Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

appearances can change in a matter of seconds. She meant as they died, but she could not say that either. “It’s just terrible,” Mary said, describing how dead faces change.
    “I just took off,” she said. “We ran away. We didn’t go to his parents because they were on vacation. I was going to Memphis.” But then she had become aware that she was headed toward Mississippi instead.
    In the same breath that she described her fear of her husband, Mary said with as much feeling as she had mustered so far, “I do love him. I do love Matthew.” She told Oprah she could not imagine life without him.
    Just before “something very bad happened,” Mary said she felt her life was in danger. But now she was better. She said she was only beginning to find out who she really was, describing how frightened she once was because she had broken the sun visor on her car and had been afraid to tell Matthew. Now, she told Oprah, she saw that it had been her car, and that she shouldn’t have been afraid over a broken visor.
    When Oprah asked about the financial crisis that came about after she bounced some checks in the computer scam aftermath, Mary said she wasn’t upset about that. She had had nothing to do with that—it had all been Matthew’s idea. Yes, she paid the bills and balanced the checkbook—but it was Matthew who participated in the “Nigerian bank scam.” No, she told Oprah, he wasn’t angry with her because it was his doing.
    She knew virtually nothing about the bank problem. That jarred with almost everything in the courtroom testimony about Mary’s frantic efforts to hide the check kiting.
    And still she seemed unable to explain what she was afraid of on the morning Matthew died.
    Possibly the most painful parts of Oprah’s interview with Mary Winkler were the questions about the couple’s sex life. During her testimony, Mary had been terribly embarrassed about Matthew’s insistence on anal sex but hadn’t been disturbed by references to oral sex. Now, she included both in her litany of sexual abuse at Matthew’s hands. She waffled about whether he had struck her physically.
    A doubter might say that Mary’s excruciatingly long pauses after Oprah asked her a question came about because she was trying to remember what she had said earlier.
    As Mary-on-film spoke, her attorneys, Leslie Ballin and Steve Farese, were live in Oprah’s audience. Farese’s sister was handling Mary’s legal struggle to win back the custody of her three daughters.
    Will that happen? Should it happen? This is a question almost as difficult to answer as one about Mary Winkler’s possible motivation for shooting her husband.
    When Oprah asked her why she should have her girls back, Mary’s answer was simple, and she gave no concrete reasons.
    “I’m their mother.”
    They have not seen her for a year. She lives in McMinnville, Tennessee, in a house provided by a supporter. Can Mary answer the questions that her three little girls will surely ask her? Can she look them in the eye, tell them as much of the truth as they can handle, and make them feel safe? Can she feel safe enough herself to deal with reality and not try to relegate it to the cloudy past where facts keep changing?
    Certainly, both Mary and her daughters should continue to receive mental health counseling and therapy. The very bad thing that happened will be a dark ghost hovering over all of them until they can learn to deal with it.
    Even Oprah Winfrey, who can get almost anyone to talk about almost anything, had an extremely difficult time trying to get Mary Winkler to tell her what had happened to her and why her children should be returned to her.
    I’m sure Oprah was still shaking her head in puzzlement when the studio lights went down, and that her hours spent with Mary Winkler will remain a sharp memory for a very long time.
     
    It soon became clear that the saga of Mary Winkler would spark continual headlines. In Huntingdon, Tennessee, on September 19, Carroll County chancellor Ron Harmon listened to eight hours of often-conflicting testimony from Mary, her former father-in-law, Dan Winkler, and four psychologists regarding her suitability to visit with her three daughters, now age nine, eight, and two.
    Dr. Lynne Zager repeated her opinion that on the morning Matthew was shot Mary had been suffering from mild depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, which resulted in a “dissociative episode,” or a break with reality. Zager was