Murder in the parsonage
Matthew Winkler was the son of a preacher, the grandson of a preacher and the great-grandson of a preacher, so he was destined for the pulpit. His large athletic frame had made him something of a sports star in Decatur, Alabama, the small town in which he had spent much of his youth. Not only that, his warm personality and dazzling smile endeared him to many of those around him.
As a young man, Matthew attended Freed-Hardeman University on the outskirts of Henderson, Tennessee, a very small city some 62 miles (100 kilometres) west of Memphis. It was a natural choice. His father, Pastor Dan Winkler, was an adjunct professor. A religious university, it was affiliated with the conservative Churches of Christ. As a result, it had very strict guidelines governing modesty in dress and relations with the opposite sex. It was in this restrictive environment that Matthew met a petite young brunette named Mary Freeman.
Nearly a year older than Matthew, Mary was born on 10 December 1973 at Knoxville, Tennessee, a city with a population of approximately 180,000. Though the Freemans were not wealthy, they were somewhat better off than the Winklers. Much of the Freemans’ efforts centred around Laurel Church of Christ, where Mary’s father served as a lay minister. The church had proved greatly supportive when Mary’s younger sister Patricia, a child who had been crippled physically and mentally by meningitis, died of a seizure at the age of eight.
Mary’s great goal was to be a teacher, just like her mother. In high school she had been a member of the Future Teachers of America, the very same organization that had once counted serial killer Marie Hilley as a member. After graduation, Mary attended David Lipscomb University in Nashville, an institution ‘committed to teach truth as revealed in God’s word through daily Bible classes and chapel’, before transferring to Freed-Hardeman University. It was here that Mary and Matthew, the couple with the Biblical names, became campus sweethearts. They became engaged after four months of dating and on 20 April 1996 they were married at the Freeman family home in Knoxville. The bride’s father performed the ceremony.
Though the couple returned to the university, their stay was short. Mary became pregnant and money grew tight. Then in October 1997 Mary gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Patricia, after the sister she had lost as a child. Two years later, a second girl, Mary Alice (known as Allie) was born. Mary put aside her dreams of becoming a teacher and tried her best to support her young family. She took on a number of low-wage retail jobs and for a time she worked in the post office. In the meantime, Matthew pursued a career in the ministry. One of his most satisfying jobs was teaching Bible classes at Boyd Christian School in the small Tennessee town of McMinnville.
Change in fortune
Although the couple’s struggles had by no means ended, it seemed that 2005 might bring a change in fortune. At the beginning of the year, Matthew became the pulpit preacher of Fourth Street Church of Christ in Selmer, a small Tennessee town just 16 miles (25 kilometres) south of Freed-Hardeman.
The couple and their two daughters moved into the parsonage, a modest bungalow on a large plot not far from the church. Within weeks of settling in, they were blessed with a third daughter, who was named Brianna. Added to the good news was Mary’s return to school, where she pursued her teaching degree.
Matthew and Mary seemed well suited to the quiet little town. Their first year passed without incident. The family celebrated Brianna’s first birthday on 5 March 2006 in the knowledge that Mary was finally about to realize her long-deferred dream to teach children. On 21 March, Mary reported for her first day as a substitute teacher at Selmer Elementary School. All appeared to go smoothly, though Mary’s new colleagues did notice that she spent a bit too much time talking on her mobile telephone. That evening, the Winklers ate takeaway pizza and watched the children’s film Chicken Little, which Matthew had rented from a nearby store. By 8.30, the girls were in bed.
It was then that the family evening took on a different tone. The young couple began to argue about money, as they had done many times before. It was familiar ground, though the terrain had been made much more difficult by Mary’s poor judgement.
Although she was the person who was entrusted with the family finances, she had become involved in internet fraud. The preacher’s wife had deposited two fake cheques amounting to $17,500 in the family’s bank account and had then transferred a portion of the money to a second bank. Both institutions, the First State Bank and the Regions Bank, were in the process of investigating Mary’s activities. The telephone calls that the new substitute teacher had received at work had been from the banks in question. Whether Matthew knew it or not, he and his wife were expected to have a meeting with a banker on the following day.
Husband’s complaints
According to Mary, her husband’s unhappiness with the sensitive situation caused him to air other complaints: his dissatisfaction with the administration of the church, for instance. Eventually, things calmed down to a point at which they were at least able to relax a bit. They began to watch a movie, but Mary fell asleep. Matthew then woke her up and they went to bed and had sexual relations of a kind that Mary would describe as ‘ordinary for us’.
Then, at about six o’clock in the morning, Mary said, the baby began to cry and Matthew literally kicked her out of bed. Both parents went to Brianna’s crib. Once there, the preacher placed his hands over the baby’s nose and mouth to encourage sleep, a method he had used many times before. Mary did not like him doing this, so she took the baby and rocked her. Matthew then went back to bed. Once Brianna had fallen asleep Mary went to make some coffee. But that was not all. Mary said that she then went to tell Matthew to ‘stop being so mean’. Then all became a cloud. Somehow she wound up with a 12 gauge shotgun in her hands. It was a gun that Matthew used to hunt turkeys. She had aimed it at her sleeping husband, Mary said, but she had not pulled the trigger. Even so, there had most certainly been a gunshot. It was not, Mary said, as loud as she had expected it would be. Nevertheless, it was efficient. The preacher took 77 pellets, which punctured several organs and broke his spine. As he lay dying, blood bubbling from his mouth, he managed just one word: ‘Why?’
Patricia then entered her parents’ bedroom, but was quickly ushered out. She had been awoken by what she would describe in court as a ‘big boom or something’. The 8-year-old and her sister Allie were told that their father had been hurt, and that they would all have to leave the house. When Patricia expressed concern for her father, Mary said that help was already on its way.
The mother and her three girls left with nothing save a pair of baby socks and the shotgun. Mary drove the family minivan throughout the night to Jackson, Mississippi, 250 miles (400 kilometres) south of Selmer. She rested for a few hours at an inn, before driving another 250 miles (400 kilometres) to Orange Beach on the Gulf of Mexico.
By the time the mother and her daughters had begun playing in the sand, news of Matthew’s death was known to all at the Fourth Street Church of Christ. In fact, some members of the church had discovered his body about 15 hours after Mary had pulled the trigger. When Matthew had not appeared for evening prayers, a delegation of elders had gone to the parsonage to check on the young family. What they found was Matthew’s dead body sprawled on the bedroom floor. Their immediate concern was for Mary and the children. Had they been abducted?
Five hundred miles (800 kilometres) away, the dead preacher’s wife and daughters were enjoying the hospitality offered by the Orange Beach Sleep Inn. Mary would later testify that she knew she would be caught but she wanted to treat her daughters to the beach. ‘I just wanted to be with them,’ she would later say, ‘before they had bad days, have a happy day.’
The preacher’s wife had demonstrated some caution, but not much. Mary had avoided using her credit cards, yet she continued to drive around in the family’s Sienna minivan. Eventually, she was spotted making an illegal U-turn and was pulled over by Jason Whitlock, an Orange Beach police officer. After running the Tennessee plates through the system and realizing what he had on his hands, he called for backup. Whitlock approached the vehicle with caution, thinking that he might find a kidnapper. He was surprised to find Mary and her three daughters, seemingly healthy and unharmed. The shotgun that had been used to kill the dead preacher was safely in its case, never to be used again.
Mary was taken to the Orange Beach Police Department headquarters, where her daughters were given food from McDonald’s as she began to talk. At first, she denied shooting her husband, but it was not long before her story began to change. It was, she insisted, a blur – she was not certain what had happened exactly. Eventually, Mary admitted that she had shot her husband. All the while, she was protective of Matthew. Looking towards the inevitable trial, she praised him to the police, ‘He was a mighty fine person. No matter what in the end, I don’t want him smeared.’
To the prosecutors, Mary’s statements were viewed as clear evidence that the murder was premeditated, and she was charged with murder in the first degree.
Obsessive
Faced with the possibility of a lifetime in prison for their client, Mary’s defence team launched a public relations campaign. First of all they organized an article, ‘She Killed Her Husband. Why?’, which was published in the November 2006 issue of Glamour magazine. The story suggested that Matthew had been obsessive about money and had possibly been abusive towards his wife. Mary’s support team also appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America, where they put forward the notion that Matthew insisted on being in control.
Although the prosecution were not going for the death penalty, they moved forward in the belief that Mary should be found guilty of first-degree murder. In her testimony, Mary spoke of the hours leading up to Matthew’s death.
‘I was upset at him because he had really been on me lately,’ she said, ‘criticizing me for things, the way I walk, the way I eat, everything. It was just building up to this point. I was just tired of it. I guess I just got to a point and snapped.’
While it was true, the defence conceded, that Mary had held the gun, she had not intended pulling the trigger. The actual firing of the gun had been an accident. By fleeing the parsonage, Mary had only been following instinct.
But there was much more. The defence put forward an account of the mental, physical and sexual abuse, not to mention the degradation, that their client had been forced to endure. After her arrest at Orange Beach, Mary had denied that Matthew had abused her in any manner at all. Now, under oath in Tennessee, she told an entirely different story.
To begin with, Mary said that her husband had kicked and punched her and had threatened her with the shotgun.
The preacher had also visited pornography sites on the internet, which he used as a prelude to sex. Mary told the court that Matthew asked her to engage in oral and anal sex, acts she considered to be unnatural. Moreover, the preacher had asked her to wear a miniskirt, a wig and platform heels in bed. These last two objects were displayed before the court as Mary sobbed.
‘If you look up spousal abuse in the dictionary,’ a lawyer for the defence asserted, ‘you’re going to see Mary Winkler’s picture.’
The ploy worked. After a little more than seven hours of deliberation, a jury consisting of ten women and two men found Mary guilty of voluntary manslaughter.
At her sentencing hearing, the convicted woman portrayed herself as a victim. Mary said that she had ‘suffered the loss of someone I love’, a reference to the man she had killed.
‘I think of Matthew every day, and the guilt, and I always miss him and love him.’
The sentence, handed down on 8 June, consisted of a mere 150 days in prison, with a further 60 days to be served in a mental health facility. These 210 days would be followed by three years probation. Since Mary had already spent 143 days in prison awaiting trial, she endured only one more week before being sent off to the psychiatric hospital.
Sixty-seven days after sentencing, Mary Winkler, the convicted murderer of Matthew Winkler, was released. In August 2008, after a lengthy legal battle with the dead preacher’s parents, she was granted full custody of her three children.