Jerry Michael
Williams (born October 16, 1969) went missing on December 16, 2000, when it
was said he left his home in Tallahassee,
Florida, United States, to go duck hunting. After subsequent
investigations, he was presumed to have drowned in Lake Seminole, a large reservoir straddling the Florida–Georgia state line;
investigators later came to suspect he had been the victim of foul play, possibly
at another location. His body was found
in October 2017 near Tallahassee, and
Florida Department of Law Enforcement
(FDLE) officials confirmed Williams was a victim of homicide.
After Williams's boat was found abandoned on the lake, the
initial theory was that he had fallen out of it after a collision. However, a
lengthy and exhaustive search of the lake bed in the area failed to find his
body: at that time, it was the only known occasion when no remains or body had
been discovered after a drowning death in the lake. It was eventually concluded that his body had
been eaten by alligators. After waders and a jacket containing Williams's
hunting license were found in the lake six months later, he was declared
legally dead, following a court petition by his widow, Denise. She went on to
marry Brian Winchester, a mutual
friend who had helped her take out a large life insurance policy on Williams
shortly before his disappearance.
Some investigators felt aspects of the case were not
consistent with the alligator theory. After years of pressure from Williams's
mother, Cheryl, the case was reopened in 2004 by the FDLE. By then, officers
had learned that alligators do not, in fact, eat during the winter months, as
the water is too cold, and as such it was suspected that foul play might have
occurred. But it did not produce any new evidence, as the potential crime scene
had not been secured during the search for Williams.
Cheryl Williams
wrote letters daily to the governor, asking him to have the state reopen the
investigation even though two later investigations were likewise unable to
uncover any significant new information, alienating many of the law enforcement
officials she had previously persuaded to reopen it. The Investigation
Discovery channel series Disappeared devoted
an episode to the case. In 2016,
Winchester was arrested on charges stemming from an incident where he allegedly
kidnapped Denise, the missing man's widow, who was now divorcing him; he was
sentenced to 20 years in prison on the day before the FDLE announced that
Williams's body had been found. In May 2018, Denise Williams was arrested and charged with first-degree murder,
conspiracy to commit murder and accessory. She was found guilty in December, after
Winchester testified to shooting Michael at Denise's behest when their original
plan to stage a boating accident failed. In 2019 she was sentenced to life.
Background
Williams grew up in Bradfordville
(north of Tallahassee), the son of a Greyhound bus driver and a day care
provider who raised him and his older brother Nick in a double-wide trailer.
Instead of building a house the family saved its money so both boys, who helped
by working nights at supermarkets, could attend North Florida Christian High School. There Mike excelled, serving
as student council president, playing football and being active in the Key Club. At the age of 15, he began
duck hunting as a hobby, and also came to know fellow student Denise Merrell.
After North Florida
Christian, he attended Florida State
University, where he majored in political science and urban planning. Even before graduation, he was hired by Ketcham Appraisal Group as a property
appraiser. He distinguished himself as "the
hardest-working man I ever saw", according to the company's owner.
After he married Merrell in 1994, he would often go home for dinner and return
to work after she (and later, his daughter as well) went to bed, and he
sometimes went in to work after going duck hunting in the morning. According to
his mother, Mike was making $200,000 annually by the time of his disappearance.
He and Denise had bought a home in a
small upscale subdivision on the east side of the city.
In 1999, Williams's only child, a daughter, was born. His
coworkers said he was as devoted to her as he was to his work. The following
year his father died. Midway through the year, the couple bought a $1 million
life insurance policy on him through Brian
Winchester, a childhood acquaintance of Merrell who had also become best
friends with her husband. Later that year, Williams told his mother, whom he
had been consoling, that he would have liked to have $50,000 to take the next
year off.
Two days before his disappearance, Mike and Denise told his
mother, as well as his brother Nick, that they were planning to have another
child soon. In 2001, she said, they were planning to go on a cruise in Hawaii that spring; later in the year he
expected to travel to Jamaica for
work as well.
Disappearance
According to Denise
Williams, on the morning of December 16, 2000, a Saturday, her husband
awoke early, leaving the house on Centennial
Oaks Circle well before dawn, boat in tow, to go duck hunting at Lake Seminole. The lake is a large
reservoir approximately 50 miles (80 km) west-northwest of Tallahassee along the Florida–Georgia
state line, where three other streams merge to form the Apalachicola River. The couple had plans to celebrate their sixth
wedding anniversary that night in Apalachicola.
At noon, Denise called her father to tell him that Mike had
not returned; Brian Winchester’s
father drove with Winchester to the areas of the lake where they knew Mike Williams frequently went duck
hunting. They found his 1994 Ford Bronco
near a remote boat launch in Jackson
County, on the Florida side.
After investigators with the Florida Fish
and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FFWCC) were called, a search began,
but soon had to be called off after a storm blew in.
Search
The initial search investigation was handled by the FFWCC.
Since it had been reported to them as a missing hunter, the agency handled the
case that way, focusing on search and rescue or recovery. "We didn't have a whole lot to go on except there was an empty
boat and the guy didn't show up," one of the agency's officers
recalled later, after his retirement. "There
was nothing there that we had from the scene that suggested foul play at
all." Deputies with the Jackson
County Sheriff's Office were present but primarily worked in a support
capacity.
Searchers focused on the 10 acres (4.0 ha) of the lake
surrounding the cove where Williams's truck was parked. His boat was soon found
roughly 225 feet (69 m) from the ramp by a helicopter pilot, who initially
assumed it was a boat being used in the search. After retrieving the boat,
investigators found Williams's shotgun, still in its case, but no sign of
Williams himself.
The cove is locally believed to have been an orchard before
the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers
and Spring Creek were dammed to
create the lake. It took its name, Stump
Field, from the many remaining stumps that protruded above and below the
water level, requiring careful handling of any powerboat in the area. Searchers
thus assumed that Williams had hit a stump with his boat, fallen out, sunk into
waters 8–12 feet (2.4–3.7 m) deep when his waders filled, and then drowned when
he was unable to extricate himself.
Had Williams drowned, his body would have been expected to
eventually float to the surface, making it easier to discover. Investigators
assured the Williams family that his body would surface, like other drowning
victims, within three to seven days, or perhaps slightly longer due to the cold
front that had moved in after the first night's storm. No body was found,
however.
Ten days into the search, a camouflage-patterned hunting hat
was found, but it could not be connected to Williams. Efforts continued until
the search was called off in early February. It has since been suggested that
the search might have been continued had Denise
Williams indicated an interest in such. At that time, the case was still
considered open. "Nothing in
investigative or search and rescue efforts has produced any definitive evidence
of a boating accident or a fatality as of this date," read the final
report, issued in late February 2001.
Subsequent developments
If Williams had drowned after accidentally falling out of
his boat, his body would be the only one from 80 known deaths in the lake never
to have been found. The head of a private search firm that supplemented
official efforts near the end of the search offered a possible explanation. "With the wildlife around, I would
guess that the alligators have dismembered and have stored the remains in a
location that we would not be able to find," he wrote in a report.
Early searchers had reported seeing many of them, and some of the officials
were willing to accept the possibility. "Everyone
knows the lake is full of alligators," said the FFWCC's David Arnette. "You look for other answers: 'Why hasn't the body appeared?'"
It was suggested that perhaps Williams's body had become
entangled in the beds of dense hydrilla beneath the lake surface, and then
found by the alligators later, with turtles and catfish finishing what they had
left behind. Denise Williams, who had avoided media attention during the search
for her husband, accepted that her husband had died. She arranged for a
memorial service for Mike to be held the day after the search ended.
In June, an angler in the Stump Field area discovered a pair of waders floating in the lake,
and divers called to search the area then recovered from the lake bottom a
lightweight hunting jacket and a flashlight: in one of the jacket pockets,
there was a hunting license with Williams's name and signature. However, there
were no teethmarks or any other damage on the waders, none of the recovered
items showed signs of having been in the water for anything like the period
Williams had been missing, and there was no DNA evidence found to link the
clothing to him. Nevertheless, a week later, a Leon County judge granted Denise
Williams's petition to have Mike declared legally dead on the basis of
those recovered items and an assumption that alligators and other water life
had consumed the body in its entirety.
The court decision allowed Denise Williams to immediately proceed with claims on her husband's
life insurance policies, from which she received $1.5 million. Five years
later, she married Brian Winchester,
who had sold Mike some of the policies a few months before he disappeared. The
couple went on to live in the same house where Denise and Mike had lived prior.
Denise and Brian have mostly declined to discuss the case publicly.
Later investigations
The private search team that surmised the alligator theory
had been hired near the end of the original search by Williams's mother,
Cheryl. After it ended, and after her son was declared legally dead
(proceedings she said in 2008 she would have contested had she been aware of
them), she was still not convinced that he had drowned in the lake, but her
attempts to bring about a further investigation were unsuccessful. She has
stated that she received threats to discourage her. For the next several years,
she investigated on her own when not operating a day care at her home. She ran
advertisements in local newspapers, and put up billboards seeking information.
All the subsequent investigations of the case have resulted from her efforts.
She believed her son might still be alive. "I get criticized a lot for not
admitting that Mike's dead," she told the Tallahassee Democrat in 2007. "All I know is I can't stop
looking for him until I find him." Her efforts had severely strained her
relationship with her former daughter-in-law.
2004
In 2004 the Florida
Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) agreed to reopen the case after
lobbying by Cheryl Williams and a
friend. It does not normally have
jurisdiction in missing-persons cases and cannot get involved in investigations
purely on the basis of a citizen's request, although it can offer assistance to
local agencies, as it did in this case.[ In retrospect, many officers agreed with her
that the circumstances surrounding Michael
Williams' apparent drowning four years before were unusual, and were
strongly at odds with that conclusion:
The boat launch where
his Bronco was found, which he would presumably have used to put his
boat in the lake, was an undeveloped patch of mud. Yet very nearby were
finished concrete launches that he was known to have used in the past.
The storm the night
after he was reported missing had westerly winds that should have blown the
abandoned, unmoored boat across the lake to the Georgia side.
When the boat was
recovered, its engine was off, yet the gas tank was full. According to the
manufacturer, if the engine had been running when Williams allegedly fell out
of the boat, as investigators had theorized, it should have stayed on, with the
boat running in circles until its fuel was exhausted. "Something sounds
fishy on that deal," he said when the situation was described to him.
Investigators also learned that Williams didn't usually hunt
alone. "Some things looked unusual right off the bat," said the
FFWCC's Arnette, who had initially thought the situation was a typical case
involving a missing hunter and a possible boating accident. "Then after a couple, three days and
after the weeks went on, those first things looked even more out of
place."
Alligator theory
debunked
Doubts that Williams had drowned became much more serious
when investigators learned that, in fact, alligators do not generally feed
during the winter months due to the colder temperatures. During the search
period, daytime temperatures averaged around 55 °F (13 °C), with overnight lows
below freezing. Some nights got as cold as 19 °F (−7 °C);[15] a fire was built
in a 55-gallon drum on the shore for searchers to stay warm.[2] The water,
already at 58 °F (14 °C) the day of Williams's disappearance, dropped to 46 °F
(8 °C), and the lake iced out to as much as 20 feet (6.1 m) from shore.
In those conditions, "it
[i]s highly unlikely an alligator would have been active" said Matt Aresco, a local herpetologist
authorities had consulted. "All they
are doing is maintaining their body temperature ... Fifty-eight degrees is too
cold for an alligator to be interested in food at all."
And even if an alligator had "defied all known gator behavior," and eaten Williams's
body, as another investigator, Ronnie
Austin, then with the state's attorney's office, put it, it would likely
have left something behind. Williams was 5 feet 10 inches (1.78 m) and 170
pounds (77 kg). Aresco considers any
theory that attributes the missing body to alligators and any other aquatic
animals a "stretch ... It would be
very, very unusual to have the complete disappearance of a full-grown
man."
The waders, discovered almost six months after Williams's
disappearance, further undermined the alligator theory. While the diver who
retrieved them reported that they were in an area of disturbed weeds with
alligator excrement nearby, consistent with the original belief that Williams
had drowned while wearing them, he allowed it was "anyone's guess" as to whether they had been later
planted in that spot. "These waders,
we don't know where they came from," Austin said.
Investigators suspicions' were further raised by the waders'
condition—undamaged, without any tooth marks, and lacking any of the residue
that would be expected to accumulate on an object submerged in the lake for as
long as the waders had supposedly been. Arnette filtered the water in them
after they were recovered, and did not find any human remains. The hunting jacket and flashlight were
likewise in much better condition than expected, with the latter even working
when turned on.
Apart from the condition of the waders was the question of why
Williams would have been wearing them when he supposedly fell out of the boat.
According to a friend who hunted with him frequently, including one week before
his disappearance, Williams took safety very seriously, keeping his guns at
work, away from his daughter, among other precautions. On the water, he never put his waders on
until he had reached the point where he planned to get out and start hunting,
following a common safety procedure in order to avoid the type of accident from
which he was later believed to have died. "As
much as he preached that to me," the friend said, "why would he be wearing his waders while driving the boat?"
Lack of evidence
"My gut feeling
is Mike did not die in Lake Seminole," Austin said in 2006, after
leaving the state's attorney's office for the FDLE. He added that that belief
was shared by all the investigators at that point. "I would say this is a suspicious missing person."
However, the new investigation was made extremely difficult
by the deficiencies of the original search, when criminal activity had not been
considered. "They did not protect
the crime scene at all," recalled a Williams’ family friend with law
enforcement experience, who had tended the drum fire during the search. "They botched it." By the time
investigators began to realize that they should have asked some more questions,
the opportunity was gone. Williams's Bronco
and boat had been returned to his family and friends, the footsteps of the many
volunteers and searchers all over the lakeshore had made it impossible to
collect any evidence from that area, and the items later recovered from the
lake had not been retained.
Without any of that evidence, or Williams's body, it was
impossible for police to make a case. "[We're]
at a brick wall ... pounding our heads against it," said Austin. Derrick Wester, an investigator with
the Jackson County sheriff's office,
agreed that they were "trying to
make up for" not having considered the possibility that things might
not have been what they seemed in 2000. His office kept the case open, and had
some persons of interest, although he did not identify them.
2007
The FDLE closed its case, convinced that the alligator
theory was wrong, but without any leads or evidence that could allow it to
further investigate. By 2006, its cold case investigators were no longer
returning Cheryl Williams's phone
calls. She continued to do what she could to publicize the case, taking out ads
in the Tallahassee Democrat.
A possible new lead emerged in October 2007, when Michael Williams's older brother found
a photograph and the serial number of a .22-caliber
Ruger pistol that had once belonged to their father. Michael had inherited
it after his father's death, and after Michael was declared legally dead it was
the only one of his firearms that Denise
Williams had not returned to her former in-laws. After Jackson County sheriff's investigator Wester asked the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
(ATF) to look for it, agents visited Denise
and Brian Winchester, now married, in their house (the same one she had
lived in with Michael), to interview them.
Several days later, their attorney delivered the gun to the
FDLE. It was sent to a state forensics laboratory for DNA testing: the results
have not been reported. On the anniversary of Williams's disappearance that
year, the Winchesters made one of their few public statements on the case: "For seven years we have prayed and
hoped to find out with certainty what happened to Mike," Brian said in
an email to the Democrat, and "Nobody wants Mike found more than we
do." Rumors were circulating around Tallahassee that a grand jury had been hearing evidence and would
soon hand down indictments.
2008
In 2008, the Florida
Department of Financial Services's Division of Insurance Fraud (DIF), in
conjunction with FDLE, began investigating the case from that angle. Normally,
under Florida law, the statute of
limitations on that crime is five years, meaning it would have expired in 2005.
But it can be extended by three years under certain circumstances.
"The
circumstances surrounding this case raise many serious and troubling
questions," said DIF's lead attorney, Mark Schlein. Perry, the FFWCC officer who had been heavily
involved in the original search, added at the time that if he or any other
person investigating had known that there was a large life insurance policy on
Williams, and who the beneficiary was, that search might have been handled
differently. It was noted that Denise
Williams's court petition to have her husband declared legally dead
mentioned only the Kansas City Life
Insurance Company policies Winchester had sold him, omitting policies
through other companies that Michael
Williams had obtained through other sources.
However, Brian Jones,
an expert in insurance law at Florida
State University, told the Democrat
that any fraud case would have to rest on more than just those facts already
known to have aroused investigative interest. "The mere fact that they can't locate the body isn't necessarily something
the insurance industry would care about," he said. But if Michael Williams were to be proven dead
and the beneficiary were to have shown to have been involved, or if he were
still alive (as his mother and many residents of Jackson County believed possible,) then an insurance company would
strongly consider pursuing a case.
By the eighth anniversary of Williams's disappearance,
however, the DIF had closed the case. "Our
job was extremely difficult, and we were simply unable to develop enough
evidence to proceed with the investigation," Schlein said. He added
that if new information were received, the investigation could be reopened. "We have suspicions, but what we need
is evidence."
Another possible lead that year proved fruitless as well. Carrie Cox, a self-described psychic and
certified forensic psychological profiler from Kentucky reviewing the case had identified a possible location of
Williams's body. She gave investigators the coordinates of a location in Wakulla County near another boat launch.
Cadaver dogs were brought to the area and sniffed it out, but found nothing.
Cox nevertheless concluded that "we
are moving in the right direction.... I think something is there." FDLE officials said in 2011 that Cox had not
found anything requiring further investigation.
Cheryl Williams's
lobbying efforts
Despite the failure of a third investigation to discern the
fate of her son, Cheryl Williams
persisted. Her efforts led to the Investigation
Discovery cable channel doing a segment on Michael's disappearance and the
later investigations in late 2011. "We
don't know what the smoking gun is, but we hope someone will find it,"
she said.
By then, she had become disillusioned with the FDLE,
believing that it was either incompetent or uninterested in resolving the case.
In particular, she came to believe the investigation was hampered by the
involvement of agent Mike Philips, a
friend of both her son and his then-wife. Philips had told her early on in the
search that Michael had probably been eaten by alligators, so she had assumed
he had been involved in the investigation at that point. He said later he never
was and was merely trying to comfort her; FDLE said his involvement was limited
to asking his superiors if the agency could help with the search; it did not
see a need to formally investigate his role.
Starting on New Year's
Day in 2012, Cheryl began writing one letter a day to Governor Rick Scott, asking him to either have another agency
besides FDLE investigate or appoint a special prosecutor to do so. After she
had written over 200 without even an acknowledgement that they had been
received, she began inquiring personally as to why. It turned out that the
governor's office had forwarded them, unopened, to FDLE's headquarters, where
they were placed in the case file. She was outraged. "They could not have hurt me more if they had punched me in the
face."
Brian Winchester
kidnapping of Denise
In 2012, Denise and
Brian Winchester separated, reportedly due to his sex addiction; she filed
for divorce in 2015. Brian opposed it initially and had to be ordered to
comply. As part of that order, he was to provide an appraisal of the couple's
house, due early in August 2016.
Denise told Leon
County Sheriff's Office investigators that, on August 5, the day when the
appraisal had to be filed with the court, she left her home to drive to her job
at Florida State University. While
she was talking on her phone to her sister, she saw someone climb over the back
seat of her car. It turned out to be Brian.
He took her phone away and began yelling directions at her.
She did not comply until he showed her a gun. She said later that he claimed
this was necessary since she was not taking his calls and was blocking his text
messages. Instead of going where he wanted her to, she pulled into a CVS drugstore parking lot, close to the
door.
Brian told her that he was planning to kill himself with the
gun. He did not want the divorce and felt he had nothing to live for if it went
through. He assured her he did not want to kill her. She was able to calm him
down and took him back to where he had parked his own truck at a nearby park.
Before he went to it, he took a tan sheet, a different-colored plastic sheet, a
spray bottle of bleach and a tool from Denise's car.
After she left, Brian pulled up to her and apologized for
his actions. Despite her promise to him not to tell police about the incident,
she drove straight to them afterwards. According to a friend of Winchester's later
interviewed by police, he had been increasingly concerned that as a result of
the divorce Denise would tell the police what she knew about "this guy who died 10 or 12 or 15 years
ago." She had not answered his many phone calls, so he came up with
his plan to wait in her car and hold her at gunpoint.
Brian was arrested and charged with kidnapping, domestic
assault and armed burglary, with two of the charges being felonies. Denise
requested protection orders, saying she feared for her life and her daughter's.
After a hearing the next week at which she said she could neither eat nor sleep
since the incident, the court decided to hold Brian without bond.
Cheryl Williams
expressed hope that this development could lead to the resolution of her son's
disappearance. "[Brian]'s not going
to let Denise run around alone with all that money," she told the New
York Daily News. "I'm praying he
doesn't commit suicide, I'm praying he'll tell us what actually happened."
She added that she is alone among her family in holding out hope that her son
is still alive.
In December 2017, Winchester was sentenced to 20 years in
prison for the kidnapping, with credit for 502 days’ time served, to be
followed by 15 years' probation. His attorney told the court that he was
suicidal that day, due to not only the divorce but also his mother's recent
terminal cancer diagnosis and the decision by his teenage son from his first
marriage to move in with his mother, and argued for the 10-year mandatory
minimum. Prosecutors countered that Winchester's actions that day indicated he
planned a murder-suicide that was only averted by Denise's quick thinking, and
asked the court for the 45-year maximum. Winchester is now imprisoned in the Wakulla Correctional Institution.
Discovery of body
No mention was made of the Williams case at Brian Winchester's sentencing, although
State Attorney Jack Campbell told the media that he hoped the case against
Winchester would help authorities solve that disappearance. Later it was
reported that he had reached an agreement with prosecutors before the
sentencing that they would neither seek a life sentence on the kidnapping
charge nor introduce certain evidence at the hearing. What that agreement
required of Winchester, if anything, beyond his guilty plea has not been
disclosed.
The next day, at a news conference, Mark Perez, the FDLE's special agent in charge, announced to
assembled reporters that Williams's body had been found and it had been
determined he was the victim of a homicide. However, they declined to release
any details of how he had been killed, who might be a suspect or person of
interest, or where the body had been found, saying they were withholding that
information since only the perpetrators would be expected to know it.
Subsequently, the Florida
Department of Law Enforcement revealed they had found Mike Williams's remains at the end of dead-end Gardner Road in northern Leon
County, five miles (8.0 km) from where he grew up; they were confirmed as
his following a match to his mother's DNA. No other details were provided.
After Denise Williams
was arrested, the FDLE disclosed that they had received information on where
the body was in early October 2017. County public works employees brought in
backhoes for what they were told was a training exercise. After five 16-hour
days of digging 9-foot-deep (2.7 m) holes in the mud at that corner of the
lake, all the while holding back the lake waters by dams and pumps amid the
constant presence of eels and water moccasins, the FDLE was ready to hire a
private contractor to finish the job.
On October 18, the team of search dogs and officers finally
found Mike Williams's remains in the
piles of dirt stacked on plywood sheets. An FDLE source told the Democrat that 98% of his bones were recovered,
all very well preserved, as was some of the clothing he had been wearing such
as winter gloves and booties. Two DNA tests matched the remains to his mother's
sample.
Arrest and trial of
Denise Williams
On May 8, 2018, Denise
Williams was arrested at Florida
State as she left work to celebrate her daughter's 19th birthday; minutes
after a grand jury had indicted her on charges of first-degree murder,
conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and accessory after the fact.
Prosecutors continued to keep details of the crime to themselves, saying they
would share them in court when the time came. They did say that they would seek
to have her denied bail.
Denise's attorney declined to comment at that time, saying
he had not had time to review the case. Denise's estranged husband, Winchester,
was serving his sentence at Wakulla
Correctional Institution near Tallahassee;
his attorney said his client would take the stand at trial if legally compelled
to do so. However, the attorney did not think Winchester would be charged in
the case as well.
Two FDLE officers went to Cheryl Williams's house immediately following the indictment to
inform her. She did not speak to the media about how she reacted to the news.
The three-page indictment was released two days later. It
revealed that prosecutors believed Denise allegedly began conspiring with
Winchester in March 2000, nine months before her first husband disappeared.
Winchester is alleged to have killed Michael with a gun. The accessory charge suggested
that sometime between August 2014 and the day Winchester was sentenced, Denise
had allegedly helped Winchester avoid prosecution or arrest for the crime.
Ethan Way,
Denise's lawyer, said his client was innocent of all the charges. "[She] had absolutely nothing to do
with Mike Williams's disappearance
and had absolutely nothing to do with any of the crimes that Brian Winchester
committed." He found it convenient that the indictment came after
Winchester had been imprisoned for several months. On Denise's behalf, Way entered
a plea of not guilty.
Trial
In late June 2018, Denise
Williams was ordered held without bond, with trial date set for September
24. Audio of Brian Winchester's
interview with the FDLE was played in court. In it, Brian confessed to pulling
the trigger but claims the killing was Denise's idea. Her defense argued that
the tape should not have been admitted as evidence since Winchester was not
charged with anything despite his admission; the prosecution said it simply
asked him to tell the truth about what happened. She went on trial in December.
The state's star witness was Brian Winchester, who testified at length about how he and Denise
had never really ended their high school relationship, even after they both
married others. Kathy Thomas,
Winchester's first wife, told the jury that she had suspected the two of having
an affair in the late 1990s, when they frequently double-dated with Mike and
Denise. Brian said in his confession, a tape of which was played for the jury,
which the affair had started in 1997 and just "snowballed".
After discreetly rekindling the relationship, the two began
to consider killing Mike so they could marry, as Denise's family frowned on
divorce for religious reasons. Denise suggested staging a boating accident on
the Gulf of Mexico where they could
throw both Mike and Thomas overboard, but Winchester did not want to kill his
children's mother. After rejecting plans for a murder at Mike's office meant to
look like a robbery, Winchester hit on the idea of an apparent hunting accident
after he saved Mike from quicksand when the two were hunting in Arkansas.
On the day Mike disappeared, Winchester said, he had enticed
him to Lake Seminole. Out on the
water, he had gotten Mike to put the waders on, and then pushed him out of the
boat, thinking he would be unable to resurface and drown. But instead, he
managed to get to a tree stump, so Winchester fired a single shotgun blast to
the face. Since Mike's death could no longer be passed off as a boating
accident, Winchester buried the body where it was later found, then cleaned out
his truck and went to a family Christmas
party, where he learned that a search was underway. He and Denise took it slow
after the accident, both to let the insurance money earn further interest and
allay any suspicion. The kidnapping which had led to his present imprisonment,
he explained, was his reaction to fear that Denise would reveal the truth about
what had happened to her first husband now that she and Brian were divorcing.
Prosecutors also played a taped phone conversation in which
Thomas, who was working with police at the time, had told Denise she knew the
truth about the crime. Each time she brought it up, Denise attempted to change
the subject,[11] but at one point asked "What
do you know?" Assistant state attorney Jon Fuchs said this evasiveness, as
well as Denise's dispassionate response when Winchester told her how he had
killed Mike, demonstrated how cold-bloodedly she had planned and executed the
crime.
Way argued in response that there was no physical evidence
linking Denise to the crime, that it had been entirely Winchester's idea and
expressed incredulity that he was not on trial despite having admitted to
committing the crime himself. After four days of testimony, the jury took eight
hours to convict Denise of all the charges. Way said his client would appeal
the conviction.
In February 2019, Denise was sentenced to life in prison.
She did not speak or offer any argument on her behalf. The only person to
address the court besides the lawyers was Cheryl
Williams, who said that justice had finally been served, and that Denise
had taken not only her son but also her granddaughter from her.
Five months later, Mike and Denise's daughter Anslee was
awarded all assets of her late father's estate and insurance monies due to
Denise, after her mother signed them over to her to avoid prosecution on three
counts of insurance fraud. As part of the deal, Anslee may not use any of the
money on her mother's legal fees; if she did, she would owe the state a
$150,000 penalty. Denise is now
imprisoned at the Florida Women’s Reception
Center.
Appeal
In January 2020, Denise
Williams appealed her conviction and life sentence. Her attorney argued
before the Florida First District Court
of Appeals that there was no evidence she was involved in the commission of
the murder.
In the media
In the early 2000s, Cheryl
Williams had posted flyers, put up signs, and run newspaper ads soliciting
information about the case. One of the ads drew the attention of Jennifer Portman, a reporter at the Tallahassee Democrat. In 2006, after the
closure of the first FDLE investigation, she wrote a lengthy story about the
case. She followed the story through
Denise's conviction, making a point of keeping the poster for the case on her
cubicle wall.
In 2011, the case made it into two other media formats. Carrie Cox, the psychic and profiler
who had identified a possible burial site at which no body was found, published
Alligator Alibi, a lengthy book with
documents from the investigation, Cheryl
Williams's notes, and her own commentary.
She supported it with an eponymous Facebook
page, where she regularly publishes whatever updates she can and news about
other, similar cases.
Near the end of that year, the Investigation Discovery cable channel series Disappeared devoted an episode to the case. Cheryl Williams promoted it heavily in the days before it aired. Portman, who was interviewed, said she could
always tell when it got rerun due to the increase in email she got, many of
which asked questions she herself had tried in vain to get authorities to
answer. After one such re-airing in 2015, she expressed the hope that "one day ... instead of a question,
there will be an answer."
