Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

shotgun many times, pointing it at her face or heaving it toward her. “He told me if I ever talked back to him he would cut me into a million pieces.”
    She said she had been “scared.”
    Asked about her own knowledge in operating a shotgun, Mary said she had none at all. She had never loaded one or shot one. She had no idea how a shotgun worked. Indeed, she didn’t believe that she had ever pulled the trigger—Matthew’s gun had simply gone off by itself.
    Now she answered Farese’s questions about how Matthew had treated Allie when she was small.
    “If she was crying when she was told to go to bed, he would suffocate her to get her quiet and go to sleep.”
    “What do you mean, he suffocated her?”
    “He’d pinch her nose and hold her nose.”
    “Would you let him do that to your child?” Farese asked, incredulous.
    “I just couldn’t stop him. I physically couldn’t do anything.”
    The questioning moved on to the financial problems that had ensued with the fake checks that came to Mary from Canada. Mary insisted that these, too, had been Matthew’s idea. He had asked her to fill out every contest form, every lottery—Publishers Clearing House, anything like that—that came in their mail. Her husband had urged her, she said, to pursue any avenue that might help their shaky finances.
    She testified that she didn’t really understand about the problem with the banks, and that they wouldn’t tell her what was wrong unless she and Matthew came in. Matthew hadn’t understood it either, she said. It had all been very confusing to both of them.
    Farese hurried quickly over this line of questioning.
    But now they had moved up to the night before Matthew died. Mary said they had ordered takeout from Pizza Hut, watched Chicken Little with the girls, and then put them to bed. When Matthew put on a movie, Mary had tried to watch with him, but, exhausted, she had fallen asleep. When they went to bed together later, they had “relations.”
    “Were they ordinary—normal?” Farese asked.
    “Ordinary for us,” she said, not explaining what she meant.
    The girls were sound asleep, even Brianna. Brianna was named after her father—his middle name was Brian—even though he had been very disappointed when the ultrasound showed that they were having another girl. Matthew came from a family of three boys, and he wanted sons, Mary told the jurors.
    Matthew’s alleged displeasure over the sex of his unborn baby seemed to be one more nail in the coffin of his reputation.
    Mary Winkler’s testimony had progressed to the morning of the murder, and the courtroom was hushed as she responded to Steve Farese’s questions.
    After they had marital relations on Tuesday night, the next thing Mary remembered was it was early Wednesday morning. She heard Brianna crying, and she said that Matthew had placed his foot on her lower back and literally kicked her out of bed so that she would go and quiet the baby.
    But then he had changed his mind—and suddenly gotten out of bed and walked into the living room, heading for Brianna’s room. When Mary caught up to him, she said he was already “suffocating Brianna—pinching her nose.”
    “I said, ‘Could I please have her?’ ”
    “Did you get her?”
    “Yeah. He just threw up his arms and walked out—walked away from the crib…He just said he was tired of hearing it and when he walked through the door, he slammed the door frame with his open hand. I picked Brianna up and calmed her down and then I changed her diaper and [found her] pacifier somewhere and just put her back down and put music on.”
    Mary testified that Brianna had gone back down easily, and she had gone to the kitchen to make coffee. She wanted to talk to Matthew. “I just wanted him to stop being so mean.”
    He had gone back to the bedroom by then, back to bed. “He liked to sleep as long as possible,” she added.
    “Did you go back in the bedroom to talk to Matthew?”
    “Yes sir.”
    “Did you talk to him?”
    “No. I couldn’t. I was just so scared.”
    “Scared of what?”
    “Scared of Matthew.”
    That dark Wednesday dawn had been the start of a day she already dreaded: whether Mary Winkler understood the fine points or not, she and Matthew were due at the bank. Did he know she was $5,000 overdrawn?
    She had testified that he did, but if he didn’t, she had good reason to be frightened. Almost any husband would be angry and embarrassed to have such news sprung on him. If, as