Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

Freeman—maiden name.”
    She told them her address in Selmer, her phone number, and said she wasn’t really employed. She was a student at Freed-Hardeman University in Henderson, Tennessee.
    Mary seemed much more worried about Patricia, Allie, and Brianna than she was about the investigator’s questions. Stan Stabler, a big man with reddish blond hair and a kind face, told her the girls were fine. They had their dinner and were now wrapped cozily in blankets in a nearby room, watching the children’s movie.
    “They’re, you know, concerned about Mom,” he said. “I told them you were fine, and we were fixing to come in here and talk with you, too, and your little girl wants to put my name on her list of names she’s got of people she’s talked to, so I’m gonna get back with her, too.”
    Finally, he now asked Mary when she had left Tennessee. She answered that they had left the day before—in the morning. “Wednesday,” she added, “the 22nd.”
    She said she had driven as far as Jackson, Mississippi, where they stayed overnight at the Fairfield Inn. That would have been a very long drive—287 miles. At legal speeds, it would have taken her four and a half hours.
    When Stabler asked Mary why she had left Selmer, she said she wasn’t ready to comment on that. She said she had never been to Orange Beach before, but “I wanted to take them to a beach, and I found a straight line.”
    She estimated that they had arrived in Orange Beach an hour or two after lunch on this day—Thursday.
    “How long were you planning on staying?”
    “Tonight.”
    She was planning to leave tomorrow, Friday, and drive back to west Tennessee. She had family in east Tennessee, in Knoxville, but she was planning to go to her in-laws’ home near Selmer.
    “How long have you been married?” Stabler asked.
    “Nine years, eleven months.”
    It was so hard to dive in and ask the heavy questions that hung in the air. She clearly didn’t want to talk about them.
    “How was your marriage?”
    “Good.” She said nothing more than that.
    Stabler could see that Mary was “getting cottonmouthed” and he offered her something to drink. She asked for water, and as she sipped it, they talked about how beautiful the beach was and what roads she had driven south from Selmer. When she seemed calmer, he asked her again about her marriage.
    She said they hadn’t had any major problems.
    “How were y’all financially?”
    “Um…getting through.”
    Mary explained that Matthew was a full-time pastor and his church had a congregation of about two hundred. His only income was his church salary, and some from speaking engagements (income that was random and couldn’t be counted on). Matthew was planning to start on getting his master’s degree in the summer, or definitely by fall.
    “When’s the last time you talked to him?” Stabler asked.
    “Yesterday morning…at home.”
    “What’d y’all discuss?”
    “No real conversation…umm. Just no comment,” she said. “I don’t know.”
    She had come out from where her mind was hiding just a little bit, but now she scurried back. She didn’t want to talk about Wednesday morning. Stabler talked quietly to her, asking her to tell him her side of what had happened—what problems she had faced. He asked her to tell him what was troubling her so much.
    “I just can’t right now.”
    “Okay.”
    “I appreciate—I feel like you have genuine concern and I do appreciate you, uh—I’m just not [up] to that right now.”
    And he did have concern for her, but he was also a detective who was trying to solve a bizarre mystery, and he pressed on.
    Mary Winkler rambled quite a bit, telling him she had heard children’s voices while she was handcuffed in an area of the police station, and then realized it was her own children. “I about did a backflip,” she said, “to get out of it because I was in line of sight.”
    She didn’t want her children to see her in handcuffs. “Those three right there are my only concern right now.”
    She had sent word to Matthew’s parents, “Nana and Poppa,” to come and get Patricia, Allie, and Brianna, and they were on the way. She felt she could relax when they arrived because her mother-in-law would take good care of her girls.
    Stabler asked her if she would tell him what happened.
    “I haven’t been told really…anything myself. I don’t know.”
    “I’ve talked with the girls a little bit,” he said. “Okay? And they’ve