Chilling journal entries and secret jail notes shared between two sex-obsessed southern Baptists have revealed how a love triangle escalated into a tale of murder, kidnapping, paranoia and denial.
In December 2000, when Denise Williams conspired to kill her husband with the help of her lover Brian Winchester – who was also his longtime best friend – the death was deemed a tragic accident.
Mike Williams was 31 when he vanished while duck hunting in a reservoir straddling the Georgia-Florida line. Detectives believed the avid sportsman had simply fallen from his boat and drowned, with his body devoured by circling alligators.
But fast-forward 17 years, long after search efforts in the 37,500-acre Lake Seminole had gone cold, and Mike’s skeleton was finally found 50 miles away at the end of a Tallahassee road.
The shocking discovery came after a series of scandalous events led Brian to turn himself in exchange for immunity from murder prosecution and take officers to the marshland burial site just five miles from where they had all grown up.
Mike and Denise Williams were high school sweethearts who married in 1994. They attended North Florida Christian School, a private school in Tallahassee. Two of their classmates were Brian Winchester and Kathy Thomas, who would also go on to wed
Brian Winchester tearfully testified about his long-running affair with Denise Williams who he later married after her husband Mike Williams was killed in 2000
Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida by Mikita Brottman is published by Atria
Brian’s private notes and court testimony chart his spiral into suicidal thoughts after shooting his childhood best friend, while Denise drove herself into a pit of denial, as chronicled in True Crime author Mikita Brottman’s new book, Guilty Creatures.
Mike and Denise had been high school sweethearts and married in 1994 before welcoming a daughter five years later. The child was 18 months old when her father vanished, and she is now aged 25.
But Denise, now 54, began having an affair with their classmate and close friend Brian, also 54, who in turn was married to another good friend, Kathy.
Mike (pictured) disappeared in December 2000 while duck hunting near Tallahassee
It came out in court that they had a threesome, before Denise later went on to have a full blown affair with Brian.
Prosecutors said the secret couple plotted the murder during this three-year affair, while seeking Mike’s $1.75 million life insurance payout which had been about to expire.
In her book, Brottman writes that the ‘seed of crime’ was planted in the late summer of 2000, when Mike inadvertently stepped into an alligator hole while out duck hunting with Brian at Lake Miccosukee.
He was saved from certain death after he grabbed Brian’s hand.
Brian told Denise of the incident: ‘If I hadn’t been there, if I hadn’t helped him out, he likely would have disappeared and nobody would have known what happened to him’.
Brottman said it was the word ‘accident’ which ‘turned the key for Denise’. ‘They rationalized the crime the same way they justified the affair – by telling themselves that this was what God wanted,’ she wrote.
‘It will be up to God what happens, and not us,’ Brian said during his court testimony.
Their Biblical references remained a common theme.
Kathy noted how in texts and conversations, Denise ‘constantly referred to the Lord’.
‘I want you to know how thankful to God I am for you and your new life. I am so proud of you – following God like this,’ Denise wrote in a letter to Brian in 2003, three years after Mike’s death and two years before they married.
‘It is incredible to me that you have come so far in such a short amount of time. We both have,’ she continued.
Mike married his high school sweetheart Denise in 1994 and welcomed a daughter with her five years later. The child was 18 months old when her father vanished and is now aged 18
Mike, Denise, Winchester and Winchester’s ex-wife, Kathy Thomas, were all close friends and attended North Florida Christian School together. Mike, Denise, Winchester are seen in their yearbook photos
Lake Seminole, the area where victim Mike Williams disappeared after plotting by his wife Denise Williams and her lover Brian Winchester
Denise, 48, (left, in court on Thursday) conspired to kill her husband Mike Williams with the help of her married lover Brian Winchester (right, in court Wednesday) nearly two decades ago in Florida
Brian was similarly complimentary in his correspondences to Denise.
‘I love her beautiful hair. I love the way she makes lists and checks off boxes… I love that she will sit on a cooler and help me gut scallops. She is the most beautiful woman in the world to me,’ he wrote in an undated letter.
But behind closed doors, their relationship was derailing. They had both been sex crazed in their younger years, but now Denise had begun re-characterizing their relationship as abusive – something she relied on as a defense in court.
Denise was sentenced to life in prison – but this term was later reduced to 30 years
She claimed Brian had made her get drunk and force her to perform acts which were ‘shameful and perverse’ and she’d be ‘afraid to say no’.
‘Denise wants to separate,’ Brian wrote in his journal on October 25, 2012.
‘She agreed to give me two weeks to show her I could be nice and kind and not be mean, I blew it on the first day.’
Brian said he ‘lost it’ – he grabbed her by the wrists and pushed her up against a door.
‘I saw how she was scared so I let her go and she ran out,’ he wrote. He kicked her exercise ball across the room in frustration, and they struck her collection of porcelain figurines which had been a gift from Mike.
As the couple’s relationship deteriorated, so did Brian’s mental health.
He obsessed over people online who he said had launched a ‘witch hunt’ against him over Mike’s death.
Though law enforcement had closed the case with their alligator theory, sleuths online had linked him and Denise to Mike’s death.
‘Google my name – there are people all over the country who hate me,’ Brian wrote in his journal. ‘I get emails, voicemails, letters on trees, death threats, blogs, Facebook pages dedicated to hating me’.
He refers to the murder in his journal as ‘the Mike Williams saga’ while using the ‘witch hunt’ against him to justify his sex addiction, Brottman’s book explains.
‘The Mike Williams investigation, accusations…shamed and isolated both of us,’ Brian wrote in his journal, ‘and I medicated all that shame and pain through sex’.
Florida prosecutors argue that Denise Williams planned the 2000 slaying of her husband Mike Williams (pictured together on their wedding day) so she could get a $1.75 million insurance payout
Denise, pictured with her daughter in a photo shared to Instagram by Mike’s mother, is currently on trial for her first husband’s 2000 murder
This only worsened after Denise filed for divorce in 2015.
‘I am a sex addict,’ Brian wrote in his journal. ‘I struggle with fear and shame over the bad publicity and rumors about the Mike Williams saga.
‘I feel lonely most of the time – and that’s probably the hardest thing for me to deal with. I am lonely and I miss Denise.’
Even before they separated, while Mike’s mother Cheryl pressed law enforcement to reopen the case into her son’s murder, Brian and Denise had become so paranoid they stopped speaking in their own home.
They worried police had bugged their phones and used gestures, including tracing the letter ‘C’ for Cheryl or miming a pair of hands holding prison bars, as a silent code they wanted to discuss the murder.
The couple would then drive somewhere discreet and take the batteries out of their phones before starting any incriminating conversations.
By this point, investigators believed the couple were to blame, but unless they turned on each other they would not have evidence to prove this.
Mike’s mother Cheryl’s own diary entries show she was certain of the connection for years before his body was found.
In February 2004, she wrote: ‘There is a possible insurance fraud. FOLLOW THE MONEY.’ Months later, in October, she named the couple directly, writing ‘Brian and Denise could have killed Mike for insurance’.
The following year in August, she noted a New York Times headline which read ‘Most murders committed by family or friends’.
Denise had used her daughter as an alibi – saying she was home with the baby at the time of his death.
In his journal, Brian revealed that Denise had started to believe this lie.
Cheryl Williams, the mother of Mike Williams, cries after a jury returns a guilty verdict against her former daughter-in-law, Denise Williams, in Tallahassee
A flood of emotions poured out into the courtroom as the verdicts are read. Mike Williams’ family friends white-knuckle gripped each other
‘I don’t know what Denise’s reality is,’ Brian wrote. He mused that ‘what she needed to believe, and tell her daughter, and tell herself to be able to live with herself, was the story that we created for her, which was that she was at home with her baby’.
‘For twenty years, she’s led a double life,’ he told investigators.
Brian said that on the surface, she presented herself as ‘an average soccer mom…a professional CPA who dresses nicely, carries herself well, she’s very smart.’
He said she’d reframed her past to cast him as the abuser and the reason for all her sins.
‘If anyone discovered the truth about Denise, her family and friends would completely disown her,’ he said.
Brian’s private journal entries trace the breakdown of his marriage to Denise as their relationship became increasingly plagued by paranoia that one would crack and reveal their darkest secret to the authorities.
The couple distrusted each other so intensely that Brian attempted to record conversations with Denise about the murder – but increasingly suspicious herself, she refused to admit that she knew anything.
Driven to despair, Brian eventually decided to kill himself, writing 10 suicide notes to family and friends saying he was sorry for everything but couldn’t face the upcoming divorce.
Denise was sentenced to life in prison – but this term was later reduced to 30 years
To Kathy, he wrote: ‘I’m sorry we got divorced. It never should have happened and I always regretted it…You were my first and I regret losing you’.
Meanwhile, he penned a letter to Denise claiming: ‘You were all I ever wanted…I always loved you. Enjoy your riches and your daughter. I hope they make you happy’.
He also left a note to a friend, reading: ‘Dude – I just couldn’t take the pain and loneliness, anymore. Please know there’s nothing you could have done – I’ve struggling with this for years now. I’m just done bro.’
Yet Brian never went through with the suicide, and instead went on to kidnap Denise at gunpoint in 2016.
He never believed Denise would risk going to the police – but she did, and it was at this point their secret began to unravel.
After Brian was arrested, Denise sent a cryptic note to him in jail in an attempt to reassure him she was going to pin the murder on him.
‘Tell Brian I’m not talking,’ it read.
But it was too late, and Brian turned on her. He struck a plea deal whereby he would confess to the murder plot and slaying of Mike 15 years earlier in return for immunity from the prosecution for murder.
In extraordinary court testimony, he admitted that when he pushed Mike in the water, his friend did not drown as planned and was left clinging to a tree stump.
So in a panic Brian shot Mike in the head, before dragging his dead body back into the boat and driving it across town to a spot near a lake – where his remains lay undiscovered in the water-clogged ground for 17 years.
Following a bombshell court trial, Brian was hit with a 20-year jail sentence for the kidnapping while Denise was sentenced to life in prison for her part in the murder plot – but this term was later reduced to 30 years.
Denise did not speak when the sentence was passed, and Mike’s mother rose to say that justice had finally been served.
Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida by Mikita Brottman is published by Atria
