Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

characterized Mary as a cold-blooded woman who had intentionally shot her husband in the back as he lay in bed early in the morning of March 22, 2006. He said she had deliberately unplugged the cord from their phone so that Matthew could not call for help after she left. He noted the financial catastrophe that was about to descend on the Winklers because Mary had been carrying out a check-kiting scheme since November 2005, depositing phony checks in several bank accounts.
    “The house of cards she set up was falling down,” Freeland said. “The defense will not produce any evidence of any good reason Matthew Winkler was murdered by Mary Winkler—because there is no good reason.”
    Steve Farese described the Winklers’ marriage as “a living hell behind closed doors.” He told the jurors that Matthew’s demands made Mary tiptoe on eggshells, and even then everything she did seemed to displease him. “He would destroy objects that she loved,” Farese said dramatically. “He would isolate her from her family, and he would abuse her. He would tell her she couldn’t eat lunch because she was too fat. Not only did she have to be perfect, her children had to be perfect.”
    The battle lines were drawn, and they were almost diametrically opposed. Local residents who were polled were fifty-fifty in support of Mary or in their allegiance to Matthew.
    Mary’s attorneys said that she had done everything for her children in a desperate effort to protect them from their punitive and unbendable father. They clearly intended to show her as a woman beaten down by domestic abuse, almost a heroine who stepped forward to save her three little girls.
    Mary had seen her daughters only twice since her arrest, and she had explained that she didn’t want to upset them. That may have been true, but it also had become a difficult process for her to have visitation with them. Her in-laws were no longer supportive as they had been in the beginning, and they weren’t anxious to expose Patricia, Allie, and Brianna to the woman who had shot their son.
    The usual parade of patrolmen and investigators took the witness stand, told of the bloody crime scene, the frantic search for Mary and her daughters, her arrest, her statement in Alabama, and her second statement to TBI agent Chris Carpenter. Photographs of Matthew’s wound were introduced as his autopsy was explained.
    Mary glanced away; she didn’t look when photos of the shotgun wadding and the seventy-seven pellets of birdshot that had penetrated her husband’s body were introduced into evidence.
    Walt Freeland questioned Stan Stabler about Mary’s statements in Orange Beach, and the taped interview was played for the jurors. Mary’s voice was very soft and vulnerable as she came almost to the point of admitting that she had shot Matthew.
    Asked if the Winklers’ shotgun could have gone off accidentally, Stabler said, “I don’t know.”
    TBI ballistics expert Steve Scott testified that it would have taken 3 to 3¾ pounds of pressure to pull the trigger on the shotgun. The defense clearly wanted to show that it might well have gone off accidentally. There were discussions and testimony about how easy it might have been for the barrel to be “racked,” and the suggestion that it might have been stored high on the master bedroom closet shelf already racked and that it would have taken only a light touch on the trigger to fire the gun.
    On the third day of trial, courthouse security was mysteriously beefed up. An anonymous man had phoned Ronnie Brooks, the court clerk, three times, complaining that the district attorneys weren’t doing their job “properly.”
    Extra court guards appeared and they used handheld metal detectors to check any potential spectator trying to gain entry to the courtroom, something that is done routinely from the start of trials in most courtrooms today.
    Mary Winkler no longer rode in her lawyer’s sports car but arrived in a heavy-paneled SUV. She clearly hated the media attention, but she no longer seemed terrified of either reporters or curious crowds.
    Some of the witness testimony disturbed her, and she sometimes appeared to be crying. On closer observation, it was more that she blew her nose vigorously when difficult issues came up.
    One aspect of her demeanor troubled some of those in the gallery: Mary didn’t seem to make eye contact with anyone—not even her own attorneys. She no longer gazed at the ground the way she had when she