BY
JACKSON BAKER |
APR 18, 2007
“I just made it up.” That was the refrain offered over and
over in downtown Memphis Wednesday as undercover informant Tim Willis described
the ever more elaborate cover story he had to keep ad-libbing in a harrowing
2005 encounter with defendant John Ford. (See story.)
THE WINKLER CASE: Willis’ remark might also serve as
a mantra that skeptics could associate with much of the testimony on both sides
of that case so far, as well as with much of what was said in a
dramatic final day at the Mary Winkler murder trial in Selmer, 100
miles away.
An example of the latter: Having put his client on the
stand as the final – and climactic witness in the case – defense attorney Steve
Farese asked Winkler about an incident in which she turned up with a black eye.
She acknowledged that she had been hit in the eye with a softball, a mishap that
happened out in public.
Winkler then testified that, once she got home, her
husband, the late Church of Christ minister Matthew Winkler whom she is accused
of killing, began fuming and snorting at her for some imagined misdeed and let
go with a kick in the same eye. That’s one of those things a juror has either to
believe or not believe. Either incident – the public sporting accident or the
monstrous spousal abuse – could have caused the black eye.
Similarly, the centerpiece of the Winkler defense – that
the blast from a 12-gauge shotgun that killed the Rev. Winkler was somehow
inadvertent – demanded a rather significant suspension of disbelief on he part
of jurors. The accused widow offered testimony Wednesday that paralleled what
she had told an Alabama investigator in a rambling, almost incoherent statement
when she was apprehended in that state last year, a day after the crime.
The Telltale ‘Pop’
She didn’t know anything had happened, the distressed Mary
Winkler said, until she heard a loud pop from the weapon. She offered no
convincing explanation as to why she happened to be holding it – and pointing it
in her sleeping husband’s direction – when it discharged.
Though such a story may have challenged credulity, it was
consistent with the testimony of a psychologist put on earlier this week by the
defense, who said, more or less, that so marked a psychic disability might well
have resulted from lengthy history of alleged abuse by Winkler’s husband,
together with other misfortunes — notably her victimization by an Internet scam
and some subsequent financial mismanagement by the accused that was potentially
felonious.
But the defense story was no more incredible than the
account by a Tennessee Bureau of Investigations officer who interviewed Winkler
shortly after the Alabama agent was through interrogating her. The T.B.I. man
then produced, instead of the earlier channeling of unknown tongues, a tidy and
logically precise summary of intentional murder that he then prevailed on the
remorseful fugitive (who had been headed south, the three Winkler daughters in tow, to find a “fun” time at a beach) to sign.
Sex “in the bottom”
Then there was the kinky business testified to by Winkler
on Wednesday. It took only a look at the hulking Matthew Winkler in family
photographs, contrasted with the almost gnomish appearance of his generally
distressed-looking wife, to suggest an abusive mismatch. But the Kraft-Ebbing
stuff that was ladled out Wednesday was another matter.
Handing his client a sack, defense attorney Steve Farese
then asked her to disgorge and describe its contents – a gaudy platform shoe
with a heel as long as the poor woman’s arm, along with a frowsy-looking wig.
Real bordello stuff. “Was this the kind of shoe you wore to church?” Farese
asked sweetly. No, she said.
“Then what did you need it for?” he followed up. She
appeared to give the matter thought, then answered in an embarrassed voice, “I
didn’t need it.” Both the shoe and the wig were implements imposed on her
by her husband’s restless sexual imagination, she testified, going on to say
that she was continually forced to look at the Rev. Winkler’s teeming
pornography collection and emulate the acts therein demonstrated – including sex “in the bottom” and oral copulation.
There was in all this a certain parallel to the case
several years ago of the Menendez brothers, who murdered their parents, inherited
their fortune, then, when charged with the crime, blamed everything on a
veritable catalogue of wicked incestuous stuff that had been tried out on them by their
late father.
Again: You either believe this kind of thing or you don’t,
and the judgment made by Winkler’s jurors, individually and collectively, will
determine whether they see her as a first-degree murderer, a manslaughter case, or
perhaps (though not likely) an outright acquitee.
With the jury having been presented the case late
Wednesday, that concluding chapter could come as early as Thursday.
THE FORD CASE: Considerations of storyline loom
large as well in former state Senator Ford’s trial, which will go on for a while
longer. So far all the evidence has come from the prosecution – though defense
attorney Mike Scholl has had his moments in cross-examination.
In general, Scholl has made as much as he can of the
obvious – that the witnesses against Ford, who is accused of accepting some
$55,000 in bribes to cook legislation on behalf of the bogus FBII front company
E-Cycle, were pretending to be something they were not, agents of a “legit,” if
law-breaking, company wanting to recycle the used computers of Tennessee
officialdom for resale overseas.
“That was a lie, wasn’t it?” Scholl repeatedly asked FBI
man “L.C. McNeil” of this or that claim he’d made while posing as an E-Cycle
executive. “It was consistent with the role I was portraying,” McNeil would
answer just as methodically.
“Methodically,” indeed, as in “method” acting . As the agent assigned most directly
to work with Ford, McNeil often saw himself compelled into dramatic improvisations quite
as agile as those performed by Willis in his tenuous February 2005 tete-a-tete
with a suspicious and threatening Ford.
One of the premises of E-Cycle’s existence was, after all,
that its main offices were in Atlanta. Since Ford, once on the hook, would
occasionally travel into Atlanta for purposes of his own, he would often
suggesting meeting with McNeil and other presumed E-Cycle personnel in the
Georgia city.
Telephone Tag
For the very good reason that no E-Cycle facility existed
in Atlanta, McNeil would have to come up with quick reasons for not being in his
home base. Sometimes he would be called off at the last minute to deal with a
wayward son at school in Chicago. Other times he would be chasing down Jamie Fox
in L.A. or suddenly heading off to Mexico or Hawaii on this or that music- or
movie-related errand.
All of this was pure improv, Neverland stuff, and at least once, as heard in one of the unending series of audios heard in court, McNeil seemed to forget where he was supposed to be in a telephone call to Ford, starting out at some airport in the continental 48, Chicago, maybe, or L.A., and ending up, minutes later, in Oahu. In actual fact, he could have been just around the corner from Ford in Memphis or Nashville or, more likely, well within walking distance of Peachtree Boulevard in home-base Atlanta.
Once, having accompanied Ford to an Usher concert in
Memphis, McNeil learned that the senator’s nephew, then U.S. Rep. Harold Ford
Jr., would be attending in the company of someone who would know McNeil’s true
name and identify. The agent promptly invented a devastating fire that, he had
just learned, was about to consume the wholly fictitious E-Cycle offices in Atlanta
and made his exit before the congressman’s party arrived. The envelope, please.
Given the facts that the government seems to have expended
copious amounts of time, energy, and cash over a multi-year period to nab a
dozen or so alleged crooks in Tennessee’s various governmental spheres, it was
probably fair game for Scholl to portray the principals of the Tennessee Waltz
sting as profligate high-lifers and dissemblers, guiltier in their determined chicanery than the put-upon “consultant” they were after and he was defending..
In particular, McNeil’s cover, that of someone who dabbled
big-time in show business, gave his end of the sting a rather gilded edge. He
and other E-Cyclers entertained Ford and the Bureau’s other marks aboard yachts
and at high-priced sporting events and entertainment venues, and seemed to
constantly be turning up giggling female escorts with names like Zekia.
‘Scholl Bald, DiScenza Lean’
Chief prosecutor Tim DiScenza, in a re-direct of McNeil,
was forced to strip away some of the government side’s own embroidery – cutting
to the essential fact that McNeil and the other agents and informants might talk
of music and the movies and other circumstantial bling-bling, but the payments
they made were restricted to getting specific governmental favors from the
targeted officials.
Since even a single recalcitrant juror could hang what
would seem in many ways an over-loaded case against Ford, the task of separating
fact from fiction, and the attitudes and auras generated by either mode, would seem
all-important as the case proceeds – keeping in mind that the defense has not
yet even begun its own presentation.
So at this point both sides are keeping an attentive eye on
appearances. DiScenza may have been only half-joking when, during a break on
Wednesday, he wandered over to the media gallery and suggested, to the two or
three sketch artists laboring away at their pads for local TV purposes,
“Remember. Scholll bald. DiScenza lean.”
Considering
that defense attorney Scholl is only moderately balding and that the heavy-set
DiScenza is anything but lean, that’s the problem in a nutshell, right there.
What, as Pontius Pilate famously asked, is truth. That, as we now know,
depends on what “is” is.
