Episode 164: Brittany Davis – Bite-Sized Crime

When a woman doesn’t return after an island vacation, the investigation reveals a complicated web of lies and deceit. What happened to Brittany Davis?

Episode Media

Brittany Michelle Davis *(Greenville PD)*

Forensic sketch of Gwinnett County Jane Doe *(Gwinnett County PD)*

Michael Lee Wilkerson *(Gwinnett County Jail)*

Episode Sources

Episode Transcript

Welcome back to Bite-Sized Crime. This week I’m bringing you a case from my home state, one that deserves more attention than it got at the time. This episode discusses sensitive topics, so listener discretion is advised.

In early 2020, 32-year-old Brittany Michelle Davis was living in Greenville, South Carolina, a vibrant city in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Brittany’s family and friends described her as being full of life, the type of person who never met a stranger and was always willing to help someone in need. Brittany was close to her family, especially her mother Melanie, and stayed in constant contact through text and social media.

In mid-February, Brittany texted several people to say that she was going on a trip to Puerto Rico. This wasn’t too surprising; Brittany had fallen in love with the island on previous trips, and it quickly became her favorite vacation spot. While she was gone, she sent several messages to family and friends, saying she’d be back home soon. She even texted her mom details about her return trip, but Melanie got worried when she didn’t hear from Brittany after she had planned to be back in Greenville. Usually her daughter would have called her to gush about her vacation, but Brittany had suddenly stopped communicating. She wasn’t answering her phone or responding to any messages, and she hadn’t been active on social media in a while. Concerned that something had happened to her daughter in Puerto Rico, Melanie contacted the Greenville Police Department and reported her missing.

Brittany’s family made missing flyers and began circulating her picture on social media, asking anyone who had seen Brittany to contact them. They listed her last known location as San Juan, Puerto Rico, and her last date of contact as March 7, 2020. But they would soon discover that the truth was much more complicated.

In her podcast “In Killing Color,” Brittany’s longtime friend Candra spoke about what it had been like to learn that Brittany was missing. She recalled being shocked when someone sent her Brittany’s missing flyer, desperate to believe that it wasn’t true. But then she thought about her last few interactions with Brittany on social media. There had been something off about the way Brittany had written her messages, but Candra hadn’t been able to put her finger on it at the time. Now she wondered if someone else had been behind the screen.

Candra and some of Brittany’s other friends decided to band together and find out the truth, starting with Brittany’s social media. They noticed that all of her accounts had recently been deactivated, but a few hours after Brittany’s missing flyer started circulating, her Instagram account suddenly popped back up again. The account creation date was listed as March 2020 and it was connected to an email address that wasn’t Brittany’s.

Now her friends were really concerned. Brittany had used the same email account for years, and this wasn’t it. They managed to guess Brittany’s password and gained access to her real email, feeling that the truth might be somewhere inside. In her inbox, they found a receipt from Uber dating back to February 12, 2020. It appeared that Brittany had ordered a rideshare from a nightclub in Greenville called Bucks, Racks & Ribs in the early morning hours. She had taken the Uber back to the house she shared with her fiancé Michael. Strangely, there were no Uber receipts after that, even though Brittany used the service often. Even more strange was the fact that there were no emails related to her Puerto Rican vacation.

In Brittany’s Sent folder, her friends discovered dozens of emails from February and March that didn’t quite match Brittany’s tone and cadence. There was an email from February 12th – the same day she had been at the nightclub – in which Brittany told her boss that she would be out of town for a week due to a family emergency. Her friends noticed that the writer’s voice didn’t sound like Brittany at all, and they had used double spaces, which was not Brittany’s style.

Then, her friends found an email dated February 15th in which Brittany was breaking up with Michael. Again, something about the tone didn’t feel right, so her friends copied the entire text of the email and put it into Google. It came back as a match to several generic templates for breaking up with the perfect boyfriend.

This was the final straw. Brittany’s friends knew something bad had happened – she was not the one writing these emails, not the one they had been texting with and messaging on social media over the past few weeks.

Around the same time her friends were making this shocking discovery, Greenville detectives were pulling Brittany’s phone records. They reached out to Brittany’s friends after finding their phone numbers in her contacts, and the friends were able to pass along the information they had gleaned from Brittany’s email.

As investigators began to dig further into the case, it didn’t take them long to realize that Brittany hadn’t actually gone to Puerto Rico. In fact, she hadn’t been seen in person since February 12th, and all of her communication since then had likely been conducted by an imposter.

Naturally, the first person they looked at was Brittany’s fiancé, Michael Lee Wilkerson. Brittany and Michael had been seeing each other for a few years and had gotten engaged sometime in 2019, in spite of the fact that Michael was already married and had been since 2006. According to Candra, Brittany knew about Michael’s wife and children, but Michael had told her that they were estranged and were going to get divorced. Brittany’s family and friends might not have agreed with her choice to be with Michael, but they tried to support her anyway.

Investigators, however, were not so generous towards Michael Wilkerson. They believed that he had done something to Brittany and had pretended to be her so her friends and family wouldn’t notice she was gone. They just had to prove it.

Using cell phone data and bank records, investigators were able to put together a timeline of Brittany’s and Michael’s movements around the time of her disappearance. Brittany’s last phone call was made on February 11, 2020. That night, she and Michael went to the nightclub, but they didn’t leave together. Shortly after 1am on February 12th, Brittany used her phone to order an Uber. Michael must have made it home before Brittany, because his email account was accessed at 1:25am from their home’s IP address. Brittany’s Uber dropped her off at 1:49am.

Michael’s phone activity on February 12th was very interesting. There was no activity at all until just after 3pm when his phone pinged at their house on McDaniel Avenue. Hours later, at 8:42pm, his phone pinged in Braselton, Georgia, 100 miles from Greenville. Somewhere along the way, Brittany’s debit card was used at a Home Depot. Investigators confirmed that Michael had used it to purchase trash bags, lighter fluid, drain cleaner, and a suitcase. When he returned to Greenville, he used Brittany’s card to purchase a car wash. That night, Brittany’s phone was used to send an email to her boss, saying she would be gone for a week. Investigators believed that Michael was hoping to buy himself some time before anyone noticed Brittany was missing.

Over the following weeks, Michael continued his attempts to cover his tracks. On February 13th, he rented a storage unit in Georgia. The same day, he met up with his supposedly estranged wife. On February 14th, his iCloud logged a search for “Break-up letters for the perfect man,” which he used to compose a fake email from Brittany to himself on the 15th. On February 16th, he used Brittany’s email to tell their landlord that she was moving out, but the landlord told investigators that they never actually saw Brittany leave or take any of her belongings. Michael apparently stayed in the house until the end of February, when he moved back to Georgia to be with his wife and kids.

Michael also leaned heavily into his lie about Brittany’s trip to Puerto Rico. On February 29th, his iCloud showed that he had taken old pictures from Brittany’s phone from a previous trip to the island and sent them to her family and friends. He corresponded with them as Brittany for over a week, acting like she was having a great time on vacation. He even purchased airline tickets, and on March 9th, he sent Brittany’s mom pictures of the flight itinerary and boarding passes, saying that she was on her way home. Of course, there was no evidence that Brittany had ever boarded a flight.

At this point, it seemed as though Michael started to worry that his ruse wouldn’t last. He stopped communicating from Brittany’s phone, and on March 10th, all of Brittany’s social media accounts were deactivated from the same IP address in Georgia where Michael was living with his wife. When Brittany’s family reached out to him to ask if he had seen her, he told them they had broken up around Valentine’s Day and he didn’t know where she was. But investigators knew better. Every ping from Brittany’s phone matched the locations where they knew Michael had been. Every piece of evidence led them to the tragic conclusion that Brittany was no longer alive, and that Michael Wilkerson was responsible.

Unfortunately, without physical proof, laying charges against him would be an uphill battle. Prosecutors decided to wait and gather more evidence in the hopes that they would be able to find Brittany.

The waiting was torturous for Brittany’s family and friends. In February of 2021, one year after Brittany disappeared, her mother Melanie spoke to FOX Carolina about the difficult journey they had been on. “The hole in my heart still bleeds for her… What parent wants to think that their child is dead? I don’t.”

Melanie also spoke directly to her daughter in case she was watching, saying, “I love you. I miss you so much. I’ll never give up. As long as there’s breath in my body, I’m gonna always search.”

On April 11, 2021, an officer with the Gwinnett County Police Department responded to a call about trash dumping behind a strip mall in Buford, Georgia. The officer walked down a small path in the heavily wooded area behind the mall and discovered a tent, as though someone had been squatting there, but no one was around. Then, the officer noticed something in the brush. It appeared to be a human skull.

Forensic teams were called to the area, where they roped off the scene and began searching for more remains. They were able to recover several small bones, but not much else. The remains were taken to the office of the medical examiner, who determined that they likely belonged to a woman between the ages of 18 and 30. Although they could not determine the cause and manner of death, the medical examiner believed the remains had been in the woods for at least a year or more.

The remains were entered into the national NamUs database as Gwinnett County Jane Doe, and officials released a forensic sketch of what they believed the woman may have looked like when she was alive. A DNA sample was sent to the DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit organization that uses genetic genealogy to identify unknown remains. Finally, in August of 2021, Jane Doe was confirmed to be Brittany Michelle Davis.

After the identification, authorities moved quickly. Michael Lee Wilkerson was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. He was booked into the Gwinnett County Jail before being extradited back to South Carolina.

At his bond hearing in February of 2022, Michael’s attorney requested that he be allowed to return to Georgia on bond so he could be with his family and support them financially. But the state asked the judge to deny his bond, saying that he was a flight risk with connections in multiple states and countries. He had several active felony charges in North Carolina that he was trying to evade – he couldn’t be trusted to show up for court hearings on his own.

Brittany’s family was given the opportunity to speak to the court. Through tears, Melanie told the judge that the past two years had been agony. “I don’t wish this kind of pain and hurt on anybody. To say it’s been a nightmare is an understatement because eventually you wake up. But I can’t wake up. It was mentioned about his kids and how he can’t be with his [family]. But what about this mom and my boys without my daughter?”

Ultimately, the judge denied bond, and Michael Wilkerson was sent back to the Greenville County Detention Center. As of this recording, he is still in jail awaiting trial, and Brittany’s family is still awaiting justice.

Brittany Michelle Davis was a bright, kind woman who loved her family and brought light into the world. She deserved to live a long and happy life. May her memory be a blessing to those who loved her.

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic abuse, please contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or text START to 88788 for free and confidential help. You don’t have to suffer alone.