Secrets of Lake Seminole

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Speaker 3 How does anybody look at somebody drowning

Speaker 6 and not help them?

Speaker 7 How do you do that?

Speaker 8 They found the boat.

Speaker 9 Mike wasn't in it.

Speaker 10 We thought maybe he's had an accident.

Speaker 11 The thought is the alligators have eaten Mike.

Speaker 8 Something don't add up.

Speaker 11 People don't just disappear.

Speaker 13 There was an affair happening for years.

Speaker 4 I'm telling you,

Speaker 4 kill Mike and he wasn't sure.

Speaker 7 That is just a whole nother level.

Speaker 4 A chilling confession and a crime almost too cruel to be true. I'm Lester Holt and this is Dateline.

Speaker 4 here's dennis murphy with secrets of lake seminal

Speaker 4 lake semino an hour outside florida's state capital is deep south fishing hunting country with spanish moss on the oaks in season the duck hunters are out before dawn And it was there in the year 2000 on a December morning, an experienced outdoorsman named Mike Williams went duck hunting.

Speaker 4 It was the 30-year-old hunter's sixth wedding anniversary, and there'd be a stay at a romantic BNB that evening. But the morning hours were his to hunt.

Speaker 10 That was his

Speaker 10 outlet. That was what he enjoyed.

Speaker 4 The thing is, he never came back, seemed to simply vanish. His wife, Denise, called around to family.
It was already late afternoon when Mike's brother, Nick, got the worrying news.

Speaker 15 There was going to be a search already starting over at Lake Seminole, so we called a friend of ours and we went together.

Speaker 4 Mike's co-worker, Christy Garrett.

Speaker 10 Mike is very skilled. I mean, he is a very skilled hunter, and we thought maybe he's had an accident.

Speaker 4 As a cold front moved in, a formal search began on the 30,000-acre lake. One member of the search party arrived early and stayed late.

Speaker 4 It was Mike's best friend going back to school days, Brian Winchester. He and his dad, using a spotlight, made the first big discovery.

Speaker 15 Brian Winchester had found the boat.

Speaker 9 Mike wasn't in it.

Speaker 15 His decoys were all in the boat, which, of course, led everybody think, obviously, he'd never got started hunting that morning.

Speaker 4 What picture came together for you at that point? Well, I think I was like everybody else,

Speaker 4 worried that he might have fallen out.

Speaker 11 It's Clay.

Speaker 4 Mike's boss, Clay Ketchum.

Speaker 11 Brian stood with me, and anytime they would come up with a potential hit, Brian said, I just don't want to be here when they find Mike.

Speaker 4 Man-made Lake Seminole can be treacherous for boaters. It was a one-time peach orchard before it was flooded and tree stumps lurked just below the surface.

Speaker 17 At night, these are very hard to see.

Speaker 4 Fish and Wildlife Officer David Arnett.

Speaker 17 You hit a stump and you could be thrown out very easily.

Speaker 4 They didn't have a body, but there was an early theory among seasoned hunters about what might have happened. Mike in the pre-dawn hour had hit a stump and been thrown into the wheat-filled lake.

Speaker 4 Like most duck hunters, he was known to wear chest-high waders, and they could turn deadly just like that. Waders are bulky.

Speaker 17 They're basically like putting two buckets on your legs. You got problems with them filling up with water and taking you down.

Speaker 4 And what was down there, everybody knew, were alligators. Hard to think of such an awful end for a nice, hard-working husband and father like Mike Williams.
Popular mind, the gators got him up.

Speaker 11 Yes, your heart is kind of, in your stomach is kind of gripped by that, but just the sheer awfulness of it.

Speaker 4 But there was a big problem with the Gator theory. With such unusually cold temperatures, fish and wildlife officers like Alton Rayno knew the alligators weren't stirring much.

Speaker 18 His metabolism is down so low, he don't want to eat. They're like a bear.
They go into hibernation.

Speaker 4 Then, on the 10th day of searching, Officer Raynu found a hunter's hat floating on the water. Ryan, the best friend, thought it looked familiar.

Speaker 18 He comes up out here to the tent and shows us a photograph with Mike with that hat on.

Speaker 4 Surely that hat was as good as evidence that Mike had had an accident and drowned in Lake Seminole.

Speaker 4 Mike's coworkers, Liz Boyette and Christy Garrett, felt hope slip away. When did you both realize that this was it?

Speaker 12 I think we all knew that something

Speaker 19 had happened. True.

Speaker 10 After a few weeks had passed, we knew that Mike wasn't coming back.

Speaker 4 Months went by with no sign of Mike. And then in June, something of Mike's did literally surface that made people wonder.
His chest high waiters.

Speaker 4 They were as clean as this new pair and showed no sign of a gator attack.

Speaker 17 We found no indication of any bite marks on the waiters, no indication of any human remains whatsoever.

Speaker 4 Traces of Mike, but still no body. And how unusual that was for a lake not to give up its dead.

Speaker 15 Mike, at that point, was the only hunter, fisherman that had gone overboard in that lake that had never been found.

Speaker 4 Fish and wildlife officers were confounded. Eventually, the case of the missing boater was handed off to local sheriff's detectives to investigate.

Speaker 8 I remember telling some of the guys, investigators, we might want to look into this a little deeper because something don't add up.

Speaker 4 duck hunter mike williams had disappeared on lake seminole and his wife denise was alone with a young daughter to raise

Speaker 4 their story began as high school sweethearts he the football star and student council president She, the cheerleader and homecoming queen.

Speaker 4 Patty Ketchum, the wife of Mike's boss, got to know them both. Impressions of her, Patty?

Speaker 7 Oh, just as nice, just absolutely delightful. Absolutely delightful.

Speaker 4 After attending a private Christian high school, the two graduated from hometown Florida State University and got married. Their baby girl, Ansley, was born on Mother's Day.

Speaker 4 Denise was a CPA. Mike, meanwhile, had become an ACE real estate appraiser in his hometown, Tallahassee.

Speaker 4 Mike's boss, Clay Ketchum, was amazed that despite the 15-hour days Mike put in at the office, he always made time to take care of the home front.

Speaker 11 Make sure that dinner was ready,

Speaker 11 laundry got going, so he's Mr.

Speaker 4 Mom.

Speaker 11 He's Mr. Mom.
We all said we wanted to be married to Mike Williams. I mean, we all needed a Mike Williams in our life.

Speaker 4 Mike's co-workers took mischievous delight in wondering what Denise had in store for him when she called him at the office.

Speaker 7 I'm across the street, please.

Speaker 20 I need gas.

Speaker 12 Yeah, he worked upstairs, so you hear this bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam down the steps.

Speaker 10 I guess Denise needs to get gas.

Speaker 7 Denise needs gas.

Speaker 4 But now, with Mike gone, Denise would be the sole provider for their young daughter. Fortunately, Mike had several hefty insurance policies.
You have a small child and a wife to take care of?

Speaker 13 Sure.

Speaker 21 Yeah, you need to get insurance, you know.

Speaker 4 Brian, Mike's best friend and an insurance broker himself, helped Denise navigate the claims process.

Speaker 4 For as long as most people could remember, Denise and Mike and Brian Brian and his wife Kathy had been couples together.

Speaker 4 They all attended that private Christian high school, married their high school sweethearts, and had children about the same time.

Speaker 4 And then came Lake Seminole. After a year had gone by since Mike disappeared, Denise asked Patty to take her to the lake.

Speaker 3 She told me how she had been going to a Christian counselor and he had encouraged her to do this.

Speaker 3 And she had a flower with her and she'd written Mike a note.

Speaker 12 And I guess probably 30, 45 minutes later, she came back and she'd been crying.

Speaker 4 The flower and the letter in particular. Those were left at the lake.

Speaker 4 Gone, but definitely not forgotten, according to Becky Moss, Denise's friend and co-worker.

Speaker 22 She loved him like a woman would love your life partner, your soulmate.

Speaker 4 The official death certificate said Mike drowned while duck hunting. But for Mike's family and friends, doubts started creeping in, spurred on by little things that just didn't add up.

Speaker 4 Like those waders found six months after Mike disappeared. They looked almost pristine.

Speaker 11 No, uh-uh, something is wrong here.

Speaker 4 It's staged.

Speaker 11 I thought staged because I know that anything left in a lake for any period of time is going to have algae on it.

Speaker 4 Speculation gave way to suspicion. Could Mike's disappearance be the result of foul play?

Speaker 4 Enter the wildcard, the squeakiest of squeaky wheels, Mike Williams' mother, who simply was not buying the official story that Mike, an experienced outdoorsman, had an accident on that lake.

Speaker 21 Mike is not in Lake Seminole.

Speaker 21 He did not drown.

Speaker 13 He did not get eaten by alligators.

Speaker 4 Some called Cheryl Williams with her pigtails eccentric, even crazy.

Speaker 4 But she demanded answers, appealing first to the media, and when she didn't get any results, she opened her purse and spent money she really couldn't afford.

Speaker 13 I take out an ad in the Tallahassee Democrat, and I ask the public to help me find my son. It was a $1,200 ad.

Speaker 4 Earnings from the daycare center she operated out of her home.

Speaker 13 You have to change a lot of diapers to pay for an ad that expensive. But it got publicity.

Speaker 4 Some of the daycare center kids, now all grown like Maria Denmark, remembered making missing person posters.

Speaker 7 I was only six years old when Mike went missing. I remember somebody would draw out Mike's name and missing, and then we would fill it in with a black sharpie.

Speaker 4 Miss Cheryl, as she became known, was a one-woman campaign.

Speaker 4 She wrote letters to the governor every day for years, 2,600 in all. She paid for billboards and stood outside churches with posters.

Speaker 13 The ministers would get mad because I was outside their church. Miss Williams, why don't you leave?

Speaker 4 Cheryl didn't. You were getting a reputation around town

Speaker 4 this kind of batty lady with the pigtails out there with her signs and the billboards and the letters to the editor and you became

Speaker 13 everybody called me crazy.

Speaker 4 But not everybody. Police began to take Cheryl seriously after years of her struggling to draw attention to Mike's case.

Speaker 20 Miss Cheryl is a straight shooter and she tells it like it is.

Speaker 4 Will Mickler is an agent with the FDLE, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, a top cops agency with statewide jurisdiction. Four years after Mike went missing, they agreed to take the case.

Speaker 20 If it wasn't for Ms. Cheryl, this case would have never gotten into the hands of criminal investigators.

Speaker 4 But Mike's widow, Denise, didn't appreciate what Cheryl was doing.

Speaker 13 She's upset because she and her daddy said it was an invasion of their privacy.

Speaker 4 Denise's friend, Becky Moss, in her defense, said Denise told Cheryl to stop all the noise because it was confusing her daughter.

Speaker 22 Mrs. Williams had very strong feelings that Mike was still alive, and she was telling that to the little girl when, by all accounts, he was not.

Speaker 13 Nick and I never told Ansley that her daddy was alive. Never.

Speaker 4 Then Denise upped the ante, laying down a demand to her mother-in-law. Stop raising a ruckus or Cheryl would never see her granddaughter Ansley again.

Speaker 13 So she followed through with her promise.

Speaker 4 And your granddaughter's gone.

Speaker 13 Totally gone out of my life. But I couldn't stop.
I had to find out what happened to Mike.

Speaker 4 And that smoldering stalemate between Cheryl and Denise held fast as the years went by.

Speaker 4 In time, Denise Williams began dating, even thinking about marriage with one of her suitors. But soon the rumor mill would be abuzz with a more sensational take on Denise's love life.

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Speaker 4 Duck seasons came and went as the years rolled by. Long after Mike Williams' ill-fated hunting trip, Denise was working for the state as an accountant, a young widow raising her daughter Annsley.

Speaker 4 She'd started dating again, and one day there was a new man in her life. someone with a very familiar name.

Speaker 15 And then all of a sudden we find out she's dating Brian Winchester.

Speaker 4 Brian, Mike's best friend and fishing and hunting buddy. Since their days as a happy foursome in high school and beyond, Brian and his wife Kathy had gotten a divorce.

Speaker 4 Friend Becky Moss said Brian wasn't Denise's first relationship after Mike.

Speaker 22 Denise dated other people.

Speaker 4 So she didn't fly right into his arms.

Speaker 22 No. I mean, she had reservations for a while.
He really kind of had to prove himself to her in terms of where he was at with his Christianity.

Speaker 4 Nonetheless, this was a juicy tidbit. Mike's best friend hooking up with the widow of the man who disappeared.
It didn't take the court of public opinion long to do the math.

Speaker 4 Could Brian have had anything to do with Mike's disappearance? And what did Denise know? Those coffee shop conspiracies took wing when five years after Mike's disappearance, Brian married Denise.

Speaker 4 Mike's old boss and his wife were invited to the wedding. They'd heard the rumors too.

Speaker 11 The minister got up and said, there is nothing that I don't know

Speaker 11 between the two of them. And Patty and I kind of punched each other in the ribs and said, well, there might be one little piece of information that he's not aware of.

Speaker 4 Brian moved into the same house Mike and Denise had lived in together and began raising Mike's daughter.

Speaker 11 What really bothered me the most was the fact that they stayed in Mike's house.

Speaker 4 Raising that child.

Speaker 11 Raising the child and assumes the role of father.

Speaker 4 Takes over his life. Takes over his life.

Speaker 12 It's just, so creepy.

Speaker 4 For Cheryl, the marriage seemed to corroborate long-running suspicions that she'd worked like a sick tooth.

Speaker 4 She'd kept a detailed notebook about Mike's disappearance, and Brian and Denise were filling more and more pages in it.

Speaker 4 She alerted investigator Mike Devaney from the FDLE about her suspicions and shared a 27-page summary of her notes.

Speaker 30 She was a good source of information, and

Speaker 20 she was a real bulldog on this.

Speaker 4 Like this item, Cheryl noted. Remember those insurance policies Mike bought? They were worth $1.75 million.

Speaker 4 And it was Brian who actually sold Mike a large part of them.

Speaker 4 And those waiters that surfaced after Mike went missing were used by Denise's lawyer as evidence to declare Mike dead in just seven months so she could collect her money.

Speaker 4 That's better than icing on the cake.

Speaker 4 If one of your goals is to get the woman, you also get the money.

Speaker 9 That was all that I really needed to know.

Speaker 4 But the authorities needed much more than idle gossip. Tully Sparkman, an investigator for the prosecutor's office, worked the case for 10 long years.

Speaker 4 Are suspicions getting grounded in the relationship between Denise and Brian, or was it in the money trail or what? It was all of it.

Speaker 14 I mean,

Speaker 14 it's a cumulative thing. You start looking at, you know, the odd fact that the body never floated, the waiters popping up, the money.

Speaker 4 So the investigators kept their eyes on the married couple, Brian and Denise, and bided their time.

Speaker 4 If either one of them was harboring a secret involving foul play, eventually it might have a corrosive effect on their relationship.

Speaker 14 Well, they're not going to turn on each other while they're married, but then you're waiting on things to flare up.

Speaker 4 And in 2012, seven years into their marriage, they did flare up. Brian moved out.
Denise wanted a divorce, but Brian managed to put it off for years. So the marriage was finished at that point.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I would say though.

Speaker 4 In August 2016, Brian did something that nearly ended very badly for Denise. The wild episode started one morning as Denise got in her car to go to work.

Speaker 4 Hiding in the back seat, Brian popped up, shoved a gun in her ribs, and said drive. Denise managed to pull into a shopping center parking lot where she talked Brian into letting her go.

Speaker 4 She promised she wouldn't tell police. But after Brian left, she did report her abduction.

Speaker 31 He's frightening and I'm just like shaky.

Speaker 4 Denise said it unhinged Brian, upset about the divorce, even threatened to take his own life.

Speaker 31 He kept saying, I've lost everything. I have nothing to live for many times.
I'm going to kill myself. Did he tell you how he was going to do that or where he was going to do that?

Speaker 31 No, but he said he bought the gun to do it. I said, Did you actually plan to kill both of us today? She goes, well, me.

Speaker 4 As Denise relived the horror of the day, little did she know that in an adjoining room, an FDLE agent was listening. He wasn't interested in some high-voltage domestic quarrel.

Speaker 4 He wanted to know about Mike's disappearance and what Brian had to do with it. and what Denise might know.

Speaker 4 Denise's already very bad day was about to get infinitely worse.

Speaker 4 Denise Williams had been carjacked at gunpoint by her estranged husband, Brian Winchester. And now she was sitting in a police interview room giving her version of the abduction.

Speaker 31 What would lead you to this?

Speaker 31 I want to kill himself because, I mean, our marriage is over.

Speaker 4 But police believe Brian wasn't going to kill just himself, especially after Denise told them he'd brought along a tarpon bleach as well as the gun.

Speaker 31 Denise,

Speaker 31 he was going to kill you. He brought that stuff using to cover his tracks.

Speaker 4 For years, police felt that Brian and Denise were the keys to understanding Mike's disappearance.

Speaker 31 And now with the kidnapping, they believed believe brian was taking no chances in getting rid of the one person who might know what he had done i'm sure sometimes he told you something i'm telling you he killed mike he was going to kill you if you go away the detective pressed her asking denise if she really knew the man she'd married that person you saw today could kill one couldn't he that person couldn't he did and that's who he was then he has conned you to no end

Speaker 31 It's not your fault. I mean, that person today could have done anything and anything.

Speaker 31 That's not the person that I married. That's not the person that I knew.

Speaker 4 Mike Devaney, the FDLE lead agent, couldn't believe Denise was finally being questioned about what happened to Mike.

Speaker 30 FDL agents had approached Brian and Denise on one occasion, and they both refused to talk. They went straight to an attorney, and that was that.

Speaker 4 Devaney had waited a long time for this moment. Now it was his turn to enter the room and find out what Denise knew.

Speaker 31 40th March, very good.

Speaker 31 Oh, I have no idea.

Speaker 23 You don't really believe he died on the lake.

Speaker 31 I do. Why?

Speaker 31 I just always have. That's what I believe.

Speaker 4 Denise tried to steer the interview back to the kidnap.

Speaker 31 I mean, this was your... This was your husband.

Speaker 31 Something vanished. I'm not comfortable talking about this right now.

Speaker 31 I've had had an unbelievable day.

Speaker 4 Devaney kept pushing, telling Denise if she didn't talk, he might get the story from someone else.

Speaker 31 I'd much rather get it from you

Speaker 31 than from Brian, because when he's arrested, I'm talking to him, too. That's fine.
I don't want to see what he says.

Speaker 31 Okay.

Speaker 31 He may say something you don't want to hear. I don't know.
Well, I had no idea. You have nothing.

Speaker 4 For now, the mystery of Mike's disappearance remained just that.

Speaker 4 But Brian was arrested and charged with kidnapping Denise. He pleaded not guilty to those charges.
But a year later, he changed his plea to no contest.

Speaker 6 It comes down to my life or his.

Speaker 20 And I'm asking you, please, to choose mine.

Speaker 4 At sentencing, Denise appealed to the judge to give him a life sentence.

Speaker 29 He will finish what he has started, no matter what age. he is when he is released.
I'm asking you to sentence him to life in prison for the crimes he has committed.

Speaker 4 In the end, the judge gave Brian Winchester 20 years. In court, nothing had been said about Mike Williams.

Speaker 11 When they shuffled him off, we walked out and I looked at Patty and I said, well, that's it. The door has just been slammed on whatever happened to Mike and we will never know.

Speaker 4 But the next day, FDLE had a major announcement. They'd found a skeletal body in a shallow grave.

Speaker 16 The human remains are those of Mike Williams.

Speaker 4 After all those years, it was over. Police were mum on how they'd found Mike's body, but speculation was that Brian had led them to it.

Speaker 16 Further forensic analysis concluded that Mike Williams was in fact murdered.

Speaker 4 And his body wasn't in Lake Seminole after all. It was 50 miles away, back in Tallahassee off a dead end road by another swampy lake.

Speaker 19 I said, he can't be dead. He can't be.

Speaker 6 And they said, it's Mike.

Speaker 21 I said, you know that? And they said, yes, we've done all the DNA.

Speaker 4 FDLE agent Will Mickler broke the news to Denise.

Speaker 20 I saw her tear up when the death notification was provided to her that Mike Williams' remains had been identified and located.

Speaker 4 Now, you'd think with the recovery of the body, murder charges would be filed forthwith. But that didn't happen.
Detectives continued to investigate. They had another suspect in their sights.

Speaker 4 And what a sensation that turned out to be. Five months after Mike's body was recovered, a perp walk to remember.

Speaker 4 Denise Williams, in handcuffs, being marched by cops from her office at Florida State University. She was charged with the first-degree murder of her first husband, Mike.

Speaker 4 It was her daughter Ansley's 19th birthday. The indictment said that Denise had conspired with Brian Winchester to kill his best friend, Mike.
She pleaded not guilty.

Speaker 4 But Denise was the only one charged. What about Brian?

Speaker 13 They told us that they had had to make a deal with the devil.

Speaker 4 Some called it the deal of the century.

Speaker 28 Really, what they wanted was information of what happened to Mike, where the body was.

Speaker 4 His attorney, Tim Janssen, said prosecutors had but one priority, to find Mike's body.

Speaker 28 They never said to him, you have to give any evidence against Denise.

Speaker 4 But he would. In exchange for his testimony against Denise, Brian got 20 years for the kidnapping and would not face murder charges.

Speaker 32 State of Florida versus Denise Williams.

Speaker 4 Almost 18 years after Mike Williams disappeared, Denise went on trial. She faced a mandatory life sentence if convicted.

Speaker 4 Prosecutors had a lineup of witnesses, FDLE agents, fish and wildlife officers, and Mike's mother, their head barely showing above the witness box. Yes.
And the jury met Brian's first wife, Kathy.

Speaker 33 Did you suspect that Brian Winchester, your husband, was having an affair with Denise Williams?

Speaker 25 I did suspect that.

Speaker 4 Suspicions that were confirmed after Brian asked her to join them in a threesome at a beach condo before the murder. There were snapshots with partial nudity.

Speaker 4 Kathy also said Denise tried to involve her in a cover-up after Brian's arrest.

Speaker 22 To get a message to Brian

Speaker 25 that

Speaker 25 I'm not talking.

Speaker 4 But those witnesses were merely the side dishes to the state's main course. The mesmerizing confession of Brian Winchester.
It was a stunning story of betrayals. A wife betraying her husband.

Speaker 4 Her lover betraying his best friend. I had my gun in the boat.

Speaker 4 And a confession from the stand you'll never be able to unhear.

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Speaker 4 Denise Williams was standing trial for first-degree murder, conspiring in the death of her first husband, Mike. And who was she accused of conspiring with?

Speaker 4 Why, her now ex-husband, number two, and Mike's best friend, Brian Winchester. He would be the state's star witness against her, required to testify to every grisly detail.

Speaker 4 Prosecutors John Fuchs and Andy Rogers knew their star witness came with some baggage. Do you guys have to worry whether the jury is going to hate your star witness, Brian?

Speaker 34 There's no question they were going to hate him.

Speaker 34 That from day one was obvious.

Speaker 4 We hate him.

Speaker 33 They walk out, they don't believe Brian Winchester.

Speaker 4 She walks. Now here he was, Brian Winchester, looking haggard and drawn after almost two years in jail on the kidnapping charge,

Speaker 4 about to tell his story of duck hunting, sex, and murder.

Speaker 31 We connected like nobody else.

Speaker 4 Brian said he and Denise had been secret lovers for three years before Mike Williams was murdered.

Speaker 37 The more we were together, the more we wanted to be together.

Speaker 23 It just snowballed.

Speaker 4 So fast that within two years, Denise and Brian were plotting Mike's Mike's so-called accident on Lake Seminole.

Speaker 23 I think there was even talk about, you know, well, it'll be up to God what happens and not us. It won't be a murder.
It'll be, you know, an accident.

Speaker 4 To most people, divorce would have been a better solution. But Brian said Denise, a devout Christian, didn't want to endure the stigma.

Speaker 23 Because of the way she was raised, because of her pride, I guess she did not want to get divorced. I mean, we wanted to be together

Speaker 23 and we weren't going to let anything stop that.

Speaker 4 Better to be a killer than a divorcee.

Speaker 34 A widow gets sympathy, and on top of that, she gets $1.75 million.

Speaker 4 So, the weekend of the wedding anniversary became D-Day. Bryant testified Mike was not hunting alone.
He was along as his early morning duck-hunting buddy. They pushed off.

Speaker 4 The plan was to make it look like Mike drowned in a boating accident. The murder weapon would be Mike's waiters.

Speaker 23 We believed that if you fell overboard with the waders on, that you would sink pretty quickly. We got to that area that I knew was a deep area.
I

Speaker 23 basically stopped the boat and got him to stand up. And when he did, I pushed him into the water.

Speaker 34 What happened next?

Speaker 23 He was in the water

Speaker 23 and he was

Speaker 23 like struggling. I

Speaker 23 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

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 4 Mike made it to a tree stump and clung for dear life. That's when Brian decided to change the plan.

Speaker 23 And he was panicking, and I was panicking.

Speaker 23 And none of this was like going with how I thought it was going to go.

Speaker 23 He started to yell.

Speaker 23 And so

Speaker 23 I had my gun in the boat.

Speaker 23 And

Speaker 23 so I loaded my gun

Speaker 23 and I just

Speaker 23 made

Speaker 31 one or two circles around,

Speaker 23 and I ended up

Speaker 23 circling closer towards him,

Speaker 23 and he was in the water.

Speaker 23 And as I passed by,

Speaker 23 I shot him.

Speaker 31 Where did you shoot him?

Speaker 23 The head.

Speaker 4 Autopsy x-rays showed buckshot throughout Mike's head. As the details emerged in court, Cheryl was struck yet another blow.

Speaker 13 What's hard for me now is what I found out in court was how he was murdered.

Speaker 4 It's a horrible story.

Speaker 21 They told me the only consolation I could have was that Michael

Speaker 21 didn't feel it.

Speaker 6 He was dead immediately.

Speaker 4 Brian said after blasting Mike with his 12 gauge, he grabbed his lifeless body and steered the boat to shore.

Speaker 23 And I pushed the boat back out into the water

Speaker 23 to make it look like he had drowned or disappeared.

Speaker 4 On shore, he stuffed Mike's body into a dog crate in the back of his truck and drove back to Tallahassee, where he found an isolated area to bury his friend.

Speaker 4 Later that day, when Brian got a call from his father saying Mike was missing, the two drove to Lake Seminole.

Speaker 23 There was a storm that came through that night.

Speaker 23 You know, my dad wanted to look at it.

Speaker 23 I think we were the last ones on the lake. And my dad didn't want to give up.
My dad loved Mike.

Speaker 4 With no body ever found in the lake,

Speaker 4 Brian testified they grew concerned about their other incentive to murder Mike.

Speaker 23 The concern between she and I then became,

Speaker 23 well, if his body's not found, what's going to happen with the life insurance?

Speaker 4 Brian admitted to staging the hat found 10 days into the search.

Speaker 23 I was the one that put it in the water during one of my searches on the lake to kind of confirm that he had drowned.

Speaker 4 And for the next 16 years, Brian said he and Denise kept a mafia-like oath of silence. It is riveting testimony, this first-person story of taking a best friend out and killing him.

Speaker 8 And you can tell from the jurors that they're on the edge of their seat.

Speaker 4 It was strong, emotional testimony. But would it be strong enough to convict? That would be for the jury to say.

Speaker 4 Now Defense Attorney Ethan Way rose with his goal set upon demolishing the star witness's credibility.

Speaker 5 Mr. Winchester, you're a murderer, isn't it true?

Speaker 4 The prosecution case would live or die by its star witness. Would jurors believe Brian Winchester? Does it come to a matter of jurors? It's he said, she said.
Pick one. Yes.
Who do you believe?

Speaker 4 I believe her.

Speaker 30 Every day, twice on Sunday.

Speaker 4 I had my gun in the boat. Brian's chilling account of murdering his best friend in a plot with Mike's wife, Denise, was an award-worthy performance, thought Denise's attorney, Ethan Way.

Speaker 4 Compelling, that is, if you were a sucker for crocodile tears.

Speaker 30 He is a well-rehearsed, well-trained, well-timed liar.

Speaker 4 Denise's defense boiled down to Brian being an obsessed lone wolf. He coveted Denise.

Speaker 16 He had this desire to have her.

Speaker 4 The defense said he was the only killer. She had nothing to do with his murderous craziness.

Speaker 4 In cross-examination, the defense wanted jurors to see that Brian's only goal was to save his own bacon by implicating Denise. And for his efforts, he wasn't charged with murder.

Speaker 4 and got just 20 years in prison for kidnapping her.

Speaker 38 He got to jail on August 5th, 2016 on the charges of armed kidnapping.

Speaker 37 But you didn't straight away go to law enforcement and volunteer the details of the Mike Williams murder, did you?

Speaker 23 Absolutely not.

Speaker 38 In fact, while you were in jail, you decided you were going to take certain steps to try to frustrate the prosecution of the armed kidnapping case. Isn't that true?

Speaker 23 Yes, sir. I was desperate to do anything that I possibly could to avoid going to prison.

Speaker 4 Like having a discussion with one jail inmate who offered to kill kill Denise and get others to lie in his kidnapping case.

Speaker 23 He did offer to make Denise go away and make other witnesses in the case go away. And I've said, don't ever speak to me of that again.

Speaker 37 So you were drawing the line at having witnesses eliminated?

Speaker 23 Yes, sir.

Speaker 37 You were not drawing the line at having witness testimony and other evidence fabricated.

Speaker 4 Correct.

Speaker 4 With the possibility of new charges for witness tampering, the defense said that's when Brian agreed to a deal. In exchange for his deal, he has to throw her under the bus.
He has to deliver.

Speaker 14 Well, he has to deliver, but he also gets a revenge element.

Speaker 30 Denise is the one that turned him in.

Speaker 30 If Denise Williams was involved in this murder in any way, why would she take the one person that can incriminate her and turn him into law enforcement and have him locked up?

Speaker 4 As for the actual murder, the defense got Brian to admit it was he and he alone pulling the trigger. Denise was an hour away at home in Tallahassee with the baby.

Speaker 38 When you shot Mike Williams at Lake Seminole with the 12-gauge shotgun, was Denise Williams standing there with you?

Speaker 23 No, she wasn't. She was in my head behind me.

Speaker 37 Is it fair to say that over the years you've been obsessed with Denise Williams?

Speaker 31 Obsessed.

Speaker 23 Denise and I were best friends. We were Bonnie and Clyde.
We were partners in crime.

Speaker 4 Then why, the defense asked, was his Bonnie in the dark about what actually happened at the lake?

Speaker 38 Denise Williams had no idea that you shot her husband in the face with a shotgun, did she?

Speaker 4 Correct.

Speaker 23 I tried to tell her about it one day, and she did not want to know the details. She told me that she

Speaker 23 assumed that what we had planned did not happen, and God was going to forgive us.

Speaker 4 In the end, the defense attorney got Brian to tell jurors exactly why they should not believe him.

Speaker 24 Mr. Winchester, you're a murderer, isn't it true?

Speaker 23 Yes, sir.

Speaker 38 Mr. Winchester, you're a liar, isn't it, True?

Speaker 31 Yes, sir.

Speaker 4 You got him to say yes to both those things.

Speaker 30 I have probably in 20 years never had a witness come right out and say boldly and emphatically that they are a liar.

Speaker 4 In his final remarks to the jury, attorney Ethan Way argued, if you exclude Brian's lying testimony, you're left with nothing forensically, evidentially, tying Denise to the murder.

Speaker 5 This case is only about crying Winchester. It is only about him killing Mike Williams.
It is only about him

Speaker 30 doing the most heinous thing that can be done

Speaker 4 in his closing remarks prosecutor fuchs pointed to denise that one person sat here and listened to ryan winchester describe how she had how he had shot and killed her husband the man she supposedly loved and cherished

Speaker 1 absolute stone face

Speaker 4 didn't bat an eye didn't shed a tear with that the jury had the case. And remember, a point easy to lose sight of, it was Denise on trial for murder, not Brian.
The waiting began.

Speaker 4 Did you feel pretty good about things?

Speaker 15 I was feeling pretty confident.

Speaker 4 I mean, I wasn't 100% sure either.

Speaker 17 Like, we didn't have a slam dunk case.

Speaker 22 There is no evidence. There is no proof.
She did nothing wrong.

Speaker 4 She just has the story told by the ex-husband.

Speaker 22 Exactly.

Speaker 4 Late that night, about eight hours into deliberations, a verdict. Cheryl had waited 18 years for this moment.

Speaker 32 State of Florida versus Denise Williams.

Speaker 4 Cheryl's jaw dropped when she heard the decision.

Speaker 32 We, the jury, find the defendant as guilty of first-degree murder.

Speaker 4 Guilty on all counts.

Speaker 21 We cut justice for Mike.

Speaker 21 And this was about justice for Mike. He loved Denise.
His wedding ring was on his hand when they found his remains.

Speaker 4 The conviction meant a mandatory life sentence for Denise Williams. Our interview with Cheryl and Nick came on a very difficult day.
Ms. Cheryl, this is an important day as we sit here, isn't it?

Speaker 4 This is an anniversary day.

Speaker 12 Yes, sir.

Speaker 13 It's the 18th anniversary of Mike's disappearance. Now that I now know that it's his murder.

Speaker 4 What did you learn about yourself in the midst of all this?

Speaker 13 I do believe in what's right, and I will stand up and I will fight for that.

Speaker 24 All right,

Speaker 4 But even with the guilty verdict, it wasn't quite over. An appeals court threw out the first-degree murder conviction, citing a lack of evidence, but let stand the murder conspiracy charge.

Speaker 4 Cheryl went through another painful sentencing hearing. After hearing from her and other witnesses, the judge sentenced Denise to 30 years in prison.
She'll be 77 years old when she gets out.

Speaker 4 That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt.
Thanks for joining us.