Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

her attorney’s questions, admitting that Matthew had bought both the shoes and the wig for her. He wanted her to wear them.
    “What do you mean he wanted you to wear it, Mary?”
    “To dress up…”
    “Dress up, for what purpose, Mary?”
    “For sex.”
    Those listening gasped—almost as one.
    “ Sex .” Farese let that answer sink in. “Besides the wig and the shoes, how else did he make you dress?”
    “Just skirts—very, very, short.”
    The gallery was hushed; this was a shocking and fascinating turn of events no one had really expected—not right out in front of everyone.
    “During the course of this,” Farese persisted, “did you ever have occasion to be asked to look at his computer?”
    “Yes sir.”
    “What were you asked to look at?”
    “Pornography.”
    “What kind of pornography? Still photographs or movies—or what?”
    “I think they were moving movies.”
    “Were any of them still?”
    “There might have been.”
    “Well—why did you look at them? Did you enjoy that sort of thing?”
    “No—he told me to.”
    “What would occur after he would ask you to look at the photographs?”
    “We had sex.”
    “Did he ever ask you to engage in any type of sex that you felt was unnatural?”
    No one in the courtroom dared to take a breath for fear they might miss the answer.
    “Yes sir.”
    “Tell the jury what that was, Mary.”
    “Ummm…he just wanted to have sex with my bottom.”
    “Did that concern you and worry you?”
    “Yes sir.”
    “Did it hurt you?”
    “Yes sir.”
    “What were you told when you expressed your concern?”
    “He said okay, but then he would do it again.”
    “What was his answer for if it did hurt you?”
    “[He said] sometimes that does happen—that they have surgery that can fix it.”
    Mary’s father, Clark Freeman, sitting just behind the defense table, covered his eyes with his hand and bent his head in shock and grief as he listened to her explicit testimony about her sex life with her late husband.
    The expressions on Dianne’s and Dan Winkler’s faces were frozen, and then Dan seemed to glare at the daughter-in-law he had once loved. It was obvious he didn’t believe what she said. Whatever had happened, these three parents clearly agonized over what had become of their children’s “perfect” marriage.
    Steve Farese continued with this line of questioning.
    “When he had you dress up, did he ever engage in any other kind of sex that you felt was unnatural?”
    “Umm, not unnatural, but stuff I didn’t always want to do.”
    “Could you give just one example?”
    “Just, uh, oral sex.”
    Now Farese showed Mary Winkler a stack of photographs—Exhibit #72—the pornographic images that TBI investigators had downloaded from the Winklers’ computer. She said these had been on the computer they kept in their living room. Asked about when Matthew used the computer, Mary testified that she had found him there at “all hours—up until two to three in the morning.”
    Mary said she would check on her husband when he hadn’t come to bed at night, and find him at the computer. “He would click the screen blank,” she testified. She didn’t explain why he sometimes hid what he was watching online, and at other times forced her to watch it with him.
    Steve Farese showed her one of the still photos. “Do those shoes look familiar in any way?”
    “They’re the same as my shoes, but they’re black.”
    Almost shuddering, Mary looked through Exhibit #72, following her lawyer’s suggestion that she save herself by glancing only at every fifth photo. She acknowledged that she recognized them as those her husband had downloaded and that he had urged her to look at so that she would “become aroused.”
    The images were passed on for the jury to look at. In some other town, some other place, the recent testimony and the proliferation of “dirty pictures” might not have had the shocking impact they did in McNairy County. But this wasn’t some other town. This was the Bible Belt, and these had come, reportedly, from a minister’s computer.
    Suddenly, Mary Winkler’s future didn’t seem so forbidding, given what she had suffered in the past.
    And Matthew Winkler still could not speak about his side of the marital battles. Nor could he ever.
     
    Mary was holding up fairly well as her hours on the witness stand progressed. Matthew’s reputation was trailing in tatters. She recalled that he had threatened her with the