Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

Mary had said repeatedly, he blamed her for everything, she was going to be in really big trouble.
    “Do you remember getting a gun?” Farese asked her.
    “No sir.”
    “Do you remember having a gun—holding a gun?”
    “Yes sir.”
    “Do you remember pulling a trigger?”
    “No sir.”
    “Did you pull the trigger?”
    “No sir.”
    “How do we know that, Mary?”
    “Because I’m telling you.”
    Mary Winkler said she recalled that “something went off,” but she didn’t know what it was. She had heard a “boom!” and smelled an awful smell she could not identify. All she could think of was getting her children out of the house.
    She knew that Matthew would be mad at her for shooting him, she said. “ ’Cause he would think I wanted to do that.”
    And she hadn’t wanted to shoot him. Mary recalled running out to the carport, and then returning to waken her daughters. She looked in the living room, but nobody was there. She thought she remembered that Patricia might have come out of her room and asked what was happening.
    “I went back to the bedroom…Matthew was laying there on his back.”
    “How did he look? Did you see blood or anything?” Farese asked quietly.
    “Yes sir. In his nose and the back of his ears.”
    “Did you do anything or say anything to him?”
    “I wiped his mouth. I don’t remember saying anything. I don’t know.”
    “What were you thinking then, Mary?”
    “Something terrible had happened. That it was just an accident and that I’d lose my girls—”
    “Did you know what had happened?”
    “Not for a fact, but—”
    “What did you do?”
    “I just ran away. I just put the girls in the van and I just drove.”
    As direct examination of Mary Winkler came to an end, she denied that she had intentionally or purposely killed her husband. She had loved him.
    “Do you still love him?” Steve Farese asked.
    “Yes sir.”
    “Even through all that?”
    “Yes sir.”
    Mary testified that she had tried to protect Matthew’s good name when she was first questioned by police in Alabama. She hadn’t cared about herself. All she cared about was “Patricia, Allie, and Brianna.”
    Judge McCraw called for a break in the proceedings. And everyone in the courtroom needed that. It was as if those who had listened so intensely were suddenly able to breathe again. As they walked outside into the April spring air, they found their voices.
    Was Mary Winkler telling the truth, or was she only playing the part of an abused wife who had suddenly snapped and shot her husband in a kind of fugue state in which she had no awareness of what she was doing?
     
    Prosecutor Walt Freeland rose to cross-examine Mary Winkler. He would now bear down on those areas that Steve Farese had skimmed over. Mary denied having been coached prior to her testimony, even though there is no rule against defense attorneys preparing their clients for trial. It was obvious that Farese and Leslie Ballin had told her what to expect, and that she had probably under-gone a test run. Any good defense attorney would have done that.
    Mary grudgingly agreed with Freeland that she had praised Matthew in the Orange Beach police station.
    “You stated that he was so good—or something to that nature. What did Matthew Winkler do to deserve the death penalty?”
    “Nothing. Nobody made that decision,” she answered, warily.
    “Matthew Winkler, in fact, did not deserve to die—did he?”
    “No.”
    Freeland switched to the tangled money transfers and checks from the swindlers in Canada. Mary repeated that it was Matthew who had urged her to enter all the lotteries and sweepstakes that came in the mail. “Any dollar amounts, vehicles, TVs…”
    “And it would have been a big thing for you and Matthew financially if you had, in fact, won a sweepstakes?”
    “Yes sir.”
    And yet, Freeland pointed out, the Winklers hadn’t told their families about the big checks coming in from Canada—for $6,900, $4,900, $6,455. Mary said that she didn’t understand just how the transactions were to be handled—she had left that all up to Matthew. They hadn’t celebrated.
    “Matthew said it wasn’t a million—but it was something.”
    Mary said they had simply put the checks in the bank, and hadn’t told the elder Winklers because nobody knew of the overwhelming credit card debt they had.
    Her answers were very vague about all of the bank problems—she maintained that she just didn’t understand them.
    Freeland