Wife charged in minister’s death
A minister’s wife was charged Friday with shooting her husband to death in the parsonage in a crime that shocked the congregation and shattered the couple’s happy and loving image.
Mary Winkler, 32, was arrested on murder charges and confessed to the slaying after fleeing to Alabama in the family’s minivan with the couple’s three young daughters, authorities said.
Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agent John Mehr said authorities know the motive for the killing, but he would not disclose it.
Her husband of 10 years, Matthew Winkler, a popular and charismatic 31-year-old preacher at a fundamentalist Christian church, was found dead in a bedroom at the couple’s home Wednesday night in Selmer, a town of about 4,600 in western Tennessee.
A judge sent the three girls – Breanna, 1; Mary Alice, 6; and Patricia, 8 – to Tennessee to live with their paternal grandparents.
Washington
Blogger quits after plagiarism alleged
A new conservative blogger for washingtonpost.com resigned Friday, a day after allegations surfaced that he had plagiarized movie reviews as a journalist in college.
Ben Domenech, 24, had just started writing a daily Web log when another online publication, Salon.com, made the allegations.
Jim Brady, executive editor of the Washington blog, said washingtonpost.com was unaware of the allegations when it hired Domenech to write for the blog, Red America.
Brainerd, Minn.
WWII airman buried at last
A World War II airman whose frozen body was chipped out of a California glacier last fall was laid to rest in his hometown Friday, more than six decades after the young man disappeared during a training flight.
Leo Mustonen’s two nieces were among about 100 people who gathered at First Lutheran Church to say goodbye. A full military funeral followed at a cemetery overlooking the Mississippi River.
Mustonen was 22 when his AT-7 navigational plane disappeared after takeoff from a Sacramento, Calif., airfield on Nov. 18, 1942. An engine, scattered remains and clothing were found over the following years, far from the plane’s intended course. All four men aboard were killed in the crash.
But Mustonen’s remains were not found until last year, when two mountain climbers in California spotted an arm jutting out of the ice. Forensic scientists at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii determined that the body was Mustonen’s.