Update 4:50 p.m. Testimony adjourns for the day

Jurors will return at 9 a.m. Wednesday when they will hear the cross examination of Brian Winchester by Denise Williams' defense team.

Update: 4:10 p.m.: Brian Winchester testifies

Brian Winchester began his testimony brimming with emotion, his voice cracking and choking back tears, before regaining his composure and detailing for the jury his account of his long affair with Denise Williams and plans to kill him so they could be together and collect his life insurance money.

Handcuffed and clad in a blue prison uniform, Brian described in detail how the affair began. On Oct. 13, 1997, he said he and his wife, Kathy, and Denise and Mike all went to Floyd’s for a Sister Hazel concert. He and Denise jumped out of the car while their spouses parked. Inside the club they kissed and made out for the first time.

They went home with their respective spouses but talked on the phone all night and had phone sex.

“We just connected like nobody else,” he said. “It snowballed really fast.”

They started meeting when Mike was at work and snuck around at night leaving their vehicles at commercial or church parking lots and rendezvousing at one or the other’s house. They took trips together, to Destin, New York City, South Beach. Winchester even secretly tagged along when Denise went out of town with Mike for a conference.

“We spent a lot of time together,” he said.

They began talking about getting rid of their spouses about a year and a half into their affair, Winchester said. He and Denise considered a couple of ideas, including seeing both their spouses drown in a staged boating accident in which he and Denise would survive.

“The more we were together the more we wanted to be together,” he said. “I’m not going here and saying Denise planned all of it … It was mutual we wanted to be together and we weren’t going to let anything stop that.”

But Winchester balked at the idea of killing the mother of his child, so they settled on just getting rid of Mike in what was made to look like a boating accident. Winchester would push him from the boat. They rationalized it wouldn’t be murder.

We thought “if God wants this to happen then it’s going to happen because it was going to be an accident and he could get out of it,” he said.

Winchester went on to detail how he lured Mike out to Lake Seminole, encouraging him to put on his waders, motoring out on the water into the darkness and pushing him out of the boat. When Mike surfaced and began struggling, holding onto a tree stump, panicked and confused, Winchester didn’t know what to do.

“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 paused, “in the head.”

Wiping his nose and eyes with a tissue, he continued, explaining how adrenaline enabled him to pull Mike’s dead body from the water and into the back of his Suburban. As he drove back to Tallahassee he tried to figure out where he was going to dispose of the body.

“It had to be close and it had to be quick and obviously it needed to be a location where he wouldn’t be found,” he said. “I saw blood coming out of my tailgate and that freaked me out.”

Winchester settled on Carr Lake in northern Leon County. The lake was dry at the time, and Winchester said he dug the hole at the edge of the lakebed. As he did so he was bit by ants and he worried their red stings would give him away.

How did we get here? See the search, listen to a confession and watch a wife’s interrogation

From there he drove to a carwash at Tharpe Avenue and Old Bainbridge Road to power wash the blood from his vehicle.

Then he went back to Lake Seminole and joined in with his dad, Marcus, in what he knew was a bogus search.

“He was searching and I was just lying,” Winchester said, crying at the mention of his father. “My dad didn’t want to give up. My dad loved Mike.”

Winchester doubled over unable to continue speaking. The judge called for a 10 minute break.

Update 2:45 p.m. — Suspicions raised in missing boater case

The investigation into the disappearance of Mike Williams took a turn toward a suspicious death in about 2007.

Denise Williams, his widow, had married his best friend Brian Winchester and had collected life insurance money.

But something didn’t look right to State Attorneys Office investigator Tully Sparkman. He’d worked as an FWC officer and had responded to several drownings.

“I’ve never been to one that the body did not float or was not recovered,” Sparkman told jurors. “So that became suspicious in itself.”

He said Denise Williams’ marriage to Brian Winchester also piqued his interest as did missing parts of the timeline in people’s alibis, evidence that was found and who found it.

Assistant State Attorney Jon Fuchs meticulously walked witnesses through the case which was “Handcuffed” by a lack of physical evidence because Mike’s disappearance initially was not considered a crime, but a missing person.

In 2010, retired FDLE investigator Mike DeVaney started working the case.

Up until that point, Mike Williams was a missing boater. But DeVaney started to review the evidence that had been collected. All they had was a few interviews conducted at the time Williams disappeared and a few bits of physical evidence.

“When this first case was first investigated it was investigated as a missing person’s case,” DeVaney said. “Any information we could have had at the time was lost.”

DeVaney said after a review of the evidence, a group of law enforcement started to develop two prime suspects: Denise Williams and Brian Winchester.

“Taking the information in its whole a lot of things didn’t quite make sense,” DeVaney told jurors. “Too many things were unanswered.”

During the cross examination of state witnesses, Denise’s defense team hammered on that lack of hard evidence, driving home their key argument that the state only has the assertion of a vengeful killer that Denise was involved in Mike’s death.

Winchester is about to testify.

Update 1:06 p.m. — Witnesses detail extensive Lake Seminole search for Mike Williams

After opening statements, prosecutors called witnesses to establish the exhaustive search for Mike Williams and the evidence discovered in the months after he was classified as a missing person after vanishing while hunting at Lake Seminole.

Brian Winchester, Mike Williams' best friend who confessed to shooting him in the face, is expected to testify later this afternoon. Winchester's confession led to the arrest of Williams' widow, Denise Williams.

Greg Morris, a retired Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officer, described the first call of a missing hunter and the initial search that started the same day.

►WATCH LIVE NOW: Denise Williams murder trial

He said an approaching cold front dipped temperatures on Dec. 16, 2000, from the balmy 70s into the teens overnight.

He said he met Denise’s father, a very concerned Warren Merrell, at the boat ramp along River Road in Sneads, about 60 miles west of Tallahassee, where Williams’ Ford Bronco was parked with an empty boat trailer.

The next day Williams’ boat was found about 75 yards from the ramp.

Jurors also heard from Mike Williams’ friend Scott Dungey, who searched for months. His testimony was pre-recorded on video because Dungey is traveling out of the country.

At first Dungey said he searched for Williams in the hope he’d fallen out of the boat and swam to shore. After a while hope faded and searcher turned to probing the lakebed for a body. He said he never saw blood on Williams’ boat or signs of a struggle.

Read More:From duck hunting disappearance to murder charge: A timeline of the Mike Williams case

"The first couple days it was a search and rescue operation,” Dungey said. “After that it became evident it was a body recovery effort.”

Dungey said that while searching from the air he noticed alligators in the area, a sighting which lent to investigators' incorrect theory that Mike Williams had fallen out of his hunting boat, drowned and was eaten by alligators.

Jurors also heard from a Sneads fisherman, Joe Sheffield, who frequented Lake Seminole and was fishing for speckled perch in June, six months after Williams’ disappearance.

Sheffield told jurors he found a pair of waders growing algae and covered in sediment floating near the surface of the water. He said a pouch containing steel shot shotgun shells, used in duck hunting, was attached.

Mike Williams' hunting license was found inside.

“Obviously it was his waders,” he said. “They were in the area where he had gone missing.”

Divers would arrive shortly after to find other items belonging to Mike Williams — including his camo jacket and a flashlight — located in a deep hole on the western side of the lake previously was scoured by search teams.

Noon update:

Testimony will resume after a lunch break at 1 p.m.

Update 10:56 a.m — 'Mr. Winchester has a motive to lie to you'

Denise Williams’ attorney Philip Padovano was clear in his opening statement to jurors.

Padovano told jurors that although his client is charged with her first husband Mike Williams’ murder, she had nothing to do with it.

He dissected the confession of Mike Williams’ best friend Brian Winchester, in which he said he shot Williams in the face during a duck hunting trip on Lake Seminole and buried the body as part of a plot devised along with Denise Williams.

WATCH LIVE: Denise Williams murder trial

“There is no tangible evidence or physical evidence tying Denise Williams to this crime,” he said. “All you will have to go on is the word of the man who actually committed the murder.”

Padovano was brief, his statement only took about 25 minutes. But in it, he said that Winchester, who was granted immunity for his confession that led to Denise Williams’ arrest in May, has a reason to be deceptive.

Winchester and Denise Williams married five years after the murder, but as it unraveled and they were looking at divorce, he kidnapped her at gunpoint in Aug. 2016.

“Mr. Winchester has a motive to lie to you, he has a motive to make up this accusation against Mrs. Williams,” Padovano said. “He didn’t mention anything about her alleged participation in this murder until he realized he was facing a life sentence in this kidnapping and after he realized Mrs. Williams was going to go into court and ask for a life sentence.”

Update 10:12 a.m — State lays out case of 'sex, lies and deceit' in Mike Williams disappearance

Assistant State Attorney Jon Fuchs laid out in his 30-minute opening statement the exhaustive search for Mike Williams’ body in 2000 in Lake Seminole and how after six months – though his waders, jacket, flashlight and hunting license were found – he remained missing.

He told jurors of the $1.75 million in insurance money Denise Williams collected upon his death. He detailed the moments before Mike was shot and killed by his best friend Brian Winchester while struggling in the cold waters of Lake Seminole.

He detailed how, although it at first appeared the Mike Williams had drowned and may have been eaten by alligators, he was in fact murdered.

“What you’re going to hear is that he never came back,” Fuchs told jurors. “At the time of the event no one knew we would get to where we are today.”

Fuchs told the jury Winchester and Denise Williams, who is charged with her husband's murder, dated for three years prior to Mike Williams’ murder. He also said evidence will show Brian, his former wife Kathy Thomas and Denise Williams had sexual relations together in Panama City before Mike Williams was killed.

Thomas and Winchester later divorced and in 2005, he and Denise Williams got married. That union began unraveling by 2012 and in August 2016 Winchester kidnapped her at gunpoint. Shortly after he was arrested, Thomas will testify – and an audio recording will show -– Denise called Kathy and told her to “tell Marcus (Winchester’s father) to tell Brian I didn’t say anything to FDLE.”

Fuchs looked at the jury and asked, “why make that statement unless her and Brian Winchester were involved in this all along?”

He ended his opening statements by displaying a slide of Denise Williams’ mugshot emblazoned with the words “21 years of sex, lies and deceit. $1.75 million.”

Original story: Denise Williams murder trial begins

State prosecutors started their opening statements Tuesday morning, beginning to lay out their case against Denise Williams.

Williams, 48, is accused of plotting the murder of her husband and high school sweetheart, Mike Williams, 18 years ago and covering it up. She faces charges of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and accessory after the fact.

At the time he went missing, 31-year-old Mike Williams was believed to have drowned during a duck hunting accident at a lake in Jackson County and his body eaten by alligators. That was until his best friend, Brian Winchester, confessed that he’d shot Williams at point-blank range then transported his body back to Leon County as part of a plot Assistant State Attorney Jon Fuchs contends was devised along with Denise Williams.

Mike Williams’ body was found in the mud along the banks of Carr Lake in Leon County last fall.

Ethan Way, Williams' attorney, contends that she knew nothing of the plot or the murder and is innocent.

Fuchs is presenting the state's case while Williams' co-counsel Philip Padovano will present the defense argument.

Winchester, who married Denise Williams five years after she was widowed, confessed after he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for kidnapping her at gunpoint.

The trial is expected to last five days with members of the Williams and Winchester families, as wells as close friends, testifying on both sides.

Much of the state’s case relies on Winchester’s confession in which he said he shot his friend at the behest of Williams so they could be together without the shame of a divorce and she could collect more than $2 million in insurance policy money. She is facing separate insurance fraud charges.

Winchester was granted immunity for his role in Williams’ death and is set to testify at trial.

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