SELMER, Tenn. — If the minister's widow can be believed -- and, accused of his murder, she might prove less than reliable -- Matthew Winkler's last, gasping utterance before he left this world was a question, one that would haunt this town for months to come, haunts it still: Why?
It was early on a Wednesday morning last March. The 31-year-old Church of Christ minister and father of three young girls had been in bed, and presumably still asleep, when the shotgun blast tore into him from behind.
Fired at close range, the single round from the 12-gauge "turkey gun" pumped 77 pellets into Winkler, fracturing his spine and perforating his ribs, left lung, diaphragm, stomach, spleen, pancreas and adrenal glands. The force of the blast flipped him off the bed. He landed on his back in a tangle of sheets.
"I went over and I wiped his mouth off with a sheet," Mary Winkler would recall two days later, after she had been stopped in the family van in Orange Beach, Ala., about 500 miles south of here. "I told him I was sorry and that I loved him....
"He asked me, 'Why?'
"And I just said I was sorry."
Though the Winklers had lived here for only a year, members of the Fourth Street Church of Christ regarded 32-year-old Mary Carol Winkler as a model minister's wife. They recalled how she would bring Matthew lunch in the church office, take walks with him in the city park. She seemed a bit reserved, maybe, almost shy, but as more than one church member put it, the place of a preacher's wife is "in the background."
In fact, said church elder Wilburn Gene Ashe, right up to the very day of the killing, "if you had asked me to name the most ideal couples in the congregation, Matthew and Mary would have been one of them, right up there at the top."
No signs of trouble at all?
"None whatsoever," said Ashe, who saw the Winklers at least three times a week and sometimes dined with them in the parsonage. "Absolutely not."
And yet two days after the killing, questioned by Tennessee investigators, Mary Winkler conceded -- as the shotgun carnage would seem to have made obvious -- that there had been "some problems" in the 10-year marriage, particularly in the past year and a half.
She complained to investigators about constant carping from her husband, criticisms about "the way I walked, what I ate, everything." She mentioned financial pressures, which she described as "mostly my fault, bad bookkeeping." It was, she said, "just building to a point. I was just tired of it. I guess I just got to a point and I snapped."
