The Perfect Husband

There is a moment in the history of the Springfield, Illinois Police Department that investigators would later describe as one of the most painful reckonings they ever faced — the moment they realized they had looked at a grieving husband, shaken his hand, and walked away.

It was August 29, 1995. Officers arrived at a neat, two-story house on Westview Drive to find a scene that seemed, on its face, to tell its own story. A man named Roger Harrington lay dead on the floor, shot twice by the homeowner. Nearby, a young woman — the homeowner's wife, Donnah Winger — lay dying from catastrophic blunt-force injuries to her head. Her husband, Mark Winger, stood in the center of it all, shaking, cooperative, and apparently devastated. He told police that Harrington, the driver of a shuttle van Donnah had used weeks earlier, had broken into the home, attacked his wife with a hammer, and that he had come downstairs and shot the man in defense of her. Donnah was rushed to the hospital, where she died hours later without regaining consciousness.

The story, as Mark Winger told it, was heartbreaking. And for more than six years, the people of Springfield, Illinois, believed every word of it.

Donnah Winger was, by every account from the people who knew her, the kind of person who made a room feel warmer the moment she walked in. Born Donnah Brown, she had grown up in Florida and carried with her a brightness that friends described as entirely genuine — not performed, not put on, but simply the way she was wired. She loved fiercely and laughed easily, and when she married Mark Winger in 1989, those who knew her said she threw herself into building a life with a wholehearted commitment that was entirely characteristic of her. She and Mark had struggled to have children of their own, and they had pursued adoption with the same determined hope. By the summer of 1995, they had brought home a baby girl named Bailey, and Donnah was, by all accounts, radiant in her new role as a mother. She was thirty-one years old.

In late July of 1995, Donnah had taken a shuttle van service from the Springfield airport, driven by a man named Roger Harrington. The ride had unsettled her. Harrington, she later told friends and family, had behaved strangely — driving erratically, making odd and disturbing comments. She was shaken enough that she called the transportation company to complain, and she called Mark, and she called her friend Ira Drescher to talk through what had happened. She was frightened, but she was also safe, and the incident seemed like one of those jarring encounters with a stranger that fade in time.

What Donnah did not know — what no one outside of one very particular conversation would know for years — was that her husband had already been thinking about how to use Roger Harrington.

Mark Winger, on the afternoon of August 29th, called the shuttle company before the murders occurred, according to investigators who later reconstructed the timeline. He left a message complaining about Harrington's conduct, a call that would initially seem like the act of a protective husband but would later take on an entirely different significance. That evening, by Mark Winger's own account to police, he came downstairs to find Harrington beating Donnah with a hammer. He retrieved his .45 caliber handgun and shot Harrington twice, killing him. Police arrived to find the hammer near Harrington's body, Donnah mortally injured, and Mark Winger as the sole living witness to everything that had happened.

Investigators from the Springfield Police Department examined the scene. What they found, they concluded at the time, was consistent with the story Mark Winger had told them. Roger Harrington, it emerged, had a history of emotional and psychological struggles. He had exhibited erratic behavior before. The hammer appeared to place him as the attacker. Within a relatively short period, the deaths of Donnah Winger and Roger Harrington were ruled a double homicide — Harrington as the killer, Mark Winger as the man who had, tragically, been unable to save his wife but had stopped her attacker. Some within the community regarded him with a kind of sad admiration. He had done what a husband does. He had just been too late.

Mark Winger's grief appeared, to those around him, to be genuine and consuming. He spoke publicly about Donnah, about baby Bailey, about the loss he was carrying. And then, not quite a year after Donnah's death, he remarried. Her name was Deann, and she moved into the house on Westview Drive and helped raise Bailey.

Life, as it appeared from the outside, had somehow continued.

The thread that would eventually unravel everything began with a woman named Jessica Roach. In the late 1990s, Jessica came forward and contacted investigators with a story that, if true, reframed every assumption that had been made about August 29, 1995. She and Mark Winger had been involved in an affair, she told them — an affair that had begun before Donnah's death. And in the course of that relationship, she told investigators, Mark Winger had spoken to her about wanting Donnah gone. About a plan. According to what she told authorities and later testified to in court, Mark had discussed using Roger Harrington as a way to stage a scenario — an intruder, a violent man who had already frightened Donnah, who could be made to look like a killer.

It was the kind of claim that, on its own, might not be enough. Affairs produce bitter allegations. Juries understand that. Prosecutors and investigators knew they needed more.

What they found, when they went back and looked with new eyes, was that the physical evidence at the scene did not comfortably hold the shape of the story Mark Winger had told.

Forensic re-examination of the scene, as detailed in court records and reporting by outlets including the Chicago Tribune and the television newsmagazine Dateline NBC, raised serious questions about where Donnah Winger had been struck and what that suggested about the sequence of events. Investigators found evidence suggesting that Donnah had been attacked in a part of the house inconsistent with the scenario Mark described — that she had not simply encountered Harrington in a spontaneous assault but had been struck in circumstances that pointed toward a different, more deliberate act. Prosecutors would argue at trial that Mark Winger had killed Donnah himself, then shot Roger Harrington — a man who, the state contended, had been lured to the house — and arranged the scene to look like the result of an intruder's attack.

The hammer, which had seemed so central to the original conclusion, now looked like a prop. The position of the bodies, the blood evidence, the trajectory of everything in that room — all of it, prosecutors argued, had been shaped by a man who understood that the story he told would only work if the evidence seemed to confirm it.

There was something else. Investigators, reviewing old records, found a note — a note that Donnah had written to Mark, found in the house, which investigators would later describe as evidence of the couple's dynamics and which became part of the picture prosecutors painted of a marriage that was not what it appeared to be from the outside.

And then there was the matter of a witness who had been there, in a sense, all along. A neighbor who had spoken to investigators early on, whose account had not quite fit the timeline Mark described, whose recollections about the sequence of events — about when shots were heard, about sounds from the house — pointed toward a more troubling reality. When investigators returned to these details with the full weight of a reopened investigation, they began to construct a case that was no longer built on the testimony of a single, potentially aggrieved former girlfriend, but on a convergence of physical, forensic, and testimonial evidence.

In 2001, Mark Winger was arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree murder — the murders of his wife, Donnah Winger, and of Roger Harrington. Roger Harrington, the man who had been categorized for six years as a killer, was now, in the eyes of the law, a victim.

The case went to trial in 2002 before a jury in Sangamon County, Illinois. The prosecution's case, as assembled by the state's attorney's office, was built on several interlocking pillars. Jessica Roach testified about the affair and about the conversations she said she had with Mark Winger before Donnah's death — conversations in which, she told the jury, he had spoken about wanting to be free of his marriage. Forensic experts testified about the physical evidence and why, in their professional judgment, the scene was inconsistent with the story of a husband who came downstairs to find an intruder attacking his wife. The prosecution argued, in the language of the court record, that Mark Winger had struck Donnah with the hammer, and that when Roger Harrington arrived — for reasons that the state argued were connected to Mark having made contact with him — Mark shot him and then arranged the bodies and the scene before calling 911.

The defense contested this account at every level. Mark Winger's attorneys challenged Jessica Roach's credibility and her motivations. They argued that the forensic interpretation was not as clear-cut as the prosecution suggested, and that the original conclusion — that Harrington was the attacker — remained a reasonable reading of the evidence. Mark Winger did not testify in his own defense.

The jury deliberated and returned a verdict of guilty on both counts of first-degree murder.

Mark Winger was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

He did not accept that verdict as final. In the years following his conviction, Winger pursued appeals through the Illinois court system, challenging aspects of the proceedings and the evidence against him. In 2007, an Illinois appellate court took up the case. Winger's legal team raised issues concerning the trial, but the appellate court affirmed the conviction. The Illinois Supreme Court declined to disturb that outcome. As documented in court records, Mark Winger has also, in subsequent years, been connected to another death — that of his former employer's wife, Betsy Bowman, who died in a fall from a hot air balloon in 1981 in circumstances that were, at the time, ruled an accident. After Winger's conviction for the 1995 murders, investigators and journalists revisited Bowman's death, and while no new charges were filed in connection with it, the case became part of the wider public record surrounding Mark Winger's history. It is worth saying clearly: no court has adjudicated Mark Winger's involvement in that earlier death, and it remains, in the legal record, an unresolved matter.

What courts have adjudicated, finally and on appeal, is this: Mark Winger murdered Donnah Winger and Roger Harrington on August 29, 1995, and he spent six years living as a free man, a grieving widower, a remarried father, while investigators operated on the assumption that the truth of that evening was exactly as he had described it.

There is something worth sitting with in that. Not to dramatize it, but to simply acknowledge the weight of it. Roger Harrington spent six years in death carrying the designation of killer. His own family — who knew him, who grieved him, who had their own complicated understanding of his struggles — carried that alongside their grief. When the truth, as the jury found it, finally emerged, it did not undo the years of that misunderstanding, but it did change what the record said about who Roger Harrington was. He was a man with difficulties, yes. He was not a murderer.

And Donnah Winger — who had called her friend after a frightening van ride, who had held her new baby daughter and believed her life was opening into something full and good — deserved to have her story told truly. For six years, the story told about her death was that it was random, terrible, the awful consequence of a chance encounter with a troubled stranger. The jury's finding said something different. It said she was killed by the person she trusted most, in the home they shared, on an ordinary afternoon.

Bailey Winger grew up. After the conviction, she was raised by Donnah's family, who had fought for years to see this case reopened and who had never fully believed the original story. There is something in that too — the persistence of people who love someone, who refuse to let the official version of events be the final version, who keep asking questions long past the point when it would have been easier to stop.

The Springfield Police Department, for its part, has been the subject of significant scrutiny over the original investigation — over how a staged scene held together long enough to let a man walk away. Law enforcement professionals who have studied the case have pointed to it as an example of the dangers of confirmation bias in the early stages of an investigation, of how a plausible narrative, offered with apparent distress by a seemingly credible witness, can organize the perception of physical evidence in ways that take years to undo.

Mark Winger remains in the custody of the Illinois Department of Corrections, serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. His appeals have been exhausted. The conviction stands.

Somewhere in that, there is the story of a woman named Donnah who loved her daughter and lit up a room. The law, finally, said her name correctly.