Posted on 04/18/2007 10:36:54 AM PDT by Froufrou
A preacher's wife accused of murdering her husband testified Wednesday that she doesn't remember picking up the shotgun or pointing it at her husband, but she said she did not pull the trigger. She heard a "boom" as the shotgun fired, she said.
"Something went off," Mary Winkler said, crying on the witness stand.
She said she just wanted to talk to her husband, Matthew, when she went into their bedroom, but she was terrified. Her husband was physically and sexually abusive, she said. That day, she said, she just wanted to stop him from being so mean.
Her depiction of her marriage contrasts radically from the description by the prosecution, whose witnesses described Matthew Winkler as a good father and husband.
Matthew Winkler, 31, was found fatally shot in the parsonage where the family lived in March 2006. A day later, his wife was arrested on the Alabama coast 340 miles away, driving the family minivan with her three young daughters inside.
Earlier Wednesday, Mary Winkler testified her husband punched and kicked her, forced her to have sex she considered unnatural and refused to grant her a divorce.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
(1) Slandering her dead husband and inventing vicious stories about him that play into the Lifetime MovieChannel/Hollywood picture of Bible-believing preachers.
(2) Taking advantage of the Scripture-based forgiveness and concern that her husband's congregation extended to her after she committed this vile crime.
It underscores precisely the cultural trap that has been set for fundamental Christians according to your analysis.
(1) Mary Winkler grew up in a strict Christian household, where she was taught that the husband has total authority over the wife and that questioning this authority is sinful.
(2) This same upbringing instilled in her the notion that divorce is evil, that it brings shame and humiliation on one's entire family and that seeking a divorce is an admission that one is a complete moral and spiritual failure.
(3) She had great trauma as a child when her sister died and never sought the help of a professional. For this reason she had terrible feelings of inadequacy and depression that tortured her and were left untreated.
(4) Her husband was abusive - mentally, physically and sexually and took delight in dominating and humiliating her. She could not conceive of leaving him because of the repressive cultural milieu in which she was raised. In her world, divorce was unthinkable, so she had to endure the abuse.
(5) In order to please her husband she hit upon a scheme to bring extra money into the household. She hoped that this would please her husband and temper his abusiveness.
(6) She wasn't thinking clearly because of her undiagnosed mental and emotional trauma, and was drawn into a scam that lost the family's savings and put them in a bad legal position.
(7) The scam may even have been her husband's idea and he may have forced her into it - and she went along wanting to please him and stop his abuse.
(8) When the scam went sour, her husband went ballistic. Crazed with fear and anticipating that the abuse would get worse, her mental and emotional problems overwhelmed her, her mind snapped, and in a moment of temporary insanity she killed her husband.
This line of reasoning has won juries over before and may again.
What went on behind closed doors is something that I know nothing about and is indeed theoretically possible that the woman was severely abused (I'm not following the trial). However, even if she is the victim in this case (again, a theoretical possiblity I am in no position to judge) we may be sure that Biblical Fundamentalism will be indicted as a whole, despite the fact that the vast majority of Fundamentalist marriages and families seem to be happy and well-adjusted.
Are you a lawyer? If not, you sure could be!
[no offense!]
My wife is the attorney in the family. But I contemplated the bar back in my younger days before deciding against it.
I did too. I even took and passed the LSAT. That’s as far as it got.
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