Posted on 06/30/2006 9:54:04 AM PDT by LouAvul
SELMER, Tennessee (CNN) -- For three months, the 4,500 souls of this God-fearing town have been left to wonder if a demure preacher's wife shot her husband in the back and ran off to the beach with their three girls.
.......
Here, third-generation preacher Matthew Winkler, a strapping 31-year-old with a booming voice and charisma to burn, was beginning to make his mark after little more than a year. He had a knack for connecting with younger members, who called him "Wink."
On March 22, four church members -- including a doctor and the town undertaker -- let themselves in to the tidy brick parsonage on Mollie Street when Winkler didn't show up for Wednesday evening services.
They found him in the master bedroom. He had been shot in the back with a shotgun.
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Across the street from where the Winklers lived, Sharon Everitt has no problem with Mary Winkler going free.
"She could come in here, she could sleep in my bed, live in my house," Everitt said. "She is not a danger to anybody." At the time of the slaying, Everitt recalled, the Winklers were portrayed as the perfect couple. The day he died, she said, Matthew Winkler "got elevated to sainthood."
Everitt and her husband, Dan, said they saw another side to Matthew Winkler that troubled them. After their rottweiler, Madison, wandered into the Winklers' yard, the preacher threatened to shoot the dog.
They found his behavior rude and aggressive, they said. Mary Winkler stepped back as her husband spoke, as if to signal she did not agree with his approach, Sharon Everitt recalled.
"I remember saying to myself, 'This is not new neighbor behavior. This is not preacher behavior. What is this aggression?' Boy, I betcha he's fun to live with," she said.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
I hadn't read the companion article on CNN (Not a CNN News fan) and went back and read it just now. I can't think of any excuse for what she did, based on her statement.
Where the heck do many professionals get the ideas for what they want to do for a living, from no where? Many times it comes from what they have seen in their lives, whether it be an artist exposed to bad or good art, a young boy that watches a fireman rescue his famiy from disaster, a daughter that watched her father struggle with Parkinson's and one day becomes a doctor herself. This is also probably true for the types of threads we pick to comment on as well.
Use your head.
It is so sad her husband had to die, because she was so oh, I don't know, idiotic. Man, I would be all apologetic and get a second job, whatever it took to make amends to my family and my husband. Not shoot him when his back was to me. Sad. Sad. Sad what people do when they are desperate and full of shame (or atleast she should have felt this way. That would seem a normal,healthy reaction.)
Well, first of all I wouldn't fall for a scam like this, though I know people do all the time (I read those emails and laugh like crazy that anyone could believe them), but say I did and put my family into a bad place as a result, killing my husband and leaving someone else to raise my three babies wouldn't even enter the equation.
The state medical examiner was on LKL one night several months ago and said he estimated that it could have taken Matthew as long as 20 minutes to die.
I don't know how long she had been doing the check kiting, or how long the Nigerian scams take to cycle through before being revealed. Seems like it wouldn't take long to find out the original checks are no good.
Mary said they had been having financial problems and/or marital problems for the past year and half - and that they had also had some marital problems the first 5 years of their marriage. Now, this is the admitted liar con artist talking, you realize.
However, the TBI agent said there had been a questionable check for $4800 in December 2005. That was 3 months before the murder. Supposedly, she was putting some of this scam money into their joint accounts (not all, lol - some was going to her *own*) - didn't Matthew wonder where it was coming from, when she had no job yet and was allegedly just going back to college?
(I said allegedly because I figured all along we would discover she wasn't enrolled at all - but I was wrong about that. Somewhere along the way, a reporter found someone who was in one of her classes this semester, so she really was showing up. I guess right after she would make her deposits in her Henderson bank account.)
String her up from the nearest tree.
However, I can imagine people were calling him from the bank when checks starting bouncing and him confronting her about what was going on.
The bank had called the day before, when she was on the job for the first time as a substitute teacher. She had heated phone calls during the day, but we're not sure how much Matthew knew.
She kept copping to her "being a bad bookkeeper" as the reason for the little spat the night before the murder. Talk about an understatement.
I will say prayers for their children though, poor things.
No reason to be embarassed, don't most of us slow down to gawk at a trainwreck? I feel terrible for how these children's lives have been forever turned upside down.
Exactly. I hope she had a very good reason to shoot her husband in the back, but what appears to be a man protecting his children is not the best evidence for her case.
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