Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

hardly seemed like a place a killer would take a captive and grieving family, and yet, on the evening of March 23, that was where Officer Jason Whitlock of the Orange Beach Police Department spotted a Sienna minivan making an illegal U-turn on Perdido Beach Boulevard. He pulled it over and with standard procedure used his radio to check for “wants and warrants” on the license plates. The report that came back galvanized him into action: he had stopped the vehicle that had an Amber Alert out for it.
    Whitlock immediately called for backup, and three police units arrived to surround the Winklers’ vehicle in the Wal-Mart parking lot.
    Whitlock had no idea what they might find, and he used great caution as he walked toward the driver-side window. If Mary Winkler and her children—Patricia, Allie, and Brianna—were still alive and hopefully uninjured, he didn’t want to do anything that might place them in danger. A kidnapper would probably try to hold them as shields to keep from being arrested.
    But when Whitlock walked up to the window, he was shocked. A youngish woman who looked very much like the Amber Alert’s description of Mary Winkler was at the wheel. Two little girls and a baby, all mercifully unhurt, were with her.
    The Orange Beach officer scanned the inside of the minivan quickly, searching for someone who might be hiding there, perhaps covered with a blanket. But there was no one else in the vehicle.
    And then he spotted a shotgun in its case. None of this made sense. Why wouldn’t a kidnapper have taken the weapon with him?
    The woman identified herself as Mary Carol Winkler. She didn’t seem to be afraid, or upset; there was only a certain flatness in her affect. She was probably in shock, and she appeared to be exhausted, which could explain her lack of emotion.
    She had not asked him a single question.
    “It was almost like she was expecting it to happen,” Whitlock would recall regarding Mary Winkler’s calmness when she saw his police car and his uniform.
    When he asked Mary if she would come to his department’s headquarters, she agreed readily. Her chief concern was for her daughters, and he assured her that they would be well taken care of.
    It would take so much time to sort out what had happened, but as what was left of the Matthew Winkler family arrived at the police station in Orange Beach, Alabama, one thing was clear. Their lives had changed forever. They had become public people, every detail of their lives sought out by the media. All over America, people who heard the news flash that the Amber Alert had been called off because the missing woman and children had been found were relieved, but still curious about what on earth could have happened back in Selmer, and later, to Mary and the girls.
    Mary was taken into custody; she didn’t object. The girls went along to the police station with her. She was worried that they were hungry, saying she had been on the way to a Waffle House to buy supper for them. The Alabama officers were very concerned for them, too, and brought in food for Mary’s daughters from McDonald’s and then found a children’s movie for them to watch.
    Even the investigators were baffled when they realized that it was quite likely that the quiet little woman was not a victim—but a suspect in the shooting of her husband. Why else would she have had the shotgun in her vehicle?

    What had caused Matthew Winkler’s death was relatively easy to determine. Someone had blasted his life away with a shotgun. And Mary Winkler had that shotgun in her possession.
    Why he became a homicide victim would be far more difficult to figure out. At 10 P.M. , far away from home in Orange Beach, Alabama, on the night before the autopsy, Mary Winkler explained what had happened, to Corporal Stan Stabler of the Alabama Bureau of Investigation and to Special Agent Steve Stuesher of the FBI.
    At the police station, Stabler read Mary her Miranda rights, advising her that she did not have to talk to him and Steve Stuesher, that she could have an attorney present if she liked. And she nodded and said she understood, signing the form to show that.
    She sat now at a long table in an interview room in the Orange Beach Police Department. A sensitive interview in a pending criminal matter doesn’t start out with the questions that detectives are most anxious to ask. Rather, they begin with easier topics.
    Mary gave her name, Mary Carol Winkler, and then added, “I’m a