Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

nothing was in his name. And we [she and Matthew] decided that day that getting a loan would be an option because Matthew had perfect credit.”
    Mary denied ever hearing the term “check kiting,” and it appeared that she had blocked the memory of anyone telling her that, or that she wanted to give that impression. She insisted her church friend who worked at the bank had told her, “Don’t worry about it. Y’all can come in.”
    Now she testified that while they were eating pizza on Tuesday night, she had mentioned going into the bank to Matthew, that they were supposed to go in the next day, and he hadn’t been at all concerned.
    “What did you say?” Freeland asked. “ ‘Oh, by the way, the bank called and says I’m doing illegal stuff’?”
    “No sir. I said he’s got to go in there, but I probably spelled it out—or whispered it to him, because Patricia and Allie were around us.”
    “What was his reaction when you said, ‘The bank says what I am doing is illegal’?”
    “He said I was misunderstanding them.”
    “Was he upset?”
    “No. He just thought it was stupid…He just said, what in the world are they talking about? We shared the same opinion, I believe.”
    Mary recalled that Matthew had been “ranting and raving” over something that night, but she couldn’t remember what. Maybe it was some church business.
    Mary Winkler’s memory came and went. Asked about the statement she had given to the TBI investigator Chris Carpenter in which she had given a much more favorable view of her marriage, she remembered that she hadn’t wanted anyone to think badly about Matthew. Now she couldn’t recall what she had said; she did remember that she had talked to the TBI men.
    Asked about the morning Matthew died, Mary said she wasn’t sure what time it was; she only knew that the alarm hadn’t gone off yet.
    “Do you remember telling Agent Carpenter that when you got up Matthew was still in bed?”
    “I don’t remember those exact words.”
    She couldn’t recall going to the closet and getting the gun. Obviously, she had been able to reach it, but she didn’t know how she got it off a high shelf there.
    “Do you recall telling Agent Carpenter you heard ‘a loud boom’ and you [said you] remembered thinking that it wasn’t as loud as you thought it would be? Had you thought about how loud a boom from a shotgun would be?”
    “I guess just—I never thought of it before. That’s just in reference to movies and TV.”
    “You remember saying you heard the boom?”
    “Yes sir.”
    “And that he rolled out of bed?”
    “I just remember that I don’t actually remember saying any of this, but I do remember being there and him [Carpenter] writing this.”
    Mary’s direct testimony, led by Steve Farese, had been relatively incisive, but now she was floundering. She wasn’t sure if she had told Chris Carpenter about seeing blood on the floor, or that her husband was bleeding from the mouth. She did recall wiping his mouth with a sheet.
    “Do you remember today that you told Matthew that you were sorry and that you loved him?”
    “No sir.”
    “You don’t recall Matthew asking you, ‘Why?’ ”
    Freeland’s voice was full of doubt.
    “No sir.”
    Even when she looked at her initials on the statement to Chris Carpenter, Mary denied that Matthew had asked her why she had shot him.
    “Do you recall that Patricia came to the hallway, and you told her Daddy was hurt?”
    Mary did not remember that, or that she had said Matthew was groaning.
    She did not agree with her own daughter’s testimony.
    Either Mary Winkler had blanked out her own memory or she was conveniently recalling only those things that served her defense best. She felt that she had been “beaten down” by her life by the time she got to Orange Beach, even though she had managed to drive there without having an accident and had been aware enough to register in hotels—even looking until she found one where there was a swimming pool.
    Freeland suggested that her foggy spots came and went.
    “When you’re so beaten down,” Mary testified, “you just don’t understand and you don’t think you’ve got a way up. At that time, I was led to feel like I didn’t have a family. I never would have imagined I would have been able to have any kind of attorney. I just—if I got into talking about anything—why did I even want to talk to him [Carpenter] that morning? I was going to have to talk about how he