SELMER, Tenn. — Was Mary Winkler a "whipping post" for an abusive husband who controlled everything from what she ate to how she dressed? Or was the former schoolteacher a controlling housewife who killed her pastor husband after she lost control of the family finances?

Lawyers painted contrasting portraits of the couple's marriage Thursday in opening statements in Mary Winkler's first-degree murder trial for the shooting death of her husband, Matthew Winkler.

After three long days of jury selection in a case drawing national attention to the small town of Selmer, relatives of Matthew Winkler crammed into a McNairy County courtroom with members of the community and the press for the first day of testimony.

Mary Winkler, who faces 51 years in prison if convicted, had her own supporters from the community seated behind her in the gallery. Her father was asked to leave the audience because he is expected to testify for the defense.

In the prosecution opening statement Thursday, prosecutor Walt Freeland charged that the defendant intentionally shot her husband in the back as he lay in bed the morning of March 22, 2006.

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Freeland said Winkler unplugged the bedroom telephone before fleeing the state with the couple's three daughters. Later that evening, congregants from Matthew Winkler's church found his prone body face up in the parsonage bedroom; they went looking for Winkler after he failed to show up for Wednesday evening services.

The former substitute schoolteacher does not deny that she shot her husband, a fifth-generation preacher who took his first pulpit at Selmer's Fourth Street Church of Christ a little more than a year before he was killed.

Instead, a lawyer for Winkler, 33, claimed she accidentally fired her husband's 12-gauge shotgun into his back during a confrontation over his abusive treatment of her and the couple's daughters.

"Matthew and Mary Winkler had what appeared to be to everyone who observed them ... a marriage made in heaven," defense attorney Steve Farese told the panel of four men and 12 women in his opening statement. "But behind closed doors, it was a living hell."

Farese said that not long after Winkler took on the role of preacher's wife in 1996, she discovered there was a dark side to the charismatic man she met as a student at Freed-Hardeman University, a Church of Christ college in Henderson, Tenn.

"He would destroy objects that she loved, he would isolate her from her family and he would abuse her," said Farese, as members of Winkler's family sat shaking their heads in the audience. "She lived a life where she walked on eggshells."

Farese said Mary Winkler would not get her hair cut without the approval of her husband, who criticized every aspect of how she looked, including her weight.

"He would tell her she couldn't eat lunch because she was too fat," Farese said. "Not only did she have to be perfect, her children had to be perfect."

Farese said the abuse was not just emotional and verbal, but physical too, and suggested that it extended to the children.