Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

Ricky Roten when he and officers from the West Tennessee Drug Task Force (Selmer Division) traveled to Alabama to transport her back to Selmer. She signed a form waiving extradition, agreeing to go to Tennessee. The fact that the drug task force officers went with Roten wasn’t significant; they often doubled as backup for the sheriff’s office in non-drug cases. Feelings were running high in the Winkler murder case, and it was a safety precaution.
    Mary gave a statement to TBI agent Chris Carpenter. She was now more forthcoming about what had happened in the little house on Mollie Drive on the morning of March 22. She admitted shooting Matthew, but insisted that she hadn’t done it deliberately. She’d had the gun in her hands, not intending to shoot, but she’d slipped on some decorative pillows that had fallen on the floor.
    Mary had lengthy fuzzy gaps in her memory, however, about the details of what had happened.
    She told Carpenter she remembered wiping blood from her husband’s mouth and that he had looked at her and gasped, “Why?”
    Lodged in the McNairy County Justice Complex, Mary had no money for bail or for attorneys. Although her family and many friends rallied around her, offering to put up their homes as security for bail, she remained in jail. To say that the citizens of west Tennessee were scandalized would be an understatement. For the moment, she was probably better off behind bars than out in the community.
    But Mary was to get a break in terms of attorneys: she would have her own “dream team.” Prominent criminal defense attorneys Steven Farese Sr. and Leslie Ballin stepped forward to represent her pro bono. They would not charge her for the hours and hours of investigation and courtroom time they would spend trying to save her from the death penalty—at worst—or from fifty-one years in prison. Their pro bono offer probably wasn’t entirely altruistic. If the defense should prevail at trial, both Farese and Ballin would be even more sought after by potential clients than they already were. Farese’s peers had recently named him one of the top ten defense attorneys in America. The Mary Winkler case would focus media spotlights all over America on her attorneys.
    When Mary was arraigned at the Justice Complex on March 27, 2005, she walked into the courtroom clad in orange jail scrubs, holding hands with her attorneys. Her hair was freshly cut in a bob reminiscent of children of the 1930s, and she herself looked childlike, given her tiny size and the fact that she stared at the floor rather than meeting anyone’s eyes. She actually had to reach up to grasp Farese’s and Ballin’s hands. She looked to be no more than twelve or fourteen. She clung to her attorneys as if they were a lifeline. And indeed they were.
    Mary spoke only once, saying, “No sir,” to Judge Bob Gray when he asked her if she had any questions. He entered a not-guilty plea for her.
    Farese wouldn’t tell reporters what his defense tactics might be. He said he hadn’t seen Mary’s “alleged confession,” and that his defense so far was “every defense known to man.” He would take a wait-and-see attitude before he decided what his approach was.
    Later that day, more than three hundred mourners filed through the Shackleford Funeral Home for a viewing to pay their last respects to the body of Matthew Winkler. And at 5 A.M. the next morning, Mary herself was escorted quietly to the funeral home for a final private moment with her husband. She stayed for more than an hour.
    On that Tuesday, March 28, funeral services were held for Matthew at the Fourth Street Church of Christ. The media was not invited to Matthew Winkler’s funeral, but it seemed that at least a third of the people in Selmer and McNairy County attended. The sanctuary was filled to its five-hundred-person capacity, and the overflow crowd, relegated to the church basement, watched the services on closed-circuit television.
    Later, Matthew was buried in the Carroll County Memorial Gardens in Huntingdon, Tennessee. His two older daughters were allowed to pick flowers from the many arrangements sent to the Fourth Street Church of Christ, mementos they could press in a Bible to remind them of their father.
    In less than a week, their entire world had changed: their father was dead, their mother was in jail, and they were now living with their paternal grandparents.
     
    The investigation into Matthew Winkler’s violent death continued, and so