Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder and Other True Cases

  Orange Beach, Alabama, is almost 350 miles from Selmer, Tennessee, a resort town with white sugar sand beaches on the Gulf of Mexico. Tourism brochures for the Alabama Gulf Coast cities and towns advertise the area as a place to “slow down, let loose, rediscover yourself,” and let its attractions “cast a spell over you.”

  Beyond the beach itself, Orange Beach has a “Monster Theatre” with continuous film footage of sharks and other deadly sea creatures, a mall, a fifteen-screen theater, a Starbucks, and “the South’s Tallest Ferris Wheel.”

  It hardly seemed like a place a killer would take a captive and grieving family, and yet, on the evening of March 23, that was where Officer Jason Whitlock of the Orange Beach Police Department spotted a Sienna minivan making an illegal U-turn on Perdido Beach Boulevard. He pulled it over and with standard procedure used his radio to check for “wants and warrants” on the license plates. The report that came back galvanized him into action: he had stopped the vehicle that had an Amber Alert out for it.

  Whitlock immediately called for backup, and three police units arrived to surround the Winklers’ vehicle in the Wal-Mart parking lot.

  Whitlock had no idea what they might find, and he used great caution as he walked toward the driver-side window. If Mary Winkler and her children—Patricia, Allie, and Brianna—were still alive and hopefully uninjured, he didn’t want to do anything that might place them in danger. A kidnapper would probably try to hold them as shields to keep from being arrested.

  But when Whitlock walked up to the window, he was shocked. A youngish woman who looked very much like the Amber Alert’s description of Mary Winkler was at the wheel. Two little girls and a baby, all mercifully unhurt, were with her.

  The Orange Beach officer scanned the inside of the minivan quickly, searching for someone who might be hiding there, perhaps covered with a blanket. But there was no one else in the vehicle.

  And then he spotted a shotgun in its case. None of this made sense. Why wouldn’t a kidnapper have taken the weapon with him?

  The woman identified herself as Mary Carol Winkler. She didn’t seem to be afraid, or upset; there was only a certain flatness in her affect. She was probably in shock, and she appeared to be exhausted, which could explain her lack of emotion.

  She had not asked him a single question.

  “It was almost like she was expecting it to happen,” Whitlock would recall regarding Mary Winkler’s calmness when she saw his police car and his uniform.

  When he asked Mary if she would come to his department’s headquarters, she agreed readily. Her chief concern was for her daughters, and he assured her that they would be well taken care of.

  It would take so much time to sort out what had happened, but as what was left of the Matthew Winkler family arrived at the police station in Orange Beach, Alabama, one thing was clear. Their lives had changed forever. They had become public people, every detail of their lives sought out by the media. All over America, people who heard the news flash that the Amber Alert had been called off because the missing woman and children had been found were relieved, but still curious about what on earth could have happened back in Selmer, and later, to Mary and the girls.

  Mary was taken into custody; she didn’t object. The girls went along to the police station with her. She was worried that they were hungry, saying she had been on the way to a Waffle House to buy supper for them. The Alabama officers were very concerned for them, too, and brought in food for Mary’s daughters from McDonald’s and then found a children’s movie for them to watch.

  Even the investigators were baffled when they realized that it was quite likely that the quiet little woman was not a victim—but a suspect in the shooting of her husband. Why else would she have had the shotgun in her vehicle?

  What had caused Matthew Winkler’s death was relatively easy to determine. Someone had blasted his life away with a shotgun. And Mary Winkler had that shotgun in her possession.

  Why he became a homicide victim would be far more difficult to figure out. At 10 P.M., far away from home in Orange Beach, Alabama, on the night before the autopsy, Mary Winkler explained what had happened, to Corporal Stan Stabler of the Alabama Bureau of Investigation and to Special Agent Steve Stuesher of the FBI.

  At the police station, Stabler read Mary her Miranda rights, advising her that she did not have to talk to him and Steve Stuesher, that she could have an attorney present if she liked. And she nodded and said she understood, signing the form to show that.

  She sat now at a long table in an interview room in the Orange Beach Police Department. A sensitive interview in a pending criminal matter doesn’t start out with the questions that detectives are most anxious to ask. Rather, they begin with easier topics.

  Mary gave her name, Mary Carol Winkler, and then added, “I’m a Freeman—maiden name.”

  She told them her address in Selmer, her phone number, and said she wasn’t really employed. She was a student at Freed-Hardeman University in Henderson, Tennessee.

  Mary seemed much more worried about Patricia, Allie, and Brianna than she was about the investigator’s questions. Stan Stabler, a big man with reddish blond hair and a kind face, told her the girls were fine. They had their dinner and were now wrapped cozily in blankets in a nearby room, watching the children’s movie.

  “They’re, you know, concerned about Mom,” he said. “I told them you were fine, and we were fixing to come in here and talk with you, too, and your little girl wants to put my name on her list of names she’s got of people she’s talked to, so I’m gonna get back with her, too.”

  Finally, he now asked Mary when she had left Tennessee. She answered that they had left the day before—in the morning. “Wednesday,” she added, “the 22nd.”

  She said she had driven as far as Jackson, Mississippi, where they stayed overnight at the Fairfield Inn. That would have been a very long drive—287 miles. At legal speeds, it would have taken her four and a half hours.

  When Stabler asked Mary why she had left Selmer, she said she wasn’t ready to comment on that. She said she had never been to Orange Beach before, but “I wanted to take them to a beach, and I found a straight line.”

  She estimated that they had arrived in Orange Beach an hour or two after lunch on this day—Thursday.

  “How long were you planning on staying?”

  “Tonight.”

  She was planning to leave tomorrow, Friday, and drive back to west Tennessee. She had family in east Tennessee, in Knoxville, but she was planning to go to her in-laws’ home near Selmer.

  “How long have you been married?” Stabler asked.

  “Nine years, eleven months.”

  It was so hard to dive in and ask the heavy questions that hung in the air. She clearly didn’t want to talk about them.

  “How was your marriage?”

  “Good.” She said nothing more than that.

  Stabler could see that Mary was “getting cottonmouthed” and he offered her something to drink. She asked for water, and as she sipped it, they talked about how beautiful the beach was and what roads she had driven south from Selmer. When she seemed calmer, he asked her again about her marriage.

  She said they hadn’t had any major problems.

  “How were y’all financially?”

  “Um…getting through.”

  Mary explained that Matthew was a full-time pastor and his church had a congregation of about two hundred. His only income was his church salary, and some from speaking engagements (income that was random and couldn’t be counted on). Matthew was planning to start on getting his master’s degree in the summer, or definitely by fall.

  “When’s the last time you talked to him?” Stabler asked.

  “Yesterday morning…at home.”

  “What’d y’all discuss?”

  “No real conversation…umm. Just no comment,” she said. “I don’t know.”

  She had come out from where her mind was hiding just a little bit, but now she scurried back. She
didn’t want to talk about Wednesday morning. Stabler talked quietly to her, asking her to tell him her side of what had happened—what problems she had faced. He asked her to tell him what was troubling her so much.

  “I just can’t right now.”

  “Okay.”

  “I appreciate—I feel like you have genuine concern and I do appreciate you, uh—I’m just not [up] to that right now.”

  And he did have concern for her, but he was also a detective who was trying to solve a bizarre mystery, and he pressed on.

  Mary Winkler rambled quite a bit, telling him she had heard children’s voices while she was handcuffed in an area of the police station, and then realized it was her own children. “I about did a backflip,” she said, “to get out of it because I was in line of sight.”

  She didn’t want her children to see her in handcuffs. “Those three right there are my only concern right now.”

  She had sent word to Matthew’s parents, “Nana and Poppa,” to come and get Patricia, Allie, and Brianna, and they were on the way. She felt she could relax when they arrived because her mother-in-law would take good care of her girls.

  Stabler asked her if she would tell him what happened.

  “I haven’t been told really…anything myself. I don’t know.”

  “I’ve talked with the girls a little bit,” he said. “Okay? And they’ve told me what they’ve seen and heard.”

  “Right,” she said.

  “I need you to fill in those gaps a little bit,” Stabler said. “All three know—to an extent—what’s taken place.”

  “What did you ask me?” Mary said vaguely.

  “To tell me what happened.”

  Again, she said she wasn’t ready to do that yet. As Stabler and Stuesher spoke about her children and what the events of the past twenty-four hours might mean to them, she listened quietly. And when she finally spoke, she talked not of her own complicity but of her concern for Matthew. And what newspapers might say about him.

  “No matter what, in the end, I don’t want it…umm, I don’t want him smeared.”

  Mary Winkler talked in circles, saying that she didn’t know what words to use to explain what had happened. “Sometimes I think something might have happened and then, there’s no way…”

  “Did he hurt you?”

  “Not physically.”

  Stan Stabler asked Mary if she knew her husband’s condition at the present time, and she said she didn’t.

  “Was he alive when you left the house, or do you know for sure?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Mary,” he asked quietly. “Why did you shoot him?” She didn’t answer.

  “Had you planned ahead of time to shoot him—or did it happen, just on the spur of the moment?”

  “Not planned.”

  Mary’s answers came in one or two words, pulled with agonizing slowness out of a memory that she insisted was blurry. She was not sure of when it had happened. She knew that the shotgun was kept on top of their closet. Matthew had used it to hunt turkeys. She kept saying that she could “surely not” have shot her husband. She had never shot that gun. She kept denying that she had shot Matthew, but then she went back in her mind to the time when she was driving away from Selmer the day before.

  “Driving down the road, something would go in my head, and I’d thought there is no way, what had just happened, and then I hadn’t really seen anything or heard anything. I’ve used my name everywhere I went…And this was just my last time to be with them, and we were just going to have some fun. I just wanted to be with them before they had bad days—have a happy day.”

  Mary murmured that she wanted to have one last happy time with her little girls, and that was why she had driven them to the pristine beach on the Gulf of Mexico. Whatever else happened, she wanted them to remember this day they had spent together, having fun, making good memories that she hoped would one day obscure whatever bad memories they had.

  As vague as she was, she seemed to know she was in a great deal of trouble, so much trouble that she might never be able to spend any happy days with her daughters again, perhaps not until they were grown women. She had planned to get them to Matthew’s parents, who were on vacation, by Friday.

  They were “good people,” she said. “They’re the family.”

  She spoke now about Matthew. She had been thinking about him and about how he had so many rules and schedules for her to follow, everything “in this certain order.

  “I love him dearly,” she said, “but gosh, he just nailed me to the ground. I was real good for quite some time. My problem was I got a job at the post office a couple of years ago—and the first of our marriage. I just took it like a mouse. Didn’t think anything different. My mom just took it from my dad, and that stupid scenario. And I got a job where I had to have nerve and high self-esteem, and I have been battling this for years…For some time, at some point, it was really good. Then, I don’t know. We moved over a year ago—February ’05—and it just came back out for some reason.”

  “He would knock your self-esteem down?”

  “Uh—no. Uh, just chewing, whatever. And that’s the problem. I have nerve now and I have self-esteem. So my ugly came out.”

  It was an unfortunate phrase for her to use, and Mary Winkler would hear it repeated over and over in the media in the months to come.

  My ugly came out.

  Mary tried to make excuses for Matthew, for what he did to push her over the edge. Even though he had controlled her, kept her on his schedule, undermined her self-confidence, she wanted the two investigators to know that Matthew was “so good—so good, too. It was just a weakness. I think a lot of times, he had high blood pressure, but he’d never go enough to the doctor to get medicine for it. He was a mighty fine person, and that’s the thing. There’s no sense, you know,” she said. “Fox News saying some hick-town lady did this because he was a mean—you know. No sense in that. Just say the lady was a moron evil woman and let’s go with it.”

  She had opened up to them, and she feared for her girls, although Mary was sure that “their nana,” Matthew’s mother, would get them through it. She worried for her father, and said she didn’t want him devoting his life to her, coming to visit her wherever she was.

  She didn’t know what had set her off yesterday morning. There was no predicting how things would go. “I just never know what’s coming next. I think we’re having a good day, and then bam! I’m nervous about something and he’s aloof about it. But it’s just no excuse for anything. But you know, it wasn’t just out of the blue either.”

  She hinted that Matthew had threatened her at some point in their marriage—had said something life-threatening. That had really scared her, but then, that was when he was at his absolute worst.

  They talked for a long time, but Mary recalled few details. She admitted to them that she had shot Matthew, but everything was a “total blur” in her memory. She remembered being surprised that the shotgun hadn’t had more of a hard kick when she fired it. She knew she had taken the girls with her and left, but she had only packed one thing: a pair of baby socks.

  She didn’t recall why she’d been angry the night before, except that Matthew had gone back on his promise to play Battleship with Patricia. They had started watching a movie, but she had fallen asleep, and that was one of her husband’s pet peeves with her.

  But now, she wanted to be fair. She wanted the news media to blame her. “There’s no reason for him to have anything ugly [said about him] because I have obviously done something very bad, so let me just, you know, get the bad. That would be my request.”

  Steve Stuesher said, “Mary, that’s very noble—but—very honorable of you to have that attitude—”

  “I never spoke up,” she said. “It’s a two-way thing. I just kept it all inside. It’s not healthy, you know, for him, not to have a clue what I thought. That’s not fair to him.”

  Suddenly, she asked, “Has there been a funeral yet?”
br />   She had clearly lost her sense of time. It had not been two days yet, and at this point, her husband’s body was awaiting autopsy.

  Steve Stuesher was about to turn off the tape recorder but he turned to Mary in an attempt to reassure her about her little girls.

  “Your girls are going to be taken care of, okay? I’ll tell you again; they had a great day today, yesterday.”

  “Beautiful,” she said.

  Neither Steve Stuesher nor Stan Stabler commented on the pain that the three girls would undoubtedly face for the rest of their lives. It seemed kinder to let Mary Winkler believe that she had been a good mother, perhaps for the last time.

  The Reverend Dan Winkler and his wife, Dianne, had raced to Alabama to take charge of Patricia, Allie, and Brianna. Clearly, Mary liked and trusted them, and she was relieved to know that her girls were safe with them.

  When her father-in-law first saw Mary in handcuffs in Orange Beach, he murmured, “I’m so sorry for all this.”

  Mary, still stoic and strangely flat emotionally, just stared at him.

  “I wish we could take the handcuffs off,” Dan Winkler said. “And I could give you a big bear hug.”

  At that point, Mary lifted her arms, her wrists still bound together by the cuffs, and reached toward Dan Winkler.

  He told her he loved her, his instincts and training taking over as he comforted her. Even though their son was dead, the elder couple was not ready to condemn this little woman who had been a daughter to them for almost ten years. Forgiveness? Dan Winkler could not bring himself to do that—not yet. His belief, based on the Bible, was that a person had to have a broken and contrite spirit, be penitent, and confess his or her sin.

  He knew that his daughter-in-law had shot his son. Ironically, it had happened on Dan Winkler’s birthday, the day before, but he didn’t yet know why it had happened.

  The postmortem examination of the body of Matthew Winkler took place at the State of Tennessee Center for Forensic Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, under the direction of McNairy County medical examiner Andrew Eason, M.D. Forensic pathologist Staci A. Turner, M.D., an assistant medical examiner, performed the autopsy with Amy McMaster, M.D., observing.