Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  “And this was a thousand?”

  “Yes.”

  Even a lay jury could understand that Matthew Winkler must have gone all night long without getting up to go to the bathroom. He would have felt a tremendous need to urinate by the time he had a full liter of fluid in his bladder.

  Why it mattered so much wasn’t immediately obvious—except that it certainly seemed to indicate that he had been shot while he lay in bed asleep.

  Freeland would come back to this testimony.

  The prosecution had presented a woman who was about to be exposed for writing bad checks, a woman who had admitted to shooting her husband in the back before she ran away to another state. Steve Farese and Leslie Ballin faced a formidable challenge as they would now try to rebuild Mary’s side of the case.

  They presented a number of witnesses who vouched for Mary Winkler’s positive image in the community and in her church community.

  And they set about demonizing Matthew.

  Dr. Lynne Zager, the forensic psychologist who spent forty-one sessions with Mary Winkler, testified for over two hours. If Mary herself should not take the stand—which was likely—Zager had clearly committed her patient’s life to memory, almost from birth to the morning Matthew died. The psychologist said she had diagnosed Mary with mild depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome. She traced the PTS disorder back to the time that Mary’s sister died suddenly of a heart attack. The Freeman family had no counseling at the time, and Dr. Zager felt Mary had carried the emotional burden ever after.

  Although Matthew had controlled Mary, she tried to excuse his actions to Dr. Zager. “She often said that Matthew helped her to be better. He helped her to improve herself. He was concerned about her improving herself.”

  Dr. Zager presented Mary Winkler as most vulnerable for domestic violence, a woman already psychologically damaged who had been subjected to a decade of emotionally abusive treatment by her minister husband.

  The defense had come up with their scenario of Matthew’s murder, and now they padded out that skeletal structure with more and more witnesses.

  A Tennessee highway patrolman testified to his contact with Matthew when the Winklers lived in McMinnville. When he had visited his terminally ill grandmother, who was a neighbor of the Winklers, the trooper said Matthew had walked across the street and shouted about a small dog that was keeping him awake. The patrolman said he’d heard about the minister’s reputation as a bully, and that he had nicknamed him “the Tasmanian Devil.”

  Matthew’s parents and siblings watched the proceedings. His brother Dan looked startlingly like Matthew, so much so that it was almost as if the victim himself was in the courtroom. All three of the Winkler sons—Jacob, Matthew, and Daniel—were large men who had once been athletes. Dianne Winkler, Mary’s mother-in-law, was extremely poised, attractive, and beautifully dressed. She must have been a daunting example for Mary to emulate during her ten-year marriage. While the Winklers had been somewhat supportive of Mary right after she was arrested, they no longer were.

  Asked about a time in McMinnville when Matthew had allegedly locked Mary out of their home, his father testified that on two occasions, Matthew had had a bad reaction to medications he’d taken for a toothache and an upset stomach and become disoriented. That might explain such an occasion—if it had really happened.

  Dianne Winkler remembered one of his bizarre reactions to medication. He had a hallucination. “He saw a woman with black hair at the end of a hall—coming at him with a knife,” she testified.

  That caused a gasp in the courtroom. And later, outside the justice center, townspeople wondered about the possibility of illegal drugs being involved.

  Mary had suffered a black eye in McMinnville, but she had explained it away at the time, saying that she’d been playing with the girls and her eye had been hit accidentally, probably by an elbow.

  TBI criminal investigator Howard Patterson and Phillip Hampton, a forensic computer expert, both testified about “certain images” retrieved from the Winklers’ computers; 263 images had been printed out. Although they didn’t spell out what the images were, the truth was that they were pornographic downloads, some stills, some videos—material not to be expected on a minister’s computer.

  Back and forth the testimony and exhibits went. A church secretary at the Central Church of Christ in McMinn ville, who had worked there for thirty-five years, testified that Matthew had been “nice” when he first came to her church but that he had begun to “treat others as lower than himself.” She said he soon began to give orders, stepping over bounds “considerably.”

  She told the jurors that she had heard him speak to Mary angrily, and that he sometimes locked his wife and children in his office for twenty to thirty minutes. When she asked him why, he said it was “to keep them safe.”

  She also testified that he had made frivolous purchases on church accounts.

  Timothy Parish, the pulpit minister at the McMinnville church, took the stand to say that he felt the Winklers’ marriage was not as happy as his own. Sometimes Mary seemed happy, but there were many times when she didn’t.

  Tabatha, Mary’s sister, recalled that Mary had been very happy during the early years of her marriage, but that that had changed. “[My] very bubbly, outgoing sister became subdued.”

  Tabatha recalled the time when Matthew had summoned Mary’s adopted siblings to explain to them that she wasn’t really their sister any longer, and that they shouldn’t expect her to be there for them the way she had been before her marriage. Matthew had struck Tabatha as very controlling, and he only rarely attended his in-laws’ family functions and celebrations.

  Criminal defense attorneys agree that it is almost always a bad idea for a murder defendant to testify in his or her own defense, even though many of them want to take the stand. Once they testify, they open themselves up to cross-examination by the prosecution.

  In this trial, however, it seemed important for the jurors to hear Mary Winkler speak. In many ways, she was a mystery woman, and the rumor that she was going to testify flashed around Selmer on April 18.

  And she did.

  On April 19, 2007, Mary took the witness stand. As Steve Farese led her through what was virtually the story of her life, her whole mien was meek and respectful. She answered, “Yes sir,” and, “No sir,” as if she were a schoolgirl being questioned by her principal.

  It was difficult to discern who Mary Carol Freeman Winkler really was.

  It was even harder to figure out who Matthew Winkler had really been. He could not take the stand to tell his side of their marriage and the last morning of his life. A lay jury would decide which of them had been at fault—or, perhaps, if both of them had acted in ways that had led inexorably to a deadly shotgun blast.

  On the witness stand for this extremely important day in her life, Mary wore her black and white dress and the white cardigan. Steve Farese pointed out that, for Mary—as in T. S. Eliot’s poem—April was the cruelest month, a month of sad anniversaries. Her sister had died on April 15, and her mother on April 10, and tomorrow she would mark the eleventh anniversary of her wedding to Matthew, an event that had promised so much and ended in blood and ashes.

  And now, it was April again, and she could go to prison for half a century if the jury didn’t believe her story.

  Farese began with Mary’s childhood and gradually asked questions that led to her meeting with Matthew and their early married life. The material he covered was essentially what psychologist Dr. Lynne Zager had already presented, but it had more impact coming from Mary’s own mouth. Many of the questions hinted at behavior by Matthew that verged on bullying.

  “Can you tell the jury about any of the bad times you had,” Farese asked, “anything that you think was unusual now?”

  “There were many times I just got hollered at, and got onto. At one time Matthew thought that I had done something with the shirts wrong, and I felt like it was my fault. But when I look back in picture
s now, Matthew had just gained weight.”

  She mentioned a time when Patricia was about a year old and had suffered a dislocated elbow. It happened when Matthew was taking care of her. Mary said she didn’t know how it happened.

  Mary testified that her husband had yelled and screamed at her often. Urged to tell the jurors about an incident when they lived in Pegram (near Nashville), she said that “he just flailed [at me]—he’s a big guy and he was just all over.”

  “Did you ever ask him what you had done wrong?”

  “No.”

  “Did he ever point at you?”

  “Yes sir. He was very—just inches away from my nose.”

  “And what would he say to you?”

  “Whatever he was upset about, it was my fault. Don’t do it again.”

  “If he thought you had done something wrong or talked back to him, did he have a word?”

  “Yes sir. ‘Ugly.’ ”

  “Tell the jury how he would use that word.”

  “On occasions if I felt like I could talk to him about something and he didn’t agree with that, he would tell me that would just be ‘ugly’ coming out, and it needed to be put away.”

  “Whose ugly coming out?”

  “Mine.”

  Farese had succeeded in defusing that one early statement Mary had made that threatened to devastate her case.

  Mary had hinted from the beginning that her life had been difficult when they lived in Pegram. Her in-laws had testified that Matthew had suffered bad reactions to medications during that time. Now Farese focused more closely on that period.

  “Matthew’s temperament escalated,” Mary testified when questioned about Pegram. “He would just be furious about certain things. He went from certain threats to more serious threats.”

  “Can you be specific to the jury about any threats?”

  “He told me one time he was going to cut the brake lines of my van.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  To further questions, she recalled a time when her husband had been “out of control,” so enraged that he had grabbed his recliner chair and turned it upside down. Mary said she then “snuck” out of the house to call one of Matthew’s brothers, Jacob. But he lived forty-five minutes away, so she went to their neighbors Glenn and Brandy Jones. Glenn was Matthew’s college roommate and best friend. When Glenn went back to the Winklers’ house, Matthew shrugged off his friend’s concern, saying that he had only mixed up his medicine and had a strange reaction.

  “Who gave that explanation?” Farese prodded.

  “Matthew did—but I may have said it as well.”

  “Was he taking medicine at the time?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It was an odd story. Mary testified that Matthew had staggered around and pretended to be “high” or “medicated” when his friend was there, while he had been acting like a “tyrant” when they were alone. She added that she had been very frightened.

  Mary said that Matthew hadn’t really wanted to be a minister at all; he really wanted to be a history teacher. Everything had come to a head in Pegram, and she was glad to leave there.

  Even so, her life had continued to be very hard. Allie, her second daughter, was born five weeks prematurely only four days after they moved to McMinnville. Mary liked their new town, but she worried a lot about Allie. Her lungs weren’t fully developed and she had to be on a “breathing machine” for about a week.

  It was in McMinnville, Mary testified, that she’d gotten up the nerve to ask Matthew for a divorce. “It was just very bad. I [had] asked Matthew to have a divorce, and he absolutely denied it. That would not be allowed.”

  “Why did you want a divorce?” Farese asked.

  “It was just so bad and I just wanted out.”

  “Why was it so bad?”

  “He just can be so mean. I was ‘fat.’ My hair wasn’t right. With the girls—if something went wrong with them, it was my fault. If it rained, it was my fault. I didn’t know when it was coming. I didn’t know what mood he was going to be in. I didn’t know [whether] to relax and have a good day or to be watching every move if he was coming out after something. I just didn’t know.”

  Matthew hadn’t been pleased at the way his career in McMinnville was going, she said. He’d expected to be moved up to the main preaching position after the current minister resigned—but that didn’t happen. Mary testified that Matthew had told her to send an anonymous note to the head minister that suggested he needed medicine for “diarrhea of the mouth.”

  She had done as he said.

  Mary told the jurors that her husband hadn’t hurt her physically until they moved to Selmer in 2005. But that changed in February. “We were arguing about something and he knocked something over and I bent down to pick it up and he kicked me.”

  “Where did he kick you?”

  “In my face.”

  She had been hit on that side of the face a few days earlier by a softball. That didn’t hurt her so much, she said, but being kicked in the face was “excruciating pain.”

  Mary was seven months pregnant with Brianna at the time, and she started to have severe pain in one of her teeth. Her mother-in-law had driven her all the way to her dentist back in Nashville.

  She testified that she hadn’t told anyone about being kicked in the face.

  Steve Farese was adept at bringing out a series of negative events in the Winklers’ marriage. When Mary failed to give details, he pursued that line of questioning until she revealed more.

  Now the defense attorney asked her how she and Matthew had corrected their children. Mary said they got spankings.

  “Did any of the spankings ever get out of hand?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Tell the jury.”

  “Patricia and Allie had got in trouble at some point, and [if] he was having a bad day, then they would just get some of it, too. And then they stayed home from school. Matthew didn’t want anybody to see their legs.”

  “Why?”

  “They were bruised.”

  “Girls love their daddy?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Mary said the girls hadn’t changed how they acted around Matthew, and they weren’t worried when he came home.

  “And how were you acting around him when he came in?”

  “I’d just do anything to help him stay happy.”

  Farese was building up to something, and the gallery leaned forward expectantly when he asked the judge if he might approach his witness. He had a paper bag in his hand, and he asked Mary to open the sack and describe what she saw inside.

  “A shoe and a wig,” she said reluctantly.

  “Show me the shoe that’s in there.”

  She pulled it from the bag, and set it up on a stand near the witness chair. It was a white strappy shoe with a very high heel—at least six inches high—and a four-inch platform sole. Mary ducked her head in shame as she showed it to the curious jury.

  Next, she removed a wig. She answered her attorney’s questions, admitting that Matthew had bought both the shoes and the wig for her. He wanted her to wear them.

  “What do you mean he wanted you to wear it, Mary?”

  “To dress up…”

  “Dress up, for what purpose, Mary?”

  “For sex.”

  Those listening gasped—almost as one.

  “Sex.” Farese let that answer sink in. “Besides the wig and the shoes, how else did he make you dress?”

  “Just skirts—very, very, short.”

  The gallery was hushed; this was a shocking and fascinating turn of events no one had really expected—not right out in front of everyone.

  “During the course of this,” Farese persisted, “did you ever have occasion to be asked to look at his computer?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “What were you asked to look at?”

  “Pornography.”

  “What kind of pornography? Still photographs or mo
vies—or what?”

  “I think they were moving movies.”

  “Were any of them still?”

  “There might have been.”

  “Well—why did you look at them? Did you enjoy that sort of thing?”

  “No—he told me to.”

  “What would occur after he would ask you to look at the photographs?”

  “We had sex.”

  “Did he ever ask you to engage in any type of sex that you felt was unnatural?”

  No one in the courtroom dared to take a breath for fear they might miss the answer.

  “Yes sir.”

  “Tell the jury what that was, Mary.”

  “Ummm…he just wanted to have sex with my bottom.”

  “Did that concern you and worry you?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Did it hurt you?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “What were you told when you expressed your concern?”

  “He said okay, but then he would do it again.”

  “What was his answer for if it did hurt you?”

  “[He said] sometimes that does happen—that they have surgery that can fix it.”

  Mary’s father, Clark Freeman, sitting just behind the defense table, covered his eyes with his hand and bent his head in shock and grief as he listened to her explicit testimony about her sex life with her late husband.

  The expressions on Dianne’s and Dan Winkler’s faces were frozen, and then Dan seemed to glare at the daughter-in-law he had once loved. It was obvious he didn’t believe what she said. Whatever had happened, these three parents clearly agonized over what had become of their children’s “perfect” marriage.

  Steve Farese continued with this line of questioning.

  “When he had you dress up, did he ever engage in any other kind of sex that you felt was unnatural?”

  “Umm, not unnatural, but stuff I didn’t always want to do.”

  “Could you give just one example?”

  “Just, uh, oral sex.”

  Now Farese showed Mary Winkler a stack of photographs—Exhibit #72—the pornographic images that TBI investigators had downloaded from the Winklers’ computer. She said these had been on the computer they kept in their living room. Asked about when Matthew used the computer, Mary testified that she had found him there at “all hours—up until two to three in the morning.”