About halfway through today's story, it's going to seem like you've reached the conclusion, but trust me, you have not.
This story takes a wild turn in the second half.
But before we get into today's story, if you're a fan of the strange, dark and mysterious Delivered in Story format, then you've come to the right podcast, because that's all we do.
And we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.
So if that's of interest to you, please thoroughly smear Poison Ivy all over the five-star review buttons AirPods.
Also, please subscribe to the Mr Bolin Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads.
It begins here.
From the director of It comes It.
Welcome to Derry, the chilling new HBO original series exploring one of horror's biggest terrors, Pennywise the Clown.
Set in 1960s Derry, Maine, the new HBO original series is streaming Sundays at 9pm on HBO Max.
Also, you can listen to the official It Welcome to Derry podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
Okay, let's get into today's story.
On August 23 1995, 31-year-old Donna Winger stepped out of the air-conditioned baggage.
Claim exit of the St.
Louis airport to look for the van that would take her back to her home in Springfield, Illinois.
Next to Donna was a cart carrying all of her luggage.
Slung over her forearm was the carrying handle of a child's car seat, and sleeping inside of it was Donna's three-month-old daughter, Bailey.
The 88 degree afternoon was warm even for August, but not nearly as hot as it had just been in Florida, where Donna and Bailey had just spent the last few days visiting with Donna's dad mom, stepdad and two sisters.
Now tanned and rested from her vacation.
Donna couldn't wait to get home to tell her husband Mark, about the trip.
Feeling very tired.
Donna suddenly felt totally relieved that her mother and stepfather had hired a private driver to take her and her daughter the rest of the way home.
It was about a two-hour drive from the airport to her single-story house just outside of the city and, with a private driver, she and her daughter could just sleep the whole time.
A minute later, a 27-year-old lanky, dark-haired man stepped out of a waiting van parked in the limo area and waved at Donna holding up a handwritten sign that had her name on it.
As Donna started to gather her bags, the driver smiled at her and hurried over to give her a hand.
A few moments later, he had opened the hatch of the van and stowed the luggage in the trunk, while Donna carefully strapped Bailey and her car seat into the back seat of the van, and then she too climbed inside and buckled up as well.
The man hopped into the driver's seat and checked his rear and side view mirrors, then pulled out into the stream of traffic, headed for the airport exit.
Even though all Donna wanted to do was just sleep, She figured she should wait to see if the driver was the type of person who wanted to make small talk, in which case she could indulge him for a few minutes and then go to sleep, and then she wouldn't be as rude.
And sure enough, within seconds of starting the car, the driver wanted to chat.
He introduced himself as Roger Harrington and said that he lived in the area.
The man seemed nice enough and for a few minutes they chatted about the weather in Springfield and how it was hotter than usual for August.
Then Roger complimented Donna on her tan, to which she kind of laughed off and said she'd just spent the last few days sitting by a pool and probably was more sunburned than tanned.
Eventually, Donna's responses got shorter and shorter, as she was trying to give the man a hint that she just kind of wanted to be left alone.
But he wasn't taking the hint.
He just kept on asking her question after question and eventually the questions became very inappropriate.
He started asking her about her sex life and whether she liked orgies and whether she wanted to come to one of his sex parties.
All the while, he'd be looking into the rearview mirror to try to make eye contact with her.
Donna felt totally creeped out and began tucking herself into the corner of her seat to try to get out of the view of his mirror.
Finally, Donna just told Roger that she did not want to talk to him anymore, that her daughter was asleep and she didn't want their voices to wake her up.
But Roger, again, did not take the hint.
Instead, his questions and remarks got more and more sexually inappropriate and explicit, and his driving became faster and more erratic.
And then he started talking about the voices he heard in his head, like the one belonging to an entity he called Dom, that apparently told him to do bad things, and lately Dom had been telling Roger to hurt people.
By the time Roger pulled onto Donna's street, Donna was panicking and just praying that he didn't try to hurt her or her child.
And so when he pulled up in front of her house, Donna hopped out of the car, grabbed her daughter and practically ran her into the house.
And then she went back outside and, without even looking up at Roger, she just grabbed all of her things and then rushed back inside the house.
With her front door shut and locked.
Donna looked through the peephole of the door and watched with relief as Roger climbed into his van and drove off.
At this point, Donna's husband Mark, who was an average-sized guy with glasses and dark hair that had begun to thin, he had come into the room.
He had been downstairs in their basement using their treadmill.
And he was about to ask how the Florida trip went.
But he could tell right away that his wife was very upset about something.
And so he asked her, you know, what's going on?
It would take her a minute to compose herself.
But Donna began explaining her car ride and how awful it had been and how she really had been in fear for her life.
Mark listened attentively while he held their daughter Bailey.
And even though he was calm and reassuring on the outside, inside he was furious.
How dare this man put his wife and daughter in danger?
So at some point toward the end of her explanation of what happened, Mark told Donna to just write down an account of exactly what happened on the drive so that they could use it later on if they decided to file a complaint.
Donna agreed that that was a good idea, and so she stepped away and jotted some notes down on some paper, and then she stuck those notes to the refrigerator door with a magnet.
Then, after that, even though both of them were still upset about the whole driver thing, they shifted their focus to their daughter, who was now rolling around on the ground smiling and cooing.
And before long, the couple was down there with her, laughing and goofing around.
By the next morning, things in the Winger household seemed to be back to normal.
Mark, a nuclear engineer for the state, was getting ready to go to work.
Donna was still on maternity leave, so she and Bailey sat in the kitchen with Mark while he ate his breakfast.
Married for six years.
The only source of tension in the Winger household had been Donna's heartbreak years ago when she found out that she could not have children of her own.
But the couple got over it, and Mark and Donna filled their lives with family and friends.
They were as openly affectionate with each other as they had been when they first got married in 1986.
They were very active in their synagogue and were part of its tightly knit Jewish community.
The pair complimented each other beautifully.
Mark was soft-spoken but had a great sense of humor, and Donna was outgoing with a smile that could light up the room.
Everybody loved them.
And in June of that year, just three months before Donna's trip to Florida, the couple got some amazing news.
A teenage mother in the hospital where Donna worked as an operating room medical technician had just had a baby and wanted to place the infant for adoption.
Donna and Mark immediately filed the paperwork and a few days later on a bright, warm day, right outside of their house with family and neighbors looking on, Bailey was delivered into Donna's arms by a man from the adoption agency.
Life was perfect.
As Mark kissed Donna and Bailey goodbye, that morning Donna's awful encounter with Roger the driver had already faded from their memories.
But that evening, she and her husband would be forced to talk about him again.
That night, when Mark, Donna, and Bailey sat down for dinner, their phone rang.
Mark got up to answer it, but when he picked up the receiver, all he heard was silence.
And then a few seconds later, he heard a click as the caller hung up.
Mark shrugged, hung up the phone himself and then sat back down with his family.
And then, just a few minutes later, the phone rang again.
Annoyed, Mark got up, answered it, and again, he heard silence, followed by a click.
When Mark sat back down the second time, he felt totally unsettled.
He couldn't help but think that the person who was calling them had to be Roger.
The man had access to their home phone number because it was on their reservation paperwork that they knew he had.
And Roger clearly had some serious issues and had shown a very unhealthy interest in Donna.
And so, as he was thinking about this as a potential possibility, Donna said to Mark I bet that was Roger.
Even though the phone did not ring again that night, the Wingers remained on edge and triple-checked their locks that night before they went to bed.
And then the next morning, when Mark got up, he immediately called Roger's employer, Boothill Area Rapid Transportation Company, or BART for short, And he filed a formal complaint about how inappropriate Roger had been during the car ride with his wife and his daughter.
Mark also told the company that he believed Roger was behind the two anonymous hang-up calls he received the night before.
The company said they would look into it.
And sure enough, later that day they called Mark back to apologize for Roger's behavior during the car ride and they told mark that as a result they had given roger a six-month suspension.
Mark thanked them and felt like justice had been done.
He figured if roger had been behind those hang-up calls too, that perhaps now he would stop because he would know that mark and donna were prepared to take action against him.
But the calls didn't stop.
For the next several days.
The phone in the Winger household rang constantly, and each time there was just silence and then a click.
Finally, on the morning of August 29th, so six days after Donna and Bailey had returned from Florida, Mark had had enough.
He pulled out the paperwork Donna had been given by Roger when she first got in the car with him, and on it was Roger's phone number.
Mark dialed the number and when Roger said hello, Mark very angrily said if you don't stop harassing my family with these phone calls, we are going to call the police.
And then before Roger could answer, Mark just hung up on him.
Confronting Roger directly had been cathartic for Mark.
However, deep down, he knew his threat was unlikely to change Roger's behavior.
Roger was obviously mentally unwell, and on top of that he was likely very angry at the Wingers because their complaint had just gotten him suspended.
And so these calls, which the police could do almost nothing about, were most likely Roger's way of getting some payback.
But Mark figured, you know, all he can do now is just wait and see what happens next.
Later that day, just before 4 pm, Mark was in the basement working out on the family's treadmill when he suddenly heard a thumping sound coming from upstairs.
He turned off the treadmill and listened, and he heard it again, more thumping.
And so he climbed off the treadmill and quickly walked over to the stairs and went up to the main floor.
And when he got up there he didn't see anything unusual on the floor, so he just walked straight to the master bedroom where Donna and Bailey had last been.
But when he looked in the bedroom, Mark was immediately concerned.
Bailey was in the middle of the bed and Donna was not in the room.
Donna would never just leave Bailey alone in a place where she could potentially get hurt, like by falling off of the bed.
And so Mark knew something was up, and those thumping sounds could not be good.
But before he could make sense of what was going on, Mark heard more thumping coming from somewhere on the other side of the house.
Mark had a terrible feeling, so he rushed over to Bailey and he put big pillows all around her to keep her from rolling off of the bed.
And then he rushed to his bedside table and he pulled out of one of the drawers a pistol that he kept there for protection.
Then Mark slowly crept out of the bedroom with the gun at the ready.
He shut the bedroom door behind him, and then he turned right and started walking down the hallway toward the dining room, which is where he believed the thumping sounds were coming from.
And so as he walked, his heart rate began to spike.
He had no idea what was making these sounds or what he was going to see when he reached the end of this hallway.
And so finally, he gets to the end of the hallway, but he's still in the hallway, so he can't see what's in the dining room.
And so he has his gun at the ready and he takes a deep breath.
And then, in one fluid motion, he steps into the dining room and turns right and gets a full view of the room to see what's going on in there.
And what he sees is beyond horrible.
His wife Donna, is on her knees in the middle of the dining room and standing behind her is a man Mark has never seen before, and the man is holding a hammer and he's raising it above his head and then he brings it down and he smashes it into the back of Donna's skull.
There was blood all over the walls.
Mark started screaming and then donna, she turned and looked at her husband, and then mark had to watch as this guy raised the hammer again and hit her as hard as he could across the base of her skull, sending her crumpling onto the ground.
Mark reflexively raised his gun, pointed it at his wife's attacker and he fired two shots, both hitting the man in the head.
The man dropped the hammer and then he fell backward onto the floor and was motionless and so shaking violently from adrenaline and shock.
Mark ran to his wife, who's face down in a growing pool of blood, and he put his gun down on the side.
And then he grabbed his wife and tried to roll her over to try to help her, but as he did, he heard the sound of this attacker starting to move around, and so, without enough time to grab his gun, mark just turned around and grabbed the hammer that was on the ground between him and this man, and he wound up and he smashed the attacker as hard as he could right in the center of his chest, and when he did, the attacker groaned and went silent.
Then Mark chucked the hammer out of reach of the attacker and he turned his attention back to his wife, who was now unresponsive.
In an absolute panic, Mark ran for the phone and he called 911.
Hey listeners, big news for true crime lovers.
You can now enjoy this podcast ad-free on Amazon Music with your Prime membership.
Listen to all episodes of my podcasts Mr Ballin's Medical Mysteries and Mr Ballin's Strange, Dark and Mysterious Stories, along with a huge collection of top true crime podcasts, completely ad-free.
No more wading through cliffhangers or dealing with ads because, let's be honest, ads shouldn't be the most nerve-wracking part of true crime.
To start your ad-free listening journey, download the Amazon Music app for free or head to amazoncom.
Slash ballin.
That's amazon.com slash b-a-l-l-e-n.
Dive into uninterrupted true crime stories today.
When the police and paramedics arrived, they rushed inside the house and they found Mark crouched over his wife, who was barely conscious, and he's sobbing over her, and her attacker was only a few feet away.
He was lying on his back, and amazingly, he was still alive.
He was groaning, even though his head had been destroyed from those two gunshot wounds.
The police very quickly took three pictures in rapid succession of the positioning of donna and her attackers bodies where they were on the ground.
Basically, they needed a snapshot of exactly what the crime scene looked like as soon as they arrived, and then the police pulled mark aside to talk to him while the medics rushed inside and put Donna and her attacker on stretchers, and then they loaded them into an ambulance that was waiting outside and they rushed them to the hospital.
Right before the ambulance left one of the police detectives, Charlie Cox.
He pulled a wallet out of the back pocket of the attacker and inside the wallet detective cox found a driver's license and it belonged to 27 year old roger harrington.
Sitting inside the bedroom he shared with his wife, mark sat on the edge of the bed, staring off into space while asking over and over again if his wife was going to be okay.
At first the police really weren't saying much, since they knew Mark was in shock.
But eventually, Detective Cox asked Mark if he had recognized his wife's attacker.
Mark said no.
But then he looked up suddenly, his eyes seeming to focus for the first time, and he said to the detective it has to be roger harrington.
After explaining why he thought that detective cox would tell him that yes, it was roger.
As it dawned on mark that roger's attack might well have been triggered by the complaint he filed, as well as the phone confrontation he had with him, Mark broke down completely and just began sobbing hysterically.
Meanwhile, Roger Harrington would die on his way to the hospital.
As for Donna, she would die too, just 40 minutes after arriving at the emergency room.
It turned out that Roger Harrington was already known to area police.
He had been a psychiatric patient at a local treatment facility.
Although he did not have a criminal history, Detective Cox himself had once had to respond to a domestic dispute between Roger and his then-wife.
And in addition to Mark's report of the harassing phone calls and his complaint to Roger's employer, the detectives had also discovered Donna's handwritten note on the fridge that detailed exactly what this guy had done in the car ride with her just six days earlier.
It all added up to a tragic pattern of obsession and violence.
Losing his job had apparently been the last straw.
Roger Harrington had snapped. and now Donna Winger was dead.
Her baby was again motherless and Mark's life was shattered.
Over the next several months, Donna's family would all take turns flying from Florida to Springfield to help Mark take care of Bailey while he tried to put his life back together.
Not only was the extended family devastated by their own loss, They were also horrified by what Mark must have gone through, what he had seen and what he had been forced to do.
And it was obviously taking a toll on him because he had begun drinking heavily.
Finally, Donna's mother just stepped in and told Mark look, you really need to go out and hire a nanny who can come in and live with you guys and take care of Bailey.
Kind of help you get back on your feet again.
And so, with the encouragement and assistance of Donna's mother, Mark Wood put an ad out for a live-in nanny.
And at the start of 1996 he hired 23-year-old Rebecca Simic, a recent college graduate who had always wanted to work with children and who felt sure she could help fix this broken family.
About four months later donna's mother was hurt but not totally surprised when mark called her to say that rebecca was pregnant.
But donna's family really liked rebecca.
She was not only amazing with bailey and mark, but she also was just very respectful of the situation she was in And in many ways she represented a way forward for Mark and for Bailey.
And so Donna's family gave the couple their blessing.
And at the end of the year, Mark and Rebecca eloped to Hawaii for a quiet wedding ceremony.
And then over the next four years, Mark and Rebecca went on to have three children of their own.
They also left the house where Donna was killed and moved to a larger house in the country with room enough for their growing family.
Eventually, Mark withdrew both from Donna's family and from the tight-knit Jewish community that had been such a big part and reminder of his life with Donna.
He also lost touch with their rabbi and converted to Christianity.
But despite these changes, Mark never forgot about Donna.
Even though the investigation into her death was officially closed, Mark periodically would stop in to the Springfield police station to ask them if they had learned anything new about Roger Harrington's motivation for this crime.
Mark knew that Roger was unhinged, but the attack just seemed so random.
Roger had only met Donna a few days earlier.
What could possibly drive him to kill her so quickly?
Even though her attacker was dead, Mark felt determined to see to it that someone be held accountable for Donna's death.
And so Mark filed a lawsuit against BART, the transportation company that had employed Roger.
Mark claimed that BART was negligent in hiring Roger and they should have known that he was dangerous.
With millions of dollars and potential damages at stake.
BART attorneys began their own investigation into the circumstances around Donna's death.
But years would go by, and the lawsuit just kind of dragged on quietly and no new developments were discovered.
But all that would change in 1999.
In February of that year, the Springfield police got a call from a local woman who made an outlandish claim.
She said there was another person besides Roger Harrington that was involved in Donna's murder and she gave the police their name.
Now, police get lots of tips and many of them are not useful or not true.
But the detective who received this tip had been directly involved in investigating Donna's murder back in 1995 and he had always kind of had his doubts about the way the crime scene was interpreted at the time.
And so, after getting this tip from this woman, the detective decided to review some of the evidence from Donna's case, and very quickly he noticed a discrepancy.
Those three pictures that were taken by police right when they arrived on scene that showed in the same picture Donna and Roger.
Well, those pictures had just been slipped into the case file as an afterthought.
And until that moment, no one had really looked at them closely.
But now, thinking about the possibility of another person being involved in this murder, these three pictures took on a whole new meaning to this detective.
These photos, along with the tip from this woman, and later combined with evidence unearthed by Bart's investigators, would reopen the Donna Winger case.
And eventually, after another two years of painstaking interviews and forensic examination, the police learned that there really was another person involved in Donna's murder, and there was much more to the story than they had originally thought.
This is the full story of what happened to Donna Winger.
At about 345 pm on August 29 1995, so the day Donna died.
Mark was in the basement on the treadmill when he heard a thumping sound coming from upstairs.
After turning the treadmill off, he listened and heard the thumping again, and so he quickly walked over to the stairs and began heading up to the main floor.
When he got up there, he looked around and he didn't see anyone or anything strange.
But instead of going to the master bedroom to check on his wife and daughter, like he had told police, Mark walked to the front door.
The thumping he had heard downstairs was just the sound of someone knocking on the door.
When he looked through the peephole of the front door, he saw a man in his mid-twenties standing there.
Mark opened the door and then this young man introduced himself as Roger Harrington.
Mark said hello and gestured for Roger to come inside of the house.
Roger did and walked straight to the nearest table, which was in the dining room, and when he got there he placed his cigarettes down on top of it, as well as his travel cup that contained some coffee.
And then roger turned around to face mark, and when he did he saw mark was now holding a pistol out in front of him.
Roger was so shocked he just froze and stood there not saying or doing anything.
And then Mark ordered Roger to turn around and get on his knees.
And once Roger did this, Mark simply raised his gun and fired a single shot into the back of Roger's head.
Hearing the gunshot, Donna who was in the master bedroom with their daughter Bailey.
She came running out to see what was going on.
And when she got to the dining room, where Roger was on the ground in this pool of blood, she saw him and had no idea what to make of it and just started crying and shaking and looking around wildly, wondering what was happening.
And as she stood there, her husband, Mark, snuck up behind her with a hammer in his hand.
His first blow struck her on the left side of her head.
She never saw it coming.
And then, as she stumbled, she turned and tried to put her arms up over her head to protect herself, but it wasn't enough.
Mark bludgeoned her skull over and over and over again while she screamed at him to stop.
Eventually, after the seventh blow to her head, Donna crumpled onto the ground next to Roger.
Once he was sure his wife was down for good, Mark picked up the phone and placed a hysterical call to 911.
In the background, barely audible, you can hear a groan.
It was Roger.
At that point Mark abruptly ends the call with the dispatcher saying his baby is crying and he has to go take care of her.
But in reality, after he hung up the phone, Mark walked over to Roger, then just fired another shot into his head, this one going straight through his forehead.
Then Mark picked up the bloody hammer and struck Roger one time as hard as he could in the chest.
Mark knew the police would find his prints all over the hammer, so he needed a story for why that was.
He would later tell police that, as he tended to his wife, he thought he heard Roger moving toward them, at which point he didn't have time to grab his gun, and so he turned around and he grabbed the hammer that was on the ground, and he hit him that one time.
With his wife's blood streaking his face and arms and soaking into his t-shirt.
Mark attempted to rearrange the two bodies to make it look like Roger had been attacking Donna from behind when he was shot down.
Then, right as he got the bodies basically the way he wanted them, he heard the sirens fast approaching, and so he got himself into position.
When the police and medics rushed inside the house, they found Mark sobbing over his wife's nearly lifeless body.
Mark had actually done a fairly good job of framing Roger for this murder.
However, he had made a critical mistake and those three photographs the police took of Roger and Donna's bodies right when they arrived on scene.
In those pictures you can see that Roger is lying at an angle that was inconsistent with Mark's description of what happened.
Basically the way Roger's body was found.
It would not have been possible for him to have been attacking Donna at the time he was shot, which meant Mark's story was a lie.
It would turn out this whole murder had just been a crime of opportunity.
The tipster who had called the police and suggested that another person had been involved in Donna's death was a woman named Deanne Schultz.
And Deanne told them that she was Donna's best friend and that Donna's husband Mark, was her killer.
Deanne said she knew this because she had actually had an affair with Mark shortly before Donna's death.
And apparently it had been a very intense relationship where they had exchanged wedding bands and vowed to be together.
And during this affair, Mark had started telling Deanne that life would be so much better for the two of them that they could finally be together for good if Donna just died.
Deanne did not think he was serious and so never thought much of it.
But it would turn out Mark was very serious.
He just needed to figure out a way to kill his wife without getting caught.
And so when Donna came home from Florida and talked about how inappropriate her driver Roger, had been and how he had seemed totally crazy and dangerous, Mark realized he had found the perfect fall guy.
He started framing Roger by complaining about him to his company and getting him suspended.
And then, as for those anonymous hang-up calls, the only person who ever answered the phone for them was Mark, and so most likely he fabricated those.
Deanne said Mark believed if he could just find a way to get Roger to come inside of his house when Donna was home, Mark could pull this murder off.
Investigators tracked down phone records that showed that Mark Winger had called Roger Harrington on the morning of Donna's death, August 29th.
Roger's family corroborated that Roger had received a call from Mark that day and that Mark had apparently asked Roger to come over to his house so they could resolve the complaint Mark had placed against him.
And since Roger desperately needed his job back, he happily agreed to go, not realizing that Mark was luring him to his death.
Deanne claimed that at the time, despite how specifically Mark was talking about this frame job, she still was not taking him seriously, which is why she didn't go to police about this.
But after Donna's murder, Deanne knew Mark had done it.
However, Mark had told her that she could never go to police because she knew too much, and if he went down, she would too.
So she had stayed quiet and eventually broken up with Mark and moved on with her life.
But four years after the murder, her conscience got the best of her, and so she contacted police.
Deanne would receive immunity for her testimony.
On June 5 2002, after a three-week-long public trial in which he declared his innocence, Mark Winger was found guilty of first-degree murder in the deaths of Donna Winger and Roger Harrington.
He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Immediately after Mark's conviction, his second wife Rebecca, divorced him and changed her last name back to Simic.
She packed Bailey and her other three children into her brother's car and she relocated to Louisville, Kentucky.
As of today, all four of the Simic children have grown into successful adults who have built careers in teaching, art and business.
Thank you for listening to the Mr. Boland podcast.
If you got something out of this episode and you haven't done this already, please thoroughly smear Poison Ivy all over the five-star review buttons AirPods.
Also, please subscribe to the Mr Ballin Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts Amazon, Google and anywhere else you get your podcasts.
This podcast airs every Monday and Thursday morning.
But in the meantime, you can always watch one of the hundreds of stories I have posted on my YouTube channel, which is just called Mr Ballin.
If you want to get in touch with me, please follow me on any major social media platform.
My username on all of them is just at Mr. Ballin. and then you can send me a direct message.
I do read the bulk of my messages.
Lastly, we have some really cool merchandise, so head on over to shopmrballin.com to have a look.
So, that's going to do it.
I really appreciate your support.
Until next time, see ya.
Hey, Prime members, you can binge eight new episodes of the Mr Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad-free, on Amazon Music.
Download the Amazon Music app today.
And before you go, please tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wonderycom slash survey.
