Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

and his wife, Dianne, would join the show was a question, but in the end, they declined.
    It was only Mary who met with Oprah, and she was not a live guest on camera but an image on film as she met privately with Oprah sometime before September 12, the date the show aired. This was probably one of the oddest interviews Oprah Winfrey has ever conducted, even though she has questioned thousands of people, from movie stars to criminals. Having been on the set with Oprah when she talked with Diane Downs, who was with us by satellite in 1985, I believe that was the last time I’ve seen Oprah so bemused by her subject. Mary was in her own world and she didn’t let Oprah in.
    Diane Downs, convicted of shooting her three young children two years earlier, denied that she had done so, and her affect was animated and inappropriately cheerful. She actually enjoyed her moment in the spotlight on Oprah.
    Mary Winkler, having admitted shooting her husband, was certainly not animated and seemed hesitant to speak at all. Although it could not be more different, her affect was just as peculiar as Diane’s. Many times during their conversation, Oprah did a subdued double take as if she could not believe what she had just heard, and she did her best to coax some kind of response from Mary. Any kind of response.
    Mary dressed very much like she had during her trial—a white cardigan jacket cut like the sweater she wore when she testified. Her haircut was the same, and her shy expression and head-ducking pose were almost identical to those shown on news clips during her murder trial. On Oprah’s show, however, Mary rarely—if ever—met Oprah’s eyes, gazing off to the left. It was almost as if she existed in another dimension, and the questions, however gently probing, never quite penetrated an invisible wall she had built around her.
    From time to time, her response was only a quiet “hmmm” that was almost cheerful in an absentminded way. For instance, when she had just mentioned how Matthew had “suffocated” their baby—“to put her to sleep”—Oprah followed up with something like, “ What did he do?” her tone reflecting her shock. Mary only “hmmmed.” Yes, Matthew had often “suffocated” their children, and she’d been powerless to stop him.
    Never looking into Oprah’s eyes, Mary explained that she had been terrified of Matthew that morning, but at the same time she’d just wanted to talk to him. “I wanted him to be happy, to stop being so mean. Just to enjoy life and [tell him] he didn’t have to be so miserable.”
    “Had you ever said that to him before?” Oprah asked.
    “He never would have allowed me to say that.”
    Some of Mary’s recitation of the facts of the morning of the shooting tracked with the version presented by the defense during her trial, but others were slightly changed. Now, she recalled that Matthew had been sitting on the bed. Months ago, she said he had gone back to bed.
    “I just wanted to talk to Matthew,” she explained to Oprah. “And then there was that awful sound… ”
    She hurried on to a safer subject, but Oprah tugged her back, asking her to explain what that meant.
    Mary clearly could not bring herself to say the words “gunshot” or “shotgun shells.”
    She explained that she never in a million years would have thought that there was “something” in there. “He always took it out.” She meant the shotgun shells, but she could not say the words.
    She showed no emotion at all as she explained that she thought something had hit the ceiling or one of the windows. Instinctively, she had run away, and then realized that Matthew wasn’t chasing her.
    Asked where the girls were at that time, she answered Oprah in a peculiar way: “I want to say they were watching TV.”
    But it was early in the morning, and the little girls were either in bed or sitting out in the hall, as Patricia had testified, frightened about what was happening in their parents’ bedroom.
    Mary said, “I still ask myself, What in the world happened?” She had a vague memory of Matthew “laying there,” but he didn’t say anything. She had wiped his mouth because there was blood coming from it, and it just kept “coming and coming.”
    But she couldn’t see anything wrong with him and couldn’t understand why he was bleeding. And now, it was akin to a shade coming down over Mary’s eyes, although they were still open. Almost to herself, she spoke of how people’s