Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast
He Killed His Best Friend To Steal His Wife - The Mike Williams and Denise Williams story
25 Feb 2025
Mike Williams disappeared in December 2000 while on a duck hunting trip at Lake Seminole in Florida, leading to an initial assumption of accidental drowning. Nearly two decades later, his wife, Denise Williams, and his best friend, Brian Winchester, were revealed to have conspired to murder him for insurance money. Brian confessed to shooting Mike and disposing of his body, leading to the discovery of his remains in 2017.
Full Episode
So this guy, his name's Brian, and Brian has a problem. He's in love with his best friend's wife, and he'll do anything to be with her, including murder his best friend. Now, Brian's best friend is this guy, Mike. And Mike is married to this woman, Denise. And they all live in Florida, because of course they do.
So one day in 1997, Brian is looking at his best friend's wife, Denise, like, damn, she kinda foine. And Denise is looking at him like, yo, he kinda foine. And soon enough, the two start secretly smashing on the side behind Mike's back. And this cheating goes on for a few years. And eventually, Brian and Denise decide that this side smashing is great for them.
And they want to be together permanently. Now, at this point, Denise could come clean and divorce Mike and go run away with Brian and live happily ever after, but that's not what they decide to do. Apparently, Denise is very Christian and way too religious to get a divorce. So instead, they decide they're going to murder Mike.
And they come up with this insane plan to take him out to a lake and drown him. So one day in 2000, Brian invites Mike to go on a duck hunting trip. These guys often go on these duck hunting trips. So they go and the two guys are out on this swampy lake in Mike's boat shooting at ducks or whatever. And so they're out there and Mike is wearing a big jacket because it's cold and waders.
And waders are rather heavy waterproof pants. They look like this. And at one point, Brian gets Mike to stand up in the boat and suddenly, boom, he pushes him as hard as he can over the side of the boat and into the water. Because he's hoping that the waders fill up with water and Mike won't be able to get them off and he'll drown in the lake and the whole thing will look like one big accident.
However, Mike is resilient and he quickly rips off the big jacket and he pulls himself out of the waders and he manages to grab on to a nearby tree stump sticking out of the water. And so Brian sees this and he's like, oh, it didn't work. He didn't drown. So he grabs his shotgun out of the boat, aims it down at Mike, and pulls the trigger. Blam! And this, unfortunately, unalives him.
Then, Brian puts Mike's body in the back of his truck, and later, he drives it to a different lake, and he buries him in the mud there. And now, it's Denise's turn to play her part in this. So she starts calling around to people, pretending to be worried that Mike hasn't returned from his duck hunting trip. Like, have you seen Mike? Mike is missing!
And pretty quickly, police get involved and a huge search gets underway. And they comb through the lake looking for any sign of Mike. But of course, they don't find a body or anything other than his boat floating out on the water. And 44 days go by and police are still looking. And ultimately, they got nothing.
So they call the search off, and everyone assumes Mike must have passed away in an unfortunate boating accident where he fell into the water with his waders on and never came back up, and that his body was probably eaten by alligators. But then, six months later, something unexpected happens.
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