Murder in a Small Town

The 31-year-old preacher had been shot in the back with a shotgun and left on the floor to die, choking on his own blood. His wife and daughters were nowhere to be found. Redmond and the elders assumed they had been abducted, and Selmer police put out a nationwide Amber Alert while the town anxiously awaited any news, hoping they would be found unharmed.

Finding Mary

The night after the discovery of Winkler's body, Officer Jason Whitlock of Orange Beach, Ala., a town hundreds of miles away, identified the missing minivan, wondering whether authorities would find Mary and the girls kidnapped, or worse, dead.

To his surprise, he found Mary and the girls unharmed. "There's four police cars around you. They've got a gun pulled on you. You would be scared most likely and you would probably want to know, 'Hey, what's going on?' She never asked one question. She never looks scared to me. It was almost like she was expecting it to happen."

What followed turned Mary from a victim to a suspect in a matter of seconds. Inside the car, police discovered the shotgun that had killed her husband. Furthermore, her recorded interrogation sounded a lot like a confession.

"I have obviously done something very bad so let me just, you know, be the, get the bad. That would be my request," she said. Detective Stan Stabler interrogated Mary, and asked her why she did it — a question Mary never really answered. She continued. "I love him dearly, but gosh, he just nailed me in the ground. I just took it like a mouse."

Stabler had what he considered a confession. She told him, "My ugly came out. I made the choice to do something that was evil and was wrong and illegal."

Strangely enough, through the course of her interrogation, Mary kept expressing her concern for Winkler's reputation. And back home in Selmer, the news that the preacher's wife would stand trial for murder sparked a media sensation.

The Secrets Behind Closed Doors

The question why was still unanswered, but prosecutor Walt Freeland had a theory — greed. He said Mary was involved in a series of financial schemes that she had hid from her husband.

The defense had a different theory: dark, perverted family secrets involving pornography, violence, sodomy and child abuse. Secrets that would shake the faith of the Bible Belt town of Selmer to its core.