The Pastor's Wife

by Diane Fanning

  “Yes,” Mary said.

  “Okay. First and only, huh?”

  “Right.”

  “Now, I know couples are going to have squabbles, that’s typical, that’s normal, but y’all didn’t have any major, major problems going on?”

  “No.”

  “None whatsoever?” Stabler asked. “Okay, anybody else involved with either party?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Okay. How were y’all financially?”

  “Um, getting through,” Mary said.

  Stabler asked a few questions about their income and her schooling, and then asked, “When’s the last time you talked to him?”

  “Yesterday morning.”

  “Where was that at?”

  “Home.”

  “Home? Okay. What did y’all discuss?”

  “No real conversation,” Mary said, fumbling for an answer. “Um, just no comment. I don’t know.”

  Stabler spoke to Mary about her inability to change the past, and the possibility of controlling her future by making the right decisions today. As he talked, he studied Mary, looking for any emotion other than the eerie calm that seemed to possess her. “I’m just going to be frank with you. You need to talk with us. We need to work all this out, okay? You need to think about your girls, the baby, yourself. Okay? What, what was going on? What was the problem? I want to hear your side. I want you to tell me what was troubling you so much.”

  Mary was not able or willing to reveal anything. “I feel like you have genuine concern, and I do appreciate you, uh, I’m just not to that right now.”

  Stabler said, “I know that, you know, a lot of things can happen between people. I know, a lot of times, mental state, emotions, everything comes into play. And it’s tough. It is tough being married sometimes these days. I mean, society itself has made it tough. I think there’s a reason, I mean, I know there’s got to be a reason that all of this had happened. I just, you know, we’re kind of tasked with trying to figure this stuff out, but, there’s only one person that really knows why, and it’s you. We want to help you, but I don’t know where to start, because I don’t know what’s going on. It’s your life.”

  “I just…” Mary began.

  “I mean, I don’t even know. I didn’t know exactly what or how to even talk to your little girls a little bit, you know?”

  “I appreciate it,” Mary said, turning the conversation to her girls. “I was sitting in there, and at first, I thought, Who in the world would have children down here at this hour? And I thought, Well, they’re getting paperwork done and they had their kids with them. And then at some point, I heard or understood the voices coming that way. And those men were very nice, and, you know, I felt like, I thought I was chained to one particular area and I about did a back-flip to get out of—because I was in the line of sight, and so I really appreciated we took care of that before they saw me, but, anyway, I heard their voices. I heard Allie going on about something. That is, uh, right now, just shock and whatever emotion, I don’t know, but that those three right there are my only concern right now.”

  “I know. I know,” Stabler reassured her.

  “When can Nana and Poppa get here?”

  “They told me they were in the mountains, and they’re our concern, too.”

  “Nana can take care of them, but I do appreciate that.”

  “Okay, all right. Will you do this for me? When you’re ready to tell me why, what’s troubling you, will you do that? Without telling me why, or the troubles that were going on, would you tell me what happened?”

  “I haven’t been told really anything myself. I don’t know,” Mary said, denying her knowledge of the events that occurred in her home the day before.

  “Mary?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I talked with the girls a little bit, okay?”

  “Hmm.”

  “And they told me what they’ve seen and heard.”

  “Right,” Mary acknowledged without giving an inch.

  “Okay. I need you to fill in those gaps a little bit. Well, all three know, to an extent, what’s taken place.”

  “What did you ask me?”

  “To tell me what happened,” Stabler answered.

  “Uh-huh, just not right now.”

  Stabler reminded her again of her children, of her unconditional love for the girls and her willingness to sacrifice for them. Special Agent Stuesher added, “You can tell by just the few minutes that we spent with them that you’ve taught them well.”

  “Yeah, you’d be proud of them,” Stabler offered. “They’re very fine young ladies.”

  “Very polite. Have manners,” Stuesher said.

  “They’ve got a lot they’re going to have to go through, too, okay? We’re going to have to talk about this, got to, for their sake,” Stabler said.

  “I just don’t understand,” Mary claimed. “Um, with all due respect, newspapers and, you know, whatever, this comes to pass. No matter what in the end, I don’t want it, um, I don’t want him smeared.”

  Stabler agreed with her that the media could be a problem, and griped about the bad image often given to law enforcement on television. “You’d probably feel more comfortable if I was down here beating on a desk yelling and screaming at you. That’s what they make us look like on TV. Okay. But that’s not—I’m just sitting here talking to you as a parent to parent, you know.”

  Stuesher spoke up again. “Are you concerned that the media’s going to say a lot of negative things about you or your family or your husband or…”

  “Yeah, what’s your concerns?” Stabler asked.

  Mary stammered about court cases and public records, unable to effectively verbalize her thoughts. “I don’t even know the words to say.”

  “Just go step to step and tell me what happened,” Stabler urged.

  “I just can’t right now. Sometimes I think something might have happened, and then, there’s no way…”

  “Just seems like it’s not real, right?”

  “Just not right now.”

  “Seems like a blur, I’m sure. Has he ever hurt you?”

  “Not physically,” Mary insisted.

  “Not physically? Okay. What about mentally? Verbally? Any kind of abuse that way?”

  “No comment. I just don’t know if—Just trying to think this through some more myself. There’s no sense in blaming…somebody else, but…”

  Stabler pushed, but Mary offered no more. He switched his questions back to the crime scene. Mary denied knowing whether or not her husband was still alive. Then he asked her, “Why’d you shoot him?”

  “Um…”

  “I mean, like I said, we can’t change the past, okay? You agree with me on that?”

  “Agree.”

  “And we know some facts already. Had you planned ahead of time to shoot him, or did it happen just spur of the moment?”

  “Not planned.”

  “It wasn’t planned? It just happened? Were you scared or something when it happened?”

  “I don’t even know right now…”

  “Were you arguing? What was going on?” he asked, then attempted to get her to define the time frame before pointing to the weapon confiscated from the mini-van. “Is that his shotgun?”

  “Um…”

  “Did he normally keep it loaded?”

  “Um, I don’t know…”

  “Or did you load it? You don’t remember if you loaded it or not, if it was already loaded?”

  “I might have messed it up and then put it back. I don’t know.”

  “Where was it?”

  “We keep it in the top of the closet and out of reach.”

  Stabler turned the discussion to hunting, and Mary told him Matthew liked to hunt turkey and enjoyed fishing. Then Stabler switched back to the crime scene. “What was going on when you shot him? Was he lying in the bed, sitting in a chair, walking around? Hmmm?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Stuesher offered her m
ore water, then Stabler asked, “How many times did you shoot? You remember that? More than once?”

  Mary and Stabler engaged in a discordant and confusing exchange that finally led to Mary’s denial of more than one shot, and her admission that she never shot a gun before. Then, Stabler turned the conversation back to the three girls. “Mary, they’re going through a lot. You’re going through a lot. You’re gonna have to…”

  Stuesher interrupted. “You said he wasn’t physically abusing you. We know how people can be abused emotionally and mentally. Was that pretty serious? What was happening?”

  Getting unintelligible responses from Mary, they kept applying pressure, urging her to tell the truth about her marriage for her own sake as well as her daughters’. “Tell me why a mother of three, a wife of over nine years, almost ten years, going to college, you look like, you know, a nice well-to-do family, what would make you do this?” Stabler asked. “Why? That’s what we’ve got to answer.”

  “Still no comment,” was Mary’s only response.

  “Well, we know you shot him,” Stabler continued. “You’ve told us that much. I just need to know why. And this is your opportunity, this is your chance, Mary, to shed some light on all this and to help yourself, okay? Do you want to help yourself? Why, why, why can’t you talk to us? Is it me?”

  “No.”

  “You just don’t like me? Just don’t want to tell me? Do I need to get someone else in here to talk to you?”

  “Unh-uh,” Mary said with a shake of her head.

  “The best thing that we could do in a situation like this to stop the media from speculating and doing all the crap that they do is to find out what happened. We could put an end to all that speculation now, and that’s up to you,” Stabler said. He hinted at the wild stories the press could make up in the absence of the truth, but, in a seeming contradiction, assured her, “We’re not going to make this public, what you tell us, okay? I don’t think you’re a cold-blooded killer. I wouldn’t be sitting this close to you. I’d be scared of you. Something’s happened. Something’s bad went wrong. Now, I know you’re hurting.”

  “I really don’t mean this selfish[ly], but…” Mary began.

  “I know you’re not selfish, I know…”

  “Driving down the road, I’d think, something would go in my head and I’d thought, There is no way what had just happened—And then, I hadn’t really seen anything or heard anything. I’ve used my name everywhere I went, I just thought, you know, I possibly could, you know, whatever. And this just was my last time to be with them, and we were just going to have some fun. I just wanted to be with them before they had bad days, have a happy day.”

  “Okay, I think I understand a little bit about what you’re telling me now,” Stabler said, encouraging her to continue.

  “And, uh, that’s why, you know, the storyline was absent. Why there was an absence, but they could be happy and enjoy themselves. And as it’s going, I just…”

  “So you felt like that because of what you’d done, that you had to take some time to spend with them?”

  “Yeah, that was it, yeah. I wasn’t going to Mexico or, I just, I had five hundred dollars and…”

  “You know that they had a happy day, too.”

  “Yeah, yesterday, we found an indoor swimming pool, was the goal of yesterday. And then, when I thought about going to Louisiana—We used to live in Baton Rouge, and I thought, I know those streets, and, I don’t know, and I thought, There’s nothing to do there,” Mary said with a sigh.

  “Right. Louisiana’s pretty messed up.”

  “And so I thought, They’ve—They don’t ever—They’ve never been to a beach that they remembered, and uh, so that, that was that.”

  “How long were you…?”

  “I planned to go home tomorrow.”

  “What were you going to do, go back up there and turn yourself in to…?”

  “I hadn’t thought it through exactly, um. The Winklers live in West Tennessee, and I was trying to think of a scenario to get the girls to them.”

  “Before you…”

  “And I didn’t know where to go from there.”

  When Stabler asked her if she had any worries about leaving her daughters with Matthew’s parents, she said, “Oh, no. Gosh, no.”

  “Good people?”

  “Yeah. They’re the family.”

  “Mary, we’re making progress, okay? We can do that, and I can understand what’s going through your mind as far as you being away from the kids. What were your thoughts? Just be honest with me. Are you going to be locked up the rest of your life, or were you afraid you were going to be…?”

  “Oh, yeah. Uh…”

  “You just…”

  “But I guess my not wanting to be selfish is: I’m just still thinking about him. And I probably deserve a slap in the face for that. I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  “I’m battling back and forth with this why thing,” Stabler said. “I mean, you seem like such a nice person. I know something had to happen.”

  “I was just lying there tonight and I fell asleep, after all this. They woke me up to come in here. It’s just the thought of stupid stuff.”

  “Like what?” Stabler asked.

  “Like schedules, and this, in this certain order…I love him dearly, but, gosh, he just nailed me in the ground, and uh, I was real good for quite some time. My problem was, I got a job at the post office a couple of years ago, and the first of our marriage, I just took it like a mouse. Didn’t think anything different. My mom just took it from my dad, and that stupid scenario. And I got a job where I had to have nerve and high self-esteem, and I have been battling this for years, and I don’t know when, but for some time, it was really good. Then, I don’t know. We moved over a year ago, February oh-five, and it just came back out for some reason.”

  “He would knock your self-esteem down?”

  “Uh, no. Just chewing, whatever. And that’s the problem, I have nerve now and I have self-esteem, so my ugly came out.”

  “So you were more or less standing up for yourself more now than you did in the past?”

  Mary veered off to talking about her children; Stabler brought her back on point when he asked, “Just fussing at you, nagging all the time?”

  “Just mistakes. And some well deserved, by all means.”

  “Did he pick on the little things a lot, though?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That gets old.”

  “And I—But gosh, I don’t want to talk about that now.”

  “I know you don’t want to.”

  “But that’s just, yeah. I didn’t just get up and say, Hey, let’s see how this thing works. I’ve been battling not to do that forever, and I don’t know why.”

  “Was he chewing on you when it happened?”

  “I don’t even know,” Mary said. “It was this and that and, I can’t even, I can’t imagine pulling anything, I’ll tell you that,” she said, referring to the trigger on the shotgun. “I don’t, I just, I really don’t know that one still.”

  “Just kind of got to a boiling point and just boiled over?”

  “But he was so good, so good, too. It was just a weakness. I think a lot of times—He had high blood pressure, but he’d never go enough to the doctor to get medicine for it. He was a mighty fine person, and that’s the thing. There’s no sense, you know, Fox News saying some hick-town lady did this because he was a mean—You know? No sense in that. Just say the lady was a moron evil woman and let’s go on with it.”

  Both men objected, saying that they did not believe that was true. Mary turned her thoughts to her girls again. “My thing there is, their Nana will get them through this. Their Nana will take care of them, for however long it takes. And if they never want to see me again, but I don’t want them hearing that, and…I don’t know—Patricia’s too old, it’s too late. I can’t imagine Bren not knowing him.”

  “I’m sure it’s tough living with a situation like that. I
know…”

  “Even…But my dad called. I checked the voicemail the other day and sometimes I just want to go through the phone and rip his head off. There you go, I opened up. And then, ’cause I thought, I do not want him to even ever come and visit me, and I know that he’ll want to live wherever I am, and visit every day, but I am not wanting to see him.”

  “Your dad, what’d your dad say on the voice message?”

  “Um, something, just, uh, calling. I guess some stuff had started happening, I couldn’t really tell if it was—But he never calls me, so I’m sure—But, uh, I just don’t know. There’s some of it. There’s no Poor me. I’m in control.”

  “There’s no major event that took place? There’s just kind of an accumulation over the years?”

  Mary talked about her nerves and then moved on. “I just never know what’s coming next. I think we’re having a good day and then, bam! I’m nervous about something and he’s aloof about it. But it’s just no excuse for anything. But, you know, it wasn’t just out of the blue, either. I don’t know.”

  “Have you thought about doing it before?” Stabler asked her.

  “Uh, it’s crossed minds,” Mary said; “threats have been made, to me as well, but, I mean, that’s hearsay, you know.”

  “Everybody’s probably thought about it,” Stabler empathized. “I’ve picked at my wife before. You know when you got some serious problems going on, that thoughts run through your mind. You said he’s threatened you before, too?”

  Mary mentioned an incident from six years earlier when she and Matthew lived in Pegram, and things were at their worst, describing it as “a life-threatening situation.”

  “Was it getting that way again?”

  “In the past year and a half, it had.”

  Stabler and Stuesher attempted to get her to re-create the events of the morning she shot Matthew, but Mary balked, stumbled around with her words and got weepy. She blamed her tears on allergies.

  After providing a tissue for her, the men tried to establish where she and Matthew were at the time she pulled the trigger. She was vague about her husband’s location, but said she kept losing her balance because she was standing on the decorative pillows that lay on the floor beside the bed.

  “What did you think had happened,” Stabler pressed, “or did you know?”