EVIL AT LAKE SEMINOLE-Steven B. Epstein

go to relax after a stressful work week. The Florida State grad was juggling fatherhood with a thriving real estate appraisal career, and that very evening, he and his high school sweetheart Denise planned to celebrate their sixth wedding anniversary, But Mike Williams never returned home When an intense search of the lake's marshy waters turned up only his hunting

boat and a camouflage hat. Investigators reached the morbid conclusion he'd fallen overboard and drowned, his body eaten by alligators. Nearly two decades passed before the dark secrets hidden at Lake Seminole and elsewhere were finally revealed. Evil at Lake Seminole is a diabolical tale of betrayal, greed and deception, and of a courageous mother who devoted her life and savings to uncovering the truth what really happened to her son.

The book they were featuring this evening is Evil at Lake Seminole, the shocking true story surrounding the disappearance of Mike Williams. With my special guests, journalist and author Stephen b Epstein Epstein, pardon me, Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Stephen b Epstein, pleasure to be with you. Thank you very much. Incredible story. Tell us the very interesting backstory to how you became involved in this what recently interviewed you asked here about

your book Murder on Birch Leaf Drive. Tell us about the circumstances in which you first heard about this story behind Evil at Lake Seminole. Well.

North Carolina. This book was written about events that occurred in northwest Florida, where I don't live, and I had never heard a thing about this story until August of twenty nineteen when I was taking my son, picking my son up actually from the locker room at his high school following an away football game, and I just so happened to turn on a podcast as I was starting to get interested in at least thinking about a topic for a new book, and I heard a podcast, A criminal,

a true crime podcast on this case, and I was enraptured from the very first words of the podcast, and literally could do nothing else but think about what I had heard for days afterward, and pretty much knew that I just had to write this story.

thirty miles to the south. Now, Lake Seminole is about an hour northwest of Tallahassee, although it has become a huge hunting and fishing mecca for folks from all over Florida, especially in the Florida Panhandle. It's a reservoir that was created by damming three different rivers that pretty much flow in the northern portion of Florida, the western portion of Georgia, and just below the southeastern corner of Alabama. And it's

a massive area. Its shoreline is three hundred and seventy six miles and lots of outdoorsmen and outdoors women have been going there since it was created in the nineteen fifties in order to hunt and fish exactly what Mike Williams was doing. The early morning hours of December sixteenth, two thousand.

hunting with a bow and arrow in his woods. There was a lake a couple of miles from his house he would bike down to, and that's where he first started duck hunting, a lake called Lake Ammonia. Florida's got zillions of lakes everywhere, and lots of folks, especially in the northwest corner of Florida, become avid hunters and fishermen. He certainly became an avid hunter from an early age. He was very very popular as a kid. He became

the president of his high school class. He went to a small Christian school called North Florida Christian School, which actually began as a segregation academy after Brown versus Board of Education. It was all white back in those days. It since integrated, but he was very friendly. People really liked him a lot. As a kid, he didn't get into Florida State, which was his dream. Initially, he went to Florida and m University or fam you on a

track scholarship. After one year he was able to get into Florida State and then graduated from Florida State and was already working for the person who became his employer named Clay Ketcham, who ran a small real estate appraisal firm in Tallahassee on thomas Ville Road, and Mike eventually became his star appraiser. He was a workaholic, working fifteen

sixteen hour days. He would have his early morning shift, he would have his night shift, and he would come home for dinner and would play with his pride and joy Annsley, who was nineteen months old at the time of his death, and then he'd go back into work. Sometimes he'd even take her and she'd be asleep in the in the car seat, and he'd rock his baby with his foot while he attended to his paperwork from his appraisal work, sometimes not going home until one or

two o'clock in the morning. Mike was married to his high school sweetheart, Denise. She was Denise Merrill when he met her in the ninth grade. They were a girlfriend and girlfriend and boyfriend pretty much ever since, and were married in nineteen ninety four, on December seventeenth of nineteen ninety four, six years almost to the day before he vanished and as we learned later, was murdered.

Mike are having expecting Annesley, their daughter. After Kathy and Brian's baby, tell us a little bit more about the relationship and their trip through university and some of the things that they shared in common, especially Brian and Mike.

Christian School in the ninth grade. And just as quickly as Denise became Mike's girlfriend, Brian Winchester became Mike's best friend. There was there were a lot of differences in upbringing between Brian Winchester and Mike Williams. Unlike the meager existence that Mike's family had, Brian Winchester grew up in fairly lavish surroundings. His father was a financial advisor and also an insurance agent, and was very well connected with Tallahassee's

upper crust. They lived in a very nice home right off of Lake McBride, one of the many many lakes in the area, and Brian grew up not wanting for anything, and he went on nice trips with his family. They had a ski boat. He became an excellent water skier.

In fact, he ultimately won several water skiing competitions. And he hunted a lot as well, and they would go on exotic hunting trips, he and his father, and eventually Mike was invited to go on these trips, to go hunting with them, to go water skiing with them, and in fact, Marcus Winchester, Brian's dad, started looking at Mike as being another son because he was there that often, and he and his son Brian adored Mike so much.

And so Mike's first policy was purchased through Winchester Financial Group and Brian and several more policies all the way up until a policy that he bought for one million dollars in April of two thousand.

stayed at home. She claimed to have postpartum depression. Mike was sympathetic about that, and Mike took on many of the child rearing responsibilities in addition to the fifteen or sixteen hours of work that he put in each day. By the time of his murder, he was making close

to two hundred thousand dollars a year. Denise was only working part time, and yet it was Mike who was laboring many of the child rearing responsibilities that in that situation you would have fought Denise would have been shouldering.

over fifty years. She runs it to this day. But that didn't make very much money, and when Jerry or JJ died, it left her in a terrible financial lurch and Mike. Mike was well aware of their financial situation all growing up, didn't want to have an adult life that was as strapped for money as his mom and dad's adult life was, and certainly didn't want his family left in a lurch the way that Cheryl was left

in a lurch when her husband JJ was killed. So Mike always knew that he wanted to provide for his family and that's why he worked so hard and made so much money. But he also knew that as a hunter and fisherman, he was exposed to circumstances that created risk risked to his own safety and his boss, Claike catch him when he brought the subject of life insurance

to Clay. When Mike did, Clay actually told him to load up on insurance that he knew how hard it was for Mike's mom After his father passed away without leaving much an insurance, and he knew the risks that Mike was taking as a hunter and a fisherman, and he knew how important it was to Mike to be

able to provide for his family. So he heard lots of voices telling him, including Brian's voice, that it was smart and wise for him to have that level of insurance to make sure his family was provided for in case something happened to him.

almost like a family. The four of them. They spent that much time together and they really enjoyed being around each other. There were, however, and you may have been getting to this, but there were, however, a couple of occasions as we get into two thousand, where Mike begged off participating in for someome activities and where just the three of them wound up going to a couple of places without Mike there, and so that was changing a

little bit. In the year two thousand, of the year that Mike was ultimately killed.

wedding anniversary. They were supposed to go on a trip to the Gibson Inn in Apalachicola Bay, which is right on the Gulf of Mexico, a beautiful seaside tourist spot where Mike was hoping they were going to basically light that flame again, and it was a really important trip to him, and he was a little bit surprised in view of how things had been that Denise had agreed

to go with him on that trip. So that was going to be that Saturday, December sixteenth, after that duck hunting trip that he was on that morning, they were supposed to head to Apalachicola Bay and spend the evening and rekindle their relationship on the eve of their sixth wedding anniversary. Obviously that never happened.

it was for. And yet Denise had never told him about this, And when he confronted Denise, Denise told him it was to buy marijuana and that she was using it in pot brownies, which was very disturbing to Mike and he didn't quite know what to make of that. In addition, when he went to New Orleans on a trip in order to get close to reaching the highest rung of certification as an appraiser, he had to take

certain seminars and he went there. Denise had been invited invited by Clay Ketcham to go with Mike on that trip, and Clay Ketcham would have paid for it, and Denise said no. Mike went alone, and afterwards Mike learned that she and Brian and Cathy had gone to Orlando to a club and nan club Firestone, which was reputed to be a place where a lot of drugs were traded and used, and Mike started forming this impression that Denise was becoming a hardcore drug user and for that reason,

he was starting to think about life without Denise, that perhaps it would be better for him to move on from Denise because he wanted to protect Annsley, and he also talked with Clay about getting custody of Ansley away

from Denise. Ultimately, nothing ever came from that. Clay was concerned initially, but that seemed to blow over eventually and again by December sixteen, two thousand, Mike is thinking he's heading to Apalachicola Bay to the Gibson Inn to have a romantic evening on the eve of his sixth wedding anniversary with Denise, but he never made it.

So they would typically his older brother Nick would pick up Cheryl at her home. She lived just north of Tallahassee in a place called Bradfordville, and Nick would pick her up at her home in Bradfordville, which was the mobile home that Mike grew up in, and then drive her the twenty five minutes or so to Mike's very nice home in a very nice subdivision which he had purchased with his hard earned money, and they would watch

Friends together. Now, that particular Thursday evening, December the fourteenth

was Christmas time, so there are Christmas decorations everywhere. There's a Christmas tree up at the Centennial Oaks home that Mike owns with Denise, and of course Annsley is running around as a nineteen month old, and Nick and Cheryl get to the door and Annsley squeals in delight when they get there, and they sit around and they just start talking about the upcoming holidays, and they talk about the upcoming anniversary trip that Mike and de Nise are

starting to take, that are going to take that Saturday after Mike gets backed from his hunting trip. They also surprise Cheryl and Nick by telling them that they're planning to have another baby, not that Denise is pregnant, but that they're talking about within a couple of months starting to try to have another baby. All of that happened that Thursday evening while Nick and Cheryl were in Mike and Denise's home on Centennial Oak Circle in Tallahassee.

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a shotgun in order to hunt with. Mike did not keep his shotguns at home once Annsley was born. He didn't want any accident. He didn't want that in home, so he kept them in a closet in his second floor office at catch him appraisal. And we know he was there at four o'clock that morning. Other than that, there are really no hard and fast records of what

Mike did that morning. We just know that Mike did not come home when Denise was expecting him around lunchtime, and Denise started making phone calls because she didn't know what happened, and suspected something was wrong, and that included calling her father, Warren Merrill, who worked for the state Department of Transportation, and she told him Mike's not here, were supposed to go to the Gibson Inn, and I'm worried. And in fact, Denise's sister Deanna. It's funny she was

she had three sisters. She was Denise. Her other sisters were Deanna, Darla, and Deborah. They were the four D's and her older sister, Diana was the one who was going to be watching Annsley while they went to the

Gibbson In. And so she called Deanna and she started making these phone calls saying, I don't know what's happened, And she asked her father to head out to Lake Seminole to see if he can figure out what was going on, why Mike hadn't called and why he hadn't come back home when he was supposed to come home.

no boat on the boat trailer. They immediately called the Florida Fish Wildlife Conservation Commission, or the FWC, which has they're the ones who are the game wardens basically who keep law and order on the lake, and they had a check station not far from there, and before long officers met with them, and they started trying to look

around and figure out where Mike could have been. The initial thought was he was somewhere on his boat and got stranded, ran out of gas whatever it was, and was stranded somewhere on his boat, but there was no sign of his boat and they couldn't figure out what had happened to him or where he was, and then a torrential rainstorm came through that in fact spawned tornadoes in the area, so they had to call off the search for a while and weren't really able to get

things going until the file following morning, except for Marcus and Brian Winchester, who arrived that evening and after everybody else had gone home to wait it out until the next morning, they went out on the water in the wee hours of that morning, December seventeenth, and they had headlamps on and were looking on the lake to see if they can find anything, And they eventually found Mike's small thirteen foot genew hunting boat up against the reeds

on the western shoreline of a lake, and there was no Mike in it, or no sign of Mike.

And there are a lot of trees and tree stumps that protrude through the water, or some that lie menacingly just below the surface of the water that you can't see. And if you're not very careful while you're in a boat, your boat can hit one of those underwater stumps and capsize or at least knock the occupants out of the boat.

And so as searchers were searching this area and this same thing was happening to them in their boats, the FWC officers quickly began forming this theory that Mike must have been jostled in his boat and knocked out of the boat and got in the water. And at that point the question is, well, why didn't he get back into his boat. And that's where the waiters come into play.

There's an old legend that if one is in their waiters and falls into the water, that the waiters will fill up water with water so quickly that they will tug whoever is wearing them underneath the surface and cause them to drown. And so when Brian met with the FWC officers, they quickly started talking about this notion that Mike was probably wearing his waiters. By the way, Brian told them he wasn't with him, and even though he was at one point supposed to go, he said, I

was not with him. In fact, I was sleeping that morning. I was actually supposed to go hunting with my father in law, but he wasn't with him, he said. But that if Mike was hunting alone, there's a good possibility he was wearing these waiters and if he fell overboard, he would have drowned. And they searched his truck. They eventually found the keys or got keys for his truck. They searched his truck, no waiters, no waiters in the boat,

so they're thinking he fell overboard in his waiters. And the other thing you need to know about stump Field is that it is an area that is, at least in the summer months and possibly as well into the fall months, it is infested with alligators. And the working theory became that Mike not only fell overboard in his waiters and drowned, but that the reason they couldn't find his body was because it had been stored in a hidden layer and ultimately consumed by the alligators in the area.

Lake Seminole other than Mike Williams. And if the officers believe FWC officers, I'm sorry, believe that Mike's body would eventually float to the surface. And even though they had this theory that alligators may had eaten him, they were still hoping that at some point, at least parts of Mike were going to float to the surface and they

would find him. And that would be particularly true as the weather turned warmer, and at that point they suspected his body would surface and they would find him, but it never did.

And Denise says, that sounds like a great gift, and Cheryl says to Denise, let me talk to Mike about it too, and Denise at that point reminds her, no, Miss Cheryl, Mike has gone hunting this morning, and Cheryl then remembered that Mike and Denise had told them that when they were there that Thursday evening watching friends, and she doesn't think much more about it. She and Nick eventually go out to lunch. They come home, and sometime that afternoon, Cheryl goes out for a walk, as she

does virtually every day. It became a ritual of hers after her husband died. She would go down to Lake Ammonia, about a two mile walk, and then walk back. And when she gets back, Nick is in tears, and Cheryl says to him what's wrong, and he tells her that Denise had just called and that Mike is missing. And Cheryl doesn't understand what he's talking about. What do you

mean he's missing? Nick told her that the Denise had said that Mike had never come home from his hunting trip, and that Denise had been expecting him for quite some time in order to go to the Gibson Inn and celebrate their anniversary, and he never came home. And Nick said I'm going to go jump in a car right now and head up to Lake Seminole and join in and try and figure out what happened. And that's how

Cheryl found out. And she was puzzled and stunned and couldn't quite understand what was going on.

And duck hunting season only happens in colder weather. And this is the middle of December, and we're in northwest Florida. We're not in Miami, we're not at South Beach. It does get cold in northwest Florida. And he told her, you don't need to worry, Mom. There's no way an alligator could harm me because during the times that I go duck hunting, it's cold enough that they're not going

to be feeding. And that's what she had always believed up until December of two thousand, when she started hearing this theory that Mike had been eaten by alligators, which never made any sense to her.

what do you mean Mike is missing? And she said he went duck hunting yesterday and he never came home. And within an hour, Clay and Petty for on clothes and they're heading the hour northwest to and by the way, we haven't mentioned this, but the place where Lake Lake Seminole's stump field is located is in Sneeds, or just north of Sneed's, Florida. So they start heading towards Sneeds in order to join in the search that is going on.

That first full day after the storm passes through, and they spend all day out at the lake helping try to find Mike. And after being there all day, they're all muddy from all the rain that had been through. They get back in their car and they drive back and they go straight to Mike's house try and console Denise and try and come to terms with what's going on.

And they arrive at the Centennial Oaks home and what they see looks more like a painting by Norman Rockwell than a vigil for a man who is missing and is possibly gone forever. Everybody is sharply dressed. These are Denise's sisters. A husband of one of the sister's boyfriend, Denise's mom, Johnny, was there, and it doesn't look like a vigil at all. It looks like somewhat of a

Christmas party. There's cookies in punch laid out on the dining room table, and it's surreal to Clay and Patty that they're walking into the scene that doesn't match what they had just experienced at Lake semon. In fact, they're wondering why these same people like them hadn't been up at Lake Semonel trying to figure out what happened and

find Mike. But that's not what they encountered, except for Denise, who came down the stairs, obviously having been in her bedroom, and her face looked like she had been crying for hours. Her eyes were baggy, mescara everywhere. She was a mess, and both Clay and Patty consoled her the best they could, but she was the one exception to the otherwise very surreal scene that was going on in that home. And

then Patty noticed something. As they're standing there with Denise at the bottom of the staircase, she noticed a suitcase that was at the foot of the stairs, which to her was a very hard to take in indication of what had happened that Denise and Mike were so close to heading out to this beautiful, romantic place to celebrate their sixth wedding anniversary. Instead, they're now thinking that Mike has gone forever, and that suitcase became a symbol for

Patty of the horror that had just occurred. Right, and then they go. Then Patty and Clay go to Cheryl's twenty five minutes north up in Bradfordville, into her mobile home. Cheryl greets them warmly, and Nick is there and Cheryl's friends are there, and it's almost like a funeral. It's the exact opposite of the scene at Denise and Mike's

home that they had just been to. I mean, people are crying, they're miserable, they're in anguish, and they're trying to understand what on earth had just happened, and they're thinking, you know, Mike may be gone forever.

They just needed to find him. Those were Cheryl's initial instincts that they were going to find Mike and he was going to be alive. And then you want me to talk about her going to the lake for the first time.

needs her to go find him. And that's what she believed God told her as she was standing at the edge of the lake on her first visit to the lake, and from that moment forward, that woman was more determined than any human being alive to get to the bottom of what had happened and to find her son, who she believed would still be alive.

any lead. They had a lot of people in boats searching a grid pattern, and they would stick poles, PVC polls, or pipes down to probe the lake. And by the way, it's a fairly shallow area. There's only a few spots that are even deep enough where you couldn't stand. That's how shallow this area is. So there's not a whole lot of lake to explore in that area, and they're

finding nothing. But every time they stick a pole down and they feel something, they sent an underwater diver down to see if there was anything there that was felt by the pole. One of the things about this area, aside from the alligators, is that there's a lot of vegetation in the lakebed and that rises all the way

up to the surface and it's called hydrilla. It's like these massive weeds that grow uncontrollably, and unfortunately, that really hampered the search, and it made it difficult to separate what one was feeling from being the hydrilla from something that could be Mike's body. And the other thing that really hampered this massive search was the cold weather it got. After that storm came through, a cold front set in and there were mornings that it was below twenty degrees.

Even though this is Florida, there's ice forming on the lake. They had a chip through that ice in order to even get the boats. Boats on the lake and divers would go down and they would come up very quickly because they were afraid they were going to get hypothermia. Their masks that they were seeing through would freeze up.

They were very unwieldy, difficult conditions. But despite that, they covered that area thoroughly, day after day, week after week from December into February, and nothing promising turned up except for a camouflage hat found toward the end of December.

And Brian Winchester was the one who actually was the one to bring that camouflage hat to the FWC officers and he said, you know, I think that might be Mike's hat, And he came back the next day with a frame five x seven photo and lo and behold Mike's in that photo wearing what appears to be the very same hat. So that was another discovery that was made that seemed to point to the notion that Mike had been there and that he had drowned, But that didn't lead them to finding Mike.

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That's ten percent off during your first three months at ritual dot com slash murder. Now, Stephen, we were about to talk about in this investigation and this massive search that really didn't wield anything except, like you say, the camouflage hat that just happened to be provided by Brian Winchester, Mike's best friend. What are the things that Cheryl did in her initiative to become involved and to have this case not go away in the public's mind.

And she realized that to the extent that they were not conducting a criminal investigation, there were important pieces of evidence that were going away and would never they'd never be able to get back again in order to search properly. So she pushed and she pushed, and she pushed the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to start a criminal investigation. She started by just seeking some publicity by sending a bunch of letters, and this woman can write letters like

no one's business. She eventually wrote over two thousand letters to the governor of Florida, but in the early going, she was writing letters to the local newspaper in Tallahassee, the Tallahassee Democrat, trying to get them to write a story about Mike. Ultimately, she succeeded, and in August of two thousand and one, some eight months after Mike disappears, the Tallahassee Democrat does a story on lots of different people of local interest who are me, and Mike is

included in that story. So that's her first bit of publicity that she's able to get, and then not much happens after that until finally, in early two thousand and three, I'm sorry, early two thousand and four, she finally gets the FDLE to sit down with her and to treat this as a suspicious missing person's case. And that's when they finally start to investigate this as a possible crime.

And then they start doing a full fledged investigation, talking with people, trying to gather material evidence and that sort of thing. For years after that, with the investigation going from warm to cold, back to warm, and back to cold again. At this time too, the paper, the Democrat, is instrumental in keeping this story alive. And at some point there is a new news director coming from outside that is interested in this story and again even takes

it too different levels with coverage. Tell us who this is and when she becomes involved in why so? It's actually Jennifer Portman is who you're talking about. And she actually starred as a senior writer. By the end of the books, she has become the news director of the Tallahassee Democrat. But she's a fairly young, enterprising, investigative reporter. She had been working for a newspaper in Missouri, I believe,

before then, and she spots so. The other thing Cheryl did is she placed a couple of ads in the Tallahassee Democrat in two thousand and six. In early two thousand and six, I think it was in May of two thousand and six, she placed a couple of ads that said my son is missing. And it ran about a quarter of the page, and it described all of the things that had happened. And how you know, there's an investigation and no one seems to know what happened.

Can someone please contact the Florida Department of Law Enforcement if they know anything. And Jennifer Portman reads this ad she had just started working at the Tallahassee Democrat, and she says, there's a story here, and she starts interviewing, among others, Cheryl Damon Jasper, who was part of that

initial search with Warren Merrill, Denise's dad. That first day, she interviews some of the law enforcement officers who are part of the investigation, and she publishes three different articles in the Tallahassee Democrat on the eve of the sixth anniversary of Mike's disappearance in December of two thousand and six, and that begins a title wave of information that the Tallahassee Democrat would publish about Mike's disappearance that would go on for years and years and years, all under the

byline of Jennifer Portman. She essentially took this up as a cause almost as important to her as it was to Cheryl Williams.

Oaks Circle in Tallahassee. Cheryl gets there that afternoon and Denise beerates her for having put that article in the newspaper, for having given the Tallahassee Democrat information that led to that article being in the newspaper, telling her that she that is unacceptable. She doesn't want to read anything about Mike in the newspaper, she doesn't want to see his picture in the newspaper. She doesn't want to ever hear

about Mike again. And she threatens Cheryl that if she ever pulls another stunt like that again, she will never see Annsley again. That was the first incident where that type of threat was made. Now it turns out Denise didn't follow through on that that even though there was a fairly tense interaction and tense relationship between Denise and Cheryl and Nick, she did allow some visitation with Annsley to go on fairly limited, typically on a Monday evening,

for a couple of years until another interaction. And this interaction occurred the day before Cheryl's birthday in January of two thousand and five. And on that date, Cheryl and Nick were eating lunch when Nick's cell phone rang and Denise said that Denise needed to meet with them. Cheryl, being the day before her birthday, thought, well, this is great. Denise is surprising me by bringing Annsley to me to

help me celebrate my birthday. So she rushed home, made Nick rush her home, and they're getting ready for Denise to arrive, and think that Annsley will be with Denise. And Denise does have somebody with her that afternoon, but it's not Ansley, rather it's Brian Winchester. And oh, by the way, by this point in time, Brian Winchester and

Denise Williams are an item. They have begun to date and yeah, exactly, in fact, Cheryl had learned about that the prior summer when Nick was married, because Denise asked for permission to bring Brian to the wedding as her date. And so Cheryl's known for some time that Denise and Brian are now in a dating relationship. And there's Brian standing at her doorstep at her mobile home along with Denise no Ansley, and it's very clear that both Brian

and Denise are upset. Denise sits her down at the table in the kitchen and says, look, if you won't stop this criminal investigation, then you're not going to see ANNs Lay anymore. We love you, but we just can't have this going anymore. And Brian is kind of standing guard at the door, not taking part in the conversation. And then Nick turns to Denise and says, Denise, we want to know what you and Brian did to Mike. And at that point Brian becomes irate. He says, let's

get out of here. This isn't going anywhere, and the two of them storm out of Cheryl's mobile home and they would never Nick and Cheryl would never see Annsley again. That was in January of two thousand and five.

looked for any evidence of human rain remains. They found none, but portantly they showed those waiters to Brian Winchester, who said, yeah, those well could have been the waiters that Mike had at that time. So it seemed to be a further indication that this theory that Mike had fallen overboard and drowned in his waiters was true, although clearly Mike wasn't

in the waiters anymore. But what happened next was Brian got a couple of his friends to head back out there on a boat a couple of days later in that exact same spot where the waiters were found. Brian wasn't there at the time, and a diver, a local diver, went down into the water to see if there was anything else there, and lo and behold, there was a hunting jacket, and inside of that hunting jacket there was a hunting license, and it was a hunting license for

Mike Williams. And also a flashlight was found in the very same spot. And when one of the people who was part of that crew that went out on that boat turned that flashlight on, lo and behold, it worked perfectly, some six months after it supposedly had been part of what Mike had on his person when he drowned in the lake. And the jacket also did not look like it had been in the lake for six months. Something appeared to be a little bit suspicious about the jacket

and the flashlight the waiters. The fishermen who found the waiters did believe it looked like they had been in the water for a long time. However, the FWC officers who then received the waiters, they didn't think so at all. They thought that the waiters being found on that day

was also very suspicious. So there was this What happened was is that there was a suspicion among the FWC and among those who were following this story, and ultimately by Jennifer Portman when she started reporting on the story that the waiters, the hunting jacket, and the flashlight were planted.

And the reason they were planted, they all believed was because that was because Denise had petitioned to have the courts declare Mike in what's called a presumptive death certificate so that she could begin collecting on his life insurance. The life insurance company would not allow her to collect on the claim for life insurance unless there was a death certificate, and the way to get the death certificate

in that instance was to petition the court. And it just miraculously happened that the waiters, the jacket, and the flashlight turned up literally right as Denise as petitioning the court for a presumptive death certificate.

if he's Mike's I'm sorry, as if he's Ansley's new dad. So Brian by two late two thousand and five is now essentially filling the role that Mike once filled. Brian and Cathy, I should say, got divorced very soon after

the events surrounding Mike's disappearance at Lake Summon. In fact, the day that Kathy left their home was September eleventh, two thousand and one, the same day of the terrorist attack in New York and Washington, d C. Their marriage ended that day, and his relationship presumably was starting with Denise sometime thereafter, and by two thousand and four, their public about their relationship, and in December two thousand and five they get married and move on with life as

a happy couple from Centennial Oak Circle, where Mike and Denise were supposedly a happy couple as well, and life goes on. Things are fine until they're not, and until their marriage starts to disintegrate, and their marriage finally hits the final point in twenty twelve, when Denise essentially kicks Brian out of the home and Brian goes to live in his parents' home where he grew up, where his son Stafford will come and spend half his time with him and half his time with his mom. Kathy, and

Brian is in death Fritz straits. He wants to get Denise back, but Denise is not letting him back into her life. And this goes on for a period of years, and eventually there's a kidnapping incident between Brian and Denise when Brian gets to his final point of desperation, and it was that kidnapping incident that led to Brian being arrested.

That's what I've always believed. So she didn't reveal anything of any help to law enforcement. She convincingly, at least to herself, told the story that she had been telling for years, which is that Mike had drowned at Lake Seminol. Brian, once he was arrested, also would not talk about anything associated with Mike Williams. The problem for him was he had just committed an armed kidnapping and the potential sentence

for armed kidnapping was life in prison. And so it got to the point where some pressure was being exerted on Brian to help law enforcement figure out what happened than to Mike Williams. And eventually, again I don't want to reveal too many details because I don't want to spoil this for readers, but eventually Brian is the lynchpin to finding out more about what actually happened. In December of two thousand, this was the big break that the

investigators had been looking for for years. They always believed that if Brian and Denise finally came to a point in their relationship where they went their separate ways, that would be the moment that they would be successful in learning what really happened to Mike. And it took basically four years into their separation for Brian to finally snap, which led to the kidnapping incident, which led to Brian being housed in the jail and potentially having a stand

trial for armed kidnapping. That led to a cascade of events that changed everybody's lives in ways that to this day are still difficult to comprehend.

morning in August of twenty sixteen. It was his belief that she was going to go to work at Florida State, and then later that day they would get together with Brian's dad, Marcus, and try and sort through what had happened that morning. It was also Denise's intention to do exactly that. That's what Denise told him she was going to do. That's how she started driving her vehicle toward Florida State and then lo and behold. Out of nowhere,

her sister winds up, her sister, Deborah. Younger sister, Deborah winds up finding her driving along and pulls her into a medical office building parking lot. The reason why her sister knew something was up was because Denise started that morning, as she started most mornings, on her way to work,

getting on her cell phone and calling her sister. The kidnapping incident started almost immediately after that, and so her sister never hurt anything after the initial hello and thought something was wrong, which is why she was out on the roads trying to find Denise, and she did. Deborah's husband is Dave McCraney, who happens to be a uniform Tallahassee police officer, and at some point Dave McCraney gets on the line with Denise and tells, Denise, you must

report this incident. You need to go directly to the Sheriff's office and report this incident. And that is how and that is why Denise went to the Sheriff's office that morning to report that Brian had kidnapped her. And then ultimately there are several criminal proceedings that Denise participates in where she's basically the most important witness to the prosecution team to help make sure that Brian stays behind bars.

Isn't granted bail, isn't granted bond. She tells the presiding judge that she's had PTSD associated with the kidnapping incident, that she lives in fear of Brian, and ultimately she does of victim impact statement at his sentencing. His sentencing, which occurs a couple of days before, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement announces that they have a big break in the case and that their big break is that they have located the remains belonging to Mike Williams. That

was I'm sorry. The day after the kidnapping the sentencing that Brian was kidnapped. Was I'm sorry long interview. It was the day after Brian was sentenced for kidnapping. He was sentenced to twenty years. The next day, the FDL has a press conference and announces that they have located Mike's remains and they have concluded that Mike Williams was murdered.

with her. It seems incredulous that she would not understand the danger of doing this well.

Winchester put behind bars if he knew something about her, and he would say that whatever Brian Winchester said about her was simply out of revenge for her reporting the kidnapping incident leading to him being sentenced to twenty years in prison, and that it was all a made up story by Brian Winchester in order to get revenge against Denise, get revenge against her for the things that happened in their marriage and her not agreeing to take him back,

get revenge for a very bad divorce where she basically robbed him of his money in Brian's view in terms of what she was able to get out of him in the divorce, and then for reporting him to the authorities for the kidnapping incident, that Brian was able to get even by making up a story about Denise having been involved in Mike's murder.

and I want to leave my readers in suspense. But obviously Brian Winchester is the most crucial witness in the case because he's going to tell the jury exactly what happened the morning of December sixteenth, two thousand, when Mike disappeared at Lake Seminole, And he's going to tell the jury how the events transpired that led to that moment in time, and what Denise's role in that event was, and what he and Denise's relationship had been for a

period of years even prior to the conception and birth of Annsley. He wants the jury to believe that this was a conspiracy between him and Denise, and that they had conspired to murder Mike. And if the jury believes that, then there's only one person who can try and convince them otherwise, and that would be Denise. And so there would be an onus on Denise to take the witness stand in her own defense to set up the classic he said, she said about whether Denise in fact had

been involved in any way. And I'm not going to tell the readers who are listening to this any more than that. I'd rather than read the book and find out. I don't want to spoil the suspense of seeing how the trial unfolds. But without question, Brian Winchester was the most important witness in the trial, and he turned out to be a very very impressive witness, both on direct examination when being examined by the prosecutor and also on

cross examination. Despite the fact that Denise had hired a pretty good attorney, that attorney was fairly tongue tied when he was trying to cross examine Brian. Many times during that cross examination, Brian got the better of him, Rather than the other way around.

The shocking truth story surrounding the disappearance of Mike Williams certainly is a shocking truth story. For those that might want to take a look at this. Do you have a website Facebook page for this? Tell us how they might find out more about this book.

Atlakeseminole dot com. That website is not a place ago if you want to read the book, because again, there are a lot of spoilers on that website. All kinds of evidence from the trial, all kinds of photographs, all kinds of information that was part of the Florida Department of Law Enforcements files is on that website. So go to the website after you've read the book and you want to learn more. And that's Evil at Lakeseminole dot com.