Murder of Mike Williams

In August 2021, the seventh season premiere of the A&E Network series Cold Case Files featured the case.

In January 2020, Denise Williams appealed her conviction and life sentence. Her attorney argued before the Florida First District Court of Appeals that there was no evidence she was involved in the commission of the murder. In November 2020, the murder conviction was overturned, but the conspiracy to commit murder conviction was upheld including the 30 year sentence that accompanied it.

On November 13, 2020, True Crime Network featured the case in season 1, episode 11, of Meet, Marry, Murder.

In February 2019, Denise was sentenced to life in prison. She did not speak or offer any argument on her behalf. The only person to address the court besides the lawyers was Cheryl Williams, who said that justice had finally been served, and that Denise had taken not only her son but also her granddaughter from her.

The Crime Junkie podcast featured the case in an episode that was released in early 2019.

On May 8, 2018, Denise Williams was arrested at Florida State University as she left work to celebrate her daughter's 19th birthday, minutes after a grand jury had indicted her on charges of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, and accessory after the fact. Prosecutors continued to keep details of the crime to themselves, saying they would share them in court when the time came. They did say that they would seek to have her denied bail.

In late June 2018, Denise Williams was ordered held without bond, with trial date set for September 24. Audio of Brian Winchester's interview with the FDLE was played in court. In it, Brian confessed to pulling the trigger but claims the killing was Denise's idea. Her defense argued that the tape should not have been admitted as evidence since Winchester was not charged with anything despite his admission; the prosecution said it simply asked him to tell the truth about what happened. She went on trial in December.

In December 2017, Winchester was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the kidnapping, with credit for 502 days time served, to be followed by 15 years' probation. His attorney told the court that he was suicidal that day, due to not only the divorce but also his mother's recent terminal cancer diagnosis and the decision by his teenage son from his first marriage to move in with his mother, and argued for the 10-year mandatory minimum. Prosecutors countered that Winchester's actions that day indicated he planned a murder-suicide that was only averted by Denise's quick thinking, and asked the court for the 45-year maximum. Winchester is now imprisoned in the Wakulla Correctional Institution.

After Denise Williams was arrested, the FDLE disclosed that they had received information on where the body was in early October 2017. County public works employees brought in backhoes for what they were told was a training exercise. After five 16-hour days of digging 9-foot-deep (2.7 m) holes in the mud at that corner of the lake, all the while holding back the lake waters by dams and pumps amid the constant presence of eels and water moccasins, the FDLE was ready to hire a private contractor to finish the job.

Near the end of that year, the Investigation Discovery cable channel series Disappeared devoted an episode to the case. Cheryl Williams promoted it heavily in the days before it aired. Portman, who was interviewed, said she could always tell when it got rerun due to the increase in email she got, many of which asked questions she herself had tried in vain to get authorities to answer. After one such re-airing in 2015, she expressed the hope that "one day ... instead of a question, there will be an answer".

Cheryl Williams wrote letters daily to the governor, asking him to have the state reopen the investigation even though two later investigations were likewise unable to uncover any significant new information, alienating many of the law enforcement officials she had previously persuaded to reopen it. The Investigation Discovery channel series Disappeared devoted an episode to the case in 2012. In 2016, Winchester was arrested on charges stemming from an incident where he allegedly kidnapped Denise, the missing man's widow, who was now divorcing him; he was sentenced to 20 years in prison on the day before the FDLE announced that Williams's body had been found. In May 2018, Denise Williams was arrested and charged with first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and accessory. She was found guilty that December, after Winchester testified to shooting Michael at Denise's behest when their original plan to stage a boating accident failed, and was sentenced to life in prison in January of 2019. In 2020, a Florida appellate court overturned her murder conviction but upheld her murder conspiracy conviction, for which she will serve 30 years.

Starting on New Year's Day in 2012, Cheryl began writing one letter a day to Governor Rick Scott, asking him to either have another agency besides FDLE investigate or appoint a special prosecutor to do so. After she had written over 200 letters without even an acknowledgment that they had been received, she began inquiring personally as to why. It turned out that the governor's office had forwarded them, unopened, to FDLE's headquarters, where they were placed in the case file. She was outraged. "They could not have hurt me more if they had punched me in the face."

In 2012, Denise and Brian Winchester separated, reportedly due to his sex addiction; she filed for divorce in 2015. Brian opposed it initially and had to be ordered to comply. As part of that order, he was to provide an appraisal of the couple's house, due early in August 2016.

Another possible lead that year proved fruitless as well. Carrie Cox, a self-described psychic and certified forensic psychological profiler from Kentucky reviewing the case had identified a possible location of Williams's body. She gave investigators the coordinates of a location in Wakulla County near another boat launch. Cadaver dogs were brought to the area and sniffed it out, but found nothing. Cox nevertheless concluded that "we are moving in the right direction... I think something is there." FDLE officials said in 2011 that Cox had not found anything requiring further investigation.

Despite the failure of a third investigation to discern the fate of her son, Cheryl Williams persisted. Her efforts led to the Investigation Discovery cable channel doing a segment on Michael's disappearance and the later investigations in late 2011. "We don't know what the smoking gun is, but we hope someone will find it," she said.

In 2011, the case made it into two other media formats. Carrie Cox, the psychic and profiler who had identified a possible burial site at which no body was found, published Alligator Alibi, a lengthy book with documents from the investigation, Cheryl Williams's notes, and her own commentary. She supported it with an eponymous Facebook page, where she regularly publishes whatever updates she can and news about other, similar cases.

The private search team that surmised the alligator theory had been hired near the end of the original search by Williams's mother, Cheryl. After it ended, and after her son was declared legally dead (proceedings she said in 2008 she would have contested had she been aware of them), she was still not convinced that he had drowned in the lake, but her attempts to bring about a further investigation were unsuccessful. She has stated that she received threats to discourage her. For the next several years, she investigated on her own when not operating a day care at her home. She ran advertisements in local newspapers, and put up billboards seeking information. All the subsequent investigations of the case have resulted from her efforts.

In 2008, the Florida Department of Financial Services's Division of Insurance Fraud (DIF), in conjunction with FDLE, began investigating the case from that angle. Normally, under Florida law, the statute of limitations on that crime is five years, meaning it would have expired in 2005. But it can be extended by three years under certain circumstances.

She believed her son might still be alive. "I get criticized a lot for not admitting that Mike's dead," she told the Tallahassee Democrat in 2007. "All I know is I can't stop looking for him until I find him." Her efforts had severely strained her relationship with her former daughter-in-law.

A possible new lead emerged in October 2007, when Michael Williams's older brother found a photograph and the serial number of a .22-caliber Ruger pistol that had once belonged to their father. Michael had inherited it after his father's death, and after Michael was declared legally dead it was the only one of his firearms that Denise Williams had not returned to her former in-laws. After Jackson County sheriff's investigator, Wester, asked the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) to look for it, agents visited Denise and Brian Winchester, now married, in their house (the same one she had lived in with Michael), to interview them.

"My gut feeling is Mike did not die in Lake Seminole", Austin said in 2006, after leaving the state's attorney's office for the FDLE. He added that that belief was shared by all the investigators at that point. "I would say this is a suspicious missing person."

The FDLE closed its case, convinced that the alligator theory was wrong, but without any leads or evidence that could allow it to further investigate. By 2006, its cold case investigators were no longer returning Cheryl Williams's phone calls. She continued to do what she could to publicize the case, taking out ads in the Tallahassee Democrat.

Some investigators felt aspects of the case were not consistent with the alligator theory. After years of pressure from Williams's mother, Cheryl, the case was reopened in 2004 by the FDLE. By then, officers had learned that alligators do not, in fact, eat during the winter months, as the water is too cold, and as such, it was suspected that foul play might have occurred. But it did not produce any new evidence, as the potential crime scene had not been secured during the search for Williams.

In 2004 the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) agreed to reopen the case after lobbying by Cheryl Williams and a friend. It does not normally have jurisdiction in missing-persons cases and cannot get involved in investigations purely on the basis of a citizen's request, although it can offer assistance to local agencies, as it did in this case. In retrospect, many officers agreed with her that the circumstances surrounding Michael Williams' apparent drowning four years before were unusual, and were strongly at odds with that conclusion:

Two days before his disappearance, Mike and Denise told his mother, as well as his brother Nick, that they were planning to have another child soon. In 2001, she said, they were planning to go on a cruise in Hawaii that spring; later in the year he expected to travel to Jamaica for work as well.

Ten days into the search, a camouflage-patterned hunting hat was found, but it could not be connected to Williams. Efforts continued until the search was called off in early February. It has since been suggested that the search might have been continued had Denise Williams indicated an interest in such. At that time, the case was still considered open. "Nothing in investigative or search and rescue efforts has produced any definitive evidence of a boating accident or a fatality as of this date," read the final report, issued in late February 2001.

According to Denise Williams, on the morning of December 16, 2000, a Saturday, her husband awoke early, leaving the house on Centennial Oaks Circle well before dawn, boat in tow, to go duck hunting at Lake Seminole. The lake is a large reservoir approximately 50 mi (80 km) west-northwest of Tallahassee located in the southwest corner of Georgia along its border with Florida, where three other streams merge to form the Apalachicola River. The couple had plans to celebrate their sixth wedding anniversary that night in Apalachicola.

Without any of that evidence or Williams's body, it was impossible for police to make a case. "[We're] at a brick wall ... pounding our heads against it," said Austin. Derrick Wester, an investigator with the Jackson County sheriff's office, agreed that they were "trying to make up for" not having considered the possibility that things might not have been what they seemed in 2000. His office kept the case open, and had some persons of interest, although he did not identify them.

The three-page indictment was released two days later. It revealed that prosecutors believed Denise allegedly began conspiring with Winchester in March 2000, nine months before her first husband disappeared. Winchester is alleged to have killed Michael with a gun. The accessory charge suggested that sometime between August 2014 and the day Winchester was sentenced, Denise had allegedly helped Winchester avoid prosecution or arrest for the crime.

In the early 2000s, Cheryl Williams had posted flyers, put up signs, and run newspaper ads soliciting information about the case. One of the ads drew the attention of Jennifer Portman, a reporter at the Tallahassee Democrat. In 2006, after the closure of the first FDLE investigation, she wrote a lengthy story about the case. She followed the story through Denise's conviction, making a point of keeping the poster for the case on her cubicle wall.

In 1999, Williams's only child, a daughter, was born. His coworkers said he was as devoted to her as he was to his work. The following year his father died. Midway through the year, the couple bought a $1 million life insurance policy on him through Brian Winchester, a childhood acquaintance of Merrell who had also become best friends with her husband. Later that year, Williams told his mother, whom he had been consoling, that he would have liked to have $50,000 to take the next year off.

After North Florida Christian, he attended Florida State University, where he majored in political science and urban planning. Before graduation, he was hired by Ketcham Appraisal Group as a property appraiser. He distinguished himself as "the hardest-working man I ever saw", according to the company's owner. After he married Merrell in 1994, he would often go home for dinner and return to work after she (and later, his daughter as well) went to bed, and he sometimes went into work after going duck hunting in the morning. According to his mother, Mike was making US$200,000 annually by the time of his disappearance. He and Denise had bought a home in a small upscale subdivision on the east side of the city.

At noon, Denise called her father to tell him that Mike had not returned; Brian Winchester's (Mike's best friend) father drove with Winchester to the areas of the lake where they knew Mike Williams frequently went duck hunting. They found his 1994 Ford Bronco near a remote boat launch in Jackson County, on the Florida side. After investigators with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FFWCC) were called, a search began, but soon had to be called off after a storm blew in.

The state's star witness was Brian Winchester, who testified at length about how he and Denise had never really ended their high school relationship, even after they both married others. Kathy Thomas, Winchester's first wife, told the jury that she had suspected the two of having an affair in the late 1990s, when they frequently double-dated with Mike and Denise. Brian said in his confession, a tape of which was played for the jury, that the affair had started in 1997 and just "snowballed".

Jerry Michael "Mike" Williams (October 16, 1969 – December 16, 2000) was an American murder victim. Initially, it was said he left his home in Tallahassee, Florida, United States, to go duck hunting. After subsequent investigations, he was presumed to have drowned in Lake Seminole, a large reservoir located in the southwest corner of Georgia along its border with Florida; investigators later came to suspect he had been the victim of foul play, possibly at another location. His body was found in October 2017 near Tallahassee, and Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) officials confirmed Williams was a victim of homicide.