Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

did the gossip. Mary received jail visits from her family, a number of loyal friends, and even some members of the Fourth Street Church congregation. Locals appeared to view her either as a Jezebel or as a pathetic woman who’d been driven to kill.
    TBI agents obtained a search warrant that permitted them to remove the Winklers’ computers—both from their home and from Matthew’s church office. Neighbors peeking out of their windows watched the investigators carry the towers and monitors away, but they had no idea what the agents might be looking for.
    TBI agent Chris Carpenter worked along with Selmer Police criminal investigator Roger Rickman and the Drug Task Force agents in an attempt to discern what had really happened inside the Winkler marriage. They knew who the victim was and who the shooter was. They just didn’t know why it had happened.
    Steve Farese and Leslie Ballin arranged to have Dr. Lynne Zager, a psychologist from Jackson, Tennessee, spend many hours with Mary. Indeed, Zager and Mary would log forty-one sessions together. Farese hinted to the media that he feared Mary’s detachment might suggest that she was suicidal, perhaps still suffering from postpartum depression after Brianna’s birth. He also speculated that the shooting might well have been accidental.
    On March 30, Mary appeared in court again. Again she spoke only once, saying, “Yes sir.” She waived her right to a preliminary hearing. Her attorneys explained that she didn’t want her children to hear “gruesome things” about their father’s death. She did not ask for bail, and would now wait in jail for the next meeting of the McNairy County Grand Jury—which wouldn’t convene until June.
    Although Steve Farese told reporters that every big name in television had called—from Oprah to Dr. Phil to Diane Sawyer, and even beyond—the defense team didn’t want Mary to do interviews. She was seeing her psychologist regularly while she was in jail. Even visits from her children were delayed; she didn’t want to say or do anything that might make their lives more difficult.
    Mary Winkler’s first trial date was set for October 2006. In August, after 144 days in jail, she was released while she waited for trial. Her father posted her $750,000 bond, and she had a job waiting for her. She would live and work in McMinnville, the little town near Nashville where she and Matthew had once lived. Cleaner’s Express, a dry-cleaning business, held a job open for her, and a couple who were close friends had invited her into their home.
    Court watchers thought they saw a defense plan emerging: the Battered Woman’s syndrome. Although Mary refused all offers to appear on television, her father gave an interview on Good Morning America.
    “I saw bad bruises,” he told Diane Sawyer. “The heaviest of makeup covering facial bruises. So one day, I confronted her. I said, ‘Mary Carol, you are coming off as a very abused wife, very battered.’ She would hang her head and say, ‘No, Daddy—everything’s all right. Everything’s all right.’ ”
    If Mary Winkler had been an abused wife, would a jury find that a justifiable reason to shoot her husband in the back?
    That question would not be answered in October. Her trial, which had been set to begin the day before Halloween, was delayed because of scheduling conflicts. Steve Farese and Leslie Ballin had filed far too many motions to be addressed before the autumn trial, and Mary’s next hearing was set for February 22, 2007.
    Mary remained free on bail, and her three daughters continued to live with their grandparents—Reverend Dan Winkler and Dianne Winkler. Mary saw her daughters for a brief visit on October 16 but spent the holidays without them.
    Mary seemed to be living a circumspect life, working at the dry cleaner’s and staying in the home of the couple who stood so firmly behind her. She had been happy once in McMinnville, and she was cosseted there now by many friends.
    But Mary Winkler had almost a talent for saying and doing the wrong thing. Her comment to Stan Stabler on the night she was arrested in Alabama had never really vanished from news coverage: “My ugly came out.”
    It may have been Southern slang, but it had a brutal ring to it, and she could not separate herself from it.
    Her public image got worse on New Year’s Eve. She had every reason to want to leave 2006 behind, although her choice to celebrate the end of the year wasn’t a good idea at all.