SELMER, Tenn. (AP) – The wife of a minister found dead in the church parsonage has confessed to shooting him and fleeing to Alabama, where she was found the following night with their three young daughters, authorities said Friday.

Mary Winkler told investigators she shot her husband on Wednesday, Selmer Police investigator Roger Rickman said.

“Our concern at this point is why the crime took place,” he said. “There have been no specific accusations made by Mrs. Winkler.”

Rickman said Mary Winkler had been “very cooperative” and authorities expected to learn more once she was back in Tennessee. She was charged Friday with first-degree murder, and police in Alabama said she agreed to waive extradition and was expected to be returned to Selmer in the next few days.

Matthew Winkler, the 31-year-old minister at Selmer’s Church of Christ, was found dead Wednesday night in a bedroom of the parsonage after church members went looking for him for the evening service.

Police said the home didn’t appear to have been broken into, but Winkler’s wife and children _ Breanna, 1; Mary Alice, 6; and Patricia, 8 _ were gone.

Mary Winkler, 32, was spotted Thursday night with the children as they left a Waffle House restaurant in Orange Beach, Ala., 340 miles south of their home.

Orange Beach Police Chief Billy Wilkins said that she had rented a condo on the beach but that she hadn’t stayed there.

A custody hearing was scheduled Friday afternoon in Foley, Ala., where a juvenile Court judge will decide whether Matthew Winkler’s parents can take custody of the three children.

Rickman said he wasn’t sure if the children knew what had happened to their father. “To my knowledge, the children saw nothing,” he said.

Mary Winkler’s father, reached in her hometown of Knoxville, Tenn., declined to comment Friday.

“I don’t have anything to say. I appreciate your interest. I just have nothing to say right now,” Clark Freeman told The Associated Press.

The news of the shooting death of the third-generation minister shocked those who knew him in Selmer, a town of about 4,600 in West Tennessee.

Matthew Winkler was hired at the Fourth Street Church in February 2005, said Wilburn Ash, an elder at the church. The congregation quickly came to love his straight-by-the-Bible sermons. Church members also took to his wife, who they described as a quiet, unassuming woman who was a substitute teacher at the elementary school.

“They were a nice family,” said former Selmer Mayor Jimmy Whittington, who worked with the minister collecting donations for hurricane victims last year. “They just blended in.”

Mary and Matthew Winkler met at the Church of Christ-affiliated Freed-Hardeman University in Henderson, where his father, also a minister, is an adjunct professor.

On Thursday, members of the Selmer congregation gathered inside the one-story brick church.

“I can’t believe this would happen,” said Pam Killingsworth, a church member and assistant principal at Selmer Elementary.

“The kids are just precious, and she was precious,” Killingsworth said. “He was the one of the best ministers we’ve ever had _ just super charisma.”