Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

she testified. Frightened, she and Allie had sat on the floor right outside the master bedroom. Her mother came out and told them that an ambulance was on the way to take their father to the hospital.
    But they didn’t wait for that.
    Patricia said their mother had gathered them all up and taken them to their van, telling them that they were going “someplace special.”
    When Freeland asked her if she had ever seen her father being mean or bad to her mother, she said, “No.”
    Rather than stand to question the witness as he usually did, Steve Farese sat at the table next to Mary Winkler as he cross-examined Patricia. That forced her to look at her mother as she answered his questions.
    She said she was happy to see her mother when Mary got out of jail, and that they had hugged and kissed. They hadn’t talked about the bad time when her father died.
    “Did you want to see your mother again?” Farese asked her.
    “…I don’t know.”
    “Why didn’t you see her again after that?”
    It was too much for a little girl. Patricia broke into tears again. “Because I didn’t want to see her. Well, I mean, I still love her.”
    It was one of the saddest moments of the trial.
     
    Prosecutor Walt Freeland summoned Dr. Staci Turner to the witness stand. She had performed the postmortem examination of Matthew’s body. The most horrifying findings from the autopsy had already been covered. Now Dr. Turner discussed something that, on the surface, didn’t seem so important. But it was.
    A layman would probably not even notice the significance of the contents of Winkler’s bladder at the time of autopsy. Freeland set out to explain what it meant.
    “You have indicated that you weighed the kidneys and indicated that the bladder contained approximately a thousand milliliters of urine,” Freeland began. “Is that correct?”
    “That is correct.”
    “Now, not knowing much about the metric system, obviously, a thousand milliliters is the same as one liter?”
    “Yes.”
    “That would be the same way to describe the amount of urine you found in the bladder?”
    “Yes.”
    Freeland held up a large liter bottle filled with water. “Now, for demonstrative purposes, do you have any problem��if this is a liter—with this being the amount of fluid or urine that was found in the bladder?”
    Dr. Turner indicated that it was.
    “Are you familiar with any studies that determine when the urgency to urinate first comes about—and when it becomes intense? Or when it becomes urgent?”
    Dr. Turner said she had read several such studies. “Generally,” she testified, “a person can feel the urine between a hundred and two hundred milliliters, with an urge to urinate around four hundred. And a pretty severe urge around five to six hundred.”
    “And this was a thousand?”
    “Yes.”
    Even a lay jury could understand that Matthew Winkler must have gone all night long without getting up to go to the bathroom. He would have felt a tremendous need to urinate by the time he had a full liter of fluid in his bladder.
    Why it mattered so much wasn’t immediately obvious—except that it certainly seemed to indicate that he had been shot while he lay in bed asleep.
    Freeland would come back to this testimony.
     
    The prosecution had presented a woman who was about to be exposed for writing bad checks, a woman who had admitted to shooting her husband in the back before she ran away to another state. Steve Farese and Leslie Ballin faced a formidable challenge as they would now try to rebuild Mary’s side of the case.
    They presented a number of witnesses who vouched for Mary Winkler’s positive image in the community and in her church community.
    And they set about demonizing Matthew.
    Dr. Lynne Zager, the forensic psychologist who spent forty-one sessions with Mary Winkler, testified for over two hours. If Mary herself should not take the stand—which was likely—Zager had clearly committed her patient’s life to memory, almost from birth to the morning Matthew died. The psychologist said she had diagnosed Mary with mild depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome. She traced the PTS disorder back to the time that Mary’s sister died suddenly of a heart attack. The Freeman family had no counseling at the time, and Dr. Zager felt Mary had carried the emotional burden ever after.
    Although Matthew had controlled Mary, she tried to excuse his actions to Dr. Zager. “She often said that Matthew helped her to be