Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

Mary went out that night—to the same bar she had visited three or four times since her release from jail. It could have been worse. It wasn’t only a bar; it was the New York Grill Restaurant. But it happened to have a cocktail lounge. Mary had gone there on her birthday on December 10, too, and no one had paid much attention to her.
    But on New Year’s Eve, things took a negative turn. Mary, not looking at all like a little girl, sat at the bar with a beer in front of her and a cigarette in her hand. Her haircut was short and sleek, and she held her head up proudly, scarcely resembling the meek Mary of the courtroom who almost always kept her eyes downcast.
    Another patron was at the bar with his wife, who nudged him when she recognized Mary. He had his cell phone with him, and it had a camera in it. Apparently without Mary’s knowledge, he took several pictures of her as she sat at the bar, smoking.
    A short time later, he went over to her and asked her if she was the “preacher killer,” or the “husband killer.”
    He was laughing when he asked what to almost anyone with tact would seem to be a rude and thoughtless question. He claimed later that Mary laughed when she said, “Yeah,” and then reportedly added, “You want to be next?”
    Others at the bar joined in the hilarity. Apparently, Mary wasn’t upset by the incident, and she and her friends remained at the bar until after 2 A.M.
    Armed with his blurry phone photographs, the bar patron went to WMC-TV-5 and sold the images of another side of Mary Winkler. When they appeared on the nightly news, there was a huge negative backlash in Tennessee. And the photos of Mary soon hit the Internet as one of the most viewed videos on YouTube.com.
    The manager of the dry cleaner’s where Mary worked gave an indignant interview to WKRN-TV in Nashville. “It was New Year’s Eve. We went to the New York Grill. What were we supposed to do—sit home and cry? She’s not a preacher’s wife. She used to be a preacher’s wife, but he’s dead now. She’s not married. She’s nobody’s wife.”
    None of this helped to paint Mary Winkler as a vulnerable little woman, cowed by her abusive husband and desperate enough to snap and shoot him. It would have taken a top political spin doctor to erase public reaction to the image of Mary sitting at a bar.
    Maybe if the Winkler case were taking place outside the Bible Belt, there wouldn’t have been so many cries of outrage. But this was small-town Tennessee, where people believed that women about to go on trial for husband killing shouldn’t be sitting in bars smoking and drinking.
    There were man-on-the-street interviews where perfect strangers commented on Mary Winkler’s morals. Predictably there were those who thought she had betrayed her Christian faith by even being in a bar, those who saw no harm in it, and those whose opinions fell somewhere in between.
    Mary’s attorneys said they would not dignify the coverage by commenting on it, beyond saying that they hoped it would not become open season on Mary as a target for camera stalkers who hoped to get pictures they could sell.
    Steve Farese said that the beer in the photos wasn’t even Mary’s drink. The cigarette in her hand, of course, was her own.
    Mary’s pretrial supervision order did not forbid her to drink, but only stipulated she must not imbibe alcohol “to excess.” No one had even suggested that she was intoxicated on New Year’s Eve. At least she didn’t have to go back to jail for violating her probation.
    Staff writer Russell Ingle of the Independent Appeal in Selmer had his fingers firmly on the pulse of anyone concerned with Matthew Winkler’s murder, and he regularly wrote thoughtful pieces on the progression toward trial. He quoted a beauty shop customer who doubted Mary’s faith, saying, “Because she confesses [ sic; she probably meant “professes”] to be a Christian, she ain’t got no business being in there [the bar] whether she killed her husband or not.”
    A local man was more forgiving: “I wouldn’t condemn her if she stayed drunk all the time, going through a psychological thing like shooting your husband.”
    And still, no one outside the case knew what had happened to provoke Mary to shoot Matthew. The State had charged her with premeditated first-degree murder, and a conviction might bring her the death penalty. On the other hand, her defense team felt that under Tennessee law, she should be allowed to walk