of a black teenager. Not only did the jury find him guilty of only the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide, but the judge sentenced the policeman to a mere one year of supervised probation. After it was served, the court expunged the record of the crime, as if it had never happened. Fellow attorneys named Steve Farese one of the top ten defense attorneys in the nation.

  Leslie Ballin worked with Farese in the defense of Howard Michael Mullins, the Memphis Federal Express pilot charged with beating his wife to death and burning up her body. Mullins was acquitted.

  Ballin’s track record on his own was equally impressive. He’d successfully defended Jeremy Hunt, a former star of the University of Memphis basketball team against charges of assault, and actor Anthony Anderson on rape. Outside of the courtroom, his laid-back, jovial dem
eanor and easy smile were in sharp contrast to the outraged anger that erupted in the courtroom on behalf of his clients.

  Against these formidable adversaries, the state’s team was an unknown factor. Elizabeth Rice led the prosecution now, but voting day was coming up in August, and Rice was not running for re-election. Nothing could be more unsettling for a victim’s family than the unknown. Dan and Diane were adrift in an ocean of it.

  They braced themselves for the worst. They turned to prayer, fellowship in the church, friends and family members for spiritual and emotional support. But nothing could prepare them for the onslaught that was to come.

  Chapter 26

  After hearing testimony from just one witness—Special Agent Chris Carpenter of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation—the Grand Jury of McNairy County issued a true bill of indictment on June 12, 2006. They found that Mary Carol Winkler

  did unlawfully, feloniously, intentionally and with premeditation kill Matthew Brian Winkler…against the peace and dignity of the State of Tennessee.

  The next day, for the first time since her arrest, Mary received a letter from her daughters.

  We miss you. We love you. We want to see you.

  Mary clutched the paper close to her heart as the comforting words echoed in her mind.

  On Wednesday, June 14, Mary appeared in court in her orange-and-white uniform, an ankle chain binding her legs, and handcuffs around her wrists. She dabbed her nose with a tissue throughout the proceedings.

  Judge Weber McCraw asked if she understood the charges against her and she softly said, “Yes, sir.” Then she told the judge her attorneys were in the room to act on her behalf.