Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

trial, however, it seemed important for the jurors to hear Mary Winkler speak. In many ways, she was a mystery woman, and the rumor that she was going to testify flashed around Selmer on April 18.
    And she did.
    On April 19, 2007, Mary took the witness stand. As Steve Farese led her through what was virtually the story of her life, her whole mien was meek and respectful. She answered, “Yes sir,” and, “No sir,” as if she were a schoolgirl being questioned by her principal.
    It was difficult to discern who Mary Carol Freeman Winkler really was.
    It was even harder to figure out who Matthew Winkler had really been. He could not take the stand to tell his side of their marriage and the last morning of his life. A lay jury would decide which of them had been at fault—or, perhaps, if both of them had acted in ways that had led inexorably to a deadly shotgun blast.
    On the witness stand for this extremely important day in her life, Mary wore her black and white dress and the white cardigan. Steve Farese pointed out that, for Mary—as in T. S. Eliot’s poem—April was the cruelest month, a month of sad anniversaries. Her sister had died on April 15, and her mother on April 10, and tomorrow she would mark the eleventh anniversary of her wedding to Matthew, an event that had promised so much and ended in blood and ashes.
    And now, it was April again, and she could go to prison for half a century if the jury didn’t believe her story.
    Farese began with Mary’s childhood and gradually asked questions that led to her meeting with Matthew and their early married life. The material he covered was essentially what psychologist Dr. Lynne Zager had already presented, but it had more impact coming from Mary’s own mouth. Many of the questions hinted at behavior by Matthew that verged on bullying.
    “Can you tell the jury about any of the bad times you had,” Farese asked, “anything that you think was unusual now?”
    “There were many times I just got hollered at, and got onto. At one time Matthew thought that I had done something with the shirts wrong, and I felt like it was my fault. But when I look back in pictures now, Matthew had just gained weight.”
    She mentioned a time when Patricia was about a year old and had suffered a dislocated elbow. It happened when Matthew was taking care of her. Mary said she didn’t know how it happened.
    Mary testified that her husband had yelled and screamed at her often. Urged to tell the jurors about an incident when they lived in Pegram (near Nashville), she said that “he just flailed [at me]—he’s a big guy and he was just all over.”
    “Did you ever ask him what you had done wrong?”
    “No.”
    “Did he ever point at you?”
    “Yes sir. He was very—just inches away from my nose.”
    “And what would he say to you?”
    “Whatever he was upset about, it was my fault. Don’t do it again.”
    “If he thought you had done something wrong or talked back to him, did he have a word?”
    “Yes sir. ‘Ugly.’ ”
    “Tell the jury how he would use that word.”
    “On occasions if I felt like I could talk to him about something and he didn’t agree with that, he would tell me that would just be ‘ugly’ coming out, and it needed to be put away.”
    “Whose ugly coming out?”
    “Mine.”
    Farese had succeeded in defusing that one early statement Mary had made that threatened to devastate her case.
    Mary had hinted from the beginning that her life had been difficult when they lived in Pegram. Her in-laws had testified that Matthew had suffered bad reactions to medications during that time. Now Farese focused more closely on that period.
    “Matthew’s temperament escalated,” Mary testified when questioned about Pegram. “He would just be furious about certain things. He went from certain threats to more serious threats.”
    “Can you be specific to the jury about any threats?”
    “He told me one time he was going to cut the brake lines of my van.”
    “Why?”
    “I don’t know.”
    To further questions, she recalled a time when her husband had been “out of control,” so enraged that he had grabbed his recliner chair and turned it upside down. Mary said she then “snuck” out of the house to call one of Matthew’s brothers, Jacob. But he lived forty-five minutes away, so she went to their neighbors Glenn and Brandy Jones. Glenn was Matthew’s college roommate and best friend. When Glenn went back to the Winklers’ house, Matthew shrugged