Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

that’s the thing. There’s no sense, you know,” she said. “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 with it.”
    She had opened up to them, and she feared for her girls, although Mary was sure that “their nana,” Matthew’s mother, would get them through it. She worried for her father, and said she didn’t want him devoting his life to her, coming to visit her wherever she was.
    She didn’t know what had set her off yesterday morning. There was no predicting how things would go. “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.”
    She hinted that Matthew had threatened her at some point in their marriage—had said something life-threatening. That had really scared her, but then, that was when he was at his absolute worst.
    They talked for a long time, but Mary recalled few details. She admitted to them that she had shot Matthew, but everything was a “total blur” in her memory. She remembered being surprised that the shotgun hadn’t had more of a hard kick when she fired it. She knew she had taken the girls with her and left, but she had only packed one thing: a pair of baby socks.
    She didn’t recall why she’d been angry the night before, except that Matthew had gone back on his promise to play Battleship with Patricia. They had started watching a movie, but she had fallen asleep, and that was one of her husband’s pet peeves with her.
    But now, she wanted to be fair. She wanted the news media to blame her. “There’s no reason for him to have anything ugly [said about him] because I have obviously done something very bad, so let me just, you know, get the bad. That would be my request.”
    Steve Stuesher said, “Mary, that’s very noble—but—very honorable of you to have that attitude—”
    “I never spoke up,” she said. “It’s a two-way thing. I just kept it all inside. It’s not healthy, you know, for him, not to have a clue what I thought. That’s not fair to him.”
    Suddenly, she asked, “Has there been a funeral yet?”
    She had clearly lost her sense of time. It had not been two days yet, and at this point, her husband’s body was awaiting autopsy.
    Steve Stuesher was about to turn off the tape recorder but he turned to Mary in an attempt to reassure her about her little girls.
    “Your girls are going to be taken care of, okay? I’ll tell you again; they had a great day today, yesterday.”
    “Beautiful,” she said.
    Neither Steve Stuesher nor Stan Stabler commented on the pain that the three girls would undoubtedly face for the rest of their lives. It seemed kinder to let Mary Winkler believe that she had been a good mother, perhaps for the last time.
    The Reverend Dan Winkler and his wife, Dianne, had raced to Alabama to take charge of Patricia, Allie, and Brianna. Clearly, Mary liked and trusted them, and she was relieved to know that her girls were safe with them.
    When her father-in-law first saw Mary in handcuffs in Orange Beach, he murmured, “I’m so sorry for all this.”
    Mary, still stoic and strangely flat emotionally, just stared at him.
    “I wish we could take the handcuffs off,” Dan Winkler said. “And I could give you a big bear hug.”
    At that point, Mary lifted her arms, her wrists still bound together by the cuffs, and reached toward Dan Winkler.
    He told her he loved her, his instincts and training taking over as he comforted her. Even though their son was dead, the elder couple was not ready to condemn this little woman who had been a daughter to them for almost ten years. Forgiveness? Dan Winkler could not bring himself to do that—not yet. His belief, based on the Bible, was that a person had to have a broken and contrite spirit, be penitent, and confess his or her sin.
    He knew that his daughter-in-law had shot his son. Ironically, it had happened on Dan Winkler’s birthday, the day before, but he didn’t yet know why it had happened.
     
    The postmortem examination of the body of Matthew Winkler took place at the State of Tennessee Center for Forensic Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, under the direction of McNairy County medical examiner Andrew Eason, M.D. Forensic pathologist Staci A. Turner, M.D., an assistant medical