Adultery, a Corpse Eaten by Alligators and a $1 Million Insurance Payout

GUILTY CREATURES: Sex, God and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida,by Mikita Brottman

Were Mikita Brottman’s “Guilty Creatures” a work of fiction, the plot would be deemed clichéd: an affair, a missing body presumed eaten by alligators, a million-dollar life insurance payout and a beautiful widow who quickly finds love in the arms of her dead husband’s newly divorced best friend.

“Nobody believed Mike had drowned in Lake Seminole,” the author and psychoanalyst Brottman establishes, before dispensing with the missing body as the least interesting part of the story and turning her attention instead to the 17 years between Mike Williams’s disappearance and the conviction of his killers — justice (mostly) served.

The book opens with feathered bangs and hunting rifles: a 1988 yearbook from North Florida Christian High, a private Baptist school, “formerly a segregation academy and almost entirely white.” Here is where we get our first glimpse of the main players — the doomed victim, “quarterback Jerry Michael Williams, always known as Mike”; his girlfriend, Denise Merrell, three rows above; and to his left, Mike’s “best buddy,” Brian Winchester, along with Brian’s girlfriend, Kathy.

“The boys played football, the girls cheered them on,” Brottman tells us. Their world was as narrow as the yearbook, its rules dictated by strict church doctrine and their conservative families. After high school, all four attended Florida State University, living at home until the storybook inevitable. “Both couples married in 1994. Church weddings. Cake and lemonade.”

Right on cue, each pair had a child. And then, on Dec. 16, 2000 — his sixth wedding anniversary — Mike disappeared during a duck-hunting trip to Lake Seminole. Initially, alligators were the presumed suspects, or at least blamed for the absence of a body.