Her husband was a pastor and criticized the way she walked and ate…
Mary Winkler was 32 and had a life that, from the outside, seemed textbook: the wife of the pastor at Fourth Street Church of Christ in Selmer, Tennessee, the mother of three girls aged 8, 6, and 1, and a substitute teacher in a town where everyone knows one another.
On March 22, 2006, members of the congregation found her husband, 31-year-old Matthew Winkler, dead in the parsonage after he failed to show up for the afternoon service. He had been shot in the back with a 12-gauge shotgun. Mary was gone: she had left in the family minivan with the three girls. An alert was issued amid fears of an abduction.
They found her the next day in Orange Beach, Alabama, about 340 miles from home, as she was leaving a restaurant with her daughters. According to police, she confessed to the crime. She said she had driven to the beach because she wanted to spend as much time as possible with the girls.
At trial, her defense argued that she had endured years of physical and emotional abuse and constant criticism.
The jury did not convict her of murder, but of voluntary manslaughter. The sentence was 150 days in jail plus 60 days in a mental health facility, and in 2008 she regained full custody of the girls.