Who was Brian Winchester and why wasn’t he charged despite confessing to murdering his best friend?

In December of 2000, Mike Williams woke up before dawn and drove to Lake Seminole in Tallahassee, Florida to go duck hunting. Later in the day, he planned on celebrating his sixth anniversary with his wife Denise Williams.

Unfortunately, in one of the more bizarre true crime tales out there, he didn’t return. His body wouldn’t be discovered for another 17 years after his best friend Brian Winchester confessed to killing him with a shotgun blast to the face. Winchester was never charged with murder in that crime, despite committing it.

There are three main characters in this homicidal love triangle. Mike Williams, the victim, grew up in Bradfordville, just north of Tallahassee. He worked hard throughout his youth and took up duck hunting around the age of 15. He attended high school at North Florida Christian and then he majored in political science at Florida State University. When he was hired by Ketcham Appraisal Group as a property appraiser, his boss said he was the “the hardest-working man I ever saw.” He married Denise Williams in 1994.

At the time, Brian Winchester, the actual murderer, was Mike Williams’ best friend and fellow property appraiser. Winchester and Mike Williams’ wife Denise had dated in high school, and later it would come out that they never stopped dating and carried on a years-long affair.

The Williams family had a daughter in 1999 and halfway through the year they bought a $1 million life insurance policy through, you guessed it, Winchester. Even more wildly: Winchester and Denise Williams would eventually get married.

Let’s go back to that December day when Mike Williams went duck hunting early in the morning. There are two tales here: one is the one authorities tried to thread together at the time of the disappearance, and the other is what really happened. Let’s start with the former.

The first tale

When Mike Williams never returned from Lake Seminole, his wife called Winchester, who went out to search with his Dad, but came up empty. Police searched for days with boats, helicopters, and underwater cameras. The search was called off after 44 days with no trace of the body, with the presumptive theory being that he’d drowned.

There were a few other hypotheses as to what happened. Mike Williams was the first death out of 80 deaths on the lake where a body wasn’t found, which was weird but also led authorities to conclude alligators “dismembered and … stored [Mike Williams’] remains in a location” hidden to them.

In June of 2001, a fisherman found some waders in the lake and divers found a hunting jacket with Mike Williams’ name on it. None of the clothes showed any damage from alligator and the clothes weren’t as worn down as they should have been after being in the water that long. Regardless, Mike was declared dead after Denise Williams petitioned the court to do so, which it did, freeing up the life insurance policies.

That could’ve been the end of it, but Mike Williams’ mother wouldn’t let the case die, as she wasn’t convinced about the whole drowning/alligator theory. The case was reopened in 2004 and many inconsistencies became glaringly obvious. A few: Mike Williams’ Bronco was found on mud and not on the boat launchers where it should be. A storm that night should have blown the boat away, but it didn’t. Also, when the boat was found the motor was off but the gas tank was full, when it should have stayed on if he fell out of it.

The alligator theory was then debunked when authorities realized alligators wouldn’t be active at the time of his disappearance. Even so, no one knew what happened. Winchester and Denise Williams married and life went on. Mike Williams’ mom kept trying to get the case reported but by 2012 it was considered closed.

Things were quiet again until August 2016: Denise (now a Winchester) and Brian separated. Apparently, he had a sex addiction and Denise Williams was over it. She stopped taking Winchester’s calls, which freaked him out because he was worried she would tell the authorities he killed her ex-husband, so he hid in her car, held a gun to her ribs and told her he was going to kill himself.

“We promised each other neither one of us would ever say anything,” Winchester would say in court later. “Because we knew the only way they’d get anything is if one of us talked.”

Denise Williams eventually calmed him down and convinced him she wouldn’t say anything, but she lied and immediately had him arrested for kidnapping. She asked the judge to keep Winchester in jail because she was scared for her life.

“I would never wish this on anyone,” she said in court. “I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t close my eyes because I always see him rising up out of the back of the car screaming and waving a gun. I can’t relax because all I can feel is the gun shoved in my ribs. I can’t have peace because I only hear his voice screaming and cussing at me.”

Winchester was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the kidnapping. Now that they had him dead to rights, Brian Winchester made a deal with the police. In exchange for immunity in the murder trial, he would confess about what really happened to Mike Williams.

Winchester’s account

Winchester said he and Denise Williams had an affair that started in college and lasted through their own marriages. After a year of sneaking around, they decided they wanted to be together for good and started talking about how to make that a reality. Because she had a religious family that frowned on divorce, Denise Williams and Winchester settled on murder.

They discussed a few ways to do it: maybe a late-night robbery at the office? No. What about they kill both their spouses in a staged boat accident? No, because Brian Winchester didn’t want to kill his kids’ mother. Eventually, they decided on the boating accident.

“Denise liked this idea. She felt better, I guess, about herself — or we could feel better about ourselves — if there’s a chance that he could make it out of it,” he said. “I think there was even talk that it would be up to God what happens. Not us. It won’t be a murder. It will be an accident. It’s kind of screwed-up thinking. But that was a scenario that she could live with, I guess.”

The description of the murder is brutal. Winchester was with Mike Williams on the boat that fateful Dec. morning in 2000. He told Mike Williams to put on his waders and then pushed him out of the boat. When Mike Williams, frightened and frantic, came up and grabbed onto a tree stump “I didn’t know how to get out of that situation, so I loaded my gun and made one or two circles around and I got closer to him and he was in the water and as I passed by I shot him.”

He pulled Mike Williams’ body from the water and stashed it in the back of his Suburban. He knew he had to leave the body “close and it had to be quick and obviously it needed to be a location where [Mike] wouldn’t be found.” He bought some tarp, weights and a shovel at Walmart and buried the body at Carr Lake about 60 miles to the southeast.

When he got back he went to a car wash to get the blood out of his car. After that, Winchester drove out to search for Mike Williams with his father Marcus.

“He was searching and I was just lying,” Winchester said in court. “My dad didn’t want to give up. My dad loved Mike.” After that, he said he worked with Denise Williams to make sure the murder stayed something only the two of them knew about. They didn’t talk for days and waited even longer to meet. Brian Winchester said he was “kind of nervous” when they did see each other because it would be “weird to see her because of what we had done.”

After the kidnapping incident years later, Winchester said he felt like he couldn’t trust Denise Williams anymore. Finally, after 18 years in 2018, Denise Williams was convicted of her ex-husband’s murder. In exchange for testifying, Brian Winchester was not charged, despite shooting Mike Williams in the face. In Feb. 2019, she was sentenced to life in prison for murder. Her murder conviction was eventually overturned on appeal, but she was still on the hook for 30 years for the conspiracy charge. Both Brian Winchester and Denise Williams are currently serving out their sentences in prison.