The Test

When Mike Williams went missing while duck hunting on Lake Seminole, investigators wondered if he had been eaten by alligators. But Mike’s mother was sure something else had happened. Mikita Brottman’s book is Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida. Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  I'm Anna Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Chloe Mel. We talk all about her taking on the top job at Vogue, finding her personal style, and her favorite lunch order in the iconic Conde Nast cafeteria. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  This episode contains adult content. Please use discretion.

• 1:23Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  This is author Makita Brodmann. Mike Williams was in his early 30s and lived in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife Denise and their young daughter.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:22Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:01Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  As soon as the weather improved, Mike's best friend, Brian Winchester, and his father took a boat out to look for Mike.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  And they actually came across Mike's boat after a few hours. And Brian even found Mike's cap in the water. So people were incredibly frightened about what had happened. And helicopters were brought in, cadaver dogs brought in.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  State authorities borrowed a special underwater camera from the National Geographic Society and brought in dive teams. When word spread that Mike had gone missing, members of the community joined in the search efforts. A friend of Mike said that at least 20 people showed up every day, but they didn't find anything else.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  After 44 days, on February 10th, 2001, the search was called off. Mike's family and friends presumed he was dead.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  Denise was terribly, terribly upset by this. She cut herself off from all her friends. She was suffering horribly.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  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.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:57Speaker 03

  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.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  Makita says that Mike's mother, Cheryl, wasn't convinced by this explanation.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  She decided to reach out to a biology professor at Florida State University.

• 6:51Speaker 03

  And he actually wrote back and said to her, "Your son could not have been eaten by an alligator because alligators don't eat during the winter."

• 7:01Speaker 02

  The authorities also consulted alligator experts, who agreed that alligators don't feed in the winter. But some people said that maybe an alligator had hidden Mike's body away and had waited until spring to feed. Another problem with the alligator theory was that Mike's hunting jacket had been found in the lake in good condition. No bite marks.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  Mike's mother believed there was enough evidence to show that Mike had not been eaten by an alligator. She began wondering if Mike hadn't died in the lake.

• 7:38Speaker 03

  She did not believe that Mike was dead and said that she had an experience, that she heard God's voice telling her, "Mike is not dead. Mike did not die in the lake. You have to bring him home." She thought maybe he knocked his head, lost his memory and was wandering somewhere. She thought perhaps he'd taken on a new identity, gone to live in a different state.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Makita says Cheryl, who was 56 at the time, started putting all of her energy into finding Mike. She reached out to missing persons networks, made and distributed flyers and posters with Mike's photo, and put ads in the newspaper. She even paid for a billboard.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Cheryl also made a picket sign with Mike's face on it and the word "missing", and would carry it around town, outside the Florida State football stadium on game days, and outside a local church on Sundays.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  Denise was absolutely opposed to Cheryl's constant search for Mike, which many people found peculiar. 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.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  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 $1 million life insurance policy just six months before he disappeared. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

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• 13:05Speaker 02

  Denise and Mike Williams, Brian Winchester and his first wife Kathy, had all grown up in Tallahassee together.

• 13:12Speaker 03

  In a very small Baptist community, very close, knew each other from, 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.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  And it was almost as though, after denying themselves their whole lives, sex, alcohol, the kinds of things that most people enjoy in high school, they sort of broke out of their straightened Baptist circumstances and began to experiment.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Sometimes Brian would ask his wife Cathy and Denise to take their clothes off and pose together so he could take pictures.

• 14:21Speaker 03

  It seemed that Brian and Denise were much more interested in these kind of lurid games than were Cathy and Mike, who were keener on settling down. Cathy wanted to start a family, and Mike just worked so hard. You know, he wanted to get up early in the morning and go to work. He stayed at work late at night.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  But Brian and Denise weren't ready to settle down. They would leave their spouses at home and go to concerts and clubs together instead. And they kept it a secret from Cathy and Mike.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  It became very clear that during these escapades, that Brian and Denise had long conversations about their relationships, about their satisfaction, about their respective marriages. And it became very clear that they were interested in each other sexually. Perhaps even that they had both married the wrong person and that they should have married each other.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  Makita says they started meeting at each other's houses when Mike and Cathy were at work. Other times, they'd meet up in church parking lots or local hotels. Sometimes, if one of them went on a business trip, the other would come along.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  It seemed like no one suspected them, and they continued with their lives as normal. Cathy and Denise both got pregnant within about a year of each other.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  Makita says Denise wasn't totally sure if the father of her baby was Mike or Brian.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  Denise and Brian kept seeing each other, even though having young children at home made it harder.

• 15:54Speaker 03

  They continued to be completely obsessed with each other and devoted to each other, but they also continued to embrace the church. 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.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  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.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  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."

• 17:24Speaker 03

  And then if he, you know, 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."

• 17:40Speaker 02

  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.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  Mike had planned to let one of his other policies lapse, but Denise continued paying for it behind his back.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  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."

• 18:31Speaker 03

  The accounting 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.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  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. Kathy immediately recognized "Meridian" as a nickname Denise sometimes went by, her party name. Within a few years, Kathy and Brian separated. She moved out and told them she wanted a divorce.

• 19:20Speaker 03

  And again, with all the stigma about divorce in the Baptist church, and since Brian and Denise were unable to contemplate the fact of Denise's divorce, it seemed strange that Kathy could just get divorced pretty easily from Brian. It kind of threw into question what Brian and Denise had done. If you could get divorced without stigma, without condemnation, without being thrown out of the church, it really made what they'd done seem horrifyingly unnecessary.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  But it did mean that Brian and Denise could stop keeping their relationship a secret. In 2003, they got engaged, and in 2005, they got married. Not all of Denise's relatives approved of her marrying someone who had been divorced. And some people were surprised that Cheryl Williams, Mike's mother, hadn't been invited to the wedding. Besides paying for the billboard and carrying a missing poster with Mike's face around town, Cheryl had been writing letters to the local newspaper, The Tallahassee Democrat. Eventually, she got in touch with a reporter named Jennifer Portman.

• 20:36Speaker 03

  Jennifer Portman became very interested in this case. She began to meet with Cheryl. She began to sympathize with Cheryl. She, too, found it very suspicious that the man who'd sold Mike his insurance policies was now married to Mike's wife. And she began posting an article every year about Mike's disappearance, saying how many days it was that he'd been missing, how many years it was since he'd been missing.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Jennifer had reached out to Brian and Denise for comment multiple times. They wouldn't agree to talk, but sometimes sent statements over email. In 2007, Brian wrote, "Nobody wants Mike to be found more than we do. We continue to love Mike and miss him every day. We ask again that our privacy be respected and that our family be allowed to live our lives in peace." After Jennifer learned that Brian had sold Mike a large life insurance policy just a few months before his disappearance, she reached out to Brian and Denise again. This time, they didn't respond at all.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  There was a lot of talk and speculation about Mike's disappearance on the newspaper's online forum.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  You know, gossip and implications and rumors and suggestions in the community. And it really must have put enormous pressure on Brian and Denise. They wouldn't speak about the crime.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  Even in front of each other in a private space. So they developed this range of hand signals that they would use to suggest that they wanted to talk about the crime. One of them was holding bars as if you were miming that you were in prison. And if either of them made one of these gestures, it meant they wanted to talk about the crime. They would go to an isolated area. And before even having a conversation, they would leave their cell phones in the car and sometimes even take the batteries out of their cell phones. Because by this time, they were getting suspicious of each other. And there was even a stage where they would both actually pat each other down before they had conversations.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  Makita says that by this point, the police no longer believed that Mike drowned and had been eaten by alligators. They suspected Mike had been murdered and that maybe Brian and Denise had something to do with it, but they had no evidence.

• 23:08Speaker 03

  They said to each other many times, unless they turn on each other, nothing can be done.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Mike's mother, Cheryl, wrote letters to the governor's office daily, trying to get someone to help.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  In 2011, producers from a show called "Disappeared" heard about the case and put together an episode about it. They interviewed Mike's family, friends, and Jennifer Portman, who said, "If anyone should be questioning what happened to Mike, you'd think it would be his wife and best friend, and they won't really comment on this."

• 23:44Speaker 02

  In 2012, Brian wrote in his journal that Denise wanted to separate. He wrote that during an especially bad argument, he'd grabbed Denise's wrists and pushed her against a door. Quote, "I saw how she was scared, so I let her go and she ran out."

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Brian moved out, but Denise did agree to go to couples' therapy for several years. Still, in 2015, she filed for divorce.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  Brian later said, "I did not handle the news well. I dealt with it by drinking and indulging in inappropriate relationships." Makita says he was spending a lot of money on strippers and prostitutes.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 24:38Speaker 03

  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.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  We'll be right back.

• 25:02Speaker 02

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  Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know Criminal sent you. It's the best way to support the show. The day before Denise Williams went to the police, Brian Winchester purchased a gun from a sporting goods store.

• 27:12Speaker 03

  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.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  The next morning, Denise got in her car around 9:00 AM 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 backseat with a gun.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  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.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  She did not want them to ask him about the murder or to charge him with the murder because she knew that he would implicate her.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Denise spoke with the police over several hours, describing what happened in the car.

• 29:41Speaker 04

  And then, and I turned around and I go, "What do you mean hurt me?" And he pulled out a gun, like, not a hunting gun, but like a gun to kill someone with. And he put it right here in my ribs. He put it right here and he goes with this. And he pressed it in there. "You will turn." Well, I kept, in my head, I was like, "I'm making it speed up because that's our speed."

• 30:00Speaker 02

  At one point, another investigator enters the room and says he's leading the investigation into the disappearance of Mike Williams. He starts asking Denise about Mike and about whether or not she thought Brian had anything to do with his disappearance. Denise said, "I do not, and I never have. I'd never have married him if I'd have thought that." Later that day, the police arrested Brian and charged him with aggravated kidnapping, domestic assault with a deadly weapon, and armed burglary. Brian was taken to the county jail and an assistant state attorney decided to raise the kidnapping charge from aggravated to armed,

• 30:44Speaker 02

  a more serious charge. It meant he couldn't be released on bond. His lawyer tried to work out a plea deal, but was unsuccessful. And then Brian heard that Denise was pushing for the maximum sentence.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  And the prosecutors came to him and said, "Look, you're going to get life without parole unless there's anything you want to tell us about Mike's death." And at this point, Brian realized it was his only chance.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  The prosecutors agreed to grant him immunity in the disappearance of Mike Williams if he fully and truthfully answered all their questions.

• 31:26Speaker 03

  So Brian began to tell the story of what actually happened on the lake. He and Mike went duck hunting, as planned. They went out on the lake, as planned. Brian asked Mike to stand up in the boat, as planned. He pushed Mike overboard, as planned. And that's where things stopped going as planned.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  Brian said that he and Denise had expected Mike would drown. He thought that the waders Hunter's wore could quickly fill with water. But what Brian hadn't realised was Mike was wearing a new kind of waders that prevented this from happening.

• 32:05Speaker 03

  And Mike didn't drown. He actually swam to one of the stumps in the lake, clung on to the stump, and started screaming. This was not what Brian had anticipated. Brian had no idea what to do. He said he felt he had no alternative. He started the motor on his boat. He circled Mike a few times, getting closer and closer. Then he lifted his gun and shot him in the head.

• 32:39Speaker 03

  After that, he realised Mike's body can't be found with a bullet hole in his head. You know, this is obviously not a drowning. He realised he had to get rid of the body. So he took one of Mike's feet in his hand. He dragged the body to shore. He pulled it up out of the lake. He went to get his truck.

• 33:02Speaker 03

  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 realised that he had to convince Cathy that he'd been there all along, that he hadn't gone out to go duck hunting with Mike because...

• 33:40Speaker 03

  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 Cathy's still asleep. He's made sure that Cathy got pretty drunk the night before they went to a concert so that she doesn't wake up early. Cathy's still asleep. Brian makes a big fuss about waking up, oversleeping. He says something to Cathy about going out to take his dogs out. He makes sure that Cathy's acknowledged his presence. He goes outside and there is the truck with Mike's body inside it.

• 34:24Speaker 03

  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.

• 35:07Speaker 03

  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 have a make small talk and have an ordinary conversation. He manages to bury the body, even though it's in a in a shallow grave. And that's where it remains for the next sixteen years.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  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.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  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.

• 36:04Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, investigators finally believed they had enough to arrest Denise and charge her with first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and accessory.

• 36:15Speaker 02

  The trial began on December 11, 2018, 18 years after Mike was killed.

• 36:23Speaker 02

  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.

• 36:38Speaker 05

  So, he was in the water.

• 36:42Speaker 05

  And I pulled off just a little bit to get kind of away from him so that he couldn't reach back into the boat. And I didn't know it at the time. I didn't know if he was trained to swim, or I didn't know what was going on, but what I came to find out or eventually realized was he was taking the waders and the jacket off. And he got those off and

• 37:12Speaker 05

  and he swam over one of those stumps and held on to it.

• 37:18Speaker 05

  And he was panicking, and I was panicking. He started to yell.

• 37:28Speaker 05

  And I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know how to get out of that situation. So I loaded my gun. And I ended up circling closer towards him. And as I passed by, I shot him.

• 37:45Speaker 05

  Where did you shoot him?

• 37:47Speaker 05

  Head.

• 37:51Speaker 03

  Everyone in the courtroom was learning for the first time what happened to Mike, how Mike had been killed. There was absolute silence in the courtroom and there was absolutely no expression from Denise at all. And this was held against her, that she seemed to be so cold and stoical when learning these dreadful, traumatizing facts. But actually, I don't think, I mean, people express their emotions differently. I think, I don't think that should have been held against her. I can see why it was, but she didn't testify. We heard everything from Brian's point of view. We didn't hear a word from Denise.

• 38:33Speaker 02

  The jury found Denise guilty and she was sentenced to life in prison.

• 38:38Speaker 03

  Someone had to take responsibility and all the responsibility fell on Denise. She wasn't just criticised for being a murderer, she was criticised for being a sexually voracious woman. And there was even some sympathy for Brian when people started to believe that, you know, that it was the Eve who tempted the Adam. It was Denise using her sexuality and her feminine wiles had led him astray and led him to murder her husband. And one member of the jury suggested, and I, I kind of agree with this, is that, yes, she agreed that they would kill Mike. Yes, she agreed to taking the insurance money. Yes, she agreed that Brian would go out in the lake early in the morning.

• 39:22Speaker 03

  But when Brian pushed Mike in the water, when he didn't die, when he grabbed onto the stump and started screaming.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  What Brian did then, he did by his own agency. He did not have the opportunity to consult Denise. What should I do? Mike had actually failed the test. He had not died. That was a sign that God did not want Brian and Denise to be together. So from Denise's perspective, it seems at that point that Brian was acting of his own free will. Now, when Brian was asked about this, he said Denise was there with him mentally, spiritually. She was on his shoulders. She was behind him. He was doing this for her. But in legal terms, really, there's no evidence that she actually knew what happened on the lake. Of course, that means she's, you know, she's still responsible for the murder.

• 40:15Speaker 03

  I mean, there's no question about that. But I do think that she should not have received a longer sentence than Brian did.

• 40:25Speaker 02

  Denise appealed, and eventually, her murder conviction was overturned in 2020.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  In a decision, the court wrote that she didn't assist or encourage Brian at the time of the murder.

• 40:40Speaker 02

  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.

• 40:54Speaker 06

  December 16th, 2000, my life, as I knew it, changed forever. There is, though, how to find your missing child manual available to help mothers in their search for lost children. I did what Dad told me to do. I wanted publicity, but it's been lost.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  Makita Brotman's book is Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida. Criminal is created by Lauren Spoor and me. Nidia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susannah Roberson, Jackie Sajikko, Lilly Clark, Lena Silson, and Megan Kinnane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com/newsletter. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining

• 42:29Speaker 02

  our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal, This is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes. These are special episodes with me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spoor, talking about everything from how we make our episodes, to the crime stories that caught our attention that week, to things we've been enjoying lately. To learn more, go to patreon.com/criminal. We're on Facebook at This is Criminal, and Instagram and TikTok at @criminal_podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.