The Pastor's Wife by Diane Fanning Read Free Book Online Page A

County vehicle. Sheriff Rick Roten and Officer Byron Maxedon of the Selmer Police Department made the trip back to Tennessee with her.
    Mary asked no questions and made no comments. She only spoke when asked if she needed a restroom break or if she was hungry or thirsty. At one of the two stops for gas, Mary was escorted to the service station lavatory. She went inside alone while Maxedon stood guard outside the door.
    They pulled up to the back of the McNairy County Justice Center at the jail entrance around 4:30 that afternoon. She entered still wearing the pink sweat suit she had on when she was stopped by the Orange Beach police two days earlier.
    The sheriff spoke briefly to the gathered media. “She’s fine. She had no emotion whatsoever. She was quiet and cooperative,” he said. “She didn’t ask any questions, didn’t talk about anything. She had good behavior. We’ve had no problems whatsoever.”
    Officials walked her through the standard booking procedures. She was fingerprinted, photographed and searched by a female guard, and placed in a holding cell alone for eight to ten hours. There she dressed in a prison uniform before being transferred to a cell in the female block.
    Mary Winkler, preacher’s wife, mother of three, college student, was now an inmate charged with first-degree murder of the man she claimed she loved.

The Lives
    â€œWho can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil. She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life.”
    â€”Proverbs 31: 10-12

Chapter 8
    No one saw it coming. Nothing in Mary Winkler’s history foreshadowed this horrendous event—the ultimate act of domestic violence. No one ever looked at Mary and believed she was capable of taking another person’s life.
    Clark Freeman and Mary Nell Hackney married on July 20, 1968. More than five years later, on December 10, 1973, Mary Nell gave birth to their first child, Mary Carol Freeman, in Knoxville, Tennessee.
    At the time of Mary’s birth, Knoxville was home to approximately 175,000 people, making it the third-largest city in the state.
    Knoxville is situated in eastern Tennessee, in former Cherokee country, embraced by the Cumberland Plateau of the Appalachian mountain chain on one side and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park on the other. Growing up, Mary often visited the park and explored the 510,030 acres of ridges, hollows, river gorges, the most diversified plant life in the country and the largest stand of virgin timber east of the Mississippi, authorized by the federal government in 1934 and dedicated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940.
    The city began its life as a fort named after George Washington’s secretary of war, Henry Knox. That structure still stands in the central business district of the city. In 1796, when Tennessee became a state, Knoxville was its first capital.
    The Freeman lifestyle owed a lot to the Tennessee Valley Authority, a New Deal project under Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, that transformed the Tennessee River and brought modern conveniences to the city. The program, beginning in 1933, built large dams, and purchased smaller existing private dams, and created a network of fifty that operated as a single system, generating power and enhancing the region’s economic development. The Tennessee Valley Authority is still one of the two largest employers in Knoxville. The other is the University of Tennessee.
    This institution of higher education began in 1794 as Blount College and gained its current status in 1879. It now leads a statewide university system that is a pivotal part of the Knoxville community, serving as a national leader in energy research and the cultural center of the city as well as providing a nationally recognized athletic program closely followed by local citizens.
    After World