Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

of domestic violence. When most of us hear the term, our first reaction is to picture victims as vulnerable females, and statistically that is certainly true. Still, I remember a day when I received an angry phone call from a man who had attended one of my seminars and felt I hadn’t been fair when I talked about strife between couples. He took issue with me because I had discussed only female victims who were physically or emotionally hurt by their male partners.
    “Why don’t you care about the men who get hurt?” he asked. “We’re out here, and nobody cares what happens to us.”
    I had to admit that he had a point. Men sometimes do become the targets for punishment, although their abuse tends to be more emotional. And when they are injured by a woman, they hesitate to come forward because they are ashamed to admit it, thinking people will see them as “sissies.”
    And sometimes they don’t come forward because they are dead. I have written books that focus on murder cases where, like a black widow spider, the female was, indeed, “deadlier than the male.”
    The case that follows was one of the most high-profile homicides in America in the past two years. By ordinary standards, the victim was the last person anyone would expect to end up murdered. The accused was just as unlikely to fill such a role. Anyone can be involved in a homicide investigation, of course, but I honestly don’t recall a murder case like this in all of the thirty years I’ve been covering true crime.
    And I’m still not absolutely sure which of the two people involved was the true victim. Perhaps they both were. I do know it’s important to look closely at this case that began in a small town in Tennessee. Perhaps the answer is in those seemingly unimportant details that the nationwide media didn’t focus on as they rushed to spread the news about a handsome young minister and his meek-appearing wife. There are several possible motives and possible catalysts that sparked murder, all of them bizarre.
    Matthew Winkler was a minister in the Church of Christ, as were his father, his grandfather, and many other male relatives. I happen to have grown up in the Church of Christ, attending services there until I was sixteen, mostly in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As a boy, my father always went to the Church of Christ in Ohio. It wasn’t so different from other Protestant churches, although instrumental music—including the organ—wasn’t allowed in the Ohio branch, and baptism was by full immersion in a hot-tub-sized pool behind the preacher’s pulpit. The drinking of alcohol was a sin. I recall my elderly and extremely kind grandfather telling me solemnly, “Ann, I would rather see my daughter dead than married to a drunkard.”
    I would come to learn that there are many Church of Christ congregations, and their tenets and taboos can be vastly different from one another. Our Ann Arbor church was far less forbidding than the one we attended when visiting my grandparents in Ohio.
    Divorce, however, is an abomination for a minister in the Church of Christ. That may have been why my grandfather preferred death to the dishonor of living with a drunk.
    In the state of Tennessee, where the Reverend Matthew Winkler preached, divorce was not a viable option. How could a minister hold up his head if he couldn’t keep his own marriage intact?

Selmer, Tennessee
    Selmer, Tennessee, was reportedly named for Selma, Alabama; perhaps the r was added because of the way local dialect pronounced it. Located in West Tennessee, Selmer is the county seat of McNairy County, the kind of Southern town where people tend to know one another. Many residents belong to extended family clans. Few citizens are wealthy; the median income is $38,000 a year, and a sixth of Selmer’s people live below the poverty level. There is a small hospital there, an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school. There are a few family-type restaurants and, of course, a Wal-Mart.
    In many ways, it’s a “Mayberry” kind of town, where most people smile and say hello to everyone and wave at drivers passing by. They eat “dinner” at noon, not “lunch.” They eat “supper” in the evening.
    McNairy County had its own almost-fictional sheriff in the 1960s and 1970s: Sheriff Buford Pusser became famous as a crusader, a tremendously tall man carrying a big stick, who waged war against corruption in his county, whether it was suspect politicians or bootleg whiskey