The Test

Megan Rapinoe here. This week on A Touch More, we've got something for everyone. We're talking about the U.S. women Olympians taking home more medals than the men, the U.S. women's national team roster heading into the She Believes Cup, and the latest on the WNBA-CBA negotiations. Check out the latest episode of A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. For a lot of Americans, credit card debt feels like a fact of life. I think it's just important for people to understand how credit can work for you or against you. Why that little piece of plastic has so much power. That's this week on Explain It To Me. Find new episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. This episode contains adult content. Please use discretion. 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 Makita 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 And people became more and more worried when Mike hadn't returned Specifically because he, like I said, he was kind of a 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. 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, you know, helicopters were brought in, cadaver dogs brought in. 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's said that at least 20 people showed up every day, but they didn't find anything else. 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. Mikita 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. 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. 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. 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. 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'd 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 Phoebe Judge This is Criminal We be right back To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. Hi, it's Phoebe, here to tell you about our newsletter. If you're not already getting it, we send one out every couple of weeks. and we hope it's an email that you'll actually look forward to getting. When you sign up, you'll hear from me and you'll hear from the producers who work on the show. You'll find out about episodes that we're making right now, the books and movies we're enjoying, and questions we have for you. Sometimes we put in pictures from our reporting trips or of our pets. You'll also be the first to find out about live events we're planning or new merch or giveaways, like this one. New subscribers who join our mailing list by the end of the month will be entered into a drawing for a one-year Criminal Plus membership. You can sign up right now at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter. Here at Gastropod, we ask the tough questions like what should go on top of a pancake? My mom always had peanut butter and brown sugar. She was not a syrup person. I am loathe to judge people's personal pancake pleasures, but that's a hard no. I'm on team maple syrup. But for a long time, for a lot of Americans, maple syrup was too expensive, so they used pancake syrup. But what is pancake syrup? I mean, like maple syrup, it's also kind of caramel color. This episode of Gastropod, we've got the answers to all your pancake questions, including what even is a pancake? And does a latke or a Dutch baby count as a pancake? To find out, find Gastropod and subscribe wherever you get your pancakes. I mean, podcasts. Denise and Mike Williams, Brian Winchester, and his first wife Kathy, had all grown up in Tallahassee together. 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. 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. 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 the straightened Baptist circumstances and began to experiment. Sometimes Brian would ask his wife Kathy and Denise to take their clothes off and pose together so he could take pictures. It seemed that Brian and Denise were much more interested in these kind of lurid games than were Kathy and Mike, who were keener on settling down. Kathy 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. 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 Kathy and Mike. 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. Makita says they started meeting at each other's houses when Mike and Kathy 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. It seemed like no one suspected them, and they continued with their lives as normal. Kathy and Denise both got pregnant within about a year of each other. Makita says Denise wasn't totally sure if the father of her baby was Mike or Brian Denise and Brian kept seeing each other even though having young children at home made it harder 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Jennifer had reached out to Brian and Denise for comment multiple times. They wouldn 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. There was a lot of talk and speculation about Mike's disappearance on the newspaper's online forum. 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 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. 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. They said to each other many times, unless they turn on each other, nothing can be done. Mike's mother, Cheryl, wrote letters to the governor's office daily, trying to get someone to help. 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, 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. Brian moved out, but Denise did agree to go to couples therapy for several years. Still, in 2015, she filed for divorce. 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. 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 ten 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. 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. Denise spoke with the police over several hours, describing what happened in the car. And then, and I turned around and I go, what do you mean hurt me? And he pulled out a gun, like, a gun, not a hunting gun, but like a gun he would 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. In my head, I was like, I'm making it a CVF because that's our CVF. 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, 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. 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. The prosecutors agreed to grant him immunity in the disappearance of Mike Williams if he fully and truthfully answered all their questions. 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. Brian said that he and Denise had expected Mike would drown. He thought that the waders hunters wore could quickly fill with water. But what Brian hadn't realized was Mike was wearing a new kind of waders that prevented this from happening. And Mike didn't drown. He actually swam to one of the stumps in the lake, clung onto 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. after that he realized mike's body can't be found with a bullet hole in his head you know this is obviously not a drowning he realized 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 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 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 weight 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, an 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. So he was in the water, 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 trying 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 he swam over to one of those stumps and held on to it. And he was panicking and I was panicking. He started to yell. And 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. Where did you shoot him? In the head. 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 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. The jury found Denise guilty, and she was sentenced to life in prison. Someone had to take responsibility, and all the responsibility fell on Denise. She wasn't just criticized for being a murderer. She was criticized for being a sexually voracious woman. And there was even some sympathy for Brian when people started to believe that, you know, 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 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. But when Brian pushed Mike in the water, when he didn't die, when he grabbed onto the stump and started screaming, 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 I mean there's no question about that 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 Listen Child manual available To help mothers in their search for lost children I did what God told me to do I wanted publicity, please do not 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 Thank you. Julie and 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 slash newsletter. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining 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 Spohr 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 slash criminal. We're on Facebook at This Is Criminal and Instagram and TikTok at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.