“Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida” by Mikita Brottman
c.2024 / One Signal Publishers / $28 / 280 pages
It’s all in the past.
Whether it was yesterday or two decades ago, what’s done is done. You can’t jump in a time machine and change it. It’s finished — but that doesn’t stop you from thinking about it, from turning the event over in your head this way and that. What happened is in the past but, as in the new book “Guilty Creatures” by Mikita Brottman, it’ll never be forgotten.
High school graduation is always bittersweet: everyone heads their separate ways, and nothing’s ever the same again — though for Mike Williams, Denise Merrell, Brian Winchester and Kathy Aldredge, very little would change. All four were raised in the Baptist faith, reared to love the Lord, and they were staying near family in Tallahassee, Florida.
Says Brottman, they made a “tight foursome.”
But there were cracks in their lives, starting almost immediately with Denise and Mike, who was a real estate appraiser. After the birth of their daughter, he became obsessed with work and money. He and Denise began having relationship problems, and Denise started hanging out more and more with Brian and Kathy — and then only with Brian.
Brian and Denise discussed divorce, but Denise clung to her faith — yet halting their affair was impossible, too. People talked, but so what? They were discreet, and they began discussing something different and dangerous: if Mike, who loved the outdoors, just happened to fall out of his boat and drown, wasn’t that God’s will?
On Dec. 16, 2000, Mike Williams left his house to go to a nearby lake for the day, and he never came home. With the help of friends, Denise quickly had him declared dead, so she could pay her bills. She received more than a million dollars in insurance money.
Brian divorced Kathy shortly afterward, which cleared the path for he and Denise to marry, settle down, and go on with their lives. Nearly two decades later, however, problems began to surface but, though they grew to hate it, they were together for life.
Says Brottman, “Their prenup was murder.”
Here’s the thing you need to know about “Guilty Creatures”: you know who did what, almost from the fifth page. Here’s another thing you need to know: you aren’t told how or why until this book screams to a blow-out of an ending.
As in most true crime stories, author Mikita Brottman keeps things tight, which had to have been a challenge: what happened in Tallahassee in those two decades was an awful lot like the tabloids, with serial bed-hopping, affairs, secrets, lies, an undercover agent — and, of course, a sordid murder, the discovery of which is told in properly gruesome ways. Yes, it’s complicated sometimes, but Brottman helps readers out by holding their attention fast to the story. A nice critique of the justice system makes further sense.
This is a good book for readers new to the genre, and one that all true crime fanatics will love. Find “Guilty Creatures” and settle in; it’s a book that should not be passed.
