Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

not concerned that Mary would be “a significant risk of hurting herself or others, including the children.” She felt that Mary’s main stressor had been her marriage to Matthew Winkler, but that was no longer an issue, and Mary had received treatment, had a good support system in friends and family, and now knew how to recognize what events could trigger dissociative episodes. In short, she felt that Mary was no longer dangerous.
    Dr. Robert Kennon, however, representing the elder Winklers, testified that he had interviewed Mary’s daughters only five days before this hearing. Patricia, nine, had expressed fear of her mother. “She killed my father,” Patricia allegedly said. “I don’t know if she will kill me…”
    Dr. Kennon offered his opinion, saying that he was concerned with the longevity of Mary’s dissociative disorder, extending, possibly, from the time her sister died many years before to the period of Matthew’s murder and to her flight afterward. In his experience, only 30 percent of patients with dissociative episodes actually got better with treatment and medication. The rest of these patients demonstrated mild to severe symptoms, Kennon said, and some grew markedly worse.
    Reverend Dan Winkler acknowledged that although he still loved Mary, warnings from psychologists made him afraid for his grandchildren. He said he had noted drastic changes in the children’s behavior after they visited with their mother.
    That, of course, had been approximately a year earlier. Mary had neither seen nor talked to them for many months.
    Another psychologist, Dr. John Ciocca, spoke for Mary’s side and said that it was quite possible that separating the girls from their mother could be hurting them.
    The sun had set by the time Chancellor Harmon handed down his decision. He granted Mary Winkler supervised visitation with her daughters but said it must be for “a limited time under limited conditions.” He also said she could speak to them by phone every other day.
    It seemed a huge coup for Mary. She was elated and, showing far more emotion than onlookers had come to expect from her, hugged her family and friends when she heard the news.
    Next, the Winklers’ attorney, Bill Neese, and Kay Farese Turner (Steve Farese’s sister, who represented Mary), would meet to work out a schedule for times, dates, and places of visitation.
    It was only the first battle. Dan and Dianne Winkler’s suit to terminate Mary Winkler’s parental rights was still pending, as was their petition to adopt her children.
    A first visit was to take place on Saturday, September 28, but it didn’t happen. Mary was devastated when a final-hour motion to block visitation was filed by Matthew’s parents’ attorneys. The court of appeals granted the motion.
    Mary’s legal team would have ten days to respond.
    On that same last weekend in September 2007, the national tabloids reported that Mary Winkler had had a close relationship with a man for months. Darrell Pillow, forty-one, a truck driver for a grocery company and the brother of Paul Pillow, who owns the dry cleaning shop where Mary works, verified that they were very close friends.
    Still, despite the tabloid reporters’ efforts to slant the friendship toward an affair, it seemed more a casual thing than a blazing romance. Mary didn’t comment on Darrell Pillow at all, and he spoke mostly of casual meetings: visiting her in the mental health facility where she spent the summer of 2007, or of eating lunch or dinner together. He seemed far more taken with Mary than she with him.
    Before her surprisingly short sentence was handed down in April, Pillow said that Mary had been reluctant to make plans for the future. During her trial, she told him that she might not have any future but “years and years” behind bars.
    Pillow, a short man with bright blue eyes and dark hair, spoke with Tonya Smith-King of the Jackson Sun. He said that when Mary was released from the treatment center, she had told him she “needed to be single,” and he felt her pulling away from him.
    “I was hurt,” Pillow said. “The times that me and Mary spent together, I thought there was more there. I asked her, ‘Mary, am I going to be history when you get out of here? Am I going to be done? Are we going to be over?’
    “And she said, ‘No. Absolutely not!’ I just kind of had the feeling that as time was getting close for her to be a free woman, I was kind of getting a little feeling that