Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

her father was. And she worried a little that he was trying to isolate her from her family. But she wasn’t really unhappy. The Bible, which Matthew knew like the back of his hand, said that when couples marry, they move on from their families and “cleave” to each other. But somehow Matthew went beyond that, reportedly urging Mary to sever her connections to old friends, and to limit her visits with her parents and adopted siblings.
    A woman who lived next door to Mary’s parents felt that Matthew was “domineering. He was never nice when he was around here,” she told reporters a long time later. “He was always very controlling with her and the kids.”
    Mary’s sister Tabatha would recall a conversation with Matthew where he called the Freeman family together and explained that they had to accept that Mary would not be a part of their family the way she had been before. He and their marriage had to come first. Tabatha was stunned. She didn’t see why being a wife would preclude Mary from being a sister.
    Mary and Matthew lived in Henderson until July 1998, when Matthew graduated. During that time, Mary gave birth to Patricia Dianne, named for her long-dead sister and Matthew’s mother. She was an exceptionally devoted mother and delighted in her baby girl. Matthew seemed happy to be a father, and their family album had many photos of him smiling with Patricia.
     
    In July 1998, Matthew accepted his first call to a church. The family moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he became the youth minister at the Goodwood Boulevard Church of Christ.
    Mary rarely visited her family in Knoxville, and Matthew preferred not to spend holidays there. She must have been torn; her mother, Nell Freeman, was very ill with colon cancer that had spread to her lymph system. When she died on April 10, 1999, Mary was six months pregnant with her second daughter, Allie. One can only imagine how difficult it must have been for her to lose her mother, be pregnant, have a toddler, and be a good minister’s wife.
    Seven months later, the Winklers lived in Pegram, Tennessee, a town of two thousand residents, and a suburb of Nashville. Matthew had a new job as youth minister with the Bellevue Church of Christ. They were settling down for a while, and bought their first house in a neighborhood of young families. Outwardly, Mary and Matthew seemed happy, although this was the time when Mary told Detective Stan Stabler that Matthew had been “at his worst” and had actually threatened her life. Perhaps.
    She and Matthew were much admired by the congregation in Bellevue and considered “a real benefit and blessing. He was a good daddy. She was a good mommy,” a church elder recalled. “And he was an excellent youth minister.”
    Mary was twenty-six; Matthew was twenty-five. And both of them were trying very hard to present the best face they could to the world. What they showed to each other, no one knew.
    Matthew was doing well; he received a call to be the youth minister of the Central Church of Christ in McMinnville, and they moved in April 2002. McMinnville had a population of almost thirteen thousand and was southeast of Nashville. They bought a house in McMinnville in September 2002 but weren’t able to sell their Pegram home until May 2003.
    And Mary was pregnant again. She lost the baby at nine weeks in 2003. Matthew had wanted a son. He once mentioned their loss in a church sermon as an example of how people can suffer losses and manage to go on.
    The Winklers’ having to carry mortgages on two houses for eight months on a minister’s salary may have been the beginning of their financial difficulties. With two small girls and her church duties, it would have been hard for Mary to take a teaching job—even substitute teaching. She found a job at the post office, and that helped some. In the fall of 2004, Matthew started teaching Bible classes to boys at the Boyd Christian School in McMinnville.
    Mary was soon pregnant for the fourth time, due in the spring of 2005. As she told the detectives in Orange Beach, she had begun to have difficulty keeping up with Matthew’s many schedules and doing things the way he wanted them done. Her neighbors and church members in McMinnville remember Mary as being full of energy, always scurrying from one commitment to another. Most of them admired her for the way she handled her latest job—at the Super-D drugstore—and her duties at Matthew’s church so well, while, at the same