Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

demands about her weight and the small things she did that annoyed him. Had they realized how skewed the power was in their marriage, they should have sought counseling.
    Marriage counseling, even within the church, could have defused the danger emerging. Their differing sexual preferences didn’t mark them as such an unusual couple; that was something that might have been dealt with in counseling. Did Matthew demand that Mary wear shoes like those in the pornographic images found in his computer? No one really knows where the white platform heels that Steve Farese showed to Mary came from. They apparently weren’t listed in the evidence removed from the Winklers’ home. Mary identified them, and the jurors believed that.
    For most mothers, if there was a deal breaker in the Winklers’ marriage, it would have been Matthew’s alleged practice of “suffocating” their baby daughters to make them stop crying. Did he really do that? If Allie and Brianna already had breathing problems and their father pinched their noses closed, most mothers would understand that Mary Winkler would do anything to stop him. There are very few things more powerful than maternal instinct in both animal and human mothers. They will literally die to save their young.
    Mary Winkler probably repressed her emotions many times over the length of her marriage. And perhaps she could do nothing right in her husband’s eyes. That, we will never know, because Matthew Winkler isn’t alive to tell his side of the story. He may have been an unpleasant and demanding husband—but that is no just cause for murder. It is only cause for divorce, and church or not, Mary could have found a way to leave.
    But she didn’t leave, and I think she became involved in the Internet con game without Matthew’s knowledge. She became more and more entangled in an illegal operation, and on Tuesday night, March 21, 2006, she probably confessed that to Matthew. Although she claimed to be confused about check kiting and NSF checks, I think she knew what she had done. Maybe she had only been trying to please Matthew by coming up with a lot of money—if she was truly naïve enough to believe that she could collect oil profits due to a Canadian firm.
    But I’m sure he was very angry when she had to confess they were due at the Regions Bank early the next morning. That surely was what they had fought about, even though she claimed not to remember. During that raging argument, Brianna may have cried, and Matthew may have silenced her by pinching her nose closed.
    Not in the early morning, but sometime on Tuesday night. I don’t think Mary had planned to kill him over a long period of time. She hadn’t set up a prepared scenario for weeks or months beforehand, telling friends and family that he was abusing her and the children. Nor did she attempt to blame anyone else for Matthew’s murder. There were no stories of bushy-haired strangers or burglars who forced their way into her home. This was not, in my mind, a premeditated act.
    But Mary Winkler had backed herself into a corner where she had no hope for the future, where she feared what was going to happen at the bank, feared being separated from her children, and, most of all, where she could no longer stand by and let Matthew “suffocate” her baby.
    And so she shot him in the back as he lay sleeping—without thinking of the future or punishment. Or even that she was taking another human being’s life.
    As Mary told the court and those at her sentencing, she has lost almost everything that mattered to her and she cannot really be punished further. She has no husband. She has no children.
    Since the verdict, she has filed many motions to have her children returned to her. But her in-laws are also moving through tedious court processes, seeking to have Mary’s maternal rights terminated so that they can adopt her three daughters. Their opposing goals seem only to make a tragic situation more tragic.
    Whatever the outcome, it seems likely that Mary Winkler will spend the rest of her life going over and over what she did in a moment that even she cannot explain.
    In a sense, she did get a life sentence.

Afterword
    MARY AND OPRAH September 12, 2007
    Mary Winkler hadn’t been out of the mental health facility even four weeks when a startling announcement came from The Oprah Winfrey Show. As Oprah’s new fall season began, Mary was slated to be one of the first week’s guests. Whether Reverend Daniel Winkler