Our First Live Book Club: A Murder in Florida

You may have heard we’ve launched a book club. Every month a Free Press writer recommends a current book and a classic one that echoes its themes. Now, we’re adding an extra cherry on top. We’re bringing back the old-fashioned book tour and doing it our way: with IRL events in cities and towns across America.

This month is the very first one and we have spots for 60 of you. Our host is River Page. The book is true-crime thriller Guilty Creatures by Mikita Brottman, which tells the story of adultery and murder committed by two God-fearing Baptists in Tallahassee, Florida. On Wednesday, July 24, Mikita will join River at the scene of the crime—well, close enough, at an indie bookstore in Florida—to talk about lust, God, death, and Southern Gothic. If you’re a paid subscriber, you can find out more about the event at the end of this piece. (Next month: East Coast! Details TBD.)

And now, here’s River’s essay about the book and the classic work he’s chosen to pair it with.
—Freya Sanders

Every Saturday in Pensacola, members of a local Baptist sect called the Ruckmanites gather on street corners to yell at you in your car. A few weeks ago, one of them, a man of about 30 wearing a blue polo shirt, pointed his King James Bible at me and started preaching. I know it was a King James Version because it’s the only Bible the Ruckmanites believe is accurate; it’s kind of their whole thing. I had the AC cranked up high and I couldn’t hear him, but I think he asked me if I’d been redeemed. I grew up in a Baptist church in East Texas. I gave him a thumbs-up.

I was on my way across the state line to Baldwin County, Alabama, to help my friend Kim open her new food truck in Summerdale, population 1,468. Business was slow, but it was fine, she said, because she planned to open on Sunday and catch the Assembly of God people on their way home from church. We closed early and I got back in my car, pulled out onto Highway 59 between the porn shop and the Walmart, and drove past the fiery billboard that says, “Don’t Forget About Hell.” 

I hadn’t. In the South, nobody can, whether you are on your way to Walmart, the porn shop, or a lesbian’s food truck. Christ haunts you through billboards and street preachers and, assuming you’re from here, in your own head most of all. The South isn’t the last place in America where people believe in God, but it is the last place where people fear him, the last place people can’t get him out of their heads, even if they want to. If you want to understand Southerners, you need to understand this.

You could start by reading the novels of Flannery O’Connor, who was born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, to a well-established Irish Catholic family. A few years before she died, she wrote an essay about Southern authors, and their obsession with what she calls the “grotesque”: “I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered,” she wrote, “it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”

Practically everything she wrote was about God, although critics often failed to realize it at the time. But her Christ-hauntedness is obvious in her debut novel, Wise Blood. Published in 1952, the book follows Hazel Motes, the grandson of an itinerant preacher who loses his devout Christian faith after fighting in World War II. After returning to the South to find his rural family home abandoned, the directionless young veteran moves to Taulkinham, a fictional Southern city, where he is drawn to a blind street preacher named Asa Hawks.

When Hawks suggests that Hazel’s interest in him is evidence of a suppressed desire for Christian salvation, Motes rebuffs him and declares his intent to start what he calls “The Church Without Christ.” To advance this newfound purpose, Hazel becomes an anti-God street preacher.

But nobody quite seems to believe that Hazel is actually an atheist. He protests too much. “The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God,” O’Connor once wrote. It’s obvious to everyone, including the reader, that Motes believes in God, perhaps more than anybody; he’s just angry that God won’t leave him alone. Wherever he goes and whoever he talks to, he can’t stop seeing Christ, most of all in himself.

Even after he murders a man. 

Wise Blood was on my mind when I read Mikita Brottman’s forthcoming book Guilty Creatures, a true-crime saga about the disappearance of a real estate adjuster from Tallahassee, Florida. I couldn’t put it down, and to me it illustrates how the South is still Christ-haunted. It follows two devout Baptist couples, Mike and Denise Williams and Brian and Kathy Winchester, lifelong friends who met as high schoolers at a private Christian school. On the surface, their lives seemed idyllic—until December 16, 2000, when Mike disappeared while duck hunting in a nearby lake. 

His body was never found. Investigators assumed Mike had drowned and the corpse had been eaten by alligators. But some in Tallahassee—most of all Mike’s mother, who spent years hounding police and local press—suspected that there was more to the story.

They were right. 

Guilty Creatures reveals how the truth unraveled. Denise, Mike’s wife, had been having an affair with Brian, his longtime best friend. They wanted to be together, but they thought divorce was against the Bible.

But, somewhat counterintuitively, the two became even more religious as their affair intensified, believing God wanted them to be together. Most Baptists believe that God can and does “speak” to people inside their own heads. Distinguishing your own impulses from the voice of God isn’t always easy.

It wasn’t supposed to be murder. It was supposed to be, Brottman writes, a “test of God’s will.” 

Brian invited Mike on a duck hunting trip on Lake Seminole, a man-made reservoir about an hour’s drive away from Tallahassee, and pushed Mike into the water. Mike was wearing the kind of waders that fill up with water quickly and can drag a person down almost immediately. If Mike somehow survived, Brian and Denise reasoned, it would be a miracle from God. 

But Mike didn’t drown. He quickly ripped off his waders, swam to a nearby tree stump jutting out of the water, and began screaming. Panicked, Brian shot him point blank and buried his corpse along the shore of a different lake nearly 60 miles away.

The plot was partly motivated by Denise’s desire to maintain her reputation. This does not surprise me. Catholics have mortal sins like murder, which imperil your soul, and venial sins, which don’t, like flipping someone off in traffic. Theologically, Southern Baptists generally believe all sins are equal in the eyes of God, but socially, we have regular sins and white trash sins, which are worse. Where I grew up, people “went across the river” to the next county over to buy alcohol, because the idea of buying it in front of the whole town embarrassed them. As a teenager, I worked at a grocery store and once I checked out a lady from our church who had a half-dozen bottles of cheap wine. Unprompted, she said, “Now honey, I don’t drink this mess, I just collect the bottles.” We both pretended that was true because it was the polite thing to do, even though she’d said the same thing the week before, when she bought the exact same bottles of wine.

Open secrets are a mainstay of Southern culture—and according to some in Tallahassee, the affair between Brian and Denise was one. But the facade matters. In the South there are two of you: the person you present to the world and the one the world gossips about. The first matters more because gossiping is a sin, and in the South people sin privately. 

But “well-to-do Southern Baptist adulterers kill husband to spare reputation” isn’t the whole story. A psychoanalyst by trade, Brottman delves deeply into the minds of her subjects, and she shows how every part of their crime and what came after was enmeshed in Christian theology, stretched and bent to their nefarious will. Brian and Denise compared themselves to King David and Bathsheba. In the Biblical story, David had an affair with the married Bathsheba and, in order to marry her, had her husband sent to the front lines of a war to be killed—yet the Bible still referred to him as a “man after God’s own heart.” 

Southern Baptists generally adhere to the theological doctrine of eternal security, which means that once saved, no sin, no matter how grave, can keep a person out of heaven. Even if he strays into a life of sin, a truly saved person will always be called back to the fold, kicking and screaming if need be. O’Connor’s Wise Blood is very Southern in this respect: despite running away from God and murdering a man, Hazel dies a saint. And the murderers of Guilty Creatures become more pious in their guilt. Denise co-founds a women’s prison ministry. Brian begins a spiritual “training regime,” reading heavily from the Bible and Christian self-help books. One could hardly say that these Southerners are “Christ-centered,” but they were “Christ-haunted”—like the South Flannery O’Connor describes.

This is what makes the South different, and it can be traced back to the Second Great Awakening, a religious revival that occurred in America between the late 1700s to around 1835. It shifted the theology of many Protestant denominations away from strict Calvinism—which posits that God creates some people to be saved and others to be damned—toward Arminian theology, or what we’d today roughly call evangelicalism, which preaches the idea that salvation is available to all. Arminians maintain one of Calvinism’s central conceits, however: the “total depravity of man,” which states that because of what happened in the Garden of Eden, we are all born into a state of spiritual separation from God and enslaved to a life of sin. We are born evil, in a sense, and it is in our nature to sin.

The Second Great Awakening happened in both the North and the South, but the effects of the evangelical revolution lasted here. As the North globalized, evangelical Christianity became a subcultural phenomenon, and Northerners often forget that it still pervades the everyday lives of the people who live in the South, particularly outside of the big cities. They forget that society here is based on the idea that though salvation can be achieved through faith alone, the newly saved person’s psyche, or soul, becomes a site of spiritual warfare. The Holy Ghost tries to keep him close to God; his sinful nature tries to take him further away. 

Like the billboard says: Don’t forget about hell.

If you care about supporting independent bookstores, preorder Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida (published July 23) and Wise Blood on Bookshop.org.

If you want to use your Amazon subscription, or buy on your Kindle, Guilty Creatures (published July 23) and Wise Blood are available there. 

And if you want to join the conversation—or attend our first-ever live book club event—become a paying subscriber today, and scroll on.

The Free Press earns a commission from all qualifying purchases made through book links in this article, including as an Amazon Associate.

On Wednesday, July 24, at 7 p.m., Mikita Brottman will join River Page at Happy Medium Books Café in Jacksonville, Florida, to discuss all things Southern Gothic. The conversation will be introduced by The Free Press’s Francesca Block—who, from her recent reporting, knows a thing or two about true crime and terrible divorces. Tickets are completely free for paying subscribers, but they are limited to 60 people—so to avoid disappointment, please reserve yours today. Use the password TFPINFLORIDA.

If you can’t make it, we still want to hear from you! Leave a question in the comments below, and we’ll make sure to feature the best ones.

River Page is a reporter at The Free Press. Follow him on X @river_is_nice, and read his piece “Stop Saying Florida Isn’t Safe for Gay People. It’s Fine.”