A Sunday night church service should not start this way. In fact, nothing should start this way. But it did on March 22, 2006. Members of the Fourth Street Church of Christ in Selmer, Tennessee couldn’t figure out where their pastor was as members gathered for the Sunday night service. Some from the church went to the parsonage in search for him, only to find him lying on the bedroom, shot in the back with a shotgun. Their pastor was dead.
The story gets worse.
The pastor’s wife, Mary Winkler and the children (Patricia, then 8; Mary Alice, then 6; Breanna, then 1) were nowhere to be found. Fearing a kidnapping, an Amber Alert was issued. They were found safe nearly 400 miles south of home in Orange Beach, Alabama, 26 miles southwest of Pensacola, Florida. Upon investigating, it was found that Mary is the one who shot her husband and had fled with the girls.
What brought about the shooting? “When asked by investigators about what had happened to her husband, Winkler stated that she and her husband had argued about money and offered “I guess that’s when my ugly came out.”1 As court proceedings would reveal, there had been a long history in the family of fighting and arguing.
Mary claimed verbal and sexual abuse from her husband. The final straw came from an argument over Mary losing money. “Mary had lost money in what her lawyer said was a scam. She had deposited checks that came from “unidentified sources” in Canada and Nigeria into bank accounts belonging to her and her husband. The checks amounted to more than $17,000. Winkler had become caught up in a swindle known as the “Nigerian scam”, which promises riches to victims who send money to cover the processing expenses. She added “He had really been on me lately criticizing me for things — the way I walk, I eat, everything. It was just building up to a point. I was tired of it. I guess I got to a point and snapped.”2
Allegedly, Mary had gotten the shotgun merely as a scare tactic to accentuate her
frustration over being belittled. She says that she was as shocked as anyone when she heard a “boom,” claiming she never pulled the trigger.
“You know that pulling a trigger is what makes it go boom?” prosecutor Walter Freeland asked in his cross-examination. “Yes, sir,” Winkler replied.
But she said she never meant for him to die. “I don’t want this at all. I don’t want any of this to be, at all,” she said.3
The oldest daughter, Patricia, was put on the stand to testify. She heard the “boom” and rushed to her parent’s bedroom where she saw her dad, dead on the floor. She also testified that she had never seen or heard her father abuse her mother.
In a strange turn of events, “the jury returned a verdict of guilty on a reduced charge of voluntary manslaughter. She received a sentence of 210 days, having already spent 150 days in pre-trial detention. The judge permitted her to serve the remaining 60 days of receiving treatment at a mental health facility.”4 On August 6, 2006, she was released from jail and in 2008, she regained full custody of her girls.
After reading this, you might be feeling a bit spent, drained from the emotional story. Obviously, this is NOT how a family should operate, regardless of whether it’s a pastor’s family, a family from the congregation, or the family across the street. You don’t resolve issues by angrily shooting your antagonist!
We must remember that anger isn’t a sin. Ephesians 4:26-27 says, “Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath: (27) Neither give place to the devil.” Be angry but don’t sin with the anger. The sin comes in when the anger is not Biblically justified and when it is expressed in an ungodly way.
Anger is one of God’s emotions. Psalms 7:11 reminds us that “God judgeth the righteous, and God is angry with the wicked every day.” Our anger has been perverted by the fall. God’s anger is righteous and holy anger. We must be very careful with such a volatile emotion.
If you have a temper that isn’t tempered, today needs to be a new beginning where you confess this as sin to the Lord and ask Him to help you get your emotions under control.
Remember this admonition from Solomon in Ecclesiastes 7:9. “Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry: for anger resteth in the bosom of fools.”
1https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Winkler
2Ibid.
3https://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/04/18/winkler.testimony/index.html
4https://thecinemaholic.com/mary-winkler-what-happened-to-her-kids/
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