Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

[Matthew] was—and I didn’t want to get into that.”
    “Well, why in the world would it have smeared Matthew if you said it was an accident? Why would you have to talk about the way he was? What would that have to do with anything if the gun just accidentally went off ?”
    “Because what led me to get in that position.”
    Why had that led to an accident? Mary insisted she had only wanted to talk to Matthew.
    “It wasn’t an accident, was it?” Freeland asked quietly.
    “Yes sir.”
    “You just wanted to talk to him and he wouldn’t listen. So you shot him in the middle of the back while he was asleep. Now has that memory come back to you, Ms. Winkler?”
    She denied any such memory.
    Walt Freeland returned to the testimony of the woman who said she had once been Mary’s best friend: Brandy Jones. Brandy was far from being a layperson; she worked at the Carl Perkins Center in Jackson, an agency dedicated to protecting abused children and working with dysfunctional families.
    At any time, Mary could have gone to Brandy with her anxieties about her marriage—but she hadn’t done that. Nor, Freeland pointed out, had she ever gone to Department of Health Services (DHS) and their child protective services or to her church for counsel or help. If, as her attorneys had pointed out, her life was a “living hell,” there had been many counselors who could have helped her and kept her problems private.
    Mary Winkler had once told investigators that she slid on decorative pillows on the master bedroom floor just before the shotgun boomed. But now that awful morning had faded into smoky, blurred places in her mind with only bits and pieces of memory floating there.
    And finally her testimony was over and she stepped down.
     
    It had become a battle of titans; both the prosecution and the defense teams had raised serious questions in a case where Mary Winkler’s motivation—if any—would certainly be the deciding factor for the jury.
    And the jurors had an awesome task ahead of them.
    Steve Farese and Leslie Ballin had presented Mary as an abused wife, frightened, desperate, and trying to protect her children.
    There were some physical evidence problems, however, that drew the attention of experts and made portions of her testimony unbelievable.
Why had Mary unplugged the phone line before she left her critically injured husband lying on the floor? The shotgun blast with its seventy-seven pellets ripping through his body had done horrible damage to a large percentage of Matthew Winkler’s internal organs and it would have taken a miracle for him to survive. Even so, there was something disturbing about her removing the last possible avenue he would have had to call for help.
Patricia had testified that the phone was not unplugged when she first looked into her parents’ bedroom, but later it was—and the phone had been moved far out of her father’s reach. He had been alive and groaning as he lay on his stomach when Patricia first saw him. He was, of course, on his back when his worried church friends found him.
There was a second, more complicated finding that had surfaced during Matthew Winkler’s autopsy. His bladder still held an entire liter of urine. Dr. Turner had testified about how humans reacted to varying amounts of urine. With a whole liter in his bladder, Matthew wouldn’t have gotten up, “suffocated” his baby daughter, smacked the doorjamb in frustration, and then gone back to bed, without going to the bathroom! He would have had a tremendous urge to void and been almost in pain with a bladder stretched to its capacity. More than likely, he would have ducked into the bathroom five feet from their bed even before he walked to Brianna’s room.
    All of these discrepancies made Mary’s story about the morning Matthew was killed either a partial lie or the result of a buried memory.
     
    The jurors in Mary Winkler’s trial listened attentively to the final remarks made by Walt Freeland and Steve Farese, and then retired to deliberate on Thursday, April 19, 2007. They deliberated for only eight hours. When they returned, their foreman, Bill Berry, announced their verdict.
    Guilty.
    But it was a gentle guilty. They had gone over Judge McCraw’s instructions, weighed the evidence and testimony, and found Mary guilty only of voluntary manslaughter.
    Mary still clutched her attorneys’ hands. She didn’t understand what that meant. They spoke to her, explaining, until she broke into a