Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

time, she managed to have birthday parties for Patricia and Allie and keep up with her housework.
    When Brianna was born prematurely on March 5, 2005, she had such serious breathing problems that Mary had to leave her behind when she left the hospital. When her third baby was allowed to come home, Mary tiptoed to her crib several times a night to be sure she was breathing.
    As far as their neighbors knew, the Winkler marriage was sound. Some thought Mary was more friendly than Matthew was, while one man described her as “odd. She wasn’t too friendly—she didn’t mix well.”
    Sometimes Matthew and Mary engaged in what is known today as “public demonstrations of affection” (PDAs), and they were glimpsed hugging each other or even exchanging a discreet kiss during church parties or trips.
    According to Mary, they did have problems in their marriage, but they involved things that she would never have told anyone else—things too embarrassing to tell, things too disturbing to contemplate.
     
    As the investigation continued, no one knew about those secret, shameful things. And the detectives wondered what might possibly have been the catalyst that triggered such bloodshed in this seemingly impossible puzzle, this incomprehensible set of circumstances.
    Was it possible that Matthew Winkler had been all façade and charisma, a man who gloried in standing in the pulpit preaching or being the center of a group of young people who viewed him with adulation, while at home he ruled with an iron fist and demanded too much of a wife who was run ragged with his edicts? Was his Christian love all for his congregation and his fans? Or was he the sincere and caring Christian that most of Selmer saw?
    Was Mary Winkler a bitter woman who schemed to shoot her husband in a cold, premeditated act of violence—so that she could be free of him? In the Church of Christ, divorce wasn’t really a choice. Had Mary Winkler decided to “divorce” Matthew with a single shot from a shotgun?
    Or was Mary a victim herself, caught in a loveless marriage where she finally turned off her emotions, after holding them inside for years? She had lost her little sister, her mother, her third baby, and apparently her hopes for the future.
    Up until March 22, 2006, Mary had managed to deal with her disappointments and anxieties by burying them so deeply that she didn’t have to face them. Surely, something had to have happened to change her coping mechanism, and she had awakened that morning to a crisis she could not avoid.
    It had.
     
    Mary Winkler had fallen victim to a con game. Con games are as old as mankind, but the one that tricked her bloomed with the millennium and the Internet: “Nigerian fraud.”
    Anyone with a computer and an e-mail address linked to the Internet receives dozens, scores, hundreds, even thousands of spam messages from con artists who promise huge rewards to those who are naïve enough—or greedy enough—to take the bait.
    It’s not unusual for e-mail boxes to be clogged with more than three hundred offers of access to fortunes every day, most originally from Nigeria; but they come from all over the world.
    The spammers usually claim to be bank officers representing wealthy deceased clients with no heirs. Sometimes they say they are the widows or the orphaned children of high-ranking officials in foreign countries (who always tend to be “dying” of “esophageal cancer”). Working from boiler rooms with banks of computers and Internet coffee shops, the crooks send e-mails to every screen name they can get their hands on.
    Some of their offers are quite sophisticated, while others are transparently phony—full of misspellings and grammatical errors.
    It would seem that no one would actually believe there are perfect strangers anxious to share huge fortunes by transferring millions of dollars into United States bank accounts. But people do believe these lies, even though common sense should tell them that no American could deposit so much money in a bank account without the Internal Revenue Service being notified.
    More pragmatically, there is no “free lunch,” but there is, as P. T. Barnum once said, “a sucker born every minute.”
    And Mary Winkler was one of them. She wasn’t stupid; she had completed several years of college, and she was still taking classes at Freed-Hardeman.
    But she was desperate.
    Matthew often criticized her bookkeeping abilities, even though he assigned her to pay their bills