Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida
By Mikita Brottman

The crime:

Mike and Denise Williams were a Florida couple who were good friends with Brian and Kathy Winchester. Mike went missing while duck hunting one day in December 2000 and was thought to have fallen out of his boat and been eaten by alligators. It later turned out that Brian Winchester had been carrying on an affair with Denise. He had killed Mike and, five years later, after divorcing Kathy, married her. He and Denise had a messy falling out, leading to their divorce and Brian being charged with kidnapping her. Brian then confessed to the murder of Mike Williams in a plea deal that gave him immunity. In 2018 Denise was tried, convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life for killing Mike, but a later appeal overturned this because there was no evidence she’d actually been involved in the murder. Her conviction for accessory to murder remained, however, for which she was given a 30-year sentence.

The book:

It’s interesting how the title emphasizes guilt. That’s not something you hear a lot about in true crime stories. We’ve become so used to the psychopath: someone unable to feel empathy who just kills and goes on with his or her life without feeling any pangs of conscience. Conscience is more of a literary trope, belonging in classic works like Crime and Punishment. It’s not something you encounter as much in real life. At least I don’t see much of it. People don’t even say they’re sorry anymore. An apology means taking responsibility, which might lead to being sued.

Introducing the notion of guilt – not guilt in a legal sense but as a moral reckoning – helps foreground the question that lies at the heart of Mikita Brottman’s telling of this tawdry tale. Were Brian and Denise tortured souls, either before or after the murder, or were they just thoughtless, sleazy people? Was Brian’s confession a genuine come-to-Jesus moment, a way of expiating a sense of guilt that had weighed on him for years? Or was it just a way of getting back at Denise? Did Denise not want to divorce Mike because it went against the Bible’s teachings? Or because she didn’t want to take the financial hit? (“Better to be a rich widow than a poor divorcée,” as Brian put it.) And how did Denise feel about marrying the man who killed her husband? Guilty? Complicit? Or did she think about it at all?

These are the questions that Brottman worries away at, and in doing so I think she takes the more literary route I mentioned, giving the protagonists a moral or spiritual depth relating to their faith that I thought they didn’t fully deserve. But I’ll admit to not being sure about that, as I never want to judge people, even murderers, so harshly that I don’t give them the benefit of a doubt.

In order to explore this question of guilt Brottman has to imagine what might have been going on in their heads. Here’s how that goes. First, Denise’s adultery:

They’d both been taught that abstaining from sex before marriage would lead to spiritual, physical, and emotional satisfaction. All their lives, they’d struggled to follow the Bible, and when the time came for them to reap their reward, it wasn’t there. They felt cheated.

Now a door had opened. Forbidden sex, it turned out, was a lot more exciting than anything that happened at home. At the same time, they couldn’t set aside what they’d learned in church – that adultery was a terrible sin. They could go to hell for what they were doing – which made it even hotter.

On the one hand, this is plausible. Forbidden fruit and all that. And a lot of people who go down this road don’t know in advance that they’re going to end up feeling cheated either way: following the rules or breaking them. We’re talking about sex here, and that’s all just hormones. I don’t think we need to invoke “the complications and paradoxes of desire.”

Then, after Brian kills Mike, he achieves a kind of post-coital clarity:

There was no feeling of exhilaration, no relief, no sense of achievement in pulling off the plan, no excitement about the prospect of finally having Denise all to himself. None of it was how he’d imagined it would be. All he could think about was the shock and horror of what he’d done. He regretted the murder right away. It weighed on him every day of his life.

Did it? And how much?

Their own way of making sense of or even justifying what they were up to led, of course, to rationalizations. Only here those rationalizations were tinged, I think in a way many would consider heretical, with faith: that God wanted them to be led astray as part of some mysterious plan he had for their salvation. That if the murder was arranged as an accident it would be a kind of “test” that God had prepared, both for Mike and for the two of them. Then, after the murder, they recommitted to doing more church work:

In terms of profit and loss, their biblical credit balance was in negative figures; they had to build it back up through religious devotion, as well as monetary tithes. Their recommitment to the church was also a symbolic attempt at moral cleanliness, a desire to sanitize themselves, to rewrite their story. It was a kind of hand washing or exorcism, a cleaning of the self after encountering a contagious force of evil. Never mind that the force was their own.

How much of this should we credit? “To the faithful, transgression has a special force and valency that’s absent from secular life.” Does it? I don’t think so. I don’t think you need to have any kind of faith to have a moral compass. And this leaves aside the question of how faithful Brian and Denise ever were.

I just don’t like this kind of thinking, where being a person of faith somehow puts you above the common run of sinners, the people who don’t even know that they’re sinning. You find this in writers like T. S. Eliot and Graham Greene and it puts my back up. Perhaps it isn’t always humbug, but in this case it sure feels like it. For Brian, Brottman tells us, “Guilt, the invader, pushed apart the cracked barriers of his conscience.” He was “not as well defended as his wife [Denise]. His armor was thinner, his capacity for repression less profound.” Really? Or was he just practicing a sort of strategic blame-shifting after it was clear that the “mutually assured destruction” of the guilty secret he shared with Denise was a token in play after their divorce? “Their pledge [to each other] was unbreakable because there was no way out. Their prenup was a murder.” But unbreakable pledges can be broken, and you can always argue over a prenup in court.

I think Brottman pitches the spiritual drama too high. She often has chapter epigraphs drawn from the Bible or Shakespeare, and even at one point describes Mike’s mother entering the courtroom at Denise’s trial “like Cleopatra sailing by on her barge,” an allusion to Anthony and Cleopatra which I thought ridiculous in context. What the story more closely resembled, and it’s a connection Brottman also makes, is the world of film noir and movies like Double Indemnity (yes, there was a big life insurance policy involved here too). In this view Denise became the femme fatale or Black Widow, which is the lens the media took to seeing her through. I found this perspective on the story reminiscent of American Fire, another tale of a criminal couple who shared a “kind of love that is vaguely crazy and then completely crazy and then collapses in on itself.” The only “essential truth” being that when they (Charlie and Tonya, Brian and Denise) started off they were in love and “by the time they finished, they weren’t.”

Sticking with American Fire, we might also note how in both cases it was the man who pled guilty and his partner (both in life and in crime) who maintained her innocence and subsequently attracted the lion’s share of media opprobrium. Denise’s attorney describes this as the “Eve Factor”: the way that when a man and a woman are part of a crime together it is generally the woman who is thought to be the mastermind, the Eve who tempts Adam. There’s the Bible again, but it’s also the standard noir plot:

When lovers plot to kill the wife’s husband, or the husband’s wife, although the woman might help plan the murder, it’s almost always the man who carries it out. But the woman is punished equally, if not more so, and unlike her co-conspirator, she’s publicly sex shamed. She’s scorned, ridiculed, and condemned, described as a Black Widow, a Jezebel, or a Delilah. Examples are easy to find.

Then, dialing things down even lower, we get to a final layer: the public (now mostly online) finding Brian and Denise to be “trashy and ugly; their story . . . lurid and tawdry, a cheap tabloid scandal.” But, naturally, a “guilty pleasure.”

Noted in passing:

I mentioned how police originally suspected that they couldn’t find Mike Williams’s body because it had been eaten by alligators. But he had disappeared on a particularly chilly day in December and it turns out that alligators do not generally feed during the winter months due to the colder temperatures. Specifically:

Most herpetologists agree that between November and late February, alligators, even in Florida, go into a state called brumation – a kind of semi-hibernation in which their metabolism slows down to conserve body temperature, and they no longer need to eat.

Search parties did encounter active alligators at the time in question so the police felt this was still at least a possible explanation for not being able to find a body, but apparently it is very unlikely alligators would be active at all in the existing conditions. They only look to maintain their body temperature and aren’t interested in food.

In 2008, with the investigation into Mike’s disappearance ongoing, authorities contacted a forensic psychologist with a Ph.D. “who used her intuitive powers to envisage what might have happened to Mike.” She said he had been shot in a bedroom by a woman with a revolver. In fact he was shot out on a lake by a man with a shotgun.

If you read enough true crime you’ll find this happens a lot. When the police are at a dead end they’ll talk to psychics. But it always surprises me. This is the twenty-first century. Why do this?

Takeaways:

I’ll throw out a couple of quotes here, both relating to the theme of “us and them” we experience when reading true crime:

It’s easy to assume that familiarity robs a story of its intrinsic interest, but the contrary is true – events are uniquely engrossing when they’re closer to home. The more alike we are, the more hypersensitive we become to tiny differences. . . . We don’t want to accept how similar we are to someone who’s done something reprehensible, so we exaggerate minor distinctions to separate ourselves from them. We try to find an otherness to disguise our sameness.

And:

People are murdered because they are loved, because they were once loved, or because they stand in the way of love. When a person kills another out of the blue, if they’re not mentally ill, we assume they must be in the grip of some great passion: rage, desire, jealousy, greed, or lust for revenge.

Most of us don’t commit murder, even though we might sometimes want to, because our fear of the consequences outweighs the impulse or the desire of the moment. It seems impossible to believe that two otherwise rational, God-fearing people would decide to kill someone rather than contemplate divorce. But it happens all the time. People aren’t reasonable. God-fearing people sometimes least of all.

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