TALLAHASSEE DEMOCRAT (Florida) 15 December 06 Experts poke holes in gator theory (Jennifer Portman)
They kept saying Mike Williams' body would float.
Everyone else who had accidentally drowned in Lake Seminole had surfaced. He would too, fish-and-game officers assured his family and friends. Maybe it would take a few extra days, what with temperatures below freezing, but he'd surface.
"We knew how long it should take - three to seven days," said Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission Officer David Arnette, a 30-year veteran who worked the initial case.
Only, Williams didn't pop up. Soon after, the alligator theory did.
"Everyone knows the lake is full of alligators," Arnette said. "You look for other answers: 'Why hasn't the body appeared?' ''
Jackson County sheriff's deputies reported seeing alligators in the area the night the search began. Six weeks later, members of a private search-and-rescue team also saw the reptiles around.
But in a case with more speculation than certainty, investigators today are convinced Williams was not eaten by alligators.
"That gator would have defied all known gator behavior," said Ronnie Austin, a former investigator with the Second Circuit State Attorney's Office, who was on the case before leaving last month for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Alligators in North Florida typically don't feed between November and March, when average temperatures drop below 65 degrees, reptile experts say. A cold front that blew in the day Williams disappeared delivered average air temperatures below 55 degrees for more than two weeks. Overnight lows dipped as far as 19 degrees.
"Given the water temperature in December and the air temperature, it was highly unlikely an alligator would have been active," said Matt Aresco, a Tallahassee herpetologist who was consulted on the case. "All they are doing is maintaining their body temperature."
The water was a chilly 58 degrees the day Williams was supposed to have drowned; two days later it had dropped to about 46 degrees. Before the cold spell ended, ice crept 20 feet out into the lake, one game officer reported. Officer Arnette said the only gators he saw during the search were small, frozen ones.
"Fifty-eight degrees is too cold for an alligator to be interested in food at all," Aresco said.
Some suggest Williams' body could have been caught in beds of dense hydrilla, then found in the spring by alligators and finished off by turtles and catfish.
"Man, that's a stretch," Aresco said. "It would be very, very unusual to have the complete disappearance of a full-grown man."
Still, the gator theory stuck, in part thanks to one sentence in a report by the now-disbanded Montgomery County Search and Rescue Inc., a private team Williams' mother contacted for help in late January.
"With the wildlife around, I would guess that the alligators have dismembered and have stored the remains in a location that we would not be able to find," wrote the group's dive-team leader, Gary Perdew.
The report was used to support the case for declaring Williams dead.
Experts poke holes in gator theory