The glistening waters of Florida’s Lake Seol just outside of Tallahassee had always been a favorite spot for Michael. A man who seemed to have it all. A successful career in real estate, a beautiful wife, a sweet young daughter, and a longtime love for duck hunting. Friends say Mike would grab any chance to hunt, even if he had to sit alone in his boat on Seol Lake.
“It was not unusual for Michael to go hunting by himself.”
Then one December morning as a whipping cold front was tearing into Tallahassee, Mike grabs his shotgun and heads out to the lake. A lot of ducks here.
“A lot of ducks.”
“What about alligators?”
“There’s alligators, too. Lake Simino has quite its share.”
Mike promises his adoring wife Denise he’ll be back by noon. After all, it’s a special day. The loving couple is celebrating their sixth wedding anniversary.
“So, what are you doing this weekend?” he says, “Denise and I are having a wedding anniversary. We’re going to go down to this little bed and breakfast and just kind of relax and kick back.”
“Sounds great.”
“I love Denise. I thought she was perfect for Michael. He gave her everything.”
“Gave her everything she wanted. She didn’t have to work after the baby was born.”
But it’s well past noon now. Mike hasn’t returned home from his hunting trip. Daylight curls into darkening skies and Denise becomes frantic.
“He had a cell phone. He wasn’t answering it.”
She phones her dad and friends rendezvous at the lake. Brian Winchester, Mike’s best buddy, and Denise’s dad lead the desperate search at dusk for her missing husband.
“It was still very windy, cold, storm had just blown through. The temperature plummeted to 19° which made searching very difficult. You got rain, you got extremely high winds.”
Florida Fish and Wildlife officer David Arnett was the first investigator called to the scene.
“And I was told that we had a missing boater on Lake Simino.”
The search is called off for the night, but the next day they get their first break into Mike’s mysterious disappearance. They find his boat.
“You’re pretty certain that this is where he launched the boat?”
“Yes, there’s no question about the boat being launched here due to the fact that his truck and trailer was right here also.”
“And where was the boat found from here?”
“The boat was found approximately 300 yd to our right. It was apparent that it had been launched by one individual the way the boat had been turned around and apparently pushed out.”
“Mike’s shotgun was there still in its case. There was some decoys on top of some other equipment.”
But there was no Mike. Search and rescue divers, choppers, and hundreds of hours of manpower by law enforcement agencies over weeks. Then months are spent scouring the lake looking for Mike, hoping by some miracle he’s still alive. But tragically, it became all too clear. At that point, it seemed to be more of a recovery type search than looking for somebody who was in distress.
“And they were treating this as an accident. Mike had fallen over.”
Florida Fish and Wildlife investigators believed he had been pulled under by the weight of his fisherman’s waders and drowned in the shallow depths of alligator-infested waters.
“When you arrived here, did you think it was anything but Hunter who fell in the water?”
“No, not at all. Everything indicated that the boater had fell out of the boat and possibly drowned. There was no other indication of anything else.”
But that just didn’t hold water with Mike’s grieving mom.
“I don’t have a body. I don’t have anything to tell me what happened to my son. Supposedly, alligators ate him.”
A potential feast of flesh for a ferocious congregation of cold-blooded reptiles. But Mike’s mom says there is one big problem, and it has to do with the weather. Remember, it was bitterly cold that day.
“Alligators do not eat in cold water.”
“Alligators don’t eat people whole, but they do attack. They chew on people. They tear arms and legs or whatever off, but there’s always parts found after an alligator attack.”
But not a gnawed human bone nor a shred of human flesh has ever surfaced from those muddy waters. And there’s something else. Nobody remembers seeing Mike at the lake that morning. Did these cold-blooded carnivores consume Mike Williams after he accidentally fell out of his boat and drowned? Or was the successful, handsome 31-year-old husband, father, and seasoned duck hunter the victim of foul play? The search for Mike Williams was exhaustive. There were divers in the water, helicopters above, search crews on the ground with dogs, and they searched for 44 days, more than 700 man-hours, and they never did find Mike or his body. Incredibly, investigators believe there may have been nothing left of Mike after the alligators. His heartbroken mother is tortured by that thought, but says it wasn’t the gators that got her son.
“I wasn’t there to help you. How did you die? Were you in pain? Was it quick? It’s horrible.”
“Every single person that went missing on that lake had been found, recovered, whatever. This was extremely unusual.”
Adding to the mystery, special agent Deainy is told alligators become zombie-like. They almost hibernate and don’t really eat in wintertime.
“Word got out that maybe Mike was eaten by alligators. And a lot of people just assumed that’s what happened to Mike. However, a lot of the folks who had been around alligators, who had been around this lake, rather discounted that because alligators don’t eat people whole.”
Then after months of searching for Mike, a strange clue suddenly surfaces.
“All of a sudden, a hat appears. But why wasn’t the hat found during that 10-day time period? It was floating on the surface. Again, real close to the area where Mike put in his boat. People couldn’t quite figure that out.”
They turned to Mike’s best buddy, Brian Winchester.
“Mike’s friend, Brian Winchester, examined the hat, and he told the folks, ‘This looks like a hat Mike may have owned.’”
But agent Deainy says a DNA test is inconclusive. Very suspicious. Things get even stranger when a fisherman scoops up a pair of waders. They’re the same kind Mike was wearing when he fell overboard. But there is something mysterious about them too.
“Let’s talk about the mystery. When you found the waders, was there any remnant of a human being in there?”
“There’s no body parts in there. There’s no sign where an alligator has tore on the waders whatsoever. They were completely intact.”
“What do you make of that?”
“This was 6 months after the initial search started, and you wonder, how did we miss this all this time? We can’t connect the dots there.”
A short time later, divers at the scene pull up Mike’s hunting jacket. His hunting license is still legible. Even his flashlight is still working after 6 months in the water.
“Wasn’t that proof that he probably did drown? The condition of these items were so pristine that there was no way that they would have been at the bottom of this lake, which is mossy and algae coated. They were too new. They were so clearly planted.”
Jennifer Portman is the news director at the Tallahassee Democrat. She’d never heard about the case until 6 years after Mike mysteriously went missing.
“What is it that got you interested?”
“Well, I was actually reading our newspaper and saw an advertisement that said, ‘Have you seen my son?’ And it was this narrative that went down written by Cheryl Williams. Her son had disappeared at Lake Seinal. They said he was eaten by alligators. And it was this incredible mystery. I couldn’t believe it.”
You see, Mike’s mom, Cheryl, never gave up hope of finding her beloved son. She took out full-page ads in the newspaper and on billboards asking the public for help. She even took to the streets calling for a criminal investigation. But Mike’s mom says her pleas fell on deaf ears all the way up to the governor’s office.
“I had to write the story and so I went ahead and started reporting it.”
“The alligators eating immediately was the thing that, you know, as a reporter I was like what? It just seemed so bizarre. And then I started going through the reporting of it and the record was so thin, but there were these clues because of course he died without a will. So the wife declaring him dead after 6 months, never finding the body. It just all seemed very strange.”
“So why do you think it didn’t get as much news attention at the time?”
“He was looked at as someone who drowned in Lake Simino. We had a brief in the newspaper, it was never followed up. At the time, his wife, Denise Williams, was not interested in publicity, and so it just kind of disappeared.”
Friends and family say Mike’s wife, Denise, was devastated. After all, she was only 31, a widow with a young daughter to raise alone. She and Mike had dated since the 9th grade at a private Christian school. It was almost cliché. He was a football jock and she was a cheerleader. He wanted more out of life than he had growing up.
Mike was on the fast track of success. He held down two jobs through college. One was with Ketchum Real Estate Appraisers.
“Would you say that Mike Williams was a successful businessman?”
“If you measure success by money, he was successful. He was successful in that he had a beautiful wife and he had his daughter Ansley that he dearly loved. So yeah, I think by most standards he would be successful.”
Normally in Florida, you have to wait 5 years before a missing person can be legally declared dead. But just 6 months after Denise’s husband vanished without a trace, she asked for the state to issue his death certificate.
“I had no idea. I was shocked.”
“And what was the evidence Denise used to convince a judge her husband met his demise at the bottom of the lake?”
“His hunting jacket, hunting license, a working flashlight, and the pristine pair of waders with no alligator holes.”
“You think this evidence was planted?”
“We’re convinced the evidence was planted.”
Cheryl’s crusade to open a criminal probe seemed to enrage her daughter-in-law.
“After Mike disappeared, she threatened me. She said, ‘If you do anything to get a criminal investigation, you’re going to lose access to Ansley, my granddaughter.’ I’d already lost my husband. I lost Michael. And now she’s telling me, ‘I’m going to lose Ansley.’ I said, ‘What if that were Ansley missing? Would you not look for her?’ She said, ‘That’s different. I have to go on with my life. I don’t ever want to hear Mike’s name. I don’t ever want to see Mike’s face.’”
To this day, a heartbroken Cheryl hasn’t seen her adorable granddaughter. It was time for me to have a chat with Denise. Then Crime Watch Daily sent a producer back to her house, but when she saw us coming, Denise took off out of the driveway.
“I believe he was killed, and I believe his body was taken somewhere else, and I believe that his truck and boat was left over there, staged over there.”
“How much insurance money did his wife get?”
“There were two insurance policies. One that was written about 6 months before he went missing. That was for $1.5 million. We don’t know if Mike ever knew that this insurance policy was taken out, though it was filled out as if it was him.”
Retired Jackson County Sheriff Derek Webster inherited the case four years after Mike vanished. If it hadn’t been for his mother, a criminal investigation would have never been opened. It would have been a missing person that was never found.
“It was Mike’s widow, Denise, who was the beneficiary of a huge life insurance policy.”
“You encouraged Mike to buy as much life insurance as possible.”
“Sure.”
His old boss, Klay Ketchum, was like a father to Mike. And he said, “What would be your advice?” And I said, “Mike, given your age at life and given your risky behavior, I would buy all the life insurance I could.”
“What was Brian Winchester’s role in all of this?”
“Brian Winchester sold insurance.”
“Brian Winchester was close pals with Mike and Denise. Is that suspicious?”
“To me? Yeah. Brian Winchester had sold him a life insurance policy.”
The suspicion is that his wife went ahead and did this with Brian and Mike was unaware of it. Clay Ketchum said alarm bells went off for him too when Mike first went missing.
“And Brian Winchester called me. He said there’s a new development and the Game and Fish Commission or FWC believes that he may have been eaten by an alligator.”
“You thought it was possible that he drowned until you heard the alligator story.”
“Yeah, the alligator story was when I started wondering as to whether Mike was really in that lake.”
There was another thing investigators found curious. Mike’s shotgun, the one that was found in the empty boat, is not for duck hunting. And Ketchum says Mike kept all his guns in the office for safety. To enter after hours, a personal password is needed to turn off the alarm.
“Do you have any record or any way of knowing whether he actually came in here to get his shotgun?”
“I can’t tell you Mike Williams came in here. I can tell you that the door opened, Mike Williams code was inserted.”
Ketchum regrets never telling investigators at the time that Mike had a terrible secret weighing on his shoulders. The seemingly perfect marriage to his high school sweetheart Denise was on the rocks.
“Mike had confided in me 30 days prior to his disappearance that there was some issues within the marriage.”
“What kind of problems were Mike and his wife having?”
“I don’t really know. It had something to do with finances. It had to do with a credit card charge and it exceeded the limit that Mike and Denise had set for themselves. That was bothersome.”
“Bothersome in which way?”
“My guess is it wasn’t Mike who charged the money. I think it had to do with a trust issue.”
The huge life insurance policies would likely assure Denise that she’d never have to pinch pennies again. But there was another theory that surfaced about what could have happened to Mike. Did he fake his own death?
“Could he have used some of that money just to leave, start a new life?”
“If people knew Mike, that’s really kind of a stupid thing to say. Mike was extremely devoted to his daughter Ansley.”
The ink was barely dry on Mike’s death certificate when his mom found out that her daughter-in-law was having a torrid affair with her son’s best friend, Brian Winchester.
“We were told on numerous occasions that Brian and Denise were having an affair before he went missing.”
In fact, Brian Winchester actually got a divorce and married his best friend’s wife.
“There’s a lot of anger because I know they’re sitting on over a million dollars.”
“It was like a dagger in the heart when she married your brother’s best friend?”
“It was.”
It seemed the grieving widow was now the merry widow with a new hubby. The Gators didn’t do it. So was Mike Williams, a successful real estate executive, loving husband, and father murdered for his money?
A question came up when his spouse started to inquire about obtaining the insurance monies during the search. Mike’s mother and brother say his widow, Denise, has been living on Easy Street since she collected at least $1.5 million in death benefits.
“When we were talking about who stood to benefit from Mike Williams being declared dead, it looks like it would have been his wife, right?”
“There were two insurance policies. One that was written about 6 months before he went missing by his best friend, Brian Winchester. That was for 1.5 million.”
“What would be the words to describe this?”
“I think it definitely raises eyebrows as to maybe what was going on surrounding Mike’s disappearance.”
Adding to the suspicion, Denise marries the man who wrote those insurance policies, Mike’s best friend, Brian Winchester. Then she reportedly cuts the family cord with Mike’s mom and big brother Nick.
“It makes it seem so calculated.”
“It does.”
“Would you ever call Denise Williams the grieving widow?”
“How it’s been characterized to me is she was not that way. She moved on pretty swiftly and was ready to just put Mike behind her.”
Initially, investigators looked at the case as a tragic boating accident. Mike possibly drowned and his corpse was eaten by alligators. But there are a bunch of clues from the scene that don’t add up. One, his boat was found with a full tank of gas like it had never been used that day. Two, the shotgun Mike’s brother says was not the one Mike used to hunt ducks. Three, his gear—Mike’s jacket, waders, even his hunting license—were not found until 6 months after Mike disappeared, and despite all that time in the water, they were all in pristine condition. Not a single tooth mark from an alligator. And number four is the biggest mystery: there was not a shred of Mike.
No arrests are made, no suspects are named.
Investigators launched an insurance probe, but couldn’t prove anything underhanded.
“What they were trying to do was prove insurance fraud, and that would involve that he was killed to get the money.”
Despite Mike’s brother’s allegations, Brian Winchester has never been charged or named as a suspect in Mike Williams’ mysterious disappearance. I wanted to get his side of the story, so I went to Brian’s insurance office.
“Brian Winchester, it’s Anna Garcia from Crime Watch Daily.”
Shortly after my visit, we find out there is big trouble in his marriage with Denise. Winchester is arrested for allegedly kidnapping Denise and holding her at gunpoint in her car. He was reportedly distraught over their impending divorce. He allegedly tells her he’s going to kill himself.
This is Denise at her estranged husband’s arraignment.
“Then I would like to read something.”
Recounting to the court her day of terror.
“He was waiting for me in the back of my car with a gun. He grabbed the steering wheel. He shoved the gun in my rib cage, screaming profanities uncontrollably at me. I will never be the same. I would never wish this on anyone. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat because I only see him rising up out of the back of the car. Because all I feel is the gun shoved in my ribs. I can’t have peace because I only hear his voice screaming and cussing at me. Please don’t let him out.”
Denise also reads a plea from her now teenage daughter she had with Mike Williams, begging the judge to keep her stepfather behind bars.
“This is from my teenage daughter. I am scared. My mom is scared. He had a gun. He could have killed her. She is all I have. Please don’t let him out. He will come for her and then I will have no one.”
“I am going to find probable cause as to the three arrest charges of kidnapping, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and armed burglary.”
Brian Winchester has pleaded not guilty to these charges. Mike’s family is wondering if this could be the break homicide detectives have been waiting for.
“I think it’s just going to take a confession from one of them to crack the case.”
“The chances of this ever being solved are so slim, unless whoever was involved in this ends up confessing.”
Mike’s mother would love to be able to ask Denise what she knows, but Denise is not talking to her or anybody in Mike’s family.
“He thinks someone killed him. I think it’s very possible somebody killed him. I only have two choices where Mike’s concerned. He can be dead or I can hold that hope that he’s alive somewhere. And right now, until somebody can bring me absolute definite proof that Michael is dead, I’m going to believe that he’s going to come home.”
