Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

examiner, performed the autopsy with Amy McMaster, M.D., observing.
    It began on March 24, 2006, at 9:30 A.M. , approximately thirty-six hours after the young minister’s body was discovered. Rigor mortis had begun to stiffen his body, but was not yet complete; the red and purple markings on the portion of the body that had been the lowest—where blood had pooled when his heart stopped beating—were fixed and complete on his back and buttocks, with blanching along the parts that had touched the floor of the Winklers’ bedroom.
    There would be few surprises in this autopsy. Matthew Winkler had only one real wound, along with some scratches on the front of his right knee and lower leg, perhaps made as he crawled on the floor in a vain attempt to escape his killer. He had been shot in the back by a weapon far enough away that there was no soot around the wound.
    “In the middle of the back is a three-quarter-
inch-in-diameter shotgun wound of entrance with slight irregular margins, and an irregular one-sixteenth-to-one-eighth-inch circumferential marginal abrasion. The defect is located twenty-one and a half inches below the top of the head and at the posterior midline. Five evenly spaced half-inch-by-half-inch rectangular abrasions surround the defect.”
    As dictated by Dr. Turner, the “defect” left by the shotgun shell sounded clinical and had no emotion. But the fatal wound was horrific, of course, as all shotgun wounds are; pellets of birdshot and wadding from the contents of a shotgun shell had blasted into Matthew’s back.
    After it perforated his skin, fatty tissue, and the muscles in his back, the birdshot cut through four ribs in the middle of his back and tore through the lower lobe of his left lung, his diaphragm, stomach, spleen, pancreas, and left adrenal gland. There were contusions in the upper lobe of his left lung and the lower lobe of his right lung, and two of the vertebrae in his spinal column were broken. His trachea (windpipe) and lungs were awash in aspirated blood, and his stomach held a hundred milliliters of blood. White foam from his ruined lungs had bubbled from his nose and mouth.
    Carefully, Dr. Turner collected scores of pellets of the birdshot and the plastic wadding from his internal organs.
    Whoever had held the shotgun had stood above Matthew; the trajectory of the birdshot could be traced from his back to the front of his body and from right to left, and slightly downward.
    Dr. Turner estimated that he might have lived a very short time before he lost a tremendous amount of blood from all these wounds.
    Matthew Winkler had appeared to be a healthy young man, although he had fat around his belly. His heart valves and other aspects of his heart were normal, and on first look, his heart seemed okay. However, a silent killer had been at work, surely shortening his life span, even without the violence of a shotgun blast.
    At the age of thirty-one, all of Matthew Winkler’s major coronary arteries were 50 percent narrowed with calcified plaque. He probably had not yet suffered symptoms from this blockage of blood flow in his heart, but he would almost certainly have died young if he didn’t change his eating and exercise habits. It didn’t matter anymore.
    In a thorough postmortem examination, all of the body’s systems are checked. Some findings may seem unimportant at the time, but become vital later on. There was no food in Matthew’s stomach, or any tablets or capsules. His bladder was extremely distended, holding a thousand milliliters of clear light yellow urine.
    Blood samples from his heart and vitreous humor (from the eyes) were taken and labeled for tests to determine the presence of alcohol or drugs. Almost two months later, the results came back. Every single test—from alcohol to barbiturates, stimulants, amphetamines, sleeping pills, cocaine, marijuana, and even aspirin—came back negative. He hadn’t ingested any of them in the period before he was killed; none of them were present in his blood and eye vitreous humor, not even in a half-life stage.
    Dr. Turner’s summary of the case of the death of the Reverend Matthew Winkler was succinct, and to be expected: “Autopsy reveals a penetrating shotgun wound of the back. A flower-shaped wad abrasion surrounds the entrance defect…. In my opinion, the cause of death is a shotgun wound of the torso. The manner of death is homicide.”

Mary and Matthew
    Mary Carol Winkler’s life imploded when she was