Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
People in Springfield, Illinois, were just getting home from work on August 29, 1995, when a man called 911.
He said he had just shot someone. The man he shot, he said, was killing his wife.
The first officers to reach the house found two people on the dining room floor, both still breathing, both badly hurt. Officer Dave Barringer had three shots left in his Polaroid camera. As the paramedics went to work, he took all three.
Nobody would look at those pictures properly for more than three years.
“They were an adorable, model couple”
Mark Winger was 32, a nuclear engineer with the Illinois Department of Nuclear Safety. Donnah was an operating room technician. They had married in Florida in 1989, after a blind date, and settled in Springfield. Her sisters said she had found her person.
“They were absolutely an adorable, model couple,” her mother, Sarah Jane Drescher, would say.
There was just one thing missing. Donnah could not have children. Then a doctor at her hospital told her about a teenager looking for a home for her baby. On June 1, 1995, the Wingers brought home a little girl.
“She looked at me with tears,” her sister Michelle remembered, “and she said, ‘I knew it the minute they put that baby into my arms, she has always been mine.'”
Twelve weeks later she was dead.
The ride from St. Louis
In late August, Donnah flew to St. Louis on her way home from visiting her parents in Florida, with the baby. Her mother had booked a van to take them the last two hours to Springfield.
The driver was Roger Harrington, 27.
According to her family and to Mark, he drove at 75 miles an hour and told her strange things. He talked about a voice in his head called Dahm, which told him to hurt people. He talked about being pulled out of his body to fly above the trees. He flirted with her.
She got home rattled. Mark called Harrington’s boss to complain, and Harrington was suspended. Mark urged her to write down everything that had happened, in case they ever needed it. She did.
There were some strange phone calls that week. The Wingers believed the driver might be stalking her.
On the treadmill
This is the story Mark Winger told, and he told it the same way for years.
He was on the treadmill in the basement when he heard a thump. He went upstairs. The baby was alone on the bed in the master bedroom. Then he heard noises from the dining room. He took his .45 from the nightstand and walked down the hall.
A stranger was kneeling beside Donnah, swinging a hammer. It was their own hammer, left out to hang a hat rack.
The man looked up. Mark shot him in the head. When the man began to sit up, he shot him again.
Then he called 911.
Detective Charlie Cox got there and found Mark in a back bedroom, rocking back and forth. Mark kept asking who the man was. When Cox told him the name, he said: “Oh my God! That’s the man who has been harassing my wife this week.”
Cox had no doubts. He knew Harrington. He had once rented a trailer to him. He knew he had been a psychiatric patient and how fast he could lose his temper. He could see the whole thing. A sick man goes to the house to get his job back, sees a hammer on the table and snaps.
“I said, ‘You’ve killed the person who was killing your wife,'” Cox remembered. He considered Mark Winger a hero.
Harrington died shortly after he reached the hospital. Donnah died minutes later. She never woke up.
The next day the prosecutor announced that Mark had acted in self-defense and that no charges would be filed. “This thing was closed by the 10:30 news that night, for all practical purposes,” Cox would admit.
Springfield wrapped its arms around him. Donnah’s family felt terrible for him. “Look what he’s lost,” her stepfather said.
Roger Harrington’s mother buried her son as a murderer. “He was a good kid,” Helen Harrington said. Nobody listened.
Almost nobody. Cox’s partner, Detective Doug Williamson, had been uneasy from the start. There was no forced entry. Somebody had let Harrington in. Why would a woman who was frightened of this man leave her baby on the bed and open the door to him?
And he kept thinking about something Mark had said. He did not know Roger Harrington. He had never met him.
Harrington’s car was still parked in front of the house, facing against traffic, with no effort to hide it. On the front seat lay a bank deposit slip with some writing on it.
Williamson read it.
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