Chapter 1: What happened to Mike Williams during his duck hunting trip?
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I got in the water in the very early morning before the sun had risen and the water was pitch black. I started swimming and I felt the water hollowing out around me and felt like something really big was swimming below.
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Chapter 2: Why did Mike's family believe he was missing?
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On December 16th, 2000, Mike Williams had planned to go duck hunting on Lake Seminole, which was just on the Florida-Georgia border. And Mike often went duck hunting. Usually he went with a friend, but this morning apparently he decided to go alone. And although he was a...
successful duck hunter and he enjoyed it very much, some people said that he did actually take risks, that he stood up in the boat to take risky shots and so forth. So people became worried when he hadn't returned home.
This is author Makeda Brotman. Mike Williams was in his early 30s and lived in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife Denise and their young daughter. The day Mike went duck hunting was his wedding anniversary. He and Denise planned to celebrate by spending the night at an inn on the coast, about an hour and a half south. They'd agreed to leave Tallahassee around noon today.
And people became more and more worried when Mike hadn't returned, specifically because he, like I said, he was kind of known to be rather a risky sportsman, but also because this terrible storm front was coming in. So Denise sent her father and a friend of Mike's out to the lake to look for him. Very quickly they found his car, but no sign of Mike.
They thought he must be still out on the lake. Denise's father called Fish and Wildlife to report him missing, and he then drove to different spots along the bank with an officer, looking for a sign of his boat on the water.
Pretty soon a search party was organized with the Department of Fish and Wildlife. Representatives from the Sheriff's Department were there. It was a huge search, but they couldn't continue searching that night because there was this very unusual for Florida, terrible winter storm.
So the search was delayed until the following morning, much to people's anxiety because at this time people were really panicking. Denise refused to come out of her room. She was terribly upset.
As soon as the weather improved, Mike's best friend, Brian Winchester, and his father took a boat out to look for Mike.
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Chapter 3: What theories emerged about Mike's disappearance?
After 44 days, on February 10, 2001, the search was called off. Mike's family and friends presumed he was dead.
Denise was terribly, terribly upset by this. She cut herself off from all her friends. She was suffering horribly.
Mike's family held a memorial service for him at the Baptist church they attended. But some people still found it odd that no trace of his body had turned up at the lake. A friend of Mike's knew a medical examiner and a retired state marshal, and he asked them what they made of it.
And they told him that it was very unusual for a body to disappear with no sign of it emerging from the water. But when the water warmed up, the body would surface in the spring. Both of them were very sure that the body would surface from their experience and their forensic knowledge.
A few months went by, and still no sign of the body. The experts Mike's friend had consulted said the same thing, that it was very unusual. In June, a fisherman found a pair of hunting waders in the lake. Later that month, a friend of Mike's brought an expert diver to the same spot, and the diver found a camouflage hunting jacket with Mike's hunting license in the pocket.
By late summer, authorities decided on what they thought was the most likely reason they hadn't found his body.
Lake Seminole was known for rather sizable alligators. And in fact, during the search to find Mike's body, a number of the investigators said that they encountered alligators in the water, including one having his ankle bitten by one and someone else actually trod on one. And after Mike's body disappeared, many people started to wonder if he might have been attacked by alligators.
Nobody thought that he would actually have been eaten alive by alligators, but people did wonder, since his body didn't surface, if he might have knocked himself out, drowned, and then his body being consumed by alligators.
Makita says that Mike's mother, Cheryl, wasn't convinced by this explanation. she decided to reach out to a biology professor at Florida State University.
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Chapter 4: How did Mike's mother challenge the alligator theory?
I mean, if your husband, your child's father, had gone missing, wouldn't you do everything you possibly can to find him? But Denise repeated what her family had told her, which is, you should listen to the experts. The experts told her that Mike would not be coming back. She believed the experts.
Denise and Mike's daughter was very young at the time, and Denise had quit her job when she was born. Now, she didn't have a steady source of income. Mike had several life insurance policies, but Denise wouldn't be able to access that money until Mike was legally declared dead, a process that takes years when there's no body.
Marcus Winchester, the father of Mike's best friend Brian, offered to help. Marcus owned an insurance and investment firm and used his connections to get Denise a certificate of presumptive death in June of 2001, about six months after Mike disappeared. She eventually received $1.8 million in benefits. As time went by, Denise and Brian Winchester started spending more and more time together.
By December of 2003, three years after Mike disappeared, they were engaged. About four years later, a local reporter revealed that Brian Winchester had sold Mike a million-dollar life insurance policy just six months before he disappeared. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal+. Support for Criminal comes from Bombas.
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In a very small Baptist community, very close, knew each other actually from preschool, a very tight-knit foursome. As they went through high school, they went to a Christian high school. Mike and Brian were football stars. Denise and Kathy were cheerleaders. Brian and Kathy were always a couple. Mike and Denise were always a couple.
After college, Brian and Kathy got married, and Mike and Denise got married. Author Makita Brotman says that the four of them kept spending a lot of time together. They started going to nightclubs and concerts, tried drugs, went to strip clubs.
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Chapter 5: What role did Brian Winchester play in Mike's life and disappearance?
And over time, they seemed to become increasingly guilty and began to think more about how could they be together while remaining in the strictures of the Baptist church. Divorce was something that they simply Denise in particular was simply unable to face, unable to consider.
But both of them felt that if you had a really, really strong feeling about something, a real desire towards something, it might be that God was pointing you in that direction. And so what Brian and Denise did was kind of try and... wrap, stretch their religion to fit their desires by telling each other that maybe they could submit Mike to a test.
And if Mike failed the test, it was a way that God was speaking to them, telling them that he wanted them to be together.
Brian later said the subject of Mike's death started coming up in conversations. There were scenarios that were discussed. They talked about staging an accident. Brian and Mike could go duck hunting together, and Brian could push Mike overboard. The heavy-duty hunting waders Mike was wearing would fill up with water, and he could drown.
And then if he survived, that was God saying, no, I don't want you to be together. Denise should stay with Mike. But if Mike drowned, that was God saying, yes, it's my will that you two should be together forever.
In April of 2000, eight months before Mike disappeared, Brian sold him a new insurance policy for $1 million. It was Mike's third life insurance policy, and the second from Brian. Mike had planned to let one of his other policies lapse, but Denise continued paying for it behind his back. Denise and Brian decided to carry out their plan the week before Denise and Mike's wedding anniversary.
Brian and Mike made plans to go hunting. But the night before, Mike called Brian and told him he had to cancel. Denise wanted Mike to stay home. Brian met up with Denise the next day to find out what had happened and remembers telling her either we're going through with this or we're not.
Duck hunting season was almost over, and so Brian persuaded Denise that it was now or never, basically, and she agreed. She finally went along with it.
After Mike disappeared, Kathy, Brian, and Denise spent a lot of time together. Kathy later said that even though she and Brian were the couple, she started to feel like she didn't belong. And she'd found a receipt for a necklace Brian had purchased. The receipt showed that it had been a custom necklace with the word Meridian.
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Chapter 6: What was the plan Denise and Brian devised regarding Mike?
And then, in 2016, Denise went to the police and said she wanted to tell them about something Brian had done. She said he had tried to kidnap her.
The police had been waiting for this chance for 16 years. They'd been waiting for Brian and Denise to turn on each other, and now it had happened.
We'll be right back. The day before Denise Williams went to the police, Brian Winchester purchased a gun from a sporting goods store.
He decides to kill himself. He writes 10 suicide notes to his various friends, family members, his father, his mother, his son. And then he decides before he does it, he wants to face Denise one last time. He wants to confront her one last time. He gets very drunk. At night, he goes to Denise's house. He climbs over the gate. He hides in her car, in the back of her car.
The next morning, Denise got in her car around 9 a.m. to go to work. When she was driving, she called her sister to check in. She later said that the moment her sister picked up, she saw a movement in her rearview mirror. It was Brian. He was climbing from the way back of her car into the back seat with a gun.
Denise is absolutely petrified. She's screaming. She throws her phone down. She manages to swerve into the parking lot of a pharmacy, a big pharmacy, and she pulls up where she knows that there's a security camera.
Denise later said that Brian held his gun to her ribs and said, if you try to get away, I'll have to hurt you. She said that his breath smelled like alcohol and that he was rambling and wasn't making a lot of sense. He said he still loved her and that he wanted to kill himself. They sat there for nearly an hour.
People went in and out of the pharmacy, but Denise was scared that if she signaled to anyone, Brian would shoot her. She tried to calm him down. She kept telling him that she could help him, that it wasn't too late to turn his life around. Finally, she convinced Brian to let her go to work. She swore she wouldn't go to the police.
But as Brian got out of her car, Denise saw him take some things from the back. A plastic sheet, and what she thought looked like a bottle of bleach and a shovel. Denise decided to go to the police after all. But Makita says she didn't fully consider that if the police arrested Brian, they might also try to question him more about Mike's disappearance.
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Chapter 7: How did the investigation into Mike's disappearance evolve?
He lifted Mike's body into the tailgate of his truck. Brian trained Labrador retrievers as a hobby, and he actually had a crate in the back of his truck, a dog crate, a big dog crate. So he hauled Mike's body, shoved it into this dog crate in the back of his truck, slammed the truck shut, and drove as fast as he could to Tallahassee. He realized that he had to convince Kathy that he'd been there,
all along that he hadn't gone out to go duck hunting with Mike because Denise had told everyone that Mike had gone out alone. So Brian drives home with Mike's body in the trunk of his car. He parks the car outside the house. He goes in the house. He undresses. He gets in bed where Kathy's still asleep. He's made sure that Kathy got pretty drunk the night before.
They went to a concert so that she doesn't wake up early. Kathy's still asleep. Brian makes a big fuss about waking up, oversleeping. He says something to Kathy about going out to take his dogs out. He makes sure that Kathy's acknowledged his presence. He goes outside, and there is the truck with Mike's body inside it.
He has to bury the body, but first he has to get a shovel and weights and a tarp. And to do that, he has to go to Walmart, leave his car with Mike's body in it in the Walmart parking lot, go into Walmart, buy what he needs, take it out and put it back in the car. And ironically, when he's in Walmart, he actually runs into an old friend of his who now works for the police force.
So he gets out of Walmart, gets back to the truck. He decides to take Mike's body to a place that he knows... which is pretty isolated and overgrown, he digs this grave. And even then, during that time, he's actually interrupted by a hunter who comes by and Brian manages to hide what he's doing and make small talk and have an ordinary conversation.
He manages to bury the body, even though it's in a shallow grave. And that's where it remains for the next 16 years.
The police recovered Mike's body after a six-day excavation. It took a team of 30 people to search and dig in the area Brian identified. Police wanted to keep the dig quiet, so they told onlookers that it was just a training exercise. As part of Brian's immunity deal, he'd agreed to plead guilty to kidnapping Denise. Two months later, in December of 2017, he was sentenced to 20 years.
Meanwhile, investigators finally believed they had enough to arrest Denise and charge her with first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and accessory. The trial began on December 11, 2018, 18 years after Mike was killed. Because they had no physical evidence connecting Denise to Mike's death, the prosecution's case depended totally on Brian's testimony.
Makita says that this was the first time Denise heard what actually happened on the lake.
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Chapter 8: What were the outcomes of the trials related to Mike's case?
But I do think that she should not have received a longer sentence than Brian did.
Denise appealed, and eventually her murder conviction was overturned in 2020. In a decision, the court wrote that she didn't assist or encourage Brian at the time of the murder. Her life sentence was overturned, and she was resentenced to 30 years. Cheryl, Mike's mother, testified at the resentencing hearing. By this time, she was in her 70s.
December 16, 2000, my life as I knew it changed forever. There is no how to find your missing child manual available to help mothers in their search for lost children. I did what God told me to do. I wanted publicity.
Reporter Jennifer Portman has said If not for Cheryl Williams, there's no way that we would know where Mike Williams was or anything that ever happened to him. She was the driving force. Makita Brotman's book is Guilty Creatures, Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer.
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