Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

moved on, questioning Mary about almost everything she had testified to on direct examination. In Pegram—on the night Matthew had flipped over his recliner—she admitted that she had laughed when Brandy and Glenn Jones had come over to see to Matthew.
    “Were you laughing on the inside or just on the outside?”
    “Just on the outside.”
    “You were able to convince your friends of something that was not true?”
    “Yes.”
    She acknowledged that Matthew had scared her so much that night that both his brother Jacob and Glenn Jones had spent the night at her house because of that.
    But still, she had laughed. Later, she and Brandy Jones had ended their friendship. So, apparently, no one had been witness to her desire for a divorce from Matthew.
    Freeland pointed out that Mary had lied again when she denied having a bruise from being hit in the face by a softball. She shook her head. “The reason I went to the doctor was because I had been kicked in the face.”
    Yes, she had sent an antidiarrheal prescription to Reverend Tim Parish, the pulpit minister, at the McMinnville Church of Christ, telling him it was for his mouth—but that, too, had been on Matthew’s instructions.
    Walt Freeland suggested that Mary hadn’t always been seen as meek and loving. In fact, hadn’t she been advised that she was too stern when she took her little girls out of church services?
    “ You were the one being counseled for being rough to the kids, weren’t you?”
    “It was brought to my attention that my body language was looking stern when I took the children out, and so Tommy [Tommy Hodge, a church elder], as a friend, came to me and said not to frown and to loosen up my body language.”
    Mary blamed the way Matthew treated her for her “body language.”
    “So Matthew is the reason…that caused concern with the church elders?”
    “Yes sir.”
    To Freeland’s questions about her accusations against Matthew, Mary insisted that he had threatened to cut her van’s brake lines and shoot her with his shotgun.
    When the district attorney reminded her that her children were in danger of being shot as they slept in their bedrooms because of the way their house was designed, she said that had never occurred to her.
    Brandy Jones had confided to investigators that Mary told her Matthew had taken her to the gun range to practice using his shotgun if she ever needed it to protect herself. But Mary now said that wasn’t true.
    “Brandy Jones—in earlier testimony—has characterized herself as being your best friend?”
    “Was…”
    “What changed that?”
    “She was affected by all this and she chose not to believe in me and not support me through this.”
    “Did you tell Brandy Jones…sometime in February 2006, that that was the happiest time you have had in your life?”
    “I very well may have said that. That may have been my public statement.”
    “So you said things that weren’t true to fool people?”
    “To cover up [for] our family. And to cover up the problems we had.”
    She wanted to explain further, but Freeland stopped her.
    “Now, this is a yes-or-no question. You told stories to people to fool them?”
    “Yes sir.”
    “Now you can explain,” Freeland offered.
    “I was ashamed. I was ashamed about Matthew and I didn’t want anyone to know about it.”
    “Well, how would being ashamed lead you to tell your friend that this was a happy time?”
    “That’s picking out one comment,” she argued, “where if anyone ever talked to me over ten years, all I would have to say is how happy we were and how great life was.”
    Freeland returned to the complicated problems Mary had had with banks. She seemed to remember that in mid-March the Regions Bank’s security officer had told her her overdraft might go to collections.
    “Do you recall her telling you that thirty days after a check—an earlier check—you had to do something?
    “I think that I had asked her when did it absolutely have to be taken care of ? I couldn’t get Matthew in the bank with me.”
    Mary recalled her day of substitute teaching, and that she might have received one call from the bank. The only person she herself had called was Matthew—who was sleeping at home—because she was trying to get him up. She had also seen the number of a credit card company flash on her phone.
    She denied worrying about her bank problems. “Matthew could have gone in, and I told Jana Hawkins that Matthew had perfect credit because