The Pastor's Wife (21 page)

“Did she also tell you that all she wants to do is to be normal and live with her mother?”

“No, she did not say that part. She said that she wanted to be normal and she wanted to have her daddy and her mother and be a normal family.”

“Sure, and she loved both her mother and her father, correct?”

“She does.”

“Did she say she wanted to come to court and testify to make sure her mother goes to prison? Did she say that?”

“No, sir.”

“So if anybody told that to the counselor, that would be a lie, wouldn't it?”

“No one's told that to the counselor.”

Farese then harassed her about not telling Mary about the time Patricia broke her arm, or that the girls were in a minor car wreck. Then he asked, “Did you try to prevent Patricia from testifying in this court?”

“It was not our decision that she testify.”

At the defense table, Mary, dressed in pink, rolled her eyes and dropped her forehead in her hand.

“Did you do anything to discourage the district attorney?”

At an objection for the prosecution, the lawyers went into another sidebar with the judge. After skimming over
some other topics, Farese turned his questioning to the September visit between Mary and the girls.

Diane testified that after returning home, the girls showed her the presents they got from their mother, and Patricia said, “Nana, mother said she did not kill Daddy, isn't that wonderful? She said that the police in Alabama did not tell the truth.”

“You said you don't want the children to have scars,” Farese said.

“Of course not. We want them to heal and learn how to deal with what they've been through.”

“Do you realize that Patricia will have a big scar when she gets home?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“I'm sure you don't,” Farese said with disdain.

Prosecutor Freeland stood up and announced, “The state calls Patricia Winkler.”

Minutes passed in anticipation. Everyone in the courtroom knew the emotional intensity of the daughter's testimony would be in sharp contrast to the stoicism presented by Matthew's mother.

The video cameras were turned off and no audio recording allowed, by order of Judge McCraw. The journalists, who'd been watching the trial feed in the adjacent media room, now saw only a still shot of the state seal of Tennessee. They packed up and moved into the courtroom, squeezing into already crowded rows of reporters.

Previous witnesses filled the space in the witness box—the larger men actually made it look cramped. Now, Patricia looked lost in its vastness, appearing even tinier than she was.

Mary's attention zeroed in on Patricia—she didn't move her eyes from her daughter's face for one moment throughout her testimony. A soft smile stole across Mary's lips, her eyes softened and glowed with warmth at the first glimpse of the girl. That expression remained fixed in place as long as Patricia was in the courtroom.

Freeland established that the little girl knew the difference between the truth and a lie, and the importance of telling the truth. When he asked her about her age and her
school, Patricia fell apart, sobbing uncontrollably. Judge McCraw whispered to her.

When she regained her composure, Freeland continued, eliciting basic biographical information. Then he said, “I'm going to ask you about the morning you left the house with your mama. Do you remember waking up that morning?”

Patricia talked about the “big boom” she heard, and about seeing her daddy on the floor crying.

Freeland asked, “Did you hear Mommy say anything after you left, about what happened to your dad?”

“When we were going to Alabama, she said he was in the hospital.”

“And how was your mother—how did she look?”

“Mom just looked like her normal self.”

“Did you ever see your daddy be ugly to your mother?”

“No, sir,” Patricia said shaking her head.

He talked to her about her time at the police station and then asked, “Did you ever ask your mother where you were going?”

“I asked her where we were going and she said we were going someplace special. I asked her if we could go pick up Daddy. She said, ‘Daddy couldn't take it with all of Breanna's crying.'”

Farese handled the cross-examination of the child with exquisite tenderness. He talked to her about her trips to Gatlinburg and Disney World, then asked about her visit with her mother in Huntingdon last fall. “Were you happy to see her?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you hug her?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you kiss her?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you tell her you love her?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You just talked about happy stuff?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Not about any of the stuff we're talking about here?”

Patricia shook her head. Farese talked with her about her counselor and then asked, “Why didn't you see your mom again?”

“'Cause I didn't want to see her.”

“You had a good time and liked seeing her in September. Suddenly, you don't want to see her again?”

The pain traced across her features. “I still love her,” she said before hanging her head and crying again.

Farese brought her a tissue and whispered to her. At last, she was dismissed.

Most in the courtroom doubted the wisdom of subjecting Patricia to the trauma of a courtroom appearance in exchange for such minor testimony. As she left the chamber, her sobs echoed in everyone's ears. Even seasoned journalists wiped moisture from their eyes.

Freeland defused the charged atmosphere in the courtroom by calling another financial witness, Special Agent Brent Booth with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. The agent worked a lot with fraud, lottery schemes and other illegal financial activities, making him the perfect witness to detail the Nigerian check scam, with its many variations, and to explain check-kiting. During direct examination, he admitted that he did see the orange tackle box in the back of Mary's van, but he did not open it.

The cross-examination was conducted by an attorney who had to this point remained silent, Tony Farese, Steve's brother and business partner. Tony Farese attacked Booth's timeline for tracking Mary's check-kiting and argued with the witness about the validity of the TBI policy not to videotape statements.

On re-direct, Booth said that Mary never used the word “accident” in her statement to him. On re-cross, Tony Farese elicited an admission that Mary also never used the word “intentionally” when describing the shooting of her husband.

The final witness of the day was Brandy Jones, a former neighbor in Pegram who lived with Matthew and Mary for a few months. She testified about Mary's insistence that she was happy in Selmer and said that she had never seen any evidence of Mary's physical or emotional abuse.

Leslie Ballin cross-examined this witness, asking her about the time when Matthew had a drug reaction. Brandy said, “I can't say whether or not the medication made Matthew act poorly to Mary 'cause Mary never told me about that, but she was laughing when she came to our door. I didn't get any distress signals from Mary, at all.”

At the conclusion of her testimony, the state rested their case.

The defense opened their case by calling Special Agent Donna Nelson, a forensic scientist with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. She described the retrieval of evidence from the parsonage and her interaction with other law enforcement officials on the scene. The positioning of the telephone in the home and at the hotel room became an issue with both sides in their questioning of this witness. The prosecution felt it demonstrated Mary's evil intentions; the defense, on the other hand, felt that the similar positions of the phones in two different locations proved that the baby had played with them in both cases. Nelson said that the only difference between the telephones in two rooms was that one of them was only a few feet away from a dead body.

Next to the stand for the defense was Tennessee Highway Patrol Officer Jimmy Jones, who related the story of Matthew Winkler shouting at him about a barking dog while Jimmy's grandmother lay dying inside the house. That run-in caused him to give Matt a nickname—“the Tasmanian Devil.”

The defense called two computer forensic experts to the stand next, to testify about images found on the hard drives used by Matthew and Mary Winkler. More than three hundred had been found on the computers, but many, if not all, of them had been deleted at some date prior to the confiscation of the hard drives by law enforcement.
Although no one specified in court to the exact content of these images, the clear allusion was that they were pornographic in nature. Although not revealed in court, the majority were shots of pairs of women engaged in sexual activity or of a woman performing oral sex on a man.

Jonathan Allen, a 21-year-old Freed-Hardeman student, said that he knew Matthew from his time as a youth minister at the Central Church of Christ in McMinnville. Allen considered him a friend, but admitted that Matthew's personality clashed with those of two or three of the teenagers in the youth group.

Rudy Thomsen, who hosted Mary in his home after her release from jail on bond, took the stand. He testified about Mary's black eye and the statement she gave about receiving the injury from one of her daughter's elbows.

“Did you ever observe Matthew interacting with Mary in a way that caused you to rethink what may or may not have caused that black eye?” Farese asked.

Rudy recounted the time in the fellowship hall at church where he saw Mary's demeanor change from bubbly to subdued when Matthew entered the room.

“Did that cause you to make further observations during throughout their tenure there at Central?” Farese asked.

“I noticed that behavior more after that, because I became more aware of it.”

After a series of questions about Mary's stay at his house, Rudy said, “I saw a woman who came to my house hurt and hurting. Now she has blossomed into that person I saw in that fellowship hall.”

On cross-examination, Freeland elicited testimony that Rudy's son had no problems with Matthew as youth minister at Central Church of Christ. Rudy also admitted that he had once gotten a black eye caused by the elbow of one of his nephews when they were horsing around in the swimming pool.

The next witness was reluctant at best. Lori Boyd, former secretary at Central Church of Christ, did not want to
testify. But when officers questioned her after Matthew's death, she told them what she remembered. Now, she'd been served with a subpoena forcing her presence in the courtroom.

She talked about her experience working for Matthew, her objections to the belittling way he treated Mary and his heavy-handed management techniques. She also brought up questionable purchases of history books that Matthew made on church accounts.

The pulpit minister of Central Church of Christ, Timothy Parish, stepped into the hot seat. He claimed that the statement he gave to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation was documented inaccurately. He said he did not see the report until recently. “Some of it was a little surprising to me. There were things I could not recall ever saying. Things attributed to me that, to the best of my recollection, I did not say.”

One of the disputed comments in the written statement was that “Mary looked whipped.” Parish said, “I don't use that phrase. But there it is in the statement.” He also claimed he never said that Matthew was controlling.

Leslie Ballin pointed out Parish's wife in the back of the courtroom and asked, “Did you have any thoughts about Matthew and Mary's marriage?”

“I tend to compare anybody's marriage to my own. I think that I have an exceptional marriage…To that extent, I didn't think it was as good as mine.”

Just after 1:30 on the afternoon of April 17, the fifth day of Mary Winkler's trial, the defense called Mary's adopted sister, 26-year-old Tabatha Freeman to the witness stand. She expressed her love for Mary and her adopted family, and in answer to Steve Farese's questions, explained the environment in the Freeman home. “It was a loving house-hold. Daddy was head of the family. He took care of discipline. He made all the family decisions.”

“Did you notice any changes in Mary after marrying Matthew?” Farese asked.

“She was happy at first. As time went on, a very bubbly, outgoing sister became subdued, and I didn't get to see her.”

Then she testified, “After Mama died, I don't think she [Mary] ever came to Knoxville to see the family.”

Farese asked her about the death of her adopted mother, Mary Nell Freeman. Tabatha, crying, responded that when she was a senior in high school, Mary Nell died of cancer.

The defense attorney turned the questioning to Matthew and Mary's relationship. Tabatha said, “Matthew pretty much dictated everything. Mary could not make decisions for herself…She always said, ‘I'll have to check with Matt' when we invited her to visit, and the answer was usually ‘No.'”

Contradicting an earlier statement that she hadn't seen
Mary for the three years prior to Matthew's death, Tabatha said that Mary visited the family in Knoxville for two hours on Christmas 2005. “Matthew, at times, just left family get-togethers and visited other people in the area. He often left angry, but I usually had no idea what he was angry about. I remember one time he was upset about dinner arrangements.”

Farese asked again about how often she was able to see her big sister after she married Matthew. “Seeing Mary was normal in the beginning, then it became less. I understood when they lived in Louisiana, but when they moved back to Tennessee, it seemed unusual,” Tabatha said.

When asked if she ever visited her sister, Tabatha said that she was never invited there for birthday parties or other occasions and didn't show up for that reason.

After fifteen minutes of gentle questioning from the defense, Tabatha faced the harsher reality of answering questions from prosecutor Walter Freeland.

“How would you describe the relationship between Mary and her father before Matt's death?”

“I know they didn't talk much…As an outsider, I would say the relationship didn't exist.”

The prosecutor said that the adopted brothers, Eric and Chase, had legal problems, insinuating that Mary would not want them to know where she lived. When he moved on to use the word “criminal,” Farese leaped to his feet. “I object, Your Honor.”

The attorneys gathered around the judge for a sidebar. At the bench, Farese shouted, “I object. I object,” loudly enough to be heard across the courtroom.

When Freeland returned to questioning Tabatha, he asked, “How often did you see Matthew and Mary in the last two years?”

Tabatha said, “At the birth of one of the children and Christmas 2005—the only times in years. I've never seen Breanna.” (Since she accompanied Mary on the September visit with the children, it can only been assumed that she was referring to the time before Mary's arrest.)

On re-direct, Farese played on his witness's emotions, bringing out tears, sniffles and tissues. “Prior to her marriage to Matthew, what type of person was Mary?”

“She was my big sister. I wrote Mary a letter when this first occurred, and I told her I didn't understand everything, but I wanted her to know, as a little sister coming from a very bad abusive past, that she was the first person that ever told me that she loved me and I believed her. Because not even my adoptive parents, who mean everything to me, who've given me every opportunity, but it was Mary that changed my life and all of our lives.”

When Farese asked her about changes in Mary since Matthew's death, Tabatha said, “Before, the only way I could describe her is, the light had gone out of her eyes. She didn't have any fire in her spirit anymore, and slowly she's come back to be that person I first knew and needed in my life, and still need very much…

“She's the best example of a good person I can think of…She's in control, and she is a happy person now, she's improved so much, she's so brave, I don't know how she does it.”

Farese turned his questions to Mary's lack of contact with her family. “Is the reason she's not seen you is because she's been segregated from her family for years?”

“Yes,” Tabatha sobbed.

“Because she'd been beaten by her husband for years?” Farese asked.

Freeland objected and the attorneys again gathered at the bar.

When the testimony resumed, Farese asked, “The fact is, you know why you didn't get to see your sister, don't you?”

“Yes, sir,” Tabatha answered, wiping her nose with a tissue. She then was dismissed from the stand.