Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

better. He helped her to improve herself. He was concerned about her improving herself.”
    Dr. Zager presented Mary Winkler as most vulnerable for domestic violence, a woman already psychologically damaged who had been subjected to a decade of emotionally abusive treatment by her minister husband.
    The defense had come up with their scenario of Matthew’s murder, and now they padded out that skeletal structure with more and more witnesses.
    A Tennessee highway patrolman testified to his contact with Matthew when the Winklers lived in McMinnville. When he had visited his terminally ill grandmother, who was a neighbor of the Winklers, the trooper said Matthew had walked across the street and shouted about a small dog that was keeping him awake. The patrolman said he’d heard about the minister’s reputation as a bully, and that he had nicknamed him “the Tasmanian Devil.”
    Matthew’s parents and siblings watched the proceedings. His brother Dan looked startlingly like Matthew, so much so that it was almost as if the victim himself was in the courtroom. All three of the Winkler sons—Jacob, Matthew, and Daniel—were large men who had once been athletes. Dianne Winkler, Mary’s mother-in-law, was extremely poised, attractive, and beautifully dressed. She must have been a daunting example for Mary to emulate during her ten-year marriage. While the Winklers had been somewhat supportive of Mary right after she was arrested, they no longer were.
    Asked about a time in McMinnville when Matthew had allegedly locked Mary out of their home, his father testified that on two occasions, Matthew had had a bad reaction to medications he’d taken for a toothache and an upset stomach and become disoriented. That might explain such an occasion—if it had really happened.
    Dianne Winkler remembered one of his bizarre reactions to medication. He had a hallucination. “He saw a woman with black hair at the end of a hall—coming at him with a knife,” she testified.
    That caused a gasp in the courtroom. And later, outside the justice center, townspeople wondered about the possibility of illegal drugs being involved.
    Mary had suffered a black eye in McMinnville, but she had explained it away at the time, saying that she’d been playing with the girls and her eye had been hit accidentally, probably by an elbow.
    TBI criminal investigator Howard Patterson and Phillip Hampton, a forensic computer expert, both testified about “certain images” retrieved from the Winklers’ computers; 263 images had been printed out. Although they didn’t spell out what the images were, the truth was that they were pornographic downloads, some stills, some videos—material not to be expected on a minister’s computer.
    Back and forth the testimony and exhibits went. A church secretary at the Central Church of Christ in McMinn ville, who had worked there for thirty-five years, testified that Matthew had been “nice” when he first came to her church but that he had begun to “treat others as lower than himself.” She said he soon began to give orders, stepping over bounds “considerably.”
    She told the jurors that she had heard him speak to Mary angrily, and that he sometimes locked his wife and children in his office for twenty to thirty minutes. When she asked him why, he said it was “to keep them safe.”
    She also testified that he had made frivolous purchases on church accounts.
    Timothy Parish, the pulpit minister at the McMinnville church, took the stand to say that he felt the Winklers’ marriage was not as happy as his own. Sometimes Mary seemed happy, but there were many times when she didn’t.
    Tabatha, Mary’s sister, recalled that Mary had been very happy during the early years of her marriage, but that that had changed. “[My] very bubbly, outgoing sister became subdued.”
    Tabatha recalled the time when Matthew had summoned Mary’s adopted siblings to explain to them that she wasn’t really their sister any longer, and that they shouldn’t expect her to be there for them the way she had been before her marriage. Matthew had struck Tabatha as very controlling, and he only rarely attended his in-laws’ family functions and celebrations.
     
    Criminal defense attorneys agree that it is almost always a bad idea for a murder defendant to testify in his or her own defense, even though many of them want to take the stand. Once they testify, they open themselves up to cross-examination by the prosecution.
    In this