My Ugly Came Out - Selmer, Tennessee

This week, in Selmer, Tennessee, a new pastor's family moves into town and all seems great until one of them ends up brutally murdered while police frantically search for the rest of the family before they meet the same fate. But the whole thing isn't what it seems to be in the end. Welcome to Small Town Murder. Hello everybody and welcome back to Small Town Murder! Yay! Oh yay indeed, Jimmy. Yay indeed. My name is James Petrogallow. I'm here with my co-host. I am Jimmy Wissman. Thank you folks so much for joining us today on another absolutely crazy edition of Small Town Murder. This is a wild one as always. We cannot wait to get into it. Before we do though, shut up and give me murder.com is the website to go to where you can get all your merchandise and keep an eye out there for tickets to be on sale for 2026. Our December shows are all sold out, but we're announcing a whole new slate of shows for 2026 and they will go on sale in time for the holidays. 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Crime in Sports, your stupid opinions and Small Town Murder all add free with your Patreon as well. Can't beat any get a shout out at the end of the show. Jimmy, you'll go ahead and mispronounce your name even though we'd love to get it correct. You would love to, but it's just hard. That said, disclaimer time, this is a comedy show, everybody. We are comedians. The stories are unfortunately 1,000% real. Nothing is made up for comedic effect or embellished, or any garbage like that. We try to do the most meticulous research of anybody else and then have jokes too. That's what we do here. What we do is we never make fun of the victims or the victims family. Why is that, James? Because we're assholes, but we're not scumbags. See how that works? It's real easy to do. If you do that, you can do it real tasteful, real easy there. So that sounds good. I can't wait to get into the story for anybody out there that thinks true crime and comedy should never, ever go together. I don't know what to tell you. This. Yeah, check it out. You might, you might change your mind. We'll see. Either way, no complaining later. That said, I think it's time to sit back, everybody. Let's all clear the lungs and let's all shout. Shut up and give me murder. Let's do this, everybody. Okay. Let's go on a trip, shall we? Let's do it. We're going to Tennessee this week. Oh boy. Selmer, Tennessee. S-E-L-M-E-R. Selmer, Tennessee. It's down in Southwestern Tennessee. About an hour and 45 minutes to Memphis. If you want to go all the way to the end of Tennessee. If you want to go the other way, it's about two and a half hours to Nashville. And it's about seven hours and 40 minutes to our last Tennessee episode. Oh, wow. That was all the way in the northeastern part of the state. So that's how big Tennessee is. It's a big, big wide state. It's a long state. No, it's a big fucker. When you drive through it, like on the 40, it's just a hill, after hill, after hill, after hill. Yeah. The last one we did was Mountain City, Tennessee. That's episode 611, the Facebook Catfish Murders, which were... Oh, yeah. I remember that episode. That was a lot. This is in McNary County, area code 731, little bit of history of the town. Apparently, the rumor is, and what they think is, that it was named after Selma, Alabama. Which makes very little sense, because Selma is S-E-L-M-A. S-E-L-M-A. And this is S-E-L-M-E-R. That went with hard R. I don't understand. Well, there you go. That's... Maybe that's part of it. The town was incorporated in 1901. Now, a couple of things in the history. They're going to be more modern history here. June 16th, 2007. A pro-modified drag racing car driven by Troy Warren Critchley lost control while performing a... They were doing a demonstration thing. He was doing a burnout routine. Look at me burning out bone in circles. During a car show charity parade on Mulberry Avenue in downtown Selma. His car left the road and struck a bunch of people in the crowd that were attending the parade, which was for... The title was, America Can, Cars for Kids. That's what this was. Unfortunately for them, they didn't realize they'd be on the hood of these cars. Pressed up against the windshield. Jesus Christ. Sending them into the crowd for them. That's horrible. And this part here is definitely not funny. Six young people were killed. Six. Oh my God. Six children were killed. Two died at the scene of the accident and four died later at hospitals. That's horrifying. That's horrifying. Imagine you go to a nice downtown, small town event to raise some money for charity and your kid is... killed by a fucking drag racing car. What did he do? How did... He was doing burnouts. Yeah, and then just got loose. The circle didn't catch at one point and he shot off into the crowd. Why would you do... Oh my God. I see... You see those all the time on TikTok now or on Instagram, whatever? They... These kids... Sounds so old. I tell you what these kids are doing. This wasn't a kid doing this. This was some... No, this isn't a grown-ass... But that's what these are. These are adult people with their fucking souped-up Dodge Charger and they got to do burnouts in a city intersection with dipshit stand-in-all. And they run from the car and they've got their phones out and... It's crazy. And every time there's a video of somebody getting blasted with the ass end of this car and... Why do you keep doing this? And this was like, you know, completely sanctioned by the town and everything. This wasn't like a... Charity event. Yeah, this was for charity. Oh Lord. Lawsuits were filed against the city and the event organizers asking for more than $85,000 or $85 million in damages. Yeah. On March 4th, 2008, the McNary County Grand Jury returned an indictment against Critchley, the driver, on six counts of vehicular homicide due to recklessness and 22 counts of reckless aggravated assault. For every person that's there. Neither cars for kids nor the city of Selma were named in the indictment. Critchley pleaded guilty to 28 charges of reckless assault and was sentenced to 18 months probation. Six kids died. He didn't do a day. That's crazy. In 2025, this year, April 3rd, 2025, an F3 tornado struck the city in early in the morning, killing five people and injuring 14 others. The city lost an estimated $10 million in property damage as well. Oh my God. Yeah. The tornado touchdown in downtown and Oak Hill neighborhoods destroying a lot of homes and buildings. Another quick piece of history here. This town, by the way. Okay. It is had a sheriff you've heard of probably. This is where Sheriff Buford Pusser came from. McNary County. Yes, they made a movie in the 70s called Walking Tall starring Joe Don Baker. Then they made a sequel to it called Final Justice. If you're an MST fan, Mystery Science Theater fan, you will definitely know that one. That's actually Mike Nelson's first episode as the host there when he replaced Joel. And there's the famous line, you guys watch Joe Don Baker movies, which is fucking hilarious. But yeah, in 1964, in August, his wife, Pauline, and he and his wife, Pauline were ambushed and she was shot fatally. So he basically, he had scars that he got shot with in his face. And he basically was like trying to hunt people down after that. So it was an interesting thing. Take it easy, Buford. And then he died seven years later. And Joe Don Baker immortalized him in a movie. So reviews of this town, let's see here. Here's five stars. Selmer is a small, quiet town filled with so much history and kind residents. Famous for a rockabilly slug burgers. I don't even want to know. Oh, boy. That sounds worse than Scrapple and famous Buford Pusser history. There's so much to see and visit in our town. The only change I wish we had was more places for families to do activities. Those activities. Yeah. Well, let's not have a. Let's not have a cars for kids event. That's a. That that was an activity for families. That's what I think activities for you guys. Chill stay in your houses. Why don't you? Well, then you'll get hit by a tornado. I don't know what to tell you. Hide. Get in the basement. The fuck out of there. I don't know what to tell you. Three stars. I would like to see high speed internet. Yeah, you'd like to see it. Huh? That'd be nice. This isn't a review from, you know, 1997 either. This is, you know, recent. The farmer's market is delightful. The school system is okay. Bethel Springs School is amazing. I wish there were more chances for technology advancement. Just yeah. Yeah, I'd like my catch up. We'd like to be in the 21st century, please. Thank you. Yeah. Uh, two stars moved here to get out of Poe Dunk. Moved here to get out of Poe Dunk. They don't even have, why? What? Where did you live before? Where were you? Goddamn. In a dugout, like just a dugout cave in the side of a hill. The hell are you talking about? That worked until the hospital closed. Moved here to get out of Poe Dunk. That worked until the hospital closed. Now this town is much, is worse than the much smaller town I moved here from. Yeah, you got to. They don't have a hospital in there. They don't have a hospital for Christ's sake. McNary County doesn't have homestead taxes for the elderly to receive free land taxes after a certain age. That's the sentence. I don't know what it means. Doesn't have homestead taxes for the elderly to receive free land taxes after a certain age. Very, very few. If you, if you own it, it after a while, it stops. Gotcha. All right. I didn't know if that was if you homestead taxes, a weird way to put it. Yeah, I don't like that one. I know that's a different. That creeps me out. Well, it's a different thing than just property taxes. I don't get whatever. Very few job opportunities has a very retirement town feel, but drugs here are a huge all caps problem in this area. Huge problem. If I hadn't bought a house here and had children, I'd pull up stakes and leave in a heartbeat. But I'm going to, since I have kids, I'm going to leave them here in a town where drugs are a huge problem and there's no hospital. If you leave, you can take your kids with you. That seems like I got to leave them behind, man. It's too rough. I'm going to keep them here and protect them. Holy shit. People in this town, 4,421. So small town, small town kind of in the middle of nowhere by itself. Men and women breakdown women are 50.1% of the population. So just over median age here, 37, which is just below the national average. It's about 50, 50 married, which is normal in the country. More people are single with children here. It's about 24%. The rest of the country is about 10%. So, interesting there. Now the race in this town, 89.5% white, 3.4% black, 0.0% Asian, 5.8% Hispanic. Religion in this town, 54.3% religious. So above the national average by a few points here. And by far and away, the number one, and really looking at all the numbers, the only religion in the town is Baptist. It is 35% Baptist and it is like 0.0% Episcopalian, Lutheran, Mormon, 0.6% Catholic. It's like two people. So I just found out how dominant this religion is in the country. Every time we've done this show, yeah, the Baptist are, as we know, the Catholics of the South. Yeah, that's right. Ubiquitous, 0.0% Jewish. Unemployment is a little bit above the national average, slightly high. Median household income here is low. It's less than half the national average. The rest of the country, it's about 69,000 here. It is 32,704. Household. That's rough. Now cost of living, maybe it's dirt cheap. Let's find out. Cost of living is 100 in the rest of the country. That's average and par or whatever. Here it's 73. So that's low. And the housing is the lowest thing by far. Median home cost here $131,200. Not bad. $1992 prices. Yeah. $1992 prices. Well, I mean, if you make 32 grand a year, you can afford $131,000 house. That's about right. Barely. I mean, I mean, that's, you know, at least it's not a half a million. You know, that's pretty good. And maybe we'll find some gems here as we look at the Selma, Tennessee real estate report. Average two bedroom rental here goes for $760 a month, which is well below them. It's over 1200 in the rest of the country. House number one is a hovel. Not going to lie. There it is. Oh, yeah. It's all the paint is peeling off the outside. The inside is somehow worse. Look at this. There's rustic. That's wild. It's a little bit of a mess. It's a little bit of a mess. It's a little bit of a mess. There's rustic. That's wild. You'd call that rustic. I would call that living in the woods, basically. Distressed. Yeah. It's distressed. All right. It's awfully distressed. It's a two bedroom, one bath, 1240 square foot house on a point, three, four acre lot. It's built in 1944 and, hey, it doesn't look like it's been touched since. So that's nice. Hasn't been messed with at all. This house is 29,900 bucks. Very affordable. It's on sale. Well, the price, it recently had a price cut of $15,000. So they took a third of the house off, basically. It was 45,000. Now it's 30,000. That is crazy. It says charming downtown opportunity awaits. The word opportunity is a red flag in a real estate listing. That means shit hole. And charming is oftentimes a red flag. That means small. Yeah. Yeah. An old, small and old is charming. Yeah. Opportunity means shit hole that you need to rebuild. Harking back to an earlier time. Centuries. God. House number two, three bedroom, two bath. This is kind of your typical little suburban, nice little 1,000, 1,096 square feet. So not a big house. It's pretty small. It's on one acre total there. Built in 2004. This is 1,069, uh, one arm. Sorry, $169,900. This is just small. It just had a price cut of $15,000 as well. And then all towns on sale. Every every real estate listing in the country that I look at for this show, everyone has a price cut. And everything's on sale. And then finally, here's this one, three bedroom, four bath, T-bowl for all your B-holes here, each and every B-hole. 4,336 square feet, big yard, big fountain out front. Yeah. That's a nice house. I love the yellow lights at night like that, that warm, the glow. Warm light color. It's such a great color. This is on 1.63 acres built in 1961, $449,000. And just went on the market, so not reduced yet. Things to do here. All right, let's get into it. The Rockabilly Highway Revival Festival. Yeah, yeah. Here it is. The Rockabilly Highway Revival Festival is an annual event in Selma, Tennessee. It features rockabilly music from old and new artists alike. Yeah, and a hot rod show. The music, motorcycles, hot rods and great food are a perfect way to pick a kickoff this summer. Dressed, dressed in your best rockabilly. Yeah. Yeah, look like a member of the Stray Cats, if you possibly can. So there's live music. There's a pin up contest. Yeah. That's interesting. Vendors all that garbage. A McNary County Music Hall of Fame induction. Oh, boy. And then. Just people from this county. Buford Pusser is in it. All right, yeah. June 1st is the Miss Rockabilly Highway Revival at the Some Little Theater, so you can pick Miss Rockabilly. Yeah, they have. Let's see. Bo Jack and Lloyd. Bo Jack and Lloyd is a band playing. Bo Jack and Lloyd. Bo Jack is one guy. And one guy. It's a separate guy, not three guys. I was trying to cruise in at the Wilson Suite Treats Bakery. And I said, that's not a band. I thought that was a band. I was like, that's a lot. It's a wordy fucking band name. M.C. Carl Perkins will be at the car show. Then they'll have the Hall of Fame induction. Then the Rooster Run trio is going to play at the Coveted 1130 AM spot that all the bands are fighting for. And then Dale Rushing and the Rust Bucket Roadies will be playing. Yep. At one o'clock. And then there is the McNary Fried Pie Festival, which no description needed. There's fries and they're fried. I'm in. Let's do it. Then there's the McNary County Harvest Festival, which is like a fall thing. Come pick out. Come pick out the perfect pumpkin. Yeah. Saver some great food or shock shop for unique handmade items shop for crap. That some lady put on a table and buy a pumpkin is what it is. This town is 20 years behind the country. Homemade earrings and pumpkins is what that is. Yeah, I would say so. They don't have high speed internet for Christ's sake. Right. It seems a little, little behind. And I'm still doing Rockervilley shit. That was 2004. Jesus, that was 2004. 1981. 1954. Every 20 years. Yeah. Uh, property crime in this town is high, like almost 50% above average high. Oh, real high. What is going on? 4,400 people, what are they doing in this town? Must be a drug thing. And then violent crime, murder, rape, robbery, and of course, assault, the Mount Rushmore of crime is almost double the national average. Wow. What are you people doing in this? There's 4,400 people. Get along. This is a dangerous place to be. That's why. Now I see why that guy wanted to leave, for God's sake, but. But he can't leave his kids. Can't leave them behind. I mean, I figured I'd leave them some food out like a cat, you know, like, I can't believe he said that. Someone could put some more food down every three, four days, maybe. See what goes on. Uh, that said, let's talk about a murder. Okay. Let's do this. Let's talk about a man first here. Let's talk about a young man at the time. Let's talk about Matthew Brian Winkler. Just like Henry, Henry's kid. Matthew Brian Winkler. He's born November 21st, 1974. He's born down in Texas. Um, but he doesn't grow up in where he's born at all. Um, no, his father is a preacher and goes from place to place as preachers do. Preachers are like, are like morning radio guys. Yeah. Like one day they're in Tampa and then the next day they're in Baton Rouge and then, oh shit, here I am in St. Paul. You know what I'm saying? Oh, there we are in Bremington, Washington. Like it's like truckers for Christ's sake. Slow truckers. Yeah. Well, truckers go home at the end. They would be like a set up a new house and fucking. Yeah. Can roll their kids in a new school and everything. Imagine if a trucker did that every time he dropped a load off. All right, kids into the school. Let's go. Yeah. Well, you live in Vegas this day. That's, that's it. That's, that's kind of what it is. Uh, his grandfather, Wendell Winkler, was an evangelist, preached for over 50 years all across the Southeast. He's a real, this is his family is some real fire in Bremstone. Oh, you're going to hell in the world. And you know, they're this short of whipping a snake out. Like they're that fucking close to getting a rattler out of a bag here. Um, so his father, Dan was the, his grandfather was Wendell, his father here. Matthew's father, Dan was the church of Christ minister and adjunct professor. And his mother was a teacher as well. So it's, it's a family business, basically. Uh, he has two older brothers, Dan, Jr. And Jacob as well. Um, the family moved constantly all the time. They're always on the move. Dad would go from one church to another church and Matthew would be in three, four different schools in a year. I mean, just wherever there was work, that's where they went. Um, but he, he's, which makes him good at transitioning into different places. Sure. I went to a ton of different schools. That's where I got humor. Figure out how to get comfortable. That's it. Yeah. I was like, that's how, that's where you get humor. Um, and he's an athletic kid. He's popular. He's handsome at the time. So he's, he makes friends easy. And if you're like a nine year old boy, a 10 year old boy and you go to a new school, if you go outside and you play kickball and you're half decent at it, you have a bunch of new friends now, you got friends. They don't care. You know what I mean? Nobody, everybody will get you. You're a good guy to play with now. Excellent. Um, in high school again, he's a great athlete. He plays multiple sports. He went to, uh, he graduated from Austin high school in Decatur, Alabama, of course, where you'd expect Austin high school to be. Um, this was in 1993. He graduates, um, he from the start knows where he's going and that's into the ministry. All right. That's what he is doing. Um, you know, and the family is of course pushing him into it also, but he seems thrilled to go along with it. Uh, here he ends up going to freed Hardiman University in Henderson, Tennessee, which is a small 2000 student Christian college. Nice. Where's that in Tennessee? Henderson, Tennessee, smaller than my high school. I mean, yeah, you know, um, yeah. So, uh, that's where they go. And this is a church of Christ town, like 90% of the town is church of Christ. Um, very strict. This is a, they're real strict. These people, you know, they go to some of these people go to church every day. Yeah. And in the school, midnight curfew, strict rules at the school, midnight curfew. You had to go to chapel every day. Oh, every day. And dorms are segregated by gender. So that's old school. That's like what they used to do. You know, um, the only time the opposite sexes were allowed to visit each other's dorms beyond going to the lobby to go up into the rooms and everything was Halloween. Why then? It's so weird. I don't know. It's, it's strange that this Bible college would be so into Halloween too. Whereas like, oh, we're, we let some rules slide for Halloween. You know, we usually stay dressed modestly. Now we're into slutty nurses. Anybody who's dressing up as that? It's just a weird. It's gonna Satan and hooter, witches and devils. And yeah, it's strange. Uh, now Matthew majors in Bible study and, uh, he is going to be a minister. So he is, uh, at college at freed Hardiman University. He's a handsome guy, six foot one. Yeah. Athletic, um, very good looking. The girls like him and, uh, he's, he's a charismatic preacher kind of guy. So you can pull people in with your energy like that. And he does. He meets a young lady who he pulls right into his aura pretty quickly here. He meets a young lady named Mary Carol Freeman. And her name's Mary. Mary. It's what's all biblical, man. Mary Carol Freeman. And that's with an A free man. Um, she's born December 30th, 1973, about a year older than him. Uh, she had just transferred from David Lipscomb University. Yeah. David Lipscomb, who knows where we'll find out where she studies elementary education. Oh, yeah. Study that. Yeah. Yeah. You got to get into that for a teaching degree. Um, she's born in Knoxville. Her father's name is Clark. Her mother's name is Mary as well. Wow. So when she's a kid, she goes by Carol to differentiate herself from her mom. And then she'll, that's her middle, but then later on, she'll go by Mary when she's an adult and goes to college and everything. Uh, so Mary is her mother. Uh, she's a teacher, very devout Christian, very strict. Her father is a deacon at the Laurel church of Christ also. And he's also a real estate guy. So if you could possibly be more full of shit than being a real estate selling fucking preacher, as I don't even know how you could possibly, you couldn't, it be impossible. What else could you do? I mean, sell a day with crypto. Like what else is there? I don't know what else. Mine crypto. I don't know. That's what I mean, or whatever the guys are doing and they're getting trouble for, yeah, bank, whatever Sam Bankman Fried was doing. Is that whoever he ruined? Yeah, I read his book. I read a book about him. I know what he did, but I don't know what other people are doing. So it's a very conservative Christian household, very much, you know, in terms of modesty and, you know, that kind of thing. And, um, you know, parents tell you what to do when you do it. That's it. It's a very old school. Hey, everybody, just going to take a quick break from the show to tell you how to get the best holiday gift of all time, or a frames or a frames.com. Oh, you need this. What'd you get people last year for Christmas? Did you screw up? You probably messed up. You got your mom, something she didn't want. She got your grandma, something she didn't want. You screwed up. You got your aunt, something, you know, make it better this year, redeem yourself by getting or a frames for people this year. This, they will love you. They'll forget every lousy gift you've gotten them in the last five years. You can wipe the slate clean with an aura frame. They're so good. 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And you will now available in Canada to don't keep settling for clothes that don't last, go to Q, U, I, N, C, E dot com slash small town murder for free shipping and 365 day returns, Quints.com slash small town murder. Now back to the show. Mary has a younger sister that's born very premature and has I have heard. I've seen from many different sources, different things that she was born with. So I'm not sure what it is. I've seen everything from cerebral palsy. She developed spinal meningitis after a while, had seizures, epilepsy. Wow. Not in good shape this kid. They tried everything. They went to specialists and experimental therapies and, you know, prayer groups and everything and nothing helps the kid, obviously here. Now, she was also a quadriplegic Patricia, her younger sister. She had apparently when Mary's 13 years old or this is the other thing. We don't know if this happened when Mary was eight or 13. We don't know. We don't know if Patricia was eight or Mary was eight when this happened. But I think it was when Mary was 13 and Patricia was eight. If I had to pin it down here, apparently Mary, Patricia was taking a bath. Mary was helping with the bath. She stepped away for a minute and the girl had a seizure in the bathtub. Oh my God. And this was horrible. She went to get a towel and came back. Epileptic seizure and Patricia, they find her under the water and they try to resuscitate her and everything else and the poor kid dies. Yeah. The poor kid. So imagine how Mary feels now. Can't imagine. Indescribably, inconsolably guilty. I mean, just absolutely feels awful about herself. She goes to school, blames herself. She's clearly having some distress in school. So the teachers, even back then, if they see you in the early 70s and send you to the school psychologist, that means something's really wrong. Because back then nobody gave a shit. So she said to the school psychologist, they call the parents just to say, hey, you know, we're talking to the kid and, you know, all that. And dad freaks out. He's you do not tell anybody outside the family this stuff. He said, these things are discussed only within the family. He was mad at Mary for going to the school psychologist and mad at her for being a human being that is sad that her sister died and she feels guilty for it. So there's no therapy. There's no counseling. There's nothing like that. It's just it's fine. Get over it type of deal. It's tough. After that, the Freeman family adopts five children from the same family, two boys and three girls. So apparently a family, they know they couldn't keep up with the kids and it was a dysfunctional deal and they adopt all of them. And Mary becomes basically their de facto mom. She is taking care of these five kids, essentially. So that's tough. Now, Mary in school, she does a lot of extracurricular activities here. She's in Spanish club. She's in religion society things. She does tennis. She does future teachers of America. She's in the choir. She keeps busy, which sounds to me like I don't want to go home and take care of these five kids. I'm going to get involved in every activity I can. Yeah. Yeah. Whenever I see a kid with a million things, I'm like, A, you know, just one of those achiever kids or B, doesn't like being home. Hates it. Or both. Achiever kid who doesn't want to be home. One of the two. That too. Yeah. So she graduates in 1992 from South Doyle High School, which was part of Knoxville's school system there. She spent that year, the next year at Nashville's David Lipscomb University, like we said, which is the Flagship College for churches of Christ believers. So this is a very Christian church. Yeah. Put up by the churches endorsing it. Then the next year transferred to Freed Hardiman University, which was another church of Christ affiliate that's in Henderson, Tennessee, which is 20 miles north of Selma, and that's where she meets Matt. Now, a friend of hers who knew her at the time said life was good there at the college. She said it was a lot of fun. This woman, Elizabeth Gentle, she transferred to the school in 94, same year as Mary, and they went through orientation together and remained friends throughout the whole year. She said that she recalled Mary as a tiny woman. She's small. She's five one. She's small. Gentle said she was a nice girl. She was quiet. She was unassuming. She had a pretty smile on her face. She was easy to get along with. I sat next to her in Bible class and she always had a good attitude. She was willing to socialize and she could be funny. She had just had a sweet spirit about her. I can't say anything bad about her. So that's Mary in college. Kind of a sweet go with the program kind of kid. Sure. Which from her background, that seems about right. And she's got a little bit of trauma. Yes. Oh, absolutely. That that'll scar you to have that. Fuck yeah. I couldn't imagine feeling responsible for killing my sibling. You know, not killing him. She didn't kill him, but you as a kid, you'd feel responsible for that. You don't know. She couldn't. She can't do anything about it. It's just there now. And as a kid, too, you can't process or even you just can't synthesize. You can't get it out of your brain, all of these medical things. And maybe that's what did it in this trigger that. It's not my fault. You just think I'm watching her. I walk away. Responsibility. She's dead. My fault. Period. There's a dead child. Right. End of story. Now here is I'm going to read from an Ann Rule book. There's one called Smoke and Mirrors and something else. I'll read the whole title later on. But Ann Rule says, describes Mary thusly, quote, Mary was both pretty and plain if such a thing as possible. At five feet one, she was a full foot shorter than Matthew and she weighed 150 pounds, although no one would have guessed that she was that heavy. She carried it well with good posture despite her full bosom. She's got a rack is what they're saying here. Yeah, she stood tall with giant boobs. And when you see pictures of her, that is the best way to describe her. Yeah. She's yeah, she's a little bit, you know, she's not real thin, but she definitely doesn't look heavy or anything like that. She carries it very well. She's got kind of a kind of a foolish face that's like youthful. You know what I mean? So that's kind of what she looks like. So they said she ran rule said she had dark brown hair cut in a short bob that wasn't particularly flattering to her round face. Her high rounded forehead gave her a resemblance to actress Winona Ryder and Christina Ricci. Her skin was lovely. She even had features and she even had features. That's an online and she was very pretty when she smiled. She didn't wear much makeup, which was to be expected of this type of kid. They have none of them were all gussied up. You know what I mean? That was forget about it, man. That's a you're painted lady, aren't you? You can't do that. They said her preference in clothing was for something tailored rather than ruffled, Mary dressed in solid colors and often wore black and white. So that's from Ann Rule. Now, Mary described at the time of talking about meeting Matt and said, we were friends first and our friendship furthered. And then we began dating. It was fantastic. We just clicked. Which I mean, similar interests, similar backgrounds, both their dads and preachers. And if sometimes girls look for somebody like their dad, here's a guy who's going to be a preacher. There you go. Just like him. So they date for about three months before Matthew proposes. Three months, three months and 90 days and he's in. Call the long courting in the Church of Christ community, I think. That's that would be considered well beyond what he needed to do for this group, though. Yeah, you meet a girl, you marry her period. That's it. Stay together forever, have kids and shut the fuck up. That's kind of how it works. So three months they're in, which seems like a little, seems a little short for that. Yeah, bit fast for that young. Mary at the campus was a member of the Evangelism Forum and she was active in the Phi Kappa Alpha, which was one of six campus social clubs. So she's very active. She likes to talk and move and do things. They're not. This isn't a sorority or fraternity, by the way. It's just a social club. No. Now, the lady, Elizabeth Gentlewoman, who talking about Mary in high school, said she also knew Matt and said that he was always wearing an infectious smile. She said, I can't say anything bad about him either. He loved life, loved people. They were just a good Christian couple. Yes, they were. There you go. April 1996 is their wedding day. They get married and Mary's family backyard in Knoxville. Very nice. Very nice. Clark Freeman, her dad, officiates, of course, Marys 22, Matt's 21. Oh, very advisable. Yeah. Then they go back to college. They go back to Fried Hardiman. Sure. Now, obviously, for a 22 year old and a 21 year old, they've never lived with anybody before. They've never lived with each other. This is all brand new. This is an adventure here. Now, at some point, Mary sees, you know, the other, the real part of Matt. What is that? If you've barely known someone, if you dated someone for three months and then you got married, you don't have a full picture of them yet. You've never lived with them. Right. You've never traveled with them. Sure. You don't know what will happen when a flight gets delayed by two hours. Will they punch out the gate agent or will they say, all right, let's go to the chilies and fucking get something like that's important. You know what I mean? So they've never had any of that before. And she's after a minute, she sees kind of a different person. She said at one point, quote, I just remember some point just being shocked at the yelling at the just this is a different person. That's what you know. That's what she says. She said he had a temper and of a bad temper. She says that her friends too, that Mary's father gave her a desk. It was a desk that belonged to somebody else in the family. It's kind of a family heirloom. And it wouldn't fit in their apartment storage unit. They tried to put it in the unit and they couldn't fit it in there. So Matthew got so frustrated, he just destroyed it with his bare hands, just broke it up. He just broke it. Just destroyed the fucking thing. Had a complete freak out. Mary said, I remember being so embarrassed and all I cared about was that nobody was looking outside their apartment at him freaking out, taking the Lord's name in vain over a fucking roll. One of those roll top desks. So real weird. Also, the couple's super broke. Matthew has to drop out of college and take a construction job. OK. He hates it as everyone does. Go to a construction site, go around and see if it's a real, a real happy place to be. It's not. See what the attitude is around there. Not great. Put it that way. Everyone's it's the most cynical environment that's ever existed is there. More than a comedy green room, even, which is saying something. So they start to have some kids here as they go on because, you know, you're broke, you're young, got to have children. So they do. Is that what they did? Absolutely. October 97 with Matthew hating his life. Worth working construction, them having a really hard time making ends meet. They, of course, have a daughter named Patricia at that point. Then they end up moving to Baton Rouge in July of 1998. Matthew accepts his first job at a church. Nice. So despite not graduating has enough charisma to get by on this. So the whole family moves to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he became the youth minister at the Goodwood, Goodwood. Goodwood Boulevard Church of Christ. All right. So if I hear that, if I see the word youth minister, I just picture Kelvin from the righteous gemstones and that's all I see. That's it. I can't I can't unsee this guy being Kelvin now. It's perfect. So seven months later, they move on again. Oh, boy. I said like a morning radio show host here to Peegram or Pegram, Tennessee, which is a small 2000 resident town outside of Nashville. Yeah. That's what it was at the time. I'm sure it's bigger now because Nashville is blown up at the time. It was small. Matthew got a new job as youth minister with the Bellevue Church of Christ. So they're settling in. They buy up their first house, as a matter of fact. So good for them in a neighborhood that's got, you know, smaller houses and a lot of young families in it. A lot of, you know, first house buyer time in this area. So they look very happy. Mary and Matthew, you know, they're doing from the outside seemed to do fine. Mary said later on told somebody that Matthew had actually been at his worst at this time, which I don't know if that's stress or him being more comfortable or who knows what his what the deal is. But the congregation loves them, though. They are told the church elders said they were a real benefit. And a blessing. He was a good daddy. She was a good mommy and he was an excellent youth minister. OK, so year 2000, Mary is pregnant again. Now, during the time she's pregnant, her mom is diagnosed with cancer and dies. Oh, no. She had like an aggressive colon cancer that was she was done before the gestation period of a baby is up. So that's rough. Her daughter now is born. Mary has another daughter named Mary Alice, who they call Ali. So that's another Mary. April 2002, moving again. Again, moving on. Matthew is doing well, so he gets a call and going up to the central Church of Christ in McMinnville, Tennessee. So they moved there. McMinnville is a little bit bigger than the other town. They're going like it's like morning radio. They're going to bigger markets. Like, hey, I got a job in Tucson. You know what I mean? Modesto is next like I'm getting there. Boy, you have no idea. Moving along. Moving right along Eugene, Oregon. I'm this close. I swear to God, I'm going to get there one of these days. So this is a place at southeast of Nashville. They buy a house there in September 2002, but aren't able to sell their other home that they bought until May of 2003. So that's about eight months of nine months of double mortgage. Yeah, yeah, that's rough. Double mortgage, double taxes, double insurance, double all that shit. So yeah. And Ann Rule says this says the Winklers having to carry two mortgages on two houses for eight months on a minister's salary was a financial burden for them, essentially, with two small girls and her church duties. It would have been hard for Mary to take a teaching job, even substitute teaching. She ends up finding a job at the post office. And that helped a little bit. A part-time post office gig. In the fall of 2004, he started teaching Matthew, started teaching Bible classes to boys at the Boyd Christian School in McMinnville for a couple extra bucks. So they say, Ann Rule says, as far as their neighbors knew, the Winkler marriage was sound. Some thought Mary was more friendly than Matthew was while one man described her as odd, quote, odd. She wasn't too friendly. She didn't mix well, which doesn't sound like Mary at all. She's involved in every social activity possible. So that's odd. They said also, sometimes Mary and Matthew engaged in little PDAs. You know, they were hugging each other and even a little kiss during a church party or church meeting or something a little, which is considered, oh, look at them. Get a room, you two. You peck away. You peck your wife on the cheek. They're like, oh, Jesus, my kids are here. What the fuck, man? Zip it up. Come on. Take a zip. So in McMinnville here, he's teaching all of this. The principal at the boys school, the Boyd Christian School that he's teaching at, said, quote, Matt had it all. He was handsome. He was full of personality. He was smart. But most importantly, he had a good Christian soul. Sure did. I don't know what handsome would matter teaching kids the Bible. I don't know. It's easier to follow him if he looks better. Oh, man. Yeah. Do whatever he does. It's wild. So he's a fifth generation minister, by the way. Yeah. His great grandfather was even a minister. Oh, wow. He is going at it. So at this point, Mary's, you know, unassuming, quiet, small, five, one, long, Burnett hair, everybody says she's always looking at the floor. What does that mean? She's shy? Shy, which is they like that, though, in the church. They say that that's supportive, submissive, silent. That's what they want for the watch. It's not insecure. It's fucking submissive. Yeah, you got to be behind him because he's the, you know, that's just how the church goes there. So in this particular church anyway, I don't want to cast a large aspersion. Now they have cute little daughters. They got everything. They live in a nice brick house and a shady yard. Very nice. They have a pet dog named Firefly. Great. People said, here's some quotes about them. They were the ideal family next door. They seem to live and breathe the Bible. OK, one neighbor described them as quote perfect. So, you know, there's trouble. You just know it. It's a nightmare. Yeah, you just know it. So some of the younger members of the congregation had like crushes on him, too. Because he's the, you know, that happens a lot with religious leaders just because it's kind of like why people fall in love with their fucking therapist or something. It's a trusting relationship that you have. We've just built so much here. Yeah, exactly. The young church members have a nickname for them. They call them Wink. What does that mean? Winkler. Oh, yeah. Hey, Wink, which god damn. That's bad. They said not not because he was a flurter or he wasn't winking at people. His name was Winkler. So everybody, there was no talk of her being him not being faithful to his wife or not being faithful to him or any of that. They were just the perfect couple. Maybe not so perfect, though. Here are some people who saw some things that they didn't really like about the soul situation. Here's a friend of Mary's who said later he once saw her with a black eye when Matt was the youth minister at the Central Church of Christ in McMinnville. She had told this friend at the time that she was messing around with her two daughters, the two older daughters here and one of them elbowed her in the eye. And so that was what they said. So he said he said I saw her with a black eye. She explained it away, which could very easily happen. If you've had little kids there. Oh, God, yeah. My daughter split my fucking lip one time. It looked like somebody beat the shit out of me, but she had a toy and just turned quick and smashed me in the face with it. Absolutely just fucked my shit up when she was like two years old, bleeding all over the place. So I mean, that's a fair thing, you know, just because someone has a black eye doesn't mean that their husband punched them. Right. And they throw things. They usually catch a fucking hot wheels in the face. If she said I slipped and fell into a doorknob, then you go, OK, come on, Mary, what's going on? Are you OK? You know what I mean? But I was playing with my kids and one of them threw an elbow at me. It seems reasonable. So easy. Yeah. Also, another woman here, who's a woman named Laurie Boyd, who is a former church of Christ member, secretary, said that it seemed to her that Matthew decided how much Mary ate and what she wore, which is the two most basic pieces of autonomy. What you wear and what you're putting into your body like they'll tell me how much she ate and what to wear. Imagine you've had girlfriends all time. I don't tell anybody anything. We're going to the house and tell Sarah, stop eating and put this on. She'll fucking stab me in the face with a fork. I can't do that. And it'd be a guy to understand it. Stop eating that. Have some lettuce. Put this on. Stop eating that and put this on. Is it going to go over big? I don't think. And I wouldn't want her to wear whatever you want. I don't care. It's fucking weird. So another guy here, her doctor, Mary's doctor, when she lived in McMinnville, he treated her for bruises to her right eye and right cheek. This is the same time the other guy saw the bruises and she told him that she was hit by a softball. So two different stories about that, which is interesting there. I don't like that at all. That's that's not good. Now, Mary's family at this point, here's another piece of the puzzle. She becomes pretty much estranged from her father at this point. Her mother's dead. Yeah, loses contact for the most part with her adopted siblings. She'll end up having some contact with them, but not as much as they would like, which isn't good if you're separating someone from their family. That's weird. You know, that's a that is the biggest relationship red flag that certainly a lady can fucking see as if the guy is trying to keep you away from friends and family. That's not good. Now, also at the same time, sometimes people get to be in their late 20s and they start to realize, hey, my parents were pieces of shit. I don't want to talk to them anymore. That also happens. Yeah. That also happens. But the adopted siblings, that doesn't make a lot of sense here. Mary, this is for Man Rules Book. Mary's sister, Tabitha would recall a conversation with Matthew where he called the Freeman family together, you know, all of Mary's family and explained that they would have to accept that Mary would not be a part of their family the way she had been before. Why? It's a real good question. Well, he he said he and their marriage, him, the kids and their marriage had to come first, which obviously your family, your nuclear unit comes first, but then you still have time to call your dad on a Sunday and say hello or go over for a have lunch with him on a Tuesday or something like you could do that. It can't have to be exclusively one people. No. Tabitha was stunned. She didn't see why being a wife would preclude Mary from being her sister, which obviously that seems crazy to say that, to say that that would be, yeah, I'm a wife now. I can't possibly, I can't be your sister. I mean, oh God, you know, so she's just her and Matthew and the kids now. So, you know, there's that though. Now, January 2005 is when they moved to Selma, Tennessee. Matthew in January 2005 takes a job as a pulpit preacher at the 4th Street Church of Christ in Selma. Right. Yeah. All right. Now this is and they move in and everybody says, oh, look at the perfect family, the perfect marriage, the perfect preacher with the perfect wife, with perfect kids. We love them. Oh my God. The best. This is exactly what they were like. The clouds have opened up and a ray from heaven brought them down. Adorable little girls and a, you know, nice wife with her head down and him with his charisma and all that bullshit. So, yeah, there's this. There are a lot of churches in Selma, by the way. Really? There's over a hundred churches in Selma with 4,400. Over a hundred. Over a hundred. It's a lot. They really like their church down there. So now about the Church of Christ, this is just from what I'm reading, looking it up. Their general thing is this is your literal Bible reading. OK. The earth is 6,000 years old. Yeah. You know, all that shit. This is a documentary in book form. Yes. And it's all and it's all literal. Yeah. None of it's an allegory. None of it. It's everything that's said is a literal thing that happened. It's not a, you know, it's not a metaphor. It's not any of that stuff, which I think I'm not a religious guy, but I think that would take the the brilliance of the writing out of it. If it was just if you took it literally, you'd go, OK, these people were just they were just jotting down notes as they watched it rather than the actual. There's kind of a brilliance in some of the, you know, metaphorical things that go on and shit like that, I think is what they're how it can relate to so many people at once. How it can relate to different things. Yeah. And I'm like I said, I'm not a religious guy. I'm not a biblical guy, but I always thought that was kind of the point of it. So I don't know. Right. We live like this because we all have the shared experience. The literal reading is you got to be out of your fucking mind to believe any of that shit. Like, I'm sorry, I know we're going to have people are going to be mad at us for that. Yeah. You think the earth is 6,000 years old? You're a fucking moron. I'm sorry. It's not. It's clearly not. There's a lot of every kid in third grade with a book about dinosaurs can tell you that. It's not the truth. You know what I'm saying? It's just not. So that's one thing. Not to get off on that shit. But in this, though, it's it's old fashioned. It's very old fashioned. One one article called it Full Immersion Adult Baptism. Forbids the use of musical instruments during services. What? None of this song and dance. Rock concerts that we have today. Fire and brimstone. None of this shit. No, none of that. So it's not a denomination. The Church of Christ, apparently. They regard themselves as a network of like minded autonomous congregations, each governed by its own slate of elders. They're not related to the United Church of Christ, which is a main line protestant denomination, not affiliated with that. So the elders are assisted by deacons who have responsibilities such as keeping the church grounds good in the pews all fucking in working order. The religious leader at the churches of Christ affiliate typically is called an evangelist or a pulpit preacher. That's what Matthew is, their pulpit preacher. So they look perfect. There's some neighbors that hear some different shit, though. What do you mean? Well, there's a neighbor here that says, quote, we heard them arguing sometimes late at night, but you never think, I mean, they were the preacher's family. You just assume everything's fine behind those walls. Do you? Why? No matter what you do for a living, that means nothing about what your private life is like, nothing. And usually I think the opposite of whatever you're doing. If you're like signaling too much, I think you're doing a worse shit. What are you doing behind closed doors? I don't like that shit. So Dan and Sharon Everett lived across the street from them from Matt and Mary. They had foster children. They had six foster children and a dog also. Oh, yeah. That's a busy household, which was a lot of. They had a lot while I would say. So one day the Rottweiler strayed into Matt and Mary's lawn. Your neighbor's dog comes in your lawn. What do you do? You go, Hey, buddy, come here. Where are you going? And then you take them back to their house. Right. Get them back home. Yeah. Matthew got pissed. Oh, he crossed the street and confronted one of the foster kids. So yelling at one of the kids. What? Then, then started yelling at the wife, Sharon. Oh, and said, quote, if you don't keep that dog away from my house, I'll kill it. So he's going to murder a neighbor's dog for no reason. Which is absolutely crazy. And there's a police report behind this as well. Yeah, there's it's crazy. So that's a lot. Sharon, I guess, said she tried to apologize and said that the dog got out accidentally. It wasn't on purpose. And also the dog's really friendly. She's not going to hurt anybody. So, you know, it's fine. It's OK. Kind of push her back in our direction. And it's OK. Matthew said, fuck that. And said, I'll kill that fucking dog if it comes in my yard again. Wow. So Dan, the husband, he went over to try to smooth things over. Yeah. Which is a different way than things would go down in my neighborhood if you did that. You go, oh, what do you fuck? You threatened my fucking wife and kids. I'll fuck. Oh, I'll fucking kill you. There'd be people murdering each other. So Dan goes over to try to smooth things out. And wow. The Matthew said, quote, I wouldn't do that if I were you. There's a law against firing guns in city limits. That's what he told him. And then he said, and if I ever see that dog again, I'll shoot him. OK. OK. Now. After that, the Everett's never spoke to Matthew again. Really? Sharon would wave when his car drove by. He never waved back. That was over. But they said Mary was as friendly as she could be. And she always returned the wave. So they said nothing to do with her, basically. Sharon said it this way, the neighbor, quote, look, if he was that way out here in public, you can imagine what he had to be like in private, they just knew him with his suit on. Meaning all the people in town just knew him as public image, which was. Right. Yeah. Also, there was neighbors that said they saw black eyes on Mary, heavy makeup around black eyes and things like that. And they all said that Mary would always cower when Matthew was around, which was kind of how that, you know, that's kind of for show, too. But I'm not sure if that was real also. We don't know. March 2005, they have another baby. No. Brianna, who was born prematurely. Shit. So the baby has to be held at this Nashville hospital. So which is 150 miles away. As we talked about, you know, it's a little decent drive. So they have to go back and forth, basically, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. So this is very expensive and their piss poor broke at this point. Mary is the person she does the bookkeeping and the bill paying and things of that nature. So she ends up falling for a scan. What? They apparently in Africa, they call it the 419 scheme. The 419. Because that's the law in Nigeria that bans it. Oh, oh, oh, 419. The scammers, basically, this is the Yahoo, Yahoo boys. You ever heard of that shit? No. It's a huge group because they have Yahoo accounts and tons of them. So that's where they got the nickname. Basically, this is the old you've won a million dollars. You just need to send us your for processing fees, bullshit. Oh, boy. They're like Nigerian Prince shit. I have 50 million dollars, but it's being held in escrow and I need a five grand to get by and I'll give you a million dollars to give me five grand. Yeah. So Mary gets checks in the mail from these people. Oh, one's from Canada, one's from Nigeria for a total of 17,500 dollars. She deposits them and withdraw withdraws $500 cash, but the checks are fake. Yeah, obviously. So the bank calls her and says, hey, you just withdrew money from shit that doesn't bad checks. Yeah. So Mary need that money back. Mary says, oh shit. So she starts writing checks from one account to cover checks on another account. Yeah, just basically trying to move money to make it work when that there's not enough there to cover money that she knows already this check bounced. Yeah. So she's like, oh, fuck, I got scammed. This isn't good. She knows she's been scammed. Oh, totally. Yeah. Once they tell her the check is fake and she's fucked. She knows what happened and she's like, oh no. So she starts opening new accounts. She's moved accounts that aren't even in town. She's opening new banks. Over $500 more because it gets worse because as she starts writing more money for checks that they don't have the money, the total gets bigger and bigger and bigger that she's a check bounced and she went and got another one. No, she took $500 out that they didn't have. Right. So then she had to cover other stuff. So she was writing checks from other accounts that have don't have the money to cover ones that she does. So it gets snowballs. All right. It's snowballs from there. It's not good. Then there's all the fees of bounce checks and all that stuff. Everything adds up. She changes her gets new accounts in her name only to try to hide this from Matthew apparently changes her mailing address to a P.O. Box. And this started over $500 started over $500 and got worse. And we'll talk about where they are in a minute when we get there in a sec. So she tried to remove Matthew's name from their bank account also at one point. So March 20th, 2006, church secretary Betty Wilkerson sees Mary and Matt having lunch together on March 20th. OK. She said they were having lunch in his office talking and laughing together. They were the ideal family next door, the perfect family. I gave them chocolate chip muffins to eat for dessert. Really? Oh, boy, that's nice. So March 21st, the family account at Regens Bank is overdrawn by $5,000. This is what it snowballed to. She. She's all fucked up. Yeah. So she is trying to fix this. This is the same day, March 21st, that she has her first day of work as a substitute teacher at Selma Elementary School, which substitute teaching. That's a lot of shifts to cover five grand in substitute teaching. Oh, my God, that's like both semesters. Yes. Now, there's people who say that Matthew knew about this and knew what happened. It was just as involved in getting scammed. And then there's a lot of other people that say Matthew had no idea and Mary was trying to fix this on her own without being having the embarrassment of telling him that she got scammed, basically. It is embarrassing. Nobody wants to feel like that. No, that's why people don't tell people when they get scammed and then more people get scammed because they're embarrassed about it. Because it's fucking, you just feel like an idiot. Yeah, I've heard. I've read in books about like like a NFL locker room. Some guy will come in with some financial shit and he'll scam 10 different guys because none of the guys will tell anybody they got scammed. So then other guys will go invest money in this guy because they're all embarrassed. So if I get scammed in my mind, I can't wait to tell fucking everyone. I'm so mad. I'm so mad. I'm angry. I did this out of your fucking mind. So this first day of school, her coworkers noticed that she is on the phone all day. Yeah, it's her cell phone. It's two different banks are calling her. The Regions Bank in Selma and the First State Bank in Henderson. They want one of the banks wants Matthew and Mary to come in to meet with them the next day, March 22nd, to explain what the fuck's going on and how we're going to get our money back and why we shouldn't call the cops on you, essentially. So Mary goes home after work that evening. The family orders pizza hut and watches the movie Chicken Little. Nice choice. There you go. Except for the pizza hut. So but in this area, I think that's probably the best pizza you're going to get. So the girls go to bed at 8 30. Apparently Matthew and Mary argue about money and overdrawn accounts and all that kind of thing and then go to bed angry. OK, that's all we know. Now, this is from a book called The Pastor's Wife by Diane Fanning. She says, Church Elder Roger Roger Graham's memory of the night here said, quote, Matthew called me around 10 o'clock that Tuesday night, he sounded agitated. He said, Mary and I had a little disagreement tonight, but everything's fine now. OK, now. Mary doesn't sleep very well. No, 6 15 a.m. is wake up time. That's when the alarm always goes off. Wow. OK, that's what we know of what happened that night. The next day, March 22nd at 2006, the Wednesday at 9.22 p.m. Remember, that's the day they're supposed to go to the bank at noon. They never went to the bank. No, no. And that Wednesday night, it's Wednesday Church service. It's a big service Wednesday. Matt doesn't show up to do a shift. No, preaching. So they sit there and wait for him and wait for him. And this is like a comic not shown up for the show. Yeah, I'm a fucking show now. Yeah, I already bought my two drinks and I got no jokes now. What's going on? So they said, Matthew, never missed a service, especially if he's leading the service, which you supposed to lead this one. So a bunch of the church people pile in a car and drive to the house. Really? Wow. That is. All right. All in over here. Jesus Christ. They knock on the door. Nobody answers. Windows are closed. Doors are locked. Lights on or on inside and they hear the TV playing loudly as well. Like, OK, somebody's got to be home. So they keep knocking. They're calling the phone, the house phone. No one's answering. They hear it ringing in there. No one's answering it. They keep knocking. Nobody responses. So they call one of the church elders and they go, hey, we're over here. He's not answering the door. And so they are. They said, what should we do? The church elder said, I know where the spare key is. Find it and go inside. He knows how to get into their house. Yeah, they all have to tell each other where the spare key is. And who knows if that church elder watered their plants when they went to get in when they went to have the daughter and all that kind of shit. Who knows? But anyway, they say, go inside his house. Even though it seems like he's in there and purposely not answering the door, you should break in with a key. So they get the key. They figure that all out in about a half hour later, they get in. OK, now inside the house, they're calling for Matthew, Mary. You know, they're calling the girls names, calling everybody. No one answers. They hear the TV playing. That's it. Everything's in place. There's not like a China cabinet knocked over chairs broken like there was a fucking old West Saloon flight in there or something. It's fine. So they reached the master bedroom. The door is closed. Yeah. They open someone's master bedroom door to their formerly locked house. Which was right on in. Yeah, right on in here. Fucking in there. That's what I mean. Him and Mary could be absolutely. I mean, they could have dropped the kids off with the parents and he could be just fucking her face like nobody's business right now. Well, she's got a giant vibrator. Yeah, they could have fucking you this is a man hanging from the ceiling. It could be wild. They may have forgotten it was it was pulpit night. Yeah, that's they for oh shit, really? Matthew's like suspended from the ceiling. I told you it was Tuesday. God damn it, Mary. I said it was Wednesday. I knew it. So they open the door and they find Matthew. No, not in a good state. No, he is face down on the floor in a big pool of blood. Oh, no, blood pattern on the walls, bloody foam dried on his face. Not looking good. Matthew's seen better days. Big giant hole in his back. Oh, boy. And very, very dead, extremely dead. And also they automatically go for the phone and find it to be unplugged from the wall jack. Yeah. Interesting. So they all go into the living room and pray for a minute. What? Later. That's later. We got a we got a body. We got a we got a round up the troops here that's later. So they go into the into there and pray and they call the cops, obviously. Now, everybody out there is going, oh, my God, we went through the house. We saw Matthew, but who did we not see? Mary and the children. Where is she? Where are they? So they assume this is a home invasion where the kids and wife have been now taken, so they're terrified. Everybody is. I will read from the Ann Rule book here. Roger Rickman, an investigator with the Selmer Police Department, with a quarter century of police experience, was one of the first to arrive at the Parsonage, which is their land plot here. OK. I don't know why they love calling it a Parsonage in Tennessee. Heath saw that Matthew Winkler had apparently died where he lay. He wore a red undershirt, a green, long sleeved shirt, and what could be called either pajama or lounging pants? House gear. You know, yeah. The minister's arms were flung out with his right hand touching the bathroom door and the left extending under the bed. His right leg was straight and his left leg was bent at the knee so that it looked so that his ankles were crossed. So everybody get the picture there. At first glance, there wasn't much blood apparent, saved for the froth from his mouth, which indicated some sort of injury to his lungs. Obviously, breathing out blood. But when the investigators turned the Husky minister over, they found that he had lost almost all the blood in his body, bleeding out from a gunshot wound located to the left of his spinal column in the lower thoracic area just above his waist. So not not like in the middle of your back, but down low. Yeah, yeah. The bedding and carpet beneath were soaked with mostly dried blood. So that helps to find out when this happened. Blood is drying, things like that. They said whatever internal wounds Winkler had, his immediate cause of death would probably have been exsanguation, which is bleeding out. He had bled to death. So they said the beginning of rigor mortis and the temperature of Matthew Winkler's body indicated that he probably been dead for more than 12 hours. So they said at this point, they don't know where Mary and the girls are and it's been at least 12 hours. They could be taken anywhere. Anywhere, 12 hour head start. 12 hour head start is insane. That's huge. I mean, they could be on a flight to anywhere. States away. Absolutely. Well, man, Tennessee, maybe not. Two, because it's eight hours across the state. Yeah, I know I was just making Tennessee his big joke. So where the fuck are Mary and the girls? They said they weren't anywhere in the house and the family's Toyota Sienna minivan. Oh, that's the worst. We we've had long we had long Toyota Sienna conversations one time. We were in some city and the only Ubers, they were all Toyota Siennas. And we're like, what's going on? Madison. Yeah, Madison, Wisconsin. You will you will get a 65 year old lady driving you in a Toyota Sienna if you take three Uber rides guaranteed and they'll be nice as shit. Friendly. It'll be beautiful. Real nice. So the minivan's missing from the driveway. So they're wondering, did Matthew die trying to protect his family? Yeah, someone come in and he got said, you know, you're not doing this or whatever. And then they shot him and just took everybody. They said we're marrying the girls now hostages of some psychopath or what the fuck here? So they said, if Matthew had been killed, this is for man rules book, had been killed in a home invasion robbery, something should be missing. So that's what we're looking for. So the detective see on his dresser is a money clip with cash in it and a decent water cash, which is strange. So they're like his driver's licenses there too. So they're like, that's right on the dresser. If you're still dead. There's a bundle of cash right there. You're stealing shit. You'd grab that right off the bat on the way out the door. Like you don't even have to go in his pocket for it. Right. They said a check of the other rooms in the house were a tiny bit reassuring as well. There was no signs of blood or struggle any place but in the master bedroom. OK. They said still Winkler's family was gone and Mary hadn't called to summon help for her husband and no one had heard from her. So this didn't look good. This looked like we're looking for four more corpses at some point here. Three of them are tiny. So the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agents Chris Carpenter and Mike Frizzell arrived near midnight from the appearance of the single wound in Matthew Winkler's back, all the detectives felt that the death weapon had been a shotgun fired from a good distance, a decent distance away. Not right on top of a mean. There was no gun though in the house or the yard. They searched the whole property, found no gun. So like OK, which that means the murderer either came with a gun or took whatever, whatever, wherever the murder weapon came from, they took it with them, obviously, so along with the family. So they issue an Amber Alert at this point. Because we got two kids, three kids, three kids, right? Including a baby, right? This is terrifying. Yeah, three small four girls or four a woman and three girls, four female human beings are missing and one of them is very, very tiny and a baby. So Amber Alert is issued here for Patricia, eight, Mary Alice, six and one year old Brianna and 32 year old Mary, family minivan, 2006, gray Toyota Sienna also put out there on the wire for everybody. And the police assumption is they've been murdered already probably. Yeah, they're probably dead and in some wood somewhere. Yeah, we're in trouble or like in a burned in the van's been set on fire and some reservoir or something. So the whole town is freaking out and this is a crazy case. Dead pastor with his wife and three little girls kidnapped like the media goes bonkers, people from everywhere come to Selma. I mean, this is not a town where anybody from outside of it's ever goes to. You know what I mean? So this is this is crazy. It's like a movie. All these people just ascending on this town. So the autopsy on Matthew begins on March 24th here. And they said rigor mortis had begun to stiffen his body, but was not yet complete. The red and purple markings on the portion of the body that had been the lowest where the blood had pooled and where his heart had stopped before, Levitity, as we call it, were fixed and complete on his back and buttocks with blanching along the parts that had touched the floor of the Winkler's bedroom. There were would be a few surprises in this autopsy. Matthew Winkler had only one real wound, along with some scratches on the front of his right knee and lower leg, which perhaps he made as he crawled on the floor in an attempt to escape after he was shot. He said he might get away. Couple of crawls and then he collapsed. He'd been shot in the back by a weapon far enough away that there was no soot around the wound, so definitely not a contact wound. So they said in this autopsy, quote, in the middle of the back is a three quarter inch in diameter shotgun wound of entrance with slight irregular margins and an irregular one sixteenth to one eighth circumference marginal abrasion. The defect is located 21 and a half inches below the top of the head and at the posterior midline, five evenly spaced half inch by half inch rectangular abrasions surround the defect. Hmm. As dictated by Dr. Turner, the defect left by the shotgun shell sounded clinical and had no emotion, but the fatal wound was horrific, of course, as all shotgun wounds are pellets of bird shot and wadding from the contents of the shotgun shell had blasted and it was back. Apparently it was 77 bird shot pellets. They took out of them. That's a lot. Yeah. So they said after it perforated his skin, fatty tissue and the muscles in his back, the bird shot cut through four ribs in the middle of his back and tore through the lower lobe of his left lung, his diaphragm, stomach, spleen, pancreas and left adrenal gland, tore him apart inside. Yeah. There were contusions in the upper lobe of his left lung and the lower lobe of his right lung and two of the vertebrae in his spinal column were broken. OK. So this is just a mess. His trachea and lungs were a wash in aspirated blood and his stomach held a hundred milliliters of blood. White foam from his ruined lungs had bubbled from his nose and mouth. So they said carefully, Dr. Turner collected scores of pellets of the bird shot and plastic wadding from the internal organs, whoever had held the shotgun had stood above Matthew. The trajectory of the bird shot could be traced from his back to the front of his body. OK. From right to left and slightly downward. So this is not someone shorter than him that shot him while he was standing up. Backwards shot, too. This is either he's laying down or somebody taller or however it works. So because it's a downward. OK. Now, they're still frantically searching for Mary and the girls at this point. Then on March 23rd, 2006, in Orange Beach, Alabama. OK. An unlikely spot for the story to go. Officer Jason Whitlock, not the sports or not that guy. Douchebag, not that guy. Spots a gray minivan matching the Amber Alert description at one point. Now he spots it and he sees it make an illegal U-turn on Perdido Beach Boulevard. Great. So he pulls it over with standard procedure used for radio to check for wants and warrants as you do. You run the plate. So the report came back and told him what was going on, basically. So he said, holy shit, this is a big one. I stopped an Amber Alert. So he immediately called for backup and three units arrived to surround the vehicle in a Walmart parking lot. Now, they said Whitlock had no idea what he might find. So he used great caution as he walked toward the driver's side window. They said that if Mary and her children were still alive and uninjured, he didn't want to do anything that would spook whoever took them and have them have this guy start shooting them in the car or something. You know what I mean? So they're like, fuck, he said he didn't want to do anything that might place them in more danger. They said a kidnapper would probably try to hold them as shields to keep from being arrested, so they're aware of all this. You might have a baby as a human shield here. So he said, but when Whitlock walked to the window, I mean, he is like, you can imagine heart beating, holy shit, walking past the tenths of the back. Oh, damn, it walks in, looks in the window. He said he was shocked, shocked. How bad is it? Just sees Mary at the wheel with three kids in there. Everybody's fine. No one else in the car. Just the four of them. Good news, guys. We've been looking for you. Everybody looks healthy and happy and clean and OK, that's odd, unhurt. They're like, OK, that's good. Everyone's healthy, but what the hell's going on? So they draw guns, man, get out of the vehicle. Show your hands, all that kind of thing. Mary steps out. She's wearing a pink jumpsuit, very calm. No, anything. She doesn't even ask what's going on. Nothing just gets out. Everything's fine. Everything's good. Yeah, the really weird. They said she got out. This is from the cop. She got out and she never asked why she was stopped, why there were officers pointing guns at her or anything. She really made guns, too. Yeah, they surrounded the car. They had guns out and everything. She really made no expression on her face and she was detained. They said the girls were totally fine. They were having a good day. Patricia kept asking, where's mommy? What's happening? Where's mommy going? What's going on? So Mary told the girls. As this is happening, daddies in the hospital were going to visit him soon. The girls are like, OK, sure, sounds good. You didn't explain why you're in handcuffs, but great. So the police take all the girls out of the car, the young children here. Yeah, and they search the van. And in the trunk, they find a shotgun. Oh, they're like, oh, this here for K. Interesting. So where the fuck has Mary been? Yeah. Well, first off, shooting pretty much. Yeah, we're going out for a nice day of target shooting at the range here. First stop, they went to Jackson, Mississippi at a fair field in and she paid cash there. The next morning, they went to the Orange Beach, Alabama at the sleep in, which is 340 miles from Selmer to keep track. This is basically a vacation beach spot. A lot of tourists here and shit. So she took the girls to the beach and to an amusement park that day. Oh, she actually tells the arresting officer, quote, I just wanted to be with them before they had bad days, you know, have a happy day. Right. That's what she tells the officer. She's like, whoa, dad was dead then. Oh, yeah, apparently so. So 955 p.m. Orange Beach Police Department. Cops are going to try to talk to her. Yeah. And you could see in her mug shot, she just looks looks like she's just a stone spondant. Yeah. Looks depressed, looks sad, just looks like you. It's like her like her dog just died. It looks tough. They were all the cops were really weirded out by her lack of any emotion whatsoever. Yeah. Of anything, not even like about the kids, nothing. There was just nothing. She was very flat on the affect there. The one assistant police chief, Greg Duck, said there were no tears shed. I was brother. Yeah, exactly. He said that no tears shed that I know of. And he said, actually, she seemed relieved. Mary. So here we go. Corporal Stan Stabler, Alabama investigation or bureau of investigation. He sits down with Mary. She's calm, real calm, eerily, creepily calm. No tears, no nothing, just flat. So he tries to do the background shit rapport with her. How long you've been married? How was your marriage? She said I was married nine years, 11 months. They're good marriage. It was fine. What about the kids? She said they're very sweet girls. OK, so he says at one point step by step, tell me what happened. She says nothing. She just stares at him, just stares at him. He said, why can't you talk to us? More silence, staring at him. OK, this is this is interesting. It's like kind of like Ruby Frankie style. You've seen that interrogation when they sit her down and she just stares at them and blinks. And it's like when she stares at them and blinks, you're just like, you're fucking kid with starving, you fucking. I just want to I want someone to close the line or I don't fucking share. Yeah, I don't care what your excuse is. Your kids are starving and you lock them in rooms. I will choke. Give me an excuse, but give me an excuse for something. Something. Tell me anything. She just blinks. Yeah. And has that smug look on her face. Crazy. This Mary's not like that at all. She's just just flat. Like she looks like she's been through a lot and is like catatonic almost. So he said, I feel like you have genuine concern. Tell me why a mother of three, a wife of over nine years, almost 10 years. What would make you do this? Right. You had the shotgun and all. She says, quote, no comment. No comment. The strangest thing I've ever heard in an interrogation room. No comment like the presses, like the paparazzi is hounding her outside of a movie premiere. So I didn't ask you if you're dating that hot young Starlet. Yeah, it wasn't what I was asking. What's going on? I didn't ask him if you're, you know, there was trouble on the set with the director here. So they talk about the ride. He changes gears and he says, well, what about the ride down there? She said, again, I just wanted to be with them before they had bad days. And she said they've never been to a beach that they remember. So I wanted to take him to the beach. She said, I wanted to give them one last happy memory, you know, and all that. So they said, what about affairs, money problems? Is he having an affair? You having an affair? You guys, what's the deal? She said, no, no major problems. No. Good. So why? So they said, well, explain. She explained, Matthew's a full time pastor at his church and there's about 200 people in the congregation is only income is church salary and some from speaking engagements because they were like, well, break down like financially. What do you guys do? You know, that was that income was kind of random whack-a-mole income that you can't count on just speaking engagements. She said, Matthew was planning to start on getting his master's degree in the summer or by the fall, definitely. So she said they asked her, when is the last time you talk to him? And she said yesterday morning at home. OK, so he said, what did you all discuss? And she said, no real conversation. Um, just no comment. I don't know. What are you saying? This is weird. So Ann Rule book goes on to say, quote, she had come out from where her mind was hiding just a little bit, but now she's scurried back. She didn't want to talk about Wednesday morning. Stabler, Stabler, by the way, is a Chris Maloney on fucking on SVU. Yeah, those are Stabler. So that's pretty funny. Stabler, harassing or sitting here interrogating someone. Stabler talked quietly to her, asking her to tell him her side of what happened, what problems she faced. He asked her to tell him what was troubling her so much. She said, quote, I just can't right now. Not right now. Yeah. And so he says, OK. And she said, quote, I appreciate. I feel like you have genuine concern and I do appreciate you. I'm just not up to that right now. Not right now. Not right now. Maybe later. Yeah. So he kept talking and she kept talking and Ann Rule goes on to say, Mary Winkler rambled quite a bit, telling him she had heard children's voices when she was handcuffed in an area of the police station. And then she realized it was her own children. She said she thought she was losing her mind for a minute. Oh, my God. But that's kind of how out of it she is. She didn't even realize that the kids are there too. Just kind of out of it. She said, I about did a backflip to get out of it because I was in the line of sight. She didn't want the kids to see her in handcuffs. She said, those three right there are my only concern right now. She, I guess, used they asked her if anybody I can get a hold of for the kids and all that kind of thing. So they had called Matthew's parents. So she said, Nana and Papa are going to come get them and all that kind of thing. They're on the way. So she felt like she could relax when they arrived because she knew that her mother-in-law would take good care of the kids. So she said, at that point she could take a breath and relax. She was in this interrogation room and didn't know where her kids were before that. They're in some other room and she didn't know what was going on. So which would worry any parent, obviously. Yeah. Yeah. So Stabler then asked her if she would, would you tell me what happened? Just tell me what happened. Whisper anything. Tell me something. Yeah. And so he said, I haven't been told really anything myself. I don't know. I've talked with the girls a little bit. OK. And they told me what they've seen and heard. And she said, right. And he said, I need you to fill in those gaps a little bit. All three know to an extent what's taken place. I don't think the one year old knows anything, by the way. The one year old doesn't know how not to shit in its pants. So I doubt that it knows. Probably not going to give you much info. Yeah. I wouldn't think so. So Mary, anyway, yeah, all three know to an extent what's taken place. She then said, what did you ask me? Which is a weird question. Yeah. He said to tell me what happened. Right. So I were sitting here, remember? Right. Yeah. Yeah. And again, she said she wasn't ready to do that yet. So that they they went and talked to her kids about the events of the past and what anything like that. As that happened, when they're talking about it, she listened and then when she finally spoke, she talked, this is from Ann Rule's book, she talked not of her own complicity, but of her concern for Matthew and what the newspapers might say about him. OK. She's concerned with the press spin on him. What are they going to say about him? Well, she said, quote, no matter what in the end, I don't want it. I don't want him smeared. That's what she said. They're sitting there going, we're trying to smear you at this point. Yeah. Yeah. You're the one who we found with the shotgun. So you're the one we're interested in. He is smeared all over the bedroom. Yeah. You've smeared blood everywhere. So Mary Winkler talked in circles and rule says saying she didn't know what words to use to explain what happened. So I don't know what words to use. How about you draw us a picture? Yeah. Something. Stick figures. She said, sometimes I think something might have happened and then there's no way. So he says, did he hurt you? Let's go to that. They make it easier. Is there a reason maybe why you did this? And she said, quote, not physically. Oh, sir. Answer. So then they stable or ask Mary if she knew her husband's condition at the present time and she said she didn't. But at one point she asked, has there been a funeral yet? Oh, which it's the next day. So it's obviously there hasn't been a funeral. She's not with it all the time. Her mind is somewhere else at this moment in time. So they said, was he alive when he left the house? Or do you know for sure? And she said, I don't know. So they said, OK, Mary, why did you shoot him? Silence. He said, had you planned ahead of time to shoot him or did it happen just in the spur of the moment? And then finally she says, quote, not planned. OK, that's all she'll give out at that room. Not planned. She said she had never shot that gun before. Oh, Matthew's like bird hunting gun or some shit. So she kept denying that she had shot Matthew at that point. But then she would go back in her mind to the time when she was driving away from Selmer the night before and just start talking about something else. She said, quote, driving down the road, something would go in my head. And I thought there was 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. OK. Then she said, I just don't want to talk about Matthew because I don't want to smear him no matter what she goes back to that. So they said, the shotgun, where was it? Did you load it? Let's start there. So she said, we kept it in the top of the closet out of reach. I messed it up and put it back. And they said, OK. They said, how do you know you didn't shoot more than once? And she said, I don't. Oh, I don't know what happened. She's unaware of what she did. Yeah. Now, back to the Ann Rulebook, they said, she spoke now about Matthew. She'd been thinking about him and about how he had so many rules and schedules for her to follow and all this. She said, quote, I love him dearly. 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 and the first of our marriage. I just took it like a mouse. I didn't think anything different. My mom just took it from my dad and that stupid scenario. And I got a job where I have to where I have 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 2005, and it just came back out for some reason. What's this? So I mean, that is this such a. I believe everything she said there because the way it came out, it's not planned. That is literally as the thoughts entered her brain. They fell out of her mouth. Yeah. Didn't think any different. My mom took it from my dad and that whole stupid scenario. And I got a job or I have to have this nerve and high self-esteem. She's just emptying whatever's up there. Right. There's no like narrative. You know what I'm saying? There's no like narrative. There's no there's no reason to hear. Yeah, she's not talking about anything. No, she's just saying things. I think she's not in a good state of mind. So the stabler said he would knock your self-esteem down. And she said, no, just chewing whatever. And that's the problem. It's little things. So I mean, just that's what she was thinking about at that moment is the time that he yelled at her for chewing weird or something. But that's how she's not her brain isn't together at this point. She says, I just chewing whatever. And that's the problem. I have nerve now and I have self-esteem. Quote, so my ugly came out. OK, so she got my ugly came out. Yeah. So he said, don't chew like that. And she's shot him. Not that day, but that's the type of I think that's what she was saying. They said he would knock your self-esteem down, not that day. Yeah. And she said, no, just chewing whatever. And that's the problem. So she's saying it's not that. No, it was just all the time. It was just this big macro thing of her, you know, feeling that. So that's about all she says. My ugly came out. It's about the last thing she says. And then she's arrested for first degree murder. Yeah, my ugly came out. My ugly came out. Yeah. Wow. So she's waves her right to the extradition hearing and is extradited back to Tennessee. The girls are placed with Matthew's parents, Dan and Diane. And they're going to be there for the next couple of years. They're going to stay with them. Oh, my God. So there's further investigation. Now we're back in Tennessee. So now we actually have the cops who have been investigating this talking to her. This is agent John Mayer from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. He's the lead investigator on the case for the TBI. He interviews Mary again in Tennessee. Now she gives a little bit different statement. She said, quote, I've gotten I got in a call from the bank and we were having troubles, mostly my fault, bad bookkeeping. He was upset with me about that. OK, he said he she said he had really been on me lately, criticizing me for things, the way I walk, the way I eat, everything. It was just building up to a point. I was tired of it. I guess I got to a point and snapped. And then Oxygen was like, hold on, let me write that down. That's a nice title. We're going to put a show on for the next 40 years where it's just about women killing people. OK, so she said, I don't remember getting the gun. The next thing I heard was a loud boom. Matthew was shot in the back as he lay in bed. He rolled from the bed onto the floor. He asked me his last words were why. Right. And she said she said, I said, I'm sorry, I love you. And then he died. Yeah. I got no answer. He said, why? And she said, I'm sorry, I love you. Wow. She said she even wiped blood away from his mouth. Really? She felt bad. Yeah. Then she just took the girls and left and drove away. Want to have a happy day. Took the last ones ever. That's it. And she took the gun with her, though, which is weird. Yeah, that is weird. I don't know why you do that. I don't know if it was just she just walked out with it. Like she was catatonic or what. She disconnected the phone, by the way. Yeah. That's her. Just in case he was alive, so he can't call for help. So that's. Oh, that's filthy. Yeah, she doesn't have an answer of why she disconnected the phone. She just said she did it and that Matthew was still alive when she left. Wow. So they're wondering whether to charge her. You know, now they first everyone's first degree murder when they're charged, but then they, you know, refined it a little bit here. So they're wondering this first degree murder, the best charge for this. Yeah. The evidence they have is she retrieved the gun from the closet. She pointed his back. She pulled the trigger. She shot him. She unplugged the phone so no help could be summoned. And then she fled the scene with the murder weapon and drove 340 miles away. That doesn't look good if you look at it from a statistical standpoint. So they go first degree murder, they indict her on. If convicted, that's life in prison with a minimum of 51 years. God dang. So that's a big one. She gets a couple of defense attorneys who are kind of hot shots in Memphis here. Yeah. Steve Farisi, senior and Leslie Ballin, B-A-L-L-I-N. Ballin. They're very good lawyers, high profile, very good lawyers, get a lot of people acquitted. They agree to represent Mary pro fucking bono. Really? That's how big of a case this is at the time. They're like, this is it's better for us just to get the pub. So yeah. And they said also they believed Mary is the victim here. They do. That's what they believe. They think over the over time you can needle a woman down enough. No, they say there's more. Oh, that Mary didn't talk about because she was embarrassed in the police interview. Oh, right. Which also makes sense because she does seem embarrassed to talk about anything in the police interview. She seems like she's normally she's a pastor's wife and all that. She's normally very private, I feel like. No comment right now. No, I just got no comment. So during the bond hearing, the defense argues that Mary's a victim of abuse of both verbal, emotional, physical and sexual abuse. And she snapped after years of torment. The shooting was an accident. The gun just went off. She didn't mean to kill him. The judge says $750,000 bail. The defense says it's excessive, calling it quote, tantamount, tantamount to no bond at all. And 750, 750. No, she doesn't have 750. So she sits there for a few months. Then on August 12th, her father, Clark, mortgages his properties to pay her bond. Wow. And bails her out of jail. So she is released from jail on August 12th, 2006. Jesus. Conditions are she has to live with friends of hers in McMinnville, Tennessee, who are Rudy and Kathy Thompson, not allowed to leave the state, can't contact the children without supervision. OK, that's it. She gets a job at a dry cleaning shop while awaiting trial. OK, someone that's a that's a tough interview. Well, I mean, I have a murder trial coming up, but it's not for months. I mean, I got I think I can work here a while here for the long haul. That's tough to see myself in five years. Well, I'm fans. Geez, let's see. Defends on what this judge thinks. I don't know. Maybe a GD course. Macramakes. You'll be making some shit possibly license plates. I don't know here. So she's doing that. It's the Cleaners Express shop. The town of McMinnville is on her side. They all believe her, her friends and are there and stuff. They all believe her. November 2006 cover of People fucking magazine. Stop it. People magazine. What? Whole cover, not a partial cover. It's a family photo of the five of them in front of Christmas tree. And it said, why did she kill him? The minister shooting. They seem the perfect couple. Then cops say she shot her husband in the back. The story of Mary and Matthew Winkler. And there they are. So big profile, very sympathetic to everybody involved. Photos of her looking very nice and not, you know, murdery crucifix, demure expressions and things like that. Her father and siblings give interviews as well. Oh, and this is where they're trying to really turn public sentiment to her side. Her father, Clark says, quote, physical, mental, verbal abuse. I don't know how she took it. She's a stronger individual than I am. Mary's sister, Tabitha said, I don't remember hearing her laugh. She was not a happy person. OK, another sister, Amanda, said, I saw a bruise on Mary. I didn't say anything because I didn't know how to. If I was to say who gave that to you, that would make her and that would make her mad. Then I wouldn't see her again. Oh, so they're saying that he sucked all the joy out of her. He sucked the joy out of her and they saw bruises and things like that. And she was scared. So that's a, you know, that says like a campaign of sure. Yeah, of abuse, started effort to. Yeah, yeah. And really holding someone hostile. Yeah, you know, so her defense attorney, Leslie Ballin, said, what went on behind their closed doors is going to have to be told. Some of what we've got from the state of Tennessee touches on sexual abuse. Good morning, America. Mary's family appears on Good Morning America. So they got out in front of this there. The People magazine article is based from her point of view. Sure. Good morning, America. Our, you know, appearance is Mary's family. So it's interesting. Now, they go further on Good Morning America. Mary's family appears there and Clark Freeman says he saw bad bruises on her. And the heaviest of makeup covering facial bruises. Oh, a friend, Rudy Thompson, who she was staying with in McMinnville, said that she saw Mary with a black eye at church one Sunday. Another friend, Amy Redmond said he was an authority figure and he made the decisions basically, it was obvious. But Mary's father said, Mary always denied everything to her father's face saying, and he said, she said, no, daddy, everything's all right, everything's all right. So they're definitely trying to get public sentiment on their side here. Sure. Yeah. And she's doing a good job of it until New Year's Eve 2006, where that takes a slight step back. What happened now? She is spotted out at a bar in McMinnville, smoking and drinking and laughing. Oh, ma'am. People got to smoke and drink and laugh. But when you're on bail for out on bond for murder and you're saying that you're so downtrodden and you're trying to turn the public sentiment, obviously, you can't just be downtrodden and feel like that 24 hours a day. You got to have a moment where something's fine. That happens. New Year, new me. It's coming up. We're about to switch over the calendar and going to change this thing. Go to a funeral. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe this is an Italian thing. But Italian funerals afterwards, when we go back to the house and everybody eats and people are playing cards and shooting dice and eating and sandwiches and shit. The insulted cured meats. Everybody's fucking laughing. Yeah. No one's sitting there going, oh, such a. It's none of that shit. It's over now. Now we're laughing. We got guys with their dress shirts off, wife beaters on fucking roll and dice and shit. It's a different scenario at that point. Well, that person's gone now. We start over. That's it. What are we going to do? We went to the funeral. We were all sad. We stood there. The women yelled and cried. My grandmother tried to jump in the casket. They all did that. And now it's over. Have some pursuit. Shut the fuck up. If I see a battered woman who fights back and shoots the guy, if she's not smiling after that, then why do it? You know what I mean? That's true, too. Well, yeah. If you're not jacked at this shit's finally over. I guess. Yeah. But that's not the rack. That's funny, but it's not the actual like emotional. Obviously. Yeah. Yeah. You shouldn't be out there just partying up, but it seems like it seems. I don't know. It's plausible. It's been nine months. Yeah. Also is the other thing. So it seems like you'd want to, if you, anyone needed stress relief, it'd be someone who's on bail for murder, but at the same time, if you're trying to make, if your whole goal here is to get the public on your side, going out, smoke and drinking and laughing on New Year's Eve, isn't the way to do it at all. So a customer captures her on cell phone video and it airs on local TV. So that is not good for her. No. The public is pissed. People are pissed. People that were on her side are now against her. They said this is a grieving widow that she's so sad. She's so abused and she's so traumatized. She's got to go out. Yeah. People who are traumatized have a drink and laugh once in a while still. But anyway, she's out partying and doing all this. The defense calls it a one time thing saying she's allowed to unwind. It was New Year's Eve. It wasn't a random Wednesday night. It was New Year's Eve. She's allowed to chill out. The prosecution doesn't think so, so much here. So in Ann Rule's book, Smoke and Mirror, Smoke, Mirrors and Murders, that's what it's called, they say that Ms. Rule also briefly discussed the incident on New Year's Eve when Mary was photographed in a bar with a beer holding a cigarette. The man who snapped the picture with a cell phone camera subsequently asked Mary, are you the preacher killer? Hey, she laughed and said, yeah, you want to be next? Oh, boy. Not good. That does not look good for you. Not look good. Making light of the situation is just publicly. We get psychologically, it makes sense, but publicly, it looks terrible. Not good. No. So now her probation officer, who's keeping track of her out on bond, said that she'd done everything she'd been required to sitting at a bar of a restaurant does not violate probation. There's nothing, no alcohol. Caveats and her probation or anything like that. So that's it. She's not supposed to kill anybody, I believe, or see her kids without whatever. That's a pretty good rule. Another problem for her is that she also gets a boyfriend while she's out here. What? Which, again, people meet people and it goes on. But doesn't look great if your whole case is based on public image. It doesn't look good. While she's working at the dry cleaner, she met the boss's brother. His name is Darryl Pillow. Yeah. Darryl Pillow. So they start dating. Darryl Pillow said, I saw interest in Mary and I thought Mary saw interest in me. Saw interest. I've never heard. Have you ever heard it put like that when someone got somebody? No, expressed. I have never seen saw. Saw interest. I was attracted to Mary. I mean, we do have a lot in common. We laugh. We got the same hobbies. It felt very normal. Felt like it was meant to be. He said the first time that we sat on the couch and I hugged her, she said, oh, this is I've missed this and that's what she needed. She needed somebody to hold her and hug her. So on week on weekends, while Mary was in the mental health facility later on, we'll talk about here, they get closer and talked about marriage. And Darryl said, we kind of joked around about it, but it wasn't nothing serious. It's not like we said a date or anything. Maybe years down the road may happen. I don't know, but the options there. Yeah. Now, here is Mary talking about the abuse. OK. Oh, boy. At different things, different times, she said, he threatened me with the shotgun many times, putting it in my face. He told me if I ever talk back to him that he would cut me into a million pieces. Yeah. So she said that he just flail. He just he just flailed. He's a big guy and he was just all over. He'd point his finger inches away from my nose. Whatever he was upset about, it was my fault. He said she said she said he kicked her out of bed, punched her in the face, choked her, pushed her and constantly criticized her as well. He said, quote, if I was fat, my hair wasn't right. The girls, if something went wrong, it was my fault. If it rained, it was my fault. I didn't know when it was coming ever. She said, wait, hair, long or short, family, friends, keeping up the house, something about the girls, just very, very critical. He also she also said that he she said that he isolated her as well. Saying, quote, he just sat me down and told me I was his wife and we were family now. And she also said that she needed his permission to get a haircut. Oh, come on, dude. Get a haircut. Get a haircut. Some guys are real weird about their wives hair. I don't understand why. Who gives a shit? I don't fucking care what you do to your head. Who cares? They're weird about it. You act like, yes, you know that. There's tons of guys who are weird about their. But guys like, I mean, I can understand being weird about like being attracted to that, but then you're in a relationship with someone and you tell them not to fuck with their hair. Yeah, that's very common for controlling where we've maybe mentioned that a good 40 times over the course of the show. But I don't understand it still. I don't get it. No, I don't get it. I know it. It's a difference. Yeah, I don't get it. I don't I'll never I'll never understand that if you're nuclear in relation either, but I know it happens. Yeah, you know, like if you're already in a relationship with somebody, they've got us, they're going to fucking change. You're going to be upset when they fucking age. That's yeah. Well, she wants he wants her to get the haircut. He wants her to get. Yeah. Which is does he have a choice? Who fucking knows what weird, you know, whatever Eve had, you know what I mean? That's the point. It's like, it's what is the biblical choice that somebody somebody. I know long hair they want on them for the most part. Those guys, there's also the fucking shoulder length bubble flip thing that is very common. Yeah. So who knows? Plain, I guess is the answer. Plain, I think is nothing that attracts attention. Colors or any of that shit. So Mary says also she asked for a divorce six or seven years into the marriage. She said that he asked you want a divorce and she said yes. And he said, well, we can't get a divorce. So that's not happening. I'm a on the preacher. We can't get divorced. That'll fuck everything up. That looks bad. Then there's the sex stuff. OK. Oh, here we go. Now we have more. Oh, man. So she says that he forced her to wear outfits and shit in the bedroom. OK. Platform heels. Big white platform heels like stripper shoes, big white ones, eight inch tall, by the way, the heels are. It's got to be a specific length, the highest ones. An Afro wig. Yeah. So basically like he wants to fuck Foxy Brown is what he's trying to do. Like he's like, yeah, Pam Greer in 1977. If you could make yourself that, that'd be excellent. He saw Beyonce in Austin Powers. Yeah. That's while she was being Foxy Brown. Right. Yeah. So that's interesting. So she also he also she claims that he wanted her to watch pornography with him as well and forced her to engage in oral and anal sex. Well, the oral you should be engaging in. That's fucking easy. You're married. Put your mouth on it. But if you don't want any in the butt, completely understandable. Understood. Understood. Everybody should be licking each other. But in the butt is that's to each his own. Yeah. You know what, though, I think if if you need it in her ass, then you should be open to it in yours too. There you go. If she needs it, if she likes it, she likes it. Yeah. But throw it on in there. But if you're forcing it in there, that's a different story. So anyway, that's she called them unnatural acts. Oh, which don't call oral sex in marriage and unnatural acts. Are you joking? Get the fuck out of here. That's crazy. I'm sorry, Mayor Bear. Yeah. That's that's third base. Yeah, right. Yeah, that's third fucking base. That's shy of actual sex. That's not even a homer. Yeah. I just got a blow job, you loser. Yeah, that's what kids consider anyway, third base. 16 year olds say to each other. Whereas sex is a home run and anal is like champagne in the locker room afterwards, right? Corks are popping. That's extra bad. Yeah, you won the series at that point. So here is a story that the cops kind of pieced together of kind of with all accounts, because Patricia has a memory of this as well. So apparently baby Brianna woke up crying around 6.15. Mary claims that Matthew kicked her out of bed literally. She said, caught me somewhere in the low of my back and I was on the floor. Oh, we shot through this. Baby's crying. He's like, take care of that bitch and kick her out of bed, which is wow. That's insane. And then come back and blow me. Okay, blow me. But apparently Matthew then got up to try to comfort the baby, kicked her out of bed and while she's recovering from figuring that out, then Mary took over and Matthew returned to bed, but he was all pissed off because in his mind, the baby cries, that's Mary's job. Yeah. Do that apparently. So Mary attends to Brianna, then they went downstairs and started some coffee. Then she went back upstairs, went to the bedroom closet and grabbed the shotgun. Oh, that was the last moment. Walked to the bed, pointed it at Matthew's back. His back was turned, never saw her coming with it and shot him. Seventy seven pellets of bird shot, go through him, tear up all the organs and everything that's on the bed. He rolls onto the floor because he was on the bed. He was literally in bed when she did this. Right. You know, he says, why? She says, I'm sorry, I love you. Wipe blood from his mouth. Then Patricia came in the room and said, what was that big boom? It was a shotgun blast at 6.15 in the morning. When my dog barks at the Amazon guy at 8.30, I'm like, what the fuck is that? Jesus Christ, God damn it. This is a shotgun. Out. Yeah, someone do something. But apparently Mary just told Patricia, daddy's hurt. We're leaving. Oh, we're leaving. We're leaving. So now it's going to come down to this is going to come down to Will. Who's the jury going to believe? I mean, science. They believe her. Yeah. I mean, the science is 100 percent. We know what happened. She and she admitted she shot him in the back while he was laying in bed. Yeah. And he bled out. So that's definitely she definitely committed the the the killing anyway. But will the jury believe her in terms of that he's been abusing her for years and that this was, you know, a moment of snapping from being abused for years and years and every way, shape and form possible, which if it is and the jury believes that, then it's understandable, you know. So basically there's no there's no medical evidence of abuse is the problem. Right. There's also no medical evidence that it didn't happen. No, there's none. So yeah, you can't prove a negative, obviously. So yeah, but there's no sheet from her side to claim that she was battered and everything else. She has to prove some of the abuse. Yeah. So there's no medical abuse. There's no police reports, never a hospital visit. None of that, which obviously there's tons of abuse that goes on that does not get reported, especially if you're in a position like a pastor and a pastor's wife, then your whole income is gone. That's almost like if you're a quarterbacks wife. Yeah. If he, if he beats the shit out of you and you call the cops, now he gets cut and you and your children lose millions of dollars too. So that's why a lot of women don't report it. Not that they should, you know, do that, but that's they don't because they go, well, fuck, that's, that's all everything we have. So anyway, friends and church members, a lot, tons and tons of them, dozens and dozens, describe Matthew as gentle and very nonviolent. And even nine year old daughter, Patricia, will testify and has talked to the police and said she never saw her father mistreat her mother at all, no pushing, no yelling, no anything, which is tough. But she took it out of the kids. And a lot of people do that. They don't do it in front of the kids. You know, there's a lot of people that do it in front of nobody. That's what I mean, which is even scarier, because that means they can control it and then and directed at the times they think they can get away with it. Yeah. Also, no wrongness of it. If you're not in front of anybody, you have a shame about it. Absolutely. It's fucking diabolical. So April 9th, 2007 is the trial. OK, this is a trial with the jury is 10 women and two men. Oh, and they did that exactly what the defense wanted. As many women on the jury as possible, because one or two of them may have gone through this or even known someone who went through it or their mother went through it or their sister, some chick they knew in college. Every woman has heard many stories of this, whether it's personal or a friend or family member, so and they know that and that's smart. If you're a defense, that's what you're trying to do. So they asked potential jurors these questions. Can emotional abuse be as damaging as physical abuse in your opinion? They get an idea where these jurors stood. Have you ever talked to someone who didn't listen, which is a weird, interesting question. Have you ever wondered why someone would stay in an abusive relationship? There's another question. So that's what they asked. Here is more about the jury from the Ann Rulebook here. The jurors were chosen. The jurors chosen were a fair representation of the citizens of McNary County. They would be sequestered, although after so much publicity, it seemed a little like locking the barn door after the horses ran away. Yeah, they already have heard everything from everything. Watch. They've read People magazine and watch Good Morning America for Christ's sake. One potential juror was excused quickly when she said that the Winklers had been her neighbors and that Matthew had once threatened to kill her dog if it came in her yard again. Right. They got that guy. Wow, that's funny. So that's a dismissal. So the defense attorney submitted a list of four forty four potential witnesses while the DA only listed thirteen witnesses. A lot of them are the police that found her, the cops that arrested her, the medical examiner, the child, all of that. So the woman on trial scarcely resembled the image of Mary Winkler at her arraignment thirteen months earlier. Then she had seemed a timid child. Now she held her head up, carried a briefcase and often strode into court ahead of Farisi and Ballin. She had dozens of hours of therapy, received many, many letters of support from around the county. She was bolstered by her attorney. So now she's confident. Walking in head up here. So now we'll talk about this a couple of things in the trial here. During the opening, the prosecution opening, Walt Freeland is the prosecutor, characterized Mary as a cold, blooded woman who had intentionally shot her husband in the back as he lay in bed early in the morning. He said she had deliberately unplugged the cord from their phone so that Matthew could not call for help after she left. He noted the financial catastrophe that was about to descend on the Winklers because Mary had been carrying out a checkkiting scheme since November 2005, depositing phony checks in several bank accounts. He said the house of cards that she set up was falling down. The defense will not produce any evidence of any good reason. Matthew Winkler was murdered by Mary Winkler because there is no good reason. OK, the defense. Steve Farisi's opening said called the marriage a living hell behind closed doors. Oh, he told jurors that Matthew's demands made Mary tiptoe on eggshells. And even then, everything she did seemed to displease him. She's the lawyer said he would destroy objects that she loved. He would isolate her from her family and he would abuse her. He would tell her that she couldn't eat lunch because she was too fat. Not only did she have to be perfect, her children had to be perfect too. So this is from the pastor's wife by Diane Fanning about the courtroom atmosphere on the first day. They say the court, the gallery was packed with reporters from as far away as Japan and England. Oh, imagine you're from Japan and you go to Selma, Tennessee. You're like, where the fuck is this? Interesting. Cameras flashed the moment Mary Winkler entered wearing a simple white blouse and black slacks. Her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She looked more like a Sunday school teacher than a woman accused of murdering her preacher husband, which is exactly what they want her to look like. Yeah, that's what you you're going for. Now, the prosecution's case is this. Shotgun, 12 age, pump, pump action, 12 gauge. Mary had to rack it to load it. Oh, so you couldn't have just pulled it. Yeah, couldn't have just got by accident. Yeah, yeah, got a racket. That's a deliberate action. Seventy seven pellets of bird shots broke his spine to destroy his organs. He bled out slowly. Yeah, but putting that unplugged phone from the wall, Jack, so he couldn't call for help. Mary drove 340 miles taking the murder weapon. Paid with cash everywhere and made no phone calls. Clearly trying to hide. They said the money, Nigerian scam, $5,000 overdrawn, banks wanting answers on March 22. Matthew shot just hours before they were supposed to go to the banks and have to call us on the table. Wow, this is from Walt Freeland's opening here. The defendant put a 12 gauge shotgun to the back of a sleeping man, her husband, the father of her children and pulled the trigger. Then she fled the state with those little girls while he bled to death on the bedroom floor. That, ladies and gentlemen, is not self-defense. That is first degree murder. You bet. The defense say no, no, no. Battered woman who snapped. That's it. They said it's self-defense at the most its manslaughter, but it sure as fuck isn't first degree murder. Mary lived in fear, isolation, sexual abuse, criticism, physical abuse. She tried to leave, but Matthew wouldn't let her saying divorce was not allowed. And she was trapped. OK. They say Matthew kicked her out of bed. She went to check on the baby. Matthew then tried to suffocate the baby by covering her mouth and nose to stop her from crying. Oh, no. She said that they say Mary was terrified that he was going to kill the baby. Yeah. So she took the baby, then retrieved the shotgun, not to kill him, to, quote, force him to talk through their problems. OK. Let's talk about our issues. That's a chat. Yeah. Let's talk, sweetie. Oh, OK. She said though the gun went off accidentally and she panicked and fled. Total in the midst of wanting to talk seriously, it went off. It went off. Just out of nowhere. Wrapping it. Yeah. They said Mary Winkler did not wake up on March 22nd, 2006 and decide to kill the man she loved. She woke up and for one tragic moment, she could not take one more day of the abuse, the humiliation and the terror. All right. Witnesses here. We got bank tellers testifying about the fraudulent checks from Mary, all signed by Mary, which she signs most of the checks of that. Even if Matthew knew about it, because part of the defense is that Matthew knew about all of this stuff and was just involved in everything as she was in check-kiting and all that kind of shit. They talk about the over drawn account, the phone calls demanding that we've called her so many times to say you have to come in. They get church members who testify. Matthew was a good man and a good father and a good husband, never violent, never angry, never abusive. Again, they wouldn't know that from where they are, but still they bring in Patricia age nine and they said, was your father a good father? And she says, yes, sir. Did he ever hurt your mother? No, sir. She describes the morning of the shooting, hearing a big boom and ran into the bedroom and saw daddy on the floor groaning and asked mommy what happened. And she said, daddy's hurt relieving. That's what the kid remembers. Well, while he's groaning, groaning. Oh, boy. This poor kid saw her dad on the floor. That's rough, man. Here are some now the defense witnesses. Here is from the Ann Rulebook. Quote, the prosecution had presented a woman who was about to be exposed for writing bad checks, a woman who had admitted to shooting her husband in the back before she ran away to another state. Steve Ferrisley and Leslie Ballin faced a formidable challenge as they would now try to rebuild Mary's side of the case. They presented a number of witnesses who vouched for Mary Winkler's positive image in the community and in her church community. And they said about demonizing Matthew. OK, which is what you got to do. Yeah, that's fucked, though. Dr. Lynn Zager, the forensic pathologist who went 41 sessions with Mary Winkler, testified for over two hours. If Mary herself should not take the stand, Zager had clearly committed her patient or her patient's life to memory almost from birth to the morning. Matthew died. The psychologist said she had diagnosed Mary with mild depression and post traumatic stress syndrome. She traced the post traumatic stress disorder back to the time that Mary's sister died suddenly from a heart attack. Yeah. The Freeman family. Was it a heart attack? No, it was the drowning. But I don't know why they put it like that. But that's fine. Yeah, that's what she said in the book. And who knows, because we didn't know if she had MS or MD or this. Nobody ever knew with L or palsy. We had no idea. So she said the Freeman family had no counseling at that time. Dr. Zager felt Mary had carried the emotional burden ever after. OK, that's fair. We've all had childhood traumas and tragedies and bad things. And although Matthew had controlled Mary, she tried to excuse his actions to Dr. Zager, they also said. So she was trying to make excuses for him. She often said that Matthew helped her to be better. He helped her to improve herself. He was concerned about her improving herself. This is what she said on the stand. Dr. Zager presented Mary Winkler as most vulnerable for domestic violence. A woman already psychologically damaged, who'd been subjected to a decade of emotionally abusive treatment by her minister husband. The defense had come up with their scenario of Matthew's murder. And now they padded out that skeletal structure with more and more witnesses. A Tennessee Highway patrolman testified to his contact with Matthew and McMinnville when he'd visited his terminally ill grandfather, who was a neighbor of the Winklers. The trooper said Matthew had walked across the street and shouted about a dog that was keeping him awake, a different dog now. Oh, he hates dogs. He fucking hate, which I don't trust him right there. Especially a barking ass dog. He cannot take it. Well, this is a small barking dog that was keeping him awake. That's why I know it's a different dog. Because a rottweiler will never be called a small dog. Never be considered a small barking dog. No. So the patrolman said he'd heard about the minister's reputation as a bully and that the neighborhood had nicknamed him, quote, the Tasmanian devil. Is that right? Apparently he comes out swinging. He's crazy. Matthew's parents and siblings watched the proceedings. His brother, Dan, looks startlingly like Matthew, so much so that it was almost as if the victim himself was in the courtroom. All three of Winkler's sons, Jacob, Matthew and Daniel, were large men who had once been athletes. Diane Winkler, Mary's mother-in-law, was extremely poised, attractive and beautifully dressed. She must have had been a daunting example for Mary to emulate during her 10-year marriage. While the Winklers had been somewhat supportive of Mary right after she was arrested, they no longer were. Now they're against her, for sure. Asked about a time in McMinnville when Matthew had allegedly locked Mary out of their home, his father testified that on two occasions, Matthew had had a bad reaction to medications he'd taken for a toothache and an upset stomach and became disoriented. Oh? That might explain such an occasion if it had even happened, really. But he said if it was, I'm sure it was one of the times Matthew took medication, had a bad reaction. So the only time he's ever been mean, it was, you know, toothache, ambasal gone wrong, you know, because. So Diane Winkler remembered one of his bizarre reactions to his medications. She said he had a hallucination. He saw a woman with black hair at the end of the hall coming at him with a knife, she testified. What? What drugs are they giving him? That's what I mean. I, toothache drugs. Holy shit. Do they give him mushrooms for his toothache? They give him fucking oxy-LSD for his goddamn. This is unbelievable. Wow. I've never had hallucinations from a drug for pain. And the only thing I've ever had hallucinations on are drugs I took to get hallucinations from mushrooms and acid. Wow. So anyway, they say that caused a gasp in the courtroom. An hour later, the outside the Justice Center, towns people wondered about the possibility of illegal drugs being involved. By the way, Matthew and his whole no drugs of any kind in the system, not even ibuprofen, just so we know here. They said Mary had suffered a black eye in McMinnville, which she had explained it away at the time, saying she'd been playing with the girls and had an accidentally hit possibly by an elbow. TBI criminal investigator, Howard Patterson and Phil Hampton, a forensic computer expert, both testified about, quote, certain images retrieved from the Winkler's computers. Two hundred sixty three images had been printed out. Oh, they didn't spell out what the images were. But we find out later they were pornograph. They were fucking naked women porn pictures. Downloads of porn, some stills, some videos. Oh, but definitely shit that no one thought was on Matthew's goddamn computer. Being Mr. Mr. Jesus and everything. The earth is 6,000 years old, but in that 6,000 years, we figured out how to make porn and video. So let's get it on, motherfucker. Yeah, I'm beaten. Yeah. Back and forth testimony and exhibits went. A church secretary at the Central Church of Christ in McMinnville, who had worked there for 35 years, testified that Matthew had been nice when he first came to her to the church, but he began to treat others as lower than himself. She said that he soon began to give orders, stepping out of bounds considerably. She told jurors that she had heard him speak to Mary angrily and that he sometimes locked his wife and children in his office for 20 to 30 minutes. Why? Get in there and there you go. You stay in there. I'll be back for you in 20 minutes. That makes no sense. OK. The only time I've heard of anybody locking their wife anywhere is Macho Man Savage locking Elizabeth up in dressing rooms during wrestling shows and shit. That's when he was a fucking psycho with that shit. So anyway, that's what she said. She said when she asked him why he said it was quote to keep them safe. They're at church. Yeah. They have to be locked in an office. What's going on out in church? Yeah. She also testified that he had made frivolous purchases on church accounts. Timothy Parish, a pulpit minister at the MacMinville church, took the stand to say that he felt the Winkler's marriage was not as happy as his own. I mean, they seemed happy, but I always looked and said, we're much happier. I bet I'm happier than them. I bet my wife is better than his wife and I'm nicer to her than he is. Sometimes Mary seemed happy, but there was other times when she didn't seem very happy and when she seemed like she was trying to cause problems or something. So church secretary said that she had heard Matthew berating Mary, heard harsh words and anger. We got family and friends saying black eyes. Heavy makeup, Mary's cowering and isolated. Clark Freeman, the dad said, I saw terrible bruises. I confronted her. She denied it. Psychologist Lynn Zager again says that she suffers from mild depression and post traumatic stress disorder that started when her sister died, which Mary was 13. I was right. I knew Mary was the one who was 13 and got worse from Matthew's abuse. She said it's a snowball effect from that. So yeah, she said that Mary told her that Matthew was verbally, emotionally, sexually and physically inappropriate to her at times. She also said that Mary accused Matthew of putting his hand over the nose of their one year old daughter to stop her from crying on that morning. And she said that Mary said that Matthew has done this to their two other children as well. Oh, I mean, they'll stop crying before they die. Is that the either way they're going to stop crying. Is that what you're doing there? I don't, that's crazy. She said also Mary could not form intent to commit a crime because of her compromised mental state. Oh, there you go. And then finally, Mary testifies. Yeah, she has to, she has to. It's all based on her, man. So if she gets up there and says what she needs to, then it'll help. So Mary testifies. She's very soft spoken, eyes downcast, very humble, doesn't come off as, yeah, that's right. No, that chin in the air, bullshit. Like the Kasotis guy was up there. Man, that Nicholas Kasotis we did a few weeks back. He was just acting like real confident about everything on the stand. None of that shit. She describes her marriage. She said he criticized her, quote, weight, hair, long or short, family, friends, keeping up the house, something about the girls, just very, very critical. She said he just sat me down and told him that I was his wife and we were family and we're going to cut off from the friends. He said, talked about physical abuse that we talked about, kicked her, punched her in the face, threatened to cut her into a million pieces. She said he threatened me with the shotgun many times, put it in my face. And then she describes the sexual stuff. Here we go. Which in a court in a small town in Tennessee is like a. It's a bomb going off. Like if you watch, you know, the staircase trial. I am. OK, if you watch the staircase documentary and you see parts of the trial, they convict him almost entirely on the prosecutor. Freaking the jury out with sexual things. So that is something that's easily done in this part of the country. It's at some point, if you have dealing with very religious people who don't deal with outside of their circle, sexual stuff very often, they kind of get freaked out by shit. And anyway, she said, Mary describes Matthew forcing her to watch pornography, forcing her to engage in oral and anal sex, called them unnatural acts. Then the defense attorney pulls out a bag. Here we go. What's in there? And says, what's in that sack, Mary? And gives it to Mary. Mary pulls it out. It is the pair of white platform, eight inch stripper shoes and an Afro wig. She puts them on there. And no, no, she puts them on the. Yes, thanks. Places them. The jury has an audible gasp. Oh my God. There they are. Because she is telling the truth about that. And they said, where'd you get that wig, Mary? And she said from Matthew. They said, why were those shoes bought, Mary? Matthew wanted me to wear them to dress up. And she said, dress up for what purpose, Mary? And she said, sex. And the jury was just, I mean, hands over their mouths, just horrified. One person said, when they brought out the shoe and the wig and put those on the witness stand, there was a gasp in the courtroom. It was just a moment in this case. I think that everything turned at that point. So Mary said, he made me do things I didn't want to do. I tried to say no, he'd just do it anyway. They said, did it hurt you? And she said, yes, sir. So she said that morning, Matthew started ranting about problems he was having in his personal feelings about the church administration. So she says on the stand. Now it's not even about her, it's about work. I didn't I didn't know what set him off. I was just listening to him. He calmed down. We started the movie. I fell asleep. This is the night before he woke me up. We went to bed. I remember not sleeping well. Brianna woke up crying at 6.15. Matthew kicked me out of bed, caught me somewhere in the lower low of my back. And I was on the floor. She tended to Brianna. Matthew got angry. Matthew tried to suffocate Brianna, covering her nose and mouth. She said he didn't even want her. He wanted a son, is what she said. She said she was terrified, took Brianna away from Matthew. Matthew went back to bed and she's followed him. She said, I just wanted to talk to Matthew. I just wanted him to stop being so mean. She said, I just wanted to talk to him, though. I went to the bedroom closet and retrieved the shotgun because I wanted to force him to work through our problems. I just wanted him to stop being so mean. I didn't pull the trigger, but something went off. OK, she said, I heard a loud boom. She kept saying that on cross. The prosecutor says, you know that pulling that trigger is what makes it go boom. Right. That's what did it. You've seen that. She said, yes, sir. They said, did you pull the trigger? And she said, no, sir. They said, did you intentionally kill your husband? No, sir. Did you love your husband? Yes, sir. I still love him. Oh, then she he points out her discrepancies. He said, well, why'd you tell Alabama police that Matthew never abused you? Which is it? You've told several times several different people. He didn't abuse you and several people he did. So which is it? Was he abusive or not? Mary says, I was ashamed. I didn't want anyone to know about Matthew. And they said, did your husband do anything for which he deserved to die? And she said, no, sir. Oh, she's saying it was an accident. So she can't say it was intentional. She the abuse is to get the abuse part is to get her holding a shotgun. Yeah. And then her claim is she didn't shoot him on purpose. She took the shotgun because that was the only way they were going to have a conversation that she wanted to have. Right. That's what that's what she was claiming. So and then once she had the shotgun, it just went off accidentally and then it's an accident. So in the closing arguments here, the prosecutor said he was brutally premeditatedly and intentionally killed shot in the middle of the back as he slept. He did not deserve to die. Justice demands one verdict guilty of murder in the first degree. OK, defense, they both attorneys give a closing. C for easy says, unfortunately, Matthew Winkler couldn't practice what he was preaching his problems or that of a bully. And what bullies do is they pick on people that are smaller than them. If you looked up spousal abuse in the dictionary, you're going to see a picture of Mary Winkler's face looking back at you. Leslie Ballin, I hate when they say look up in the dictionary. I don't know why it's so trite, stupid, come up with something else. Why do people still say it? It's such a cliche, especially in court. Now, Leslie Ballin says this is a case about two people who had a tumultuous marriage of some 10 years that ended in tragedy. There are no winners were left with the memory of Matthew Winkler, even though there's been a lot of negative things said about him in this trial. There was a good side to him, too. So they kind of play good cop, bad cop, the two lawyers, which is nice way to do that. Now, the verdict goes out. There is eight hours of deliberation, wow, which is quite a bit. And then they reach a verdict. They bring her in now. There is three options or four options, I should say, guilty of first degree murder. Sure. Or I'm sorry, because then there would be eight options. OK, seven and seven. So anyway, first degree murder, second degree murder, guilty, not guilty. And voluntary manslaughter, guilty, not guilty or just not guilty. So that's a total of seven outcomes here. So here we go. They find her guilty of voluntary manslaughter. Wow. Not first, not second. Voluntary mans, which means they believed that the gun just went off when she was pointing it at him for this. And they believe the all the other stuff. Yep. Vol, under Tennessee law, voluntary manslaughter is a crime of passion, quote, produced by adequate provocation, sufficient to lead a reasonable person to act in an irrational manner. OK. So the defense's reaction to this, they're fucking thrilled. Yeah. High profile people from Japan taking pictures of the victory. This is awesome for them. So she's going to get to see the light of day. Oh, we'll talk about it. So Farisi said we were offered 35 years. Yeah. Then we were offered 20 years. We were offered 15 years. Prosecution wasn't a problem at all. No, now we're just looking at three to six years. My reaction. Yeah, my reaction is the verdict that was probably just. Balan said there's no winners. We're just left with the memory of Matthew. He said that again. So he said this is a case about two people who had a tumultuous marriage of some 10 years that ended in tragedy. Nothing good about it. This is unbelievable. But also high five because we just pulled off a magic trick. OK. Sentencing comes around now. Victim impact statements. They bring in Matthew's brother who stands up in the stand and stares at Mary. And said, I've watched as the life of my brother's been turned into a circus. I don't see any remorse in you. Matthew's mother gave a 30 minute long monologue. Staring at Mary the whole time. 30 minutes. That is that's a good set right there. It's a it's more than a feature set. Like that's a boy. She has got some minutes. She said, you broke your girl's hearts. Mary, you have destroyed your husband's character. You destroyed his good name. You've accused him of being a monster who abused and belittled you. The monster you have painted for the world to see. I don't think that monster existed. There's been no remorse from you. You've never told your girls you're sorry. Don't you think that that you at least owe them that? You've never told us you're sorry. I think you at least owe us that. The girls are having nightmares. They fear people with guns breaking into their house. They're terrified. Don't you think you owe them an explanation? Now, the defense has 10 witnesses testify on her behalf. Also, tons of letters of recommendation, church friends, family friends, supporters, tons of letters, and Mary reads a statement herself. OK. Quote, whatever sentence you give me can never punish me enough. I've suffered the loss of someone I loved. I've lost my freedom. I've lost my children and I've had my life on public display. I think of Matthew every day and the guilt and I always miss and love him. I hope this situation sheds light on unhealthy relationships and that others will find the strength and have the courage to seek help before such a tragedy occurs again. The prosecutor argued for the maximum six years in jail. Defense attorney said probation should be fine for no jail time. So the judge says this, quote, this offense meets the state's legal definition of a violent, shocking and reprehensible act. However, in fashioning this sentence, the court has considered the seriousness of the offense, the jury's verdict and the testimony about allegations of abuse of this defendant, you, ma'am, may fuck off three years in prison. God damn how this breaks down is 210 days in prison custody minus 143 days already served, which is five months in jail awaiting trial before she got out. Minus 60 days to be served in a mental health facility on the weekends instead of prison, total time she does in jail is seven days. Seven days. She does a week in jail and then gets out for the mental health stuff. Oh, that's it. She's put on probation for the rest of her sentence as well. So then another two years on probation. That's that the defense obviously pretty thrilled about this. They're jacked over the moon here. Now, the jury foreman is pissed off and he talks to the press about. Oh, yeah. Bill Berry, the jury foreman, gives an interview to Court TV. He says, quote, I don't think justice was done. It's the times we're living in. People are getting away with murder today. If only there was a group of people who could fucking stop that. Only there was a group of especially a signed group of people set to really figure out the facts of these cases and and make sure that doesn't happen. It's all stop it. Yeah. If only if only someone was in charge of that group of people, maybe a four person possibly. Oh, yeah, that's this asshole. So he says the jury was unbalanced and unfair. He said it was 10 men and 10 women and two men and they all ganged up on the two men is what he said. He said nine of the 10 women wanted to acquit Mary entirely, wanted her to walk free. They felt like he deserved what he got. They felt like she had already lived through enough prison with the life she lived and that it was justified. Is that right? Berry and the other man, first of all, you have to. You have to give credit to the generosity of women in this way. There are 10 women and two men and who's the foreman? A guy. They let him be the fucking foreman. They're like, fine. Made, probably. Yeah, you do it. So they said that they compromised on voluntary manslaughter. It was just a compromise verdict. He said we had to settle on something. I didn't want her to just walk. He says he says he didn't believe Mary's abuse claims, doubted the physical abuse, wasn't sure about the sexual abuse, and he thought the sentence, if there was just going to be manslaughter, should have been the maximum six years. And he said he thinks she shouldn't get her daughters back. As well. Now, the public is split here. Public is split. Here is from the Tennessee in Tennessee in newspaper. Okay, here are some. This is from there. They asked readers to email in their thoughts. And here's what they got. Here's Susan Hines. I'm glad she was convicted in this case, even if she was just threatening Matthew with the gun with no intention of harming him, she did not protect her children from the argument by locking the bedroom door. That's what she's pissed about. Their eight year old daughter came in moments after the shooting and this alone is unforgivable concerning her sentence. The jail she will sit in can never punish her like the jail she's had to live inside of herself. Her children are gone forever along with her husband and the secure life she's living, she made a choice that has and will continue to affect the great number of people in a horrific way, some of some for the rest of their lives. This is John Salyer of Kentucky. Considering the vast documented sexual, physical and emotional abuse from her husband over many, many years, a document vast, you can say, but there isn't no documentation of any of this. So that's you can't really put that word in there. True or not, Mary Winkler should be credited with time served, reunited with her children and allowed to make the best of her remaining life. Here is Terry Hill. Here's another example of a justice system that's biased. Had it been the other way around, Mary Winkler's husband would have received a first degree murder verdict. Well, we know that's true, but we also know that a wife couldn't be physically and sexually abusing her husband for years either. That'd be very difficult to do. So it's not it's not an even flip on that one. It's definitely apples and oranges. But today all a woman has to do is claim mental, physical or sexual abuse and she'll get a lesser conviction and a possible acquittal. Just look at the Scott Peterson trial. The man was convicted and sentenced to death on 100 percent circumstantial evidence that piece of pizza is enough for me. I think our justice system is broke, not broken, broke. And women like Mary Winkler need some money or helping break it. Patricia Lewis of Tennessee, this verdict is verdict is just dot, dot, dot. It was blatantly obvious. Mary Winkler was a woman who'd been battered emotionally. Her continents radiated abuse. I'm a health care professional and without exception, all of my peers, one of whom was married to an abusive dominating minister, quote, unquote, of the gospel, agreed that this man was duplicitous, controlling and demeaning. There are no winners here, but hopefully she can be reunited with her children. And then finally, Gary Redden, quote, I cannot believe Mary Winkler got off with a slap on the wrist for shooting her husband in the back while he slept. What is wrong in this country? No matter no wonder murderers run rampant when there's no justice for real victims. The murder rate is so far down. Shut up. Even back then it was so far down. If her crime is excused away because of alleged circumstances, wow, you just alleged circumstances, circumstances is a lot. Why is it Matthew's alleged behavior excused? If the alleged abuse did occur, where's the psychologist to explain away his behavior? Yeah. OK, that's an interesting devil's advocate type of deal there. August 14th, 2007, Mary is released from. Oh, my God. That is very quickly, very quick. She returns to McMinnville, goes back to her friends, the Thompson's, and actually goes back to work at the dry cleaning shop. Wow. Like, well, I had my sorry, I had to take a little leave there. It's a radical. So I was gone for a week. Little murder, jail, mental institutions, sabbatical, you know, that goes. Oh, boy, oh, boy. She's told by the lawyer she'll go back to work real soon. The community completely welcomes her, supports her 100 percent. Everybody is good. By the way, remember her relationship with Darrell? Darrell Pillow. After Mary was released, she ended things with Darrell Pillow. She saw him all through the time when she was in jail, though. Darrell said, quote, she just said, Darrell, I've got to be single right now. And I said, that's fine. She needs to be focused on her children. And that's where she's at right now. All right, Darrell, at least Darrell seems like a decent guy. Then there's a custody battle. Oh, since her arrest, her daughters have been living with Dan and Diane Winkler. Oh, and the Winklers want to keep the kids permanently. They don't think that the mother should get the kids back after the mother killed their father. I kind of agree. So there's a file to terminate Mary's parental rights and adopt the girls. Their argument is Mary killed their father. She's unstable. She lied to the girls about what happened and the girls are fucking terrified of her. And all that shit. That's what they say. They also file a $2 million wrongful death lawsuit against Mary as well. OK, that's the other thing you can say. It's voluntary manslaughter. All you want, if it's a wrongful death, which doesn't matter, manslaughter is wrongful, then you can win money. So Mary fights back wanting her daughters back. Her argument is she's the victim of abuse. She's undergone undergone mental health treatment. She's completely rehabilitated and children need their mother. Yes, but you're also strong arguments. Yeah. So the case goes to court in Jackson, Tennessee. Psychologists evaluate Mary, the children, the parents, the situation, the house. The battle drags on for over a fucking year. In the meantime, September 2007, the month after she gets out of jail, Mary appears on Oprah. What Oprah? What do you do? She's on Oprah, the Oprah Winfrey Show, which is her first major interview. September 12, 2007. Yes, I'll read this is from the Ann Rulebook here. Mary 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 weeks. Guess she's like a kick off the week, too. That sweeps week are the big ones. So where whether Reverend Daniel Winkler and his wife, Diane, would join the show was a question, but in the end, they declined. It was only Mary who met with Oprah and she was not a live guest on camera, but an image on film as she met privately with Oprah sometime before September 12th. The date the show aired. She wasn't out in front of the audience. It was a here's the interview I did with her and they show footage of it here. So that was this was probably one of the oddest interviews. Oprah has ever conducted, even though she was has questioned thousands of people for movie stars to criminals. Having been on the set with Oprah when she talked to Diane Downs, who was with us by satellite 1985, I believe that was the last time I've seen Oprah so bemused by her subject. Mary was in her own world and she didn't let Oprah in. Diane Downs, convicted of shooting her three young children two years earlier, denied that she had done so and her affect was so animated and inappropriately cheerful, she actually enjoyed her moment in the spotlight on Oprah. Mary. Yeah. That was that was a weird interview. Her on Oprah's fucking weird, dude. It's so weird. I mean, Diane Downs interview on everything Diane Downs did was fucking weird. Diane Downs is just very weird. She's not a prison too, isn't she? Oh, I don't remember. I sure as shit. Hope not. God, she killed her kids. There's no use for that. You can't they didn't abuse her. You can't say my kids abused me. They put it in my ass. No. So Mary Winkler, having admitted shooting her husband, was certainly not animated and seemed hesitant to speak at all. Although it could not be more different, her affect was just as peculiar as Diane's. Many times during their conversation, Oprah did a subdued double take as she could not believe what she just heard and she did her best to coax some kind of response out of Mary, any kind of response. Mary dressed much like she had during the trial, a white cardigan jacket cut like a sweater, a cut like the sweater she wore when she testified. Her haircut was the same and her shy expression, the head ducking pose, were almost identical to those shown on news clips during her murder trial. On Oprah's show, however, Mary rarely, if ever, met Oprah's eyes, instead gazing off to the left, which is weird. It was almost as if she existed in another dimension and the questions, however gently probing, never quite penetrated an invisible wall that she had built around herself. From time to time, her response was only a quiet hmm and was almost cheerful in an absent minded way. For instance, when she had just mentioned how Matthew had suffocated their baby to quote, put her to sleep, Oprah followed up with something like, what did he do? Like, holy shit, her tone reflecting shock. Mary only. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yes, Matthew often suffocated their children and she'd been powerless to stop him. Never looking into Oprah's eyes, Mary explained that she'd been terrified of Matthew that morning, but at the same time, she just wanted to talk to him. She said, I wanted him to be happy, to stop being mean, just to enjoy life and tell him he didn't have to be so miserable. And Oprah said, have you ever said that to him before? And Mary said he would have never, he never would have allowed me to say that. Some of Mary's recitation of the facts of the morning of the shooting tracked with the version presented by the defense at her trial, but others were slightly changed by now. Oh, she's got a new event. Now she recalled Matthew had been sitting on the bed. Months ago, she said she had gone back to bed and was laying down. Yeah, it's a very different. Those are very different. Yeah. She said, quote, I just wanted to talk to Matthew, she explained to Oprah. And then there was that awful sound. Then she, quote, she hurried to a safer subject, but Oprah tugged her back, asking her to explain what that meant. Mary could not bring herself to say the words gunshot or shotgun shells. She explained that she never in a million years would have thought there was something in there, meaning both shotgun shells, quote. He always took it out. She meant she meant the shotgun shells, but she couldn't say the words. Oprah was like, during anal or what are you talking about? Oh, this. She showed no emotion at all. She explained that she thought something had hit the ceiling or one of the windows. Instinctively, she had run away and then realized Matthew wasn't chasing her. Asked where the girls were at that time. She answered Oprah in a peculiar way, quote. I want to say they were watching TV. So it was. Yeah, but it was early in the morning and the girls were either in bed or sitting out in the hall as Patricia had testified, frightened about what was happening in their parents' room. Mary said, quote, I still ask myself, what in the world happened? She had a vague memory of Matthew, quote, laying there, but he didn't say anything. She had wiped his mouth because there was blood coming from it and it just kept coming and coming, but she couldn't see anything wrong with him and couldn't understand why he was bleeding. She claims. And now it was akin to shade coming down over Mary's eyes, although they were still open, almost to herself. She spoke of how people's appearances can change in a matter of seconds. She meant as they died, but she could not say that. She couldn't say that either. She said, it's just terrible. Describing how dead faces change. She said, I just took off. We ran away. We didn't go to his parents because they were on vacation. I was going to Memphis, but then she had been aware that she was headed toward Mississippi instead. In the same breath that she described her fear of her husband, she said, with as much feeling as she had 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. She said, just before something very bad happened, Mary felt like her life was in danger, but now she's better. She said she was only beginning to find out who she really was, describing how frightened she had once been because she broke the sun visor on her car and had been afraid to tell Matthew. No, God, that's that sucks. Now she told Oprah that she had that she told now she saw that it had been her car and that she shouldn't have been afraid over a broken visor. So that's my car. If I want to break it, I'll break it. When Oprah asked about the financial crisis that came out after she bounced some checks in the computer scam aftermath, Mary said she wasn't even upset about it. She said she had nothing to do with it. It was all Matthew's idea. Which in the beginning, she said she didn't want him to find out. Now she said it was all his idea. Idea. Yeah, she said, yes, she paid the bills and balance the checkbook, but it was Matthew who participated in the Nigerian bank scam. She told Oprah she wasn't angry or he wasn't angry with her because it was his doing. She knew virtually nothing about the bank problem. She said that jarred with almost everything in the courtroom testimony about Mary's frantic efforts to hide the checkkiting. There's witnesses talking about her opening other accounts and trying to get ones with him. She's not telling the truth there. And still she might have been trying to do that for the family, but she can't say she didn't know about it. Right. She was very well aware. She was at the. She could say Matthew fucked up and I tried to fix it, but you can't say I didn't know it was happening. That's crazy. Um, and she still seemed unable to explain what she was afraid of 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. Okay, so she'll throw it out. That's fine. Now she included both in her litany of sexual abuse at Matthew's hands. She waffled about whether he had struck her physically. Now she was with Oprah. She wasn't saying he beat me all the time. A doubter might say that Mary's excruciatingly long pauses after Oprah's asked, asked a question came out, came about because she was trying to remember what she had said earlier. As Mary on film spoke, her attorneys, Leslie Ballin and Steve Farisi were in Oprah's live in Oprah's audience. Farisi'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 the one about her possible motivation for shooting. So Oprah said, tell me what you want. Tell me why you wanted to have this conversation today. Why did you want to talk to me? Yeah. Which I'm sure she didn't call Oprah. Probably. Well, maybe the lawyers did. Yeah. Mary said, up to this point, up to, up to my life at this point, I, she has weird syntax, up to my life at this point. I can't have done all this in vain. I cannot sit back if there's anything I could do to help somebody else. That's my goal at this time. Oprah says, how soon after you married him did the problem start? She said, I would say two, three months, just being shocked at the yelling in this different person. What surprised you the most? Mary said, the things he would say, just one day, he may encourage me to be with my family, then another day, he might say, we're never talking to them again. Right. They say, were there other examples of him being enraged? And Mary said, with the rage against you, just a certain thing. See, I can tell you one thing. What was the reason to begin anything? It's just if something upset him, if he's having a bad day, then that's all that. Then that was just all that was about it. God, that's hard to read. She's got some weird ways of speaking. The words are like you jumbled up fucking scrabble tiles and then just picked random ones. You know what I mean? Spit it out there. It's hard to read. Oprah asked about the sex and said, you know, things you considered unnatural. She said anal sex, oral sex. He made me watch pornography. He made me wear those shoes in that wig. Did you ever try to say to him, I'm not doing this? She said, at that moment, no. But when we were not in the heat of the moment, I would say, I don't like that. Let's not. And he'd say, OK, then he would get going. And that was just that. Oprah said, so when you got to the closet and got the shotgun because you wanted to talk to him and she said, I just wanted to talk to Matthew. I was so afraid of him. Oprah said, but why the shotgun? Right. And Mary said, I can't tell you an actual memory of a thought. But today, when I think back, it's just being so afraid. I don't think if it was, I don't think if it was to intimidate him or just to get his attention. So Oprah says, help me understand. You went to the closet, got the gun and then what? And Mary said, I remember holding the shotgun, hearing the boom and then a smell. He asked me why and I just said I was sorry. Do you remember pulling the trigger? No. Oprah says, that doesn't make sense to me. And I imagine it doesn't make sense to you either. Right. And Mary says, I know, I know, rather than yes, you're right. So it's real weird. They said, well, why do you think you should have your children back? And Mary says, I'm your mother or I'm their mother. And Oprah says, you killed their father. And Mary says, I did not want any of this to happen. And Oprah said, do you think you served enough time for this crime? And she said, there's no amount of time, I think you can put something like you can put on something like this. No, I was just ready for them to lock the door and throw away the key. So August 2008, after a prolonged year long battle over custody, Mary wins full custody of her three daughters. Get the fuck out of here. Nope. She picked them up on a Friday in August. Wow. Her attorney said she was absolutely overjoyed. The girls will live with her near McMinnville. The Winklers will retain visitation rights. I cannot believe it. Those are some uncomfortable kid exchanges there, boy. Wow. Holy shit. 2010, Mary is diagnosed with MS. Oh, no. Sclerosis, which my stepfather has that it's terrible. She said, I've read everything I can get my hands on, experienced it. And it's just the strangest disease. I don't fully understand it. Yeah, she sat down and she said, where we rent the man who bought this property, he bought it for the eight acres for the field. And so there's certain places where the fence is down and the girls will just get out there and we'll run and enjoy that. Sounds like she's got three golden labs or something. They just run in the field and come back and tires them right out. They just curl up by my feet while I'm on the couch and they're just passed right out. She says that she she tried to make life as normal as possible, but she started having trouble with her hands and feet. She said it was such a scary time. At one point, we thought I had had a stroke just because the disabilities were on the right side of my body, but upon further testing, because that's not something you go to the emergency room to find out you have MS. But when you have such an exasperation, it came to that point. So they diagnosed her with that. She said, I had just been accepted into nursing school that last fall. And then with the MS, I talked to my physical therapist, my occupational therapist, and the problem, she said, nursing would not be an occupation to go into because I'm on my feet so much. And also they have to like lift people and you got to be strong. Yeah. So she returned here and wow, forced to take time to care for herself. She had to give the kids back to the in-laws a little bit. She said, when I had the exasperation with my MS, it was a real hard time. The Winklers were wonderful because the girls had gone for a weekend visit and that turned into three months. And so the Winklers were just right there for the girls and took great care of them. She says she's getting used to opening pill bottles and giving herself shots. She said, it's a safety thing where you have to actually push two things to make it open. Honey, I can't hardly do that with two good hands. She said, my right hand and right foot were just completely disabled. I could not use them. Sometimes with MS, whatever you experience may be permanent. You just don't know. So I was very fortunate that I'd been able to come back to full capacity. She said she's also fortunate and thankful for her friends. And she said, I'm doing really good. I appreciate and all the, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. She said, whatever reason people have any problem with me, that's fine. Everybody's entitled to their opinion. But these girls are treated for who they are, not because of what their mother's done, but because they themselves are unique. They're three very fine young ladies. Just her, her. Just the way she put sentences together has improved so much since then. Think about it in the Oprah interview. Yeah. When you can't even read it because those words don't go in the right order. Is that from the MS? I don't know if this is from that or if this is her. She's mentally more clear now or what it is. But so what really happened? Let's what the fuck? Mary, team Mary says abused, snapped, accident or self defense deserves a second chance. The other side, no evidence of abuse, no medical records, police record. She killed him over money, which doesn't make sense because she's not like she got anything. That doesn't make sense. The shooting, she racked the shotgun unplugged the phone, drove away. There you go. So a lot. It's weird because this is not a male female thing the way it's breaking down. It's not a man and woman thing because Oprah is clearly not on her side. Right. And Oprah was for a long time considered the queen of all women. You know what I mean? Yeah, she's literally their leader forever. And she didn't buy it. Yeah. And Ann Rule, who is Ann Rule, does not like her. If you read this fucking book and she's not happy about her, does not like this Mary at all. But how the fuck do we know? You know what I mean? And also, I hate to say it because I'm not in this world and people get pissed off at me for saying this because I'm not in this world. But the image consciousness and the whole thing of being a pastor is such a fucking mind fuck. Yeah. As far as that got the image and this and that. And so I mean, like I tend to believe when someone says behind closed doors, someone's doing shit like this. I tend to believe it. How do you say no? Because it makes sense to me. So I got to kind of believe I believe her. But at the same time, I'm like, yeah, but then why'd you say it? Like why'd you do it? Like you did it? Why'd you have the kids there? Like you couldn't wait? It's just a straight. I don't know what happened. It's a strange, just fucking thing in the world. I feel bad. I feel bad for him too, because that's fucked up. Yeah. I feel bad for these kids. I mean, it sucks, man. So 2023, Matt's dad gives a sermon. Oh, yes. And in his sermon, he said 18 years ago, trauma knocked on the front door of our house and we lost a son. I live with that emptiness all the time and it's been almost two decades. But I remember the sound of his voice. And every time we sit down at Christmas at a Christmas table as a family, there's an empty place for him. 2025, Mary is asked for an interview by ABC News. Oh, this is this year. She said, we've moved on. I'm busy taking care of my three daughters. I don't want to talk. Yeah, and they're 20 something. Oh, 26, 24 and 19. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're full adults. One just got like indicted for mail fraud for a MLM scam or not. That didn't happen. But I mean, Jesus Christ, they've stayed out of the public eye. No interviews, no social media presence. Pretty much since 2010 when she gave that MS interview, she's shut the fuck up and stayed out of everything. The town remembers it this way. This is what a local said. This is awesome. Quote, until the cars for kids accident, this was the biggest thing that ever happened here. So Jesus Christ. Ah, now you know why we had to cover cars for kids. Plowing over six. Remember that. So there you go. Wow. That is Selma, Tennessee. We'll get through the end real quick here. That's Selma, Tennessee. Hope you liked it. If you like that story, first of all, we don't know what the fuck happened. Number one, so don't yell at us for thinking one thing or the other because we have no thoughts on this. I don't know. She did something. We don't know. So anyway, if you're listening, give us five stars on whatever app you're listening on. It really does help drive the show up the chart. So thank you for doing that. You can also follow us on social media all over the place on Instagram at small town murder on Facebook at small town pod. You do that there on. So follow all of that. You can email us. You can do whatever the hell you want, but definitely get yourself patreon. That is the thing you're going to want patreon. Anybody five dollars a month or above a cup of coffee, it is right. You're going to get so much hundreds of bonus episodes immediately upon subscription. You can binge that you've never heard before. Then every other week you get new ones that come out one crime and sports and one small town murder and you get it all. You get all of everything we got here this week for crime and sports. This is very interesting. You definitely don't have to like sports for this. We're going to talk about dead bicyclists. We're going to talk about crazy cycling accidents that have happened and all sorts of dead people. It makes NASCAR look like the safest thing in the world. It's crazy. And then for small town murder, it's Charles Stark weather time. We're going to talk about this guy who went on a killing spree of 11 people and said, no, it was really a 13 year old girl that forced me to do it. She's tough, man. She's tough. So there you go. Do that. That is patreon.com slash crime in sports. And in addition to all the bonus material that you get, that's worth five bucks alone. You're also going to get on top of all that. You're going to get all the shows we do ad free as well. And you get a shout out at the end of the show as well. Jimmy, line them up. Hit me with the names of the people who love us so much, but don't mind having their name mispronounced. Hit me with them right now. Lay them down. Is that going to produce a Rachel? No, that's Rochelle Gentner, Kyle Norwig in the UK. He's going to come to the DC show. Wow. See you there. Gary Howard. Happy birthday. Hey, happy birthday. Alenia. Alenia. Montreux. Alenia. Alenia. Alenia. Alenia. Don't look at me. Aaron. Thank you very much. And Saul. Angela Gullart. Happy birthday. Katie Huffden. Houghton. Happy birthday. They're coming to Philly. Happy birthday. Katie and her husband are from the UK also, I believe. Wow. Yeah, it's amazing. People flying across the ocean to come see our dumb shit. Wow, thank you. That's always, I always blows my mind. Jamie Mutz, maybe Moots. Julie Martinez. Robin Baldahl. Joe Welch. Washed his mom. And he went to Tortilla Flats, James. And Spreader Ashes. That's nice. Oh, that's nice. Okay, he was doing it for a reason. Yeah, I'm gonna get there. Liz Vasquez. Other producers this week. Liz Vasquez, Peyton Meadows. Happy Hour. Fishing on the Blue Bayou of Lafitte, Louisiana. Where's Lafitte? Lafitte? Lafite? Probably Lafitte. Lafitte? Yeah, I was assuming like the wine. Lafitte is a French wine. So everything in New Orleans is French. That makes sense. Ryan Bender, Janice Hill, Mima. Teresa Rubino. Pazia Kennedy. She put her name Teresa in quotes. I think Mima is the quotable part. We'll call you Mima if you want. Pazia, Pazia, Pazia, Kennedy. Franny McIntyre. Rainbow Preston Valley Girl. Chris with no last name. Dalia Grayson. Paleo Jen. Bean with no last name. Corellium Locus. I think that. Corellium. I don't know. Lindy Peterson. Jeff Moore. He had a Corellium Locus. It's impenetrable. Impenetrable. Adam Euston. Ariel Marquette. Marquay. Morgan Casey. Tina Amaya. Susan Walsh. Luke Quigley. Scott VP. Stanley Daly. Crystal with no last name. Tessa Rivers. George Asillowash. Silowash. Teresa Delatorre. Natalie Rich. Jesse with no last name. Dylan Cook. Carl V. Justin Olson. Kyle Stubbs. Sarah Ash. Luna Pazdeck. Vanessa Jenkins. Robin Wall. Stacy Hafner. Dale with no last name. Jack with no last name. Peanut Butterfly. 75. Chris Daniel. Tyler Pacman. Bates with no last name. Renee Nirgarten. Oh boy. Alex Smith. Jess Kennedy. Diggy with no last name. Dana Ellison. Probably resigned to just listening to podcasts at this point in his life. Pleasure to have you, Alex. It's been a long time. We barely knew you. Sorry to offend your Mormon sensibilities, but. Dana Ellison. Justin Astrid, a.k.a. Sastrid. Love you, James. Evidently, you have to say that back now. There it is. Catherine Nichols. Emily Patterson. Kane. DePesh Girl. Elizabeth Hill. Cameron Kay. Robbie. W1RCP. Pitts. I don't know what that is. Seth with no last name. Susan Grant. Jessica Williams. Jamie Janway. Alyssa with no last name. Hammer Andronicus. Todd Smith. Justin with no last name. AJ Bork. Burke, probably. William the Wicked. J. F. Tiger. Kristen Grimes. Speedcore Dave. Megan Beasley. Crystal Jackson. Speedcore. Not hardcore. How fucking badass he is. Crystal Jackson. Peter Carmichael. BBQ Beans. Shelley Fane. Anthony Fernandez. Kimberly Strebler. Chris Stevens. Phillip Dion. Mitchell. That's Michelle G. There was also Michelle B. That was in porn. That's probably not the same person. It could be. Brendan. Brendan Kedrowski. Chris Bedard. Vedard. Charles Meek. Charles Meek said that. Natalie Crespo. Trevor Gordon. Alice Crawford. Eric Fowler. Chris Haas. Morgan O'Shea. Alyssa D. Badmofo Inc. James. It's got a whole company. That's good to know. Danielle Deadline. You know. Brett Savoyah. John Perry. You can write all that bad motherfucker shit off. Gabriel Stansfield. Don Harmer. Jesse Marlowe's kid. Jessica Coburn. Chastity. Chastity. Not Chastity. Chastity Drawty. They fucked your name up Chastity. It's supposed to be Chastity. We're sorry your parents did that to you. They missed a T. Sarah Young. Johnny Diaz. Lindsay Boyd. Rebecca with no last name. Mark with no last name. Chris Carr. Eric McMahon. Flapjack Short Stacks. Annie Nair. Jill Hanglin. We're getting that Nair money. C. Jean. Finally. C. Green. 91. R.D. Zep 3. Jacob with no last name. Katie Olson. Herman Horsehair. Bug Fuzz. The third. Jason Novichak. Who was it? Was there a Novichak? Yeah. Tight end for the no ones. Yeah. That's what it was. I'd see Czech and I go basketball. Kinda with no last name. Brenna and Matthew Reicharts. Rickarts. Reicharts. Kelly Rogers. Mike Robinson. Amanda Fredericks. Lord Skullfucker. Wow. That's gross. High exalted position. Crystal Smith. Brennan Till. Jeff with no last name. Amos with no last name. Steve Stevens. L'Oreal Testa. Andrew Glenn. And all of our patrons. You're the best. Thank you so much everybody. Yeah. You fantastic, wonderful, beautiful people. We fucking love you to death. So thank you for keeping this show going always. If you want to follow us on social media, shut up and give me murder.com has drop down menus. I'm taking anywhere you need to go. So go there and see us and keep coming back. And until next week, everybody, it's been our pleasure. Bye. 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