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It was summer of 2002, a year and a half after Mike had gone missing.A middle-aged guy named Chuck Bunker sat at his desk at Florida's State Board of Administration. He looked up as a blonde woman in her early 30s approached him.
She came up and asked me if there was any job openings at that time.
Chuck had seen the woman around the office before.They chatted for a while and kind of hit it off.
She used to drop by and visit me and talk to me for a few minutes every day.
Chuck and Denise Williams got to know each other.They were both single parents, both looking for companionship, and they started to date. They took it slow.Chuck didn't have much of a choice in that.Denise made it clear she had strict boundaries.
It was probably four or five months before I ever even had her phone number where I could actually call her in the evening and say, hey, Denise, do you want to go out on Monday or Friday or whatever?
Even after she gave me her phone number, she always told me never to call and leave her a message.
That wasn't a big red flag for Chuck.At his age, everyone had quirks and baggage.He just thought Denise was being protective of her daughter.But then one day she told him what was actually going on.
She came over to my house one day and said that she had been involved with a past friend of hers.You know, they dated and whatever, and that he was still sort of around.
But that past friend was more than just around.
He had access to all of her bank accounts.He had access to all of her phone numbers and stuff, you know, the numbers that you dial in and you hit whatever to listen to what messages.He had access to all of that.And he wouldn't leave her alone.
He started calling her late at night, showing up at her house 2 o'clock or 3 o'clock in the morning or whatever.Denise was scared.She would call me crying and bawling, doing all this other kind of stuff.
Chuck told Denise, go to the police.But she wouldn't.She insisted she could work it out. Even with all that going on, Chuck felt like things were going well between them.Denise was opening up to him, and they began to spend more time together.
About a year after they started dating, Denise had an out-of-town work trip.
She was headed up to Atlanta, and she said, hey Chuck, do you want to go with me to Atlanta?I said, yeah, I can take a couple days off.
Chuck was looking forward to it.Their relationship was starting to get serious.It felt like there might be a future there.After arriving at the hotel, the two headed out for dinner.
We went down to the lobby.Lo and behold.
There was a man waiting for them there.The same man who controlled Denise's bank accounts and showed up at her door at 3 in the morning.The man's name was Brian Winchester. The same Brian Winchester who'd been Mike's best friend.
From Wondery, I'm Jennifer Portman, and this is Over My Dead Body, Gone Hunting.
Baby, you're crazy.I never touched that man.
This is Episode 3, A Beautiful Wedding. When Mike Williams disappeared on December 16, 2000, law enforcement had pursued the case as a search and rescue operation, not a criminal investigation.Nearly everyone agreed on what had happened.
Mike had gone hunting alone, and one way or another, Mike had fallen into the water and drowned. But when Cheryl Williams approached Jackson County Detective Derek Wester, that changed.
Detective Wester thought there really might be something to Cheryl's suspicions about what had happened to her son.
There was the way Denise rushed the process of getting a death certificate, how angry she got at the idea of an investigation into Mike's disappearance.And Cheryl had also given Detective Wester a new name, a guy Denise had been dating.
a guy named Chuck Bunker.When Detective Wester found Chuck, he didn't seem eager to talk.But the story started to come out, bit by bit.He began with a hotel lobby in Atlanta, and the man waiting there, Brian Winchester.
I'd never met the guy before.
Chuck told the story to law enforcement in a later interview.
He actually confronted both of us.He said, all right, Denise, me and you have got to talk.
Standing in that lobby in Atlanta, Chuck only knew Brian from what little he'd heard about him from Denise.He didn't know much about Denise's past.He knew that she was a widow, but she hadn't said much more than that.
So he didn't know about her long and complicated history with Brian, didn't know that Brian had been Mike Williams' best friend, didn't know that Brian was the guy who had sold Mike his life insurance policy, or that he had helped Denise get Mike's death certificate.
But Chuck had heard enough about the way he was treating Denise to know this meeting was not a good idea.
And I said, you know, Brian, you probably should not be here.You probably could get in a lot of trouble if we decided to tell the lobby person there to give the police a call.
Chuck wanted to do exactly that, but Denise insisted on talking it out.They sat down outside and Denise tried to persuade Brian to leave.But Brian wouldn't listen.
Instead, he began to try every way he could to persuade Denise to get back together with him.
He said, Denise, if you make me go home, I'm going to go home and kill myself.And, you know, my death is going to be on your conscience for the rest of your life.
And from there, he got more unhinged.
I mean, he said he had a gun in the truck.He was going to go get it and basically kill me and Denise on the spot.
But Brian didn't walk out to his truck to get his gun.Instead, he shifted tactics.
You know, if you don't get back with me, I've got pictures of you doing weird stuff that I'm going to broadcast to everybody, you know, send them to her mom and dad or send them to her sisters.
Denise knew exactly what Brian was talking about.He had taken some pictures of her, I guess, doing whatever.Chuck hadn't seen the photos, but he had a good idea what they showed just from the way Denise reacted.It was clear she was terrified.
And he knew enough about her to know the photos probably were sexual in nature.It went beyond normal embarrassment.
Denise always explained it to me, you know, that she was, you know, just completely, as a child growing up, wasn't allowed to do anything, that she decided just to go crazy.I mean, she was very religious, too.
And she was brought up in an extremely religious background.She always had those guilty feelings about stuff like that after she had done it.
But releasing those compromising pictures wasn't the end of Brian's threats.
This is where it's even stranger.Basically, they had done something together.I'm not exactly sure what it was, but it was something financial.And Denise was worried about it.She was really afraid that Brian was going to tell somebody about this.
At that point, Denise asked Chuck to leave her alone with Brian so they could talk. Chuck wasn't going to tell Denise what she could and couldn't do, but he was also a little alarmed.
So he said to her, as long as you feel like you're safe and that you've got people that you can contact or whatever to make sure he she says, well, Brian's not going to do anything.So I said, all right.
So I left and checked into a different hotel and I headed back.
When Chuck got into his room, he sat there just worrying about Denise.His phone rang after midnight.It was her. But Denise's voice was different somehow.
She basically told me all this information that she had made a mistake going out with me and that her and Brian had resolved everything and that they were happy and everything was, you know, this whole big statement.
I said, all right, Denise, that's fine.Chuck didn't know what to think.Maybe I left Denise in a bad situation.
I wasn't really thinking about, you know, like I said, when you've never done this before, when you've never been involved in this kind of, you just don't know how to react.
The next morning, he flew back to Tallahassee.And with that, things were pretty much over between Chuck and Denise.But Chuck had something else to tell Detective Wester.Because that wasn't the last he heard from Denise.
Two weeks after the trip, Chuck was back in his office at the State Board of Administration when his phone rang.It was a colleague on another floor.
He says, a sheriff's deputy is down to talk to me.I said, oh, shoot.The first thing you do is you think about something's happened to your daughter or something.The guy comes up and he says, you know, he hands me this restraining order.
The restraining order had been filed by Denise.I'm sitting there reading this thing and I just, oh my goodness, what the hell do I do? You know, I'm sitting there crying.I'm very emotional.I just, wow.
You know, if my ex-wife sees this or anybody, I mean, I might lose full custody of my daughter.
After the shock had worn off, Chuck went to see his lawyer.
I wanted to go to court and raise Kane.But when I went and talked to the attorney, he said, just mellow out, Chuck.Just let me handle this.Don't worry about it. I'll deal with this and you go on with your life and let me handle this whole situation.
Chuck had never been in any trouble like this before.He struggled to understand it.
I think Denise was trying to absolutely destroy me for whatever reason, I don't know, because I certainly, I don't think I ever did anything mean to her or anything.But she was absolutely trying to just make my life absolutely miserable.
After a while, his lawyer came back to him with news.Denise was offering him a deal.She would drop the request for the restraining order, but on one condition.
All she wanted me to do was sign an order that said basically that I would not discuss any of the stuff, any of our relationship with anybody else.
That would mean he wouldn't talk about their relationship or anything that had happened.Like, for instance, at that hotel in Atlanta.And Chuck took the deal.He signed the confidentiality agreement and got on with his life.
But even then, he still had a lingering suspicion.The whole thing.Maybe it hadn't come from Denise.
I think it actually came from Brian.Like I said, that's just me speculating.I don't think it came from her.It's just, you know, she has this person that controls her life and it's real tough for her to do what she wants to do.
Hearing Chuck's story brought Brian into a new focus for Detective Wester. This was a guy who seemed to share a secret with Denise, and also seemed dangerous, a guy who Chuck had seen threaten violence to himself and others.
Brian had been part of a foursome of friends, Mike, Denise, and his wife Kathy, since school.But after Mike's death, Brian's marriage to Kathy had disintegrated.Now it seemed Brian had been in some kind of a relationship with Denise.
It could look suspicious. But Brian had a rock-solid alibi for the day Mike went missing.Brian and his wife Kathy had been together that entire morning at their house in Tallahassee.
Then they'd driven up to see Kathy's grandparents together in Cairo, Georgia, about an hour away.Without any proof, there was not a lot Detective Wester could do. It was April 2004.
A smartly dressed woman in her mid-30s walked into Detective Wester's office.It was Kathy.She had something to tell him about the day Mike disappeared.Something that ran counter to Brian's alibi. When Kathy woke up that morning, Brian wasn't there.
It was hunting season.Like, I assumed he was hunting.Kathy recalled what happened in a later police interview.
I mean, during duck hunting season, he would just be hunting.And I would not necessarily know where he was going to specifically be hunting.It would be every day.
In her interview, Kathy told Detective Wester Brian was never planning to be with her that morning.She didn't expect to see him until the afternoon when they needed to leave for the family gathering at her grandparents' house in Cairo.
He needed to be back by 2 o'clock so that we could get there by 3 o'clock.
But when 2 o'clock came around, Brian hadn't come home yet.So Kathy left without him.
I remember being aggravated that he didn't get there in time to come.
When she got up to Cairo, it turned out her dad had been wondering where Brian was, too.
My dad was like, well, I was supposed to go hunting with Brian, and he didn't show up.And I said, what?You know, I was surprised by that.
This was all very interesting to Detective Wester.If Brian Winchester wasn't with his wife or father-in-law the morning that Mike went missing, where was he?
In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a beloved wife and mother.But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker.Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her.
And she wasn't the only target.Because buried in the depths of the internet is the kill list.A cache of chilling documents containing names, photos, addresses, and specific instructions for people's murders.
This podcast is the true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those whose lives were in danger.And it turns out, convincing a total stranger someone wants them dead is not easy.
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Detective Wester greeted Brian Winchester at the door of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement office in Tallahassee.He looked like he'd made an effort.
He's dressed in a suit with no tie.
But he's got hunting boots on.
Detective Wester led him through to a conference room.He told Brian the meeting would just be a casual conversation.
It's more along the lines of he's here in his own best to clear up whatever he needs to get cleared up.And so we're not to the confrontational type thing.We're letting him tell us his side of the story.
Detective Wester was there with another officer on the case.The three men sat down.
He said at the end, and we sat on either side of him.And you just basically ask him questions to see how he's going to react.You just kind of let it go where it goes.
They began by asking about Brian and Mike's school days together, their families, and their shared love of hunting.Then they turned to the day Mike went missing.
His alibi was that he was supposed to meet his father-in-law to go to Lake Jackson to shoot ducks, but he said that he remembers oversleeping.
So he went out in the yard, kicking around with his dogs, and then that afternoon, him and his wife drove to the family Christmas event.
The same story Brian had always told.The one Kathy was now saying didn't happen.
We knew that he wasn't being truthful.
So Detective Wester made a suggestion.He could take a polygraph test, just to clear things up.
He said, yeah.So we're going to set it up for a couple of days.
It must have seemed like an incredible stroke of luck.This would be the golden opportunity to confront Brian with what Kathy had said, catch him in a lie.But then, a few hours later, Brian's lawyer called.
he wouldn't be taking a polygraph, and if I had any other correspondence for him or a niece, that I needed to go through them.
His chance had gone.Now, if he wanted to ask Brian any more questions, he would need to arrest him. Next, Detective Wester tried to talk to Denise.But by now, the lawyer was involved and she was ready.
She never elaborated other than the original story of he went hunting.They were going to celebrate their anniversary that night, going to Apalachicola.He didn't show up.And that's pretty much all she knows.
Detective Wester tried everything he could think of.
It was like, I need some help to find your husband, your baby's daddy.And it was nothing, no emotion, no nothing.
Brian and Denise's accounts of what happened backed each other up.Brian stuck to the story about being with Kathy that Saturday morning, and Denise said she'd heard the same thing, even though Kathy had directly contradicted this.
Detective Wester could do no more.He needed more than an ex-wife raising doubts about an alibi.He needed solid evidence.And his investigation had found none.No forensics, no eyewitnesses, no murder weapon, not even the body.
Eventually, it was taken out of his hands.
I was kind of forced to close our in because based on everything we gathered, if something happened, it probably didn't happen in Jackson County.So we really didn't have a justification for additional funding.
The case was reassigned back to Florida's Department of Law Enforcement.Detective Wester's investigation had hit a brick wall.
As for Brian and Denise, after that weekend in Atlanta, they eventually got back together, and they'd gradually become more public with their relationship.
Denise and Brian went on family vacations together, celebrated Ansley's birthday together, and even attended the wedding of Nick, Mike's brother, together.
By June of 2005, six months after Denise's interview with Detective Wester, she and Brian were spotted at jewelry stores trying on rings.
And another six months later, on a beautiful 70-degree December day in 2005, Denise sat in a horse-drawn carriage that made its way towards the house where she once lived with Mike.
There's a giant oak tree out there in this little park area in that subdivision.
Mike's old friends, Patty and Clay Ketchum, were sitting in chairs lined up in the grass facing that giant oak. They watched as Denise stepped out of the carriage in a white dress and made her way towards the tree.
Brian Winchester was standing there waiting for her.Five years after Mike's disappearance, Denise and Brian were tying the knot. Patty didn't find their relationship particularly unusual.
You know, when soldiers would go to war, and a soldier would be killed, and then another soldier that knew him well would meet the widow, and then they would marry.We knew they had always said they were each other's best friends.
Denise always said Brian was her best friend, and Brian was also Mike's best friend, so you could kind of understand how they were drawn together.
But sitting in their seats, watching Denise and Brian hold hands in front of the altar, the Ketchums realized something.
I remember Clay and I looking around and thinking, we're the only people here that are from Mike's part of her life.
By then, Detective Wester had already interviewed Clay and Patty for the investigation, and a lot of his attention had seemed to be focused on Brian and Denise.
Funny thing is the minister that married them said, just kind of a side reference, he said, there's nothing about this couple, there's no secrets that they have that I'm not aware of.
And I remember Clay and I nudging each other and thinking, hmm, wonder if that's true.
As Denise and Brian celebrated their wedding, their future seemed bright.Denise had claimed the insurance money.She was looking to buy a house.Brian was doing well from his dad's business, too.
That little awkwardness with the detective sniffing around had gone away as well.He'd found nothing.In any way, now they were married.They had legal protection.
If it ever came to that, marital privilege meant they couldn't be forced to testify against each other. Life seemed to be looking good for the new Mr. and Mrs. Winchester.But there was one person who wasn't wishing the new couple well.
Mike's mother, Cheryl, was still asking questions. A few months after Brian and Denise's wedding, she wrote in her journal about her new plan.She was going to place an ad in the Tallahassee Democrat.It would print on Ansley's birthday.
There are people in Tallahassee, besides Denise and Brian, who know what happened to Mike or where he is.And that's how I first read the name Mike Williams and decided to investigate his disappearance myself.
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Starring Bethany Joy Lenz, Clive Standen, and Michael O'Neill.Welcome to the Dark Sanctum.Listen to Dark Sanctum season two exclusively on Wondery Plus.Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.
It was a Monday morning in May 2006.I was sitting at my desk in the Tallahassee Democrat newsroom, flipping through the day's paper like I did every morning.That's when Cheryl's ad caught my eye.
It was pretty plain, just a photo of a man's slightly smiling face and the headline.My son is missing.Please help me find him.Beneath the headline and the photo were seven paragraphs.
They spelled out how Mike Williams had disappeared six years earlier while duck hunting, how everyone had assumed he'd fallen out of his boat and drowned, and maybe even been eaten by alligators, how he'd been declared dead within six months, even though no one had ever found his body.
Something about Cheryl's ad drew me in.It sounded like the setup of some swampy film noir.A missing body, a hasty court proceeding, a lake full of scaly gators.I had to know more.
Days later, I found myself sitting across from Cheryl Williams in the tiny kitchen of her mobile home.Cheryl was 62 years old then and spent her adult life running an at-home daycare. But it was clear almost immediately she was a savvy investigator.
Like Detective Wester, listening to Cheryl convinced me there was something to the case.
I called up investigators, friends, family members, and a lot of them told me, yeah, right after Mike died, I thought Cheryl was a grieving mother who just refused to accept the reality that Mike died in an accident.
But now, six years later, most of the people I talked to agreed with her.One investigator told me that the shared feeling of all law enforcement working on the case was that Mike did not die in Lake Seminole.
They thought there was a small chance he had run away from his life and family.But the more likely scenario, they thought, was that he'd been murdered.But they were clear that without a body or new evidence, they couldn't do very much at all.
A few months later, I published my first big story on the case, laying out the holes in the theory that Mike had drowned.It made law enforcement admit, for the first time in public, that Mike could have been a victim of foul play.
And I kept on reporting on new developments.In 2007, divers went back to Lake Seminole to try and find Mike's remains.Nothing was found. In 2008, I reported on an investigation into possible insurance fraud.
Investigators said it raised, quote, many serious and troubling questions.But in the end, it didn't go anywhere.Eventually, even the new lines of inquiry started to dry up.
But I continued to write about Mike Williams every year on the anniversary of his disappearance, hoping that a lead would come sooner or later.Cheryl didn't let up on her own crusade either.
I think Patty spotted her and said, oh, there's Cheryl.
Clay and Patty Ketchum were driving home from church one Sunday when they noticed her at the side of the road.
I believe it was on Thomasville Road, and gosh, it was a hot day, and she had on a t-shirt with Mike's picture on it, and she was sweating, and golly, it just, you know, I didn't expect it.
She was standing in the mid-morning sun, holding a makeshift sign.
It was a white sign with a black and white picture of Mike, and it said, please help me find my son.It was just heartbreaking.
Cheryl had picked that particular location for a reason.It was right in front of Thomasville Road Baptist Church. And it was where Denise's father, Warren Merrill, was a parishioner.
That's where they got married, and it's where we have Mike's memorial.It's a prestigious church in our community, and a lot of prominent people in our community go to that church.
And obviously the people at the church saw her because you couldn't go in or out of the church driveway without seeing her.
Cheryl wrote about one of these protests in her journal.One of the assistant ministers came out to the sidewalk and demanded I leave because I was upsetting the parishioners.I had the right to be here, I told him.
I told him I would leave whenever Brian and Denise told me what they did to my son.I never knew Christians knew so many obscene words. Cheryl kept on coming back, a one-woman picket line.
I can't imagine having the courage to go stand out there in front of basically Tallahassee's prominent people, knowing that they disapprove of what you're doing and that they think you're crazy, and to stand up there and, I mean, just simply ask for help finding her son.
But the thing was, Cheryl didn't care.Disapproval, people calling her crazy.By this point, she was immune.And wherever Denise, Brian, or any of their family members were, Cheryl was going to be there too. Detective Wester was watching all this.
Even though his investigation had stalled, he still kept up with what was happening at Florida Department of Law Enforcement.The case kept being passed from agent to agent.
I would say the agency wasn't as compassionate about it as the agents were.It just became a mess.It was just kind of like one of those things that sit on the back burner and you hope something happens.
So he couldn't have been happier with what Sheryl was doing. Maybe it would make something happen.
I thought it was an excellent idea.She keeps it public.She does her picket in that church.Everybody come by seeing this crazy lady out here holding a sign.Have you missed my son?
Inevitably, someone from church would recognize Mike's picture and connect the dots back to Denise and Brian.
Hey, that's her ex-mother-in-law.She thinks they killed him.
The rumors would snowball, and friends and family would start to distance themselves.
For now, all any of us could do was wait and hope.But when something did happen, it happened in a way no one was expecting. You need to hear it, and you need to hear it a lot.You are going to die today.
That's on the next episode of Over My Dead Body, Gone Hunting. From Wondery, this is episode three of six of Over My Dead Body, Gone Hunting, a series about the extremes of love and betrayal.
Over My Dead Body, Gone Hunting is hosted by me, Jennifer Portman.This series is written and reported by Eric Barton.Producer is Denise Chan.Senior producer is Russell Finch.Story editor is Eric Benson.Consulting producer is me, Jennifer Portman.
Production Assistance by Evangeline Barras.Sound Design and Mixing by Michelle Macklem.Music Supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Freesound Sync.Fact Checking by Annika Robbins.Senior Managing Producer is Lata Pandya.
Managing Producer is Olivia Weber, and Coordinating Producer is Heather Beloga.Executive Producers are George Lavender, Marshall Louie, and Jen Sargent, for Wondery.
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