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Due to the nature of this case, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of violence, child abuse, child death, and murder. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. Officer Scott Coonrod circled the perimeter of the Watts family home. He'd been called to do a wellness check on Shanann Watts, who wasn't answering any calls or texts. Her car was in the garage, but nobody was coming to the door.
Shanann and her two children, four-year-old Bella and three-year-old Cece, had apparently disappeared. But when her husband, Chris, parked in front of the house and trotted up the driveway, Officer Coonrod only felt more uneasy. The man had just learned that his pregnant wife and two young kids were missing. But instead of racing into the house to look for them, he stopped to exchange pleasantries with the officer.
Once inside, Chris seemed distracted. He kept looking at his phone. He didn't seem particularly invested in finding Shanann and the children. The man who lived next door offered to let the investigator look at the footage from the security camera in his driveway.
The video showed Chris' truck leaving for work around 5:30 that morning. But there was no sign of Shanann leaving the house or of anybody else arriving. The video itself wasn't remarkable, but Chris' reaction was. He kept looking at his phone or up at the ceiling. He was sweating. He seemed on the verge of panic.
Once the video stopped, Chris hurried out of the neighbor's house. The neighbor turned to Officer Coonrod and said what they were both thinking. He's not acting right.
I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast. You can find us here every Monday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at Serial Killers Podcast. We'd love to hear from you. If you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Stay with us. Hey, y'all. Marci Martin here with a little Tampax story. One time I went on vacation in the Bahamas with some friends, and of course, I got my period.
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Late in the summer of 2018, Shanann Watts worried that her marriage to Chris Watts was irreparably damaged. She didn't know for sure that Chris was having an affair, but she felt that he'd been pulling away from her for weeks. For the sake of their family, she was desperate to fix things. They had two young children, four-year-old Bella and three-year-old Cece. And Shanann was 15 weeks pregnant with their third.
On August 10th, Shanann left town for a training event in Scottsdale, Arizona, hosted by the direct sales company she worked for as a sales rep. She planned to return two nights later.
Chris and the children stayed at their home in Frederick, Colorado. On the afternoon of the 12th, Chris took the kids to a family friend's birthday party. The three of them seemed normal. At one point, Cece fell off the swing set and Chris ran to comfort her. The party host noted how good he seemed with the kids. Chris dutifully took pictures of the girls having fun at the party and texted them to Shanann. He told her they were all having a good time. Shanann responded,
Good, I'm glad. Okay, I love you. That evening around 5 p.m., Chris and the girls FaceTimed with Shanann to say goodnight. About an hour later, Shanann left her hotel for the airport. She texted Chris that she couldn't wait to be back home in bed. After a delay, she finally landed in Denver at 1.30 a.m.,
She got a ride home from her friend and fellow sales rep, Nikki Atkinson, arriving at the house just before 2. Chris was asleep when she got home, but he woke up when she climbed into bed. He felt her stirring. She seemed restless, unable to fall asleep. Chris said that Shanann began stroking his chest. He turned to face her, and they had sex.
He later said it felt strange, like it was some kind of test. It was as if Shanann wanted to know whether or not they still had a functional marriage. It felt wrong to Chris. He sensed that Shanann knew about his affair and he would soon have to come clean.
After they had sex, Chris fell asleep but woke up again not too long after, around 4 a.m. He got ready for work, then woke Shanann up to talk. He felt they had to have a discussion before he left the house. He later said he was worried that Shanann might be on the verge of leaving him and taking the kids with her. He didn't want to go to work until they'd at least gotten things out in the open.
As Chris sat on the bed looking down at Shanann, he realized he didn't know what he wanted to say. Did he want to save his marriage or end it? He wasn't sure. He wasn't even sure who he was anymore. He didn't feel like a husband or a father at that moment.
he felt like he was inhabited by a stranger. The old Chris had spent his entire life walking down a set path, one where the road felt safe and familiar beneath his feet. Now, the stranger in his head was beckoning him toward the darkness, and suddenly, he couldn't seem to find his footing.
Chris saw Shanann was crying. She knew it was over. The path was in shambles. The old Chris let the stranger take over. He became a new version of himself. And this one was filled with rage.
As they talked, Chris climbed on top of Shanann. His legs straddled her body. She told him to get off. He was hurting the baby. But he didn't. He told her that he didn't love her anymore. At some point, according to Chris, she told him that she was going to leave him and he'd never see his kids again.
In 2015, professor of criminology David Wilson co-authored a study on individuals who kill family members. The study collected data on family killings between 1980 and 2012. Researchers found that the threat of a family breakup was a top motivator behind such crimes. It was cited as the precursor to violence in 66% of the cases.
Chris later said he wasn't sure if he'd outright planned to kill his wife or not. He said, "It felt like there was already something in my mind that was implanted that I was going to do it, and when I woke up that morning, it was going to happen, and I had no control over it." On the morning of August 13th, Chris strangled Shanann. He said she didn't fight back, and he didn't know why. He thought maybe she was praying.
Moments later, Chris said their four-year-old daughter Bella came into the room, dragging her pink and blue blanket behind her. She saw her mother and asked Chris what happened.
Chris told her mommy didn't feel good. He wrapped Shanann's body in a sheet and brought her downstairs. Bella cried. He removed Shanann's wedding ring and left it on the kitchen counter. Then he brought her into the garage. He went out to the driveway where his truck was parked and backed it partway into the garage.
he lay her on the bench seat in the back of his truck. Then he slipped a trash bag over Shanann's head and another over her feet, completely covering her. When he got back to the house, three-year-old Cece had also woken up and was out of bed. Chris loaded the two little girls into the truck.
He began to drive. The girls quickly fell asleep, leaning against each other. Chris later said his mind was empty. He wasn't thinking about anything at all. Chris drove to a remote oil site owned by his employer. He was scheduled to examine an oil leak on the site that morning. When he got there, around 6:30 a.m., the field was empty. Nobody else had arrived yet.
Chris took out Shanann's body and laid it on the ground. Then he returned to his car. Chris turned to the children in the back seat. First, he strangled Cece in the back of the truck. Bella remained in her seat, watching her own father murder her sister. She didn't say a word.
At the corner of the oil field, two large tanks loomed over the site. Each tank stored 400 barrels, or 16,800 gallons, of crude oil. Chris took Cece's body over to the tanks. He carried her up a metal staircase to the top. There he opened the hatch, just a small opening about eight inches wide. Chris dropped Cece's body inside.
He then returned to the truck and strangled Bella before putting her body in the same oil tank. Chris returned to Shanann. He dug out a shallow grave about 100 yards away from the oil tanks. He put Shanann's body inside, then covered her with dirt.
After the murders, Chris waited until his co-workers began to show up at the site about an hour later. He'd tried to act normal. He'd hidden the bodies in a location that was remote enough he thought it was unlikely that anybody might stumble upon them. All he had to do was act like nothing was wrong while he tried to figure out what to do next.
But Chris had no way of knowing how quickly his cover-up would unravel. In the early morning hours of August 13th, 2018, Chris Watts murdered his pregnant wife, Shanann, and their two children, Bella and Cece.
Chris went to work that morning at a remote oil site near Roggen, Colorado. His coworkers that day knew he'd been first to arrive at the job site. What they didn't know was that he had hidden the bodies of his wife and children there.
Over the course of that morning, Chris took breaks from his work to make several phone calls and texts. He called his children's private school and told them they would no longer be attending. He also reached out to his realtor to talk about selling his house. The realtor and the preschool staffer both found it strange that Chris called them. They were used to speaking with Shanann.
Some of Chris's coworkers also noticed a few details that stuck out as odd. Chris had come to the site to inspect a leak near the oil wellhead, but he had parked his truck next to the tanks, nowhere near the leak. They also noted that his boots and shirt were shabbier than usual,
After the murders, Chris threw out the clothes he was wearing and changed into an old set of spare work clothes he kept in his truck. According to a work acquaintance, Chris also seemed rather quiet. Then again, he normally had a reserved demeanor, so his behavior didn't seem that out of the ordinary. Shanann's silence, though, immediately caught the attention of her friends and family.
Shanann was an active Facebook user, posting multiple times a day, every day. Her friend Nikki Atkinson noted Shanann's quiet Facebook activity just a few hours after her death. She tried calling and texting Shanann to see if she was okay and got no response. It worried her enough that she called the police and asked them to do a wellness check around 9 a.m.
When they weren't able to send someone right away, Nikki went to the Watts house herself. She saw that Shanann's car was still in the garage. Nikki thought she must be home. But no matter how hard she knocked, nobody answered. Nikki knew the code to the front door's lock. However, she discovered that the door was also locked from the inside with a sliding safety latch.
Nikki called Chris and told him she was worried that something happened to Shanann. She thought perhaps she'd gotten sick and passed out. Over the phone, he tried to allay her fears. He told her Shanann had taken the girls on a playdate.
Nikki wasn't convinced. This excuse didn't explain why Shanann wasn't answering her texts. And if Shanann had really taken the girls out, why was her car still there? She had a gut feeling that something horrible had happened. She called the police again and then told Chris they were on their way.
Chris quickly left work to come home. He stopped at a construction dumpster on the way back. He deposited the blanket he'd used to cover the girls' heads before strangling them. He also threw away the clothes he'd been wearing that morning. He texted his girlfriend to tell her his family had gone missing. Then he went home to meet the police. ♪
That afternoon, police officers questioned Chris at the house. He told them the same thing he'd told Nikki, that Shanann had taken the girls on a playdate. He didn't know where they were. When he left for work that morning, Shanann had been home and the girls were asleep in bed. He also told them that he and Shanann had had an emotional conversation that morning. They'd discussed divorce.
Chris pretended to find Shanann's wedding ring in the kitchen and showed it to the police. He hoped to make it look like she'd placed it there as a signal that she was leaving him. Officers probed Chris about the state of his marriage. They asked about infidelity. Chris lied, telling them that he never cheated on Shanann. Instead, he suggested Shanann might be seeing someone else.
Chris gave police permission to search the house. They found Shanann's cell phone, wallet, purse, and medication inside. It seemed unlikely that she'd left the house without any of these belongings. Chris's story didn't seem to add up.
That evening, police canvassed the neighborhood and put out a press release about the missing woman and children. The next day, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation activated an endangered missing alert for the family. They urged the public to spread the message on social media in the hopes that someone might call in with a lead.
Chris gave a television interview in which he begged for his wife and children's safe return. He talked about how much he missed them. He concluded, "I need to see everybody. I need to see everybody again. This house is not complete without anybody here."
Many watching found the interview odd. Although the literal words themselves reflected worry, Chris didn't show any emotion when he spoke. Psychotherapist Lena Derholly was struck by how indifferent he seemed when talking about his family. Derholly later wrote a book about Chris and noted that it was this initial interview that first drew her attention to the case.
She described how his voice remained monotone, mixed with little laughs and suppressed smirks. Although Chris's behavior struck some as peculiar, the interview drew attention to the case. Word spread about the disappearance of Shanann, Bella, and Cece.
Chris's girlfriend, 30-year-old Nicole Kessinger, read more and more about the case. Based on what Chris had already told her, Nicole thought that Shanann had left him and taken the kids with her. But news reports contained some details Chris hadn't shared, like the fact that Shanann was 15 weeks pregnant.
Nicole was horrified. He'd told her that the marriage was all but over and they were no longer intimate, that they slept in separate rooms, that they were about to get a divorce. Clearly, he lied. Now Nicole wondered what else he might be lying about.
Chris wasn't exactly playing the role of a tormented husband and father concerned for his missing children. The night after the murders, he even emailed his friends about their fantasy football league. Later, he went to the Frederick Police Department for an interview with Special Agent Graham Coder with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. Chris repeated the story he told the police. Shanann said she was taking the girls on a play date.
Agent Coder asked Chris if he would return the following day to take a polygraph exam. Chris agreed. The next morning, August 15th, Chris picked up his father, Ronnie, from the airport. Together, they went to the police station for the polygraph.
As Chris drove to the station, he half listened to his father chatting about sports. He was struck by a strange feeling. Right now, he was still a free man. These were his last moments of freedom. This car ride, this conversation, this was it. He knew that his life was about to come crashing down around him.
Investigators were already treating him like a suspect, and now he was on his way to take a polygraph test he had no way of passing. He wondered how he was staying so calm as he inched forward toward the end of his life. He didn't really feel afraid. In fact, he couldn't seem to feel anything at all.
A week ago, it occurred to him that he didn't really feel like a husband and father anymore. He'd gotten so wrapped up in an affair, he felt like a different man. Now, he wondered whether he was even human.
Around the same time he went to take his polygraph test, his girlfriend Nicole also contacted the police. Chris's lies had made her so suspicious she couldn't let go of the nagging feeling that something was horribly wrong. She wanted to come forward with everything she knew.
In an interview, she told them about her affair with Chris, contradicting what he'd told police two days before. Nicole's statements were corroborated by emails pulled from Chris's work account. But investigators played it cool when they dealt with Chris later on. They simply administered the polygraph test,
Only after it was over did they tell him it was clear he wasn't being truthful. CBI agents began an interrogation, trying to elicit a confession. Chris finally admitted to his affair, but he still insisted he had no idea what happened to his wife or children. When they pressed him, he asked to speak to his father. The agents let Ronnie into the room.
When they were alone, Chris told him that he was in trouble. He concocted a story based on half-truths. He said that he and Shanann had an argument the morning of the 13th. They'd discussed separating. Then, Chris claimed that Shanann had attacked and killed the girls. Chris caught her in the act and was so enraged that he murdered her. He said he panicked and hid the bodies.
Ronnie was horrified. Chris's family had always been at odds with Shanann, but he still struggled to believe that she would hurt those two girls. On the other hand, he couldn't believe his son was capable of hurting them either. So he accepted Chris's story that Shanann had killed the children and Chris retaliated. He reportedly told Chris, well, we need to find a good lawyer and see what the hell they can do.
When the CBI agents returned to the room, Chris told them what he'd told Ronnie, that his wife and children were dead. He also told them where the bodies were located at the oil field. They placed Chris Watts under arrest.
That afternoon, investigators flew drones over the oil field. They captured photos of a bed sheet and two plastic garbage bags tangled in the grass. These were the items Chris used to wrap up Shanann's body. Officers gathered at the field to excavate Shanann's makeshift gravesite. They recovered her body just after midnight on August 16th.
The following afternoon, the oil tanks were drained. The bodies of Cece and Bella were removed and taken to a medical center in Loveland, Colorado.
Days later, Chris was arraigned and formally charged three counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Shanann, Bella, and Cece, plus an extra count for each of the children. The affidavit also included counts of unlawfully terminating a pregnancy and tampering with a deceased body. In the first week of September 2018, Shanann and the children were laid to rest in a funeral service in North Carolina.
While Shanann's relatives celebrated their lives, Chris's parents did not attend. And of course, Chris was in jail. He was being held without bond and facing a potential death sentence for massacring his family.
In the late summer of 2018, Chris Watts was arrested and charged for the murders of his pregnant wife, Shanann, and their two children, Bella and Cece. When it was clear that police suspected foul play, Chris tried to pin the girls' murders on Shanann. He said he caught his wife strangling them, and then he lost his mind and killed Shanann when he found his daughters dead.
But it wasn't long before he dropped this argument. Chris came to trust the public defenders appointed to his case. A few weeks after his arrest, he confessed everything to them. He killed the girls. He told them that he didn't want to fight the charges in a long, drawn-out case. In exchange for pleading guilty, Chris would face a life sentence in prison rather than the death penalty.
On November 6th, 2018, Chris Watts entered a guilty plea to all the charges. His decision to plead guilty was a relief for most of the horrified residents of Frederick, Colorado, still reeling from the death of a young mother and her children.
But not everyone was satisfied. Even after Chris agreed to a plea deal, his parents still seemed to cling to his original story that he had only murdered Shanann after witnessing her killing the children. They felt he should have fought the murder charges against him. Chris's parents sat for an interview a few days after he entered his guilty plea. His mother insisted, "'He's not a sociopath. He's not a psychopath.'
She added, "I just want him to fight. I don't want him to take this plea deal. I want him to plead not guilty to the children." Despite her objections, the plea deal moved forward. On November 19th, Chris Watts appeared at his sentencing hearing, where he was sentenced to five life terms. After the hearing, Chris returned to the Weld County Jail, and he was eventually transferred to a prison in Wisconsin.
But the case did not quickly fade from public consciousness. People remained fascinated. Some even tried to capitalize on the case's notoriety to boost their own public profile. A few individuals, including a man from Glen Rock, Wyoming, and a woman from Greeley, Colorado, claimed they had met Chris through dating apps and had sexual encounters with him prior to the murders.
These claims had little credibility, but they revealed how deeply people connected to the Watts story. Perhaps because their lives seemed to be an open book, Shanann's Facebook profile was public, she gave everyone a window into their world. Even people who never met her felt like they knew her. It seemed unthinkable that this perfect family met such a horrifying end.
Beyond Shanann's social media presence, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation was remarkably transparent about their work on the matter. Just a few days after Chris' sentencing, the Bureau released its case file to the public, over 2,000 pages of detailed notes, reports, and interviews relating to the murders. For true crime fans, it was a goldmine of information.
For some, Chris Watts emerged as a sympathetic figure, while they viewed Shanann as the villain. Some felt Chris was telling the truth in his first confession. They believed Shanann had killed Bella and Cece, and not their father. They felt Chris suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, caused by prolonged emotional abuse from his marriage to Shanann.
They circulated conspiracy theories questioning Shanann's character, digging for evidence that she was a liar and a criminal. This kind of victim blaming is not uncommon after a tragedy.
Sherry Hamby, a professor of psychology and founding editor of the Psychology of Violence journal, relates victim blaming to the "just world" hypothesis. She explained, "It's this idea that people deserve what happens to them. There's just a really strong need to believe that we all deserve our outcomes and consequences."
Those who blamed Shanann for her own murder targeted her family for abuse. Her father, Frank Rusek, released a statement saying, "Our family, including Shanann and her children, have been ridiculed, demeaned, slandered, mocked in the most vicious ways you can imagine.
We have been subject to false accusations, fake Facebook accounts, hate speeches, and a constant stream of ugly, evil insults and attacks. Every time we turn around, there's someone trying to capitalize on our tragedy by spreading false rumors and outright lies about Shanann and our grandchildren. The abuse was heartbreaking for a family already in mourning.
Others theorized that he wasn't himself at the time of the murders. They suggested that vitamin supplements and energy merchandise had pushed Chris over the edge. He frequently used products that Shanann sold for her direct sales job. He'd appeared in dozens of her promotional social media videos, but he later said they had negative side effects, including insomnia. At one point, he talked to investigators about using a patch for weight loss, stating, I
Chris also said his parents had received letters from people all over the world claiming that the products were not FDA approved and that they could contain stimulants that could have mind-altering properties.
Internet commenters and bloggers seemed obsessed with the idea of finding some excuse that could explain Chris's behavior. It didn't seem possible that Chris could have gone from the typical family man to a cold-blooded killer overnight.
But even though Chris's actions seem to defy explanation, in some ways they fit a disturbing pattern. In many ways, he seems to match the profile of the "family annihilator," a type of murderer who kills close family members in quick succession. Neil Websdale, the director of the Family Violence Institute at Northern Arizona University, spoke about the Watts case in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine.
He said that while some cases involve perpetrators who are regularly controlling and violent up until the time of the killing, at the other end of the continuum, quote, you're looking at more controlled, repressed, depressed individuals who may be on the edge of a psychotic break.
But this sudden break isn't necessarily spontaneous. Agent Garrett said that family annihilator crimes are often premeditated. The anger leading up to the murders builds up for weeks or months beforehand.
But while these individuals may spend many hours contemplating murder, they usually don't put a lot of careful planning into their crimes. They don't often think of future consequences when they carry out the murders. They focus on, as Agent Garrett said, the immediate need and gain of the moment. These men often confess after the crime, but sometimes create an alternate version of what happened, as Chris did.
Eventually, however, Chris repudiated his former lies.
In February of 2019, he sat down for an interview with the investigators who handled his case. In the interview, he gave a full confession to the murders. He emphasized that Shanann was a good mother who had never hurt her children. He told investigators he didn't want anyone to bash Shanann's memory. He wanted to clear her name and give her parents closure by speaking out.
Chris spoke until his throat was dry. He talked for hours. It wasn't something he wanted to do, but felt he had to. Perhaps his confession would put an end to all the speculation and gossip. Maybe then the fervor would finally go away, and his family could stop reliving this hell.
Chris spoke flatly about that last morning with Shanann and the girls. He heard his own voice recounting the horrors, but his mind and body felt somewhere else. He still couldn't feel the weight of it all, even after months of prison. He wondered if it would ever fully hit him, or if he would remain like this forever, detached from reality.
Perhaps he had permanently destroyed the part of himself that was capable of confronting the truth. Perhaps he was better off without it. In his confession, Chris expressed his regret. He told investigators he kept pictures of his children on the wall of his prison cell. He said he talked to them every night.
Even so, he expressed very little emotion when discussing the brutal crimes. He didn't seem to show remorse or grief or anguish, only confusion. He said, "I don't see how this could happen. Every time I see pictures of them now, I don't know how this could happen.
This question is the only one that continues to drive obsession with the case. Chris Watts ostensibly had everything he needed to enjoy a happy life. For Chris, it wasn't enough. He is still reckoning with that fact. In February 2019, he told his interviewers, "...right now I'd have a five-year-old, a three-year-old, and more than likely a one-month-old son, and a beautiful wife."
And right now, it's just me. Thanks for listening to Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast. We're here with a new episode every Monday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at Serial Killers Podcast. And we'd love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts.
Amongst the many sources we used, we found the book My Daddy is a Hero, How Chris Watts Went from Family Man to Family Killer by Lena Derholly, extremely helpful to our research. Stay safe out there.
This episode was written by Christina Pammies, with writing assistance by Abigail Cannon, fact-checked by Cheyenne Lopez, researched by Mickey Taylor and Chelsea Wood, and sound designed by Alex Button. Our head of programming is Julian Boirot, our head of production is Nick Johnson, and Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor. I'm your host, Vanessa Richardson.