Chris Watts: The Family Man Pt. 2

In August 2018, Chris Watts strangled his pregnant wife Shanann and drove his daughters Bella and CeCe to an oil field east of Frederick, Colorado, where he killed them and hid their bodies. He had been planning a new life with another woman...and his family was in the way. This episode follows the interrogation that broke him, the confession he gave in a Wisconsin prison, and what researchers have learned about men who destroy their families rather than leave them. If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Serial Killers & Murderous Minds to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped together on Monday ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com http://crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Serial Killers & Murderous Minds is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios. 🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Murder True Crime Stories, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts! Follow me on Social Instagram: @Crimehouse https://www.instagram.com/crimehouse/TikTok: @Crimehouse https://www.tiktok.com/@crimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudios https://www.facebook.com/crimehousestudiosYouTube: @crimehousestudios https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Vanessa Richardson?

  Hi, everyone. Before today's episode, there's another show I want to tell you about. It's called What the Fact with Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum and Carter Roy. Every week, they take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Plus Connor's infectious energy that'll make you realize history is the most fascinating thing on earth. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  This is Crime House.

• 0:42Vanessa Richardson?

  Okay, here's the question everyone asks about a case like this one. Why didn't he just leave? We know divorce is painful. It's expensive and even sometimes humiliating. But millions of people get through it every year. They split the furniture, work out custody and start over. Nobody has to get hurt. So when a man kills his family instead of leaving it, we scramble for explanations. He snapped. He was a monster all along. There must have been something we couldn't see. Chris Watts didn't look like a monster. He looked like the quietest guy on the block, a man who'd never raised his voice, never told anyone when something was wrong,

• 1:24Vanessa Richardson?

  which may be exactly why nobody saw it coming.

• 1:41Vanessa Richardson?

  The human mind is powerful. It shapes how we think, feel, love and hate. But sometimes it drives people to commit the unthinkable. This is Serial Killers and Murderous Minds, a Crime House original. I'm Vanessa Richardson.

• 1:56Tristin Engels?

  And I'm forensic psychologist Dr. Tristin Engels. Every Monday and Thursday, we uncover the darkest minds in history, analyzing what makes a killer.

• 2:06Vanessa Richardson?

  Crime House exists because of listeners like you. Want even more? Join Crime House Plus and get both parts of every story dropped on the same Monday, completely ad free, no waiting three days for part two, plus Crime House bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com. Or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap Try Free at the top of the Serial Killers and Murderous Minds page. Before we get started, please be advised this episode contains descriptions of the murder of a pregnant woman and two young children, including details from the killer's own confession. So please listen with care. Today, we're concluding our deep dive on Chris Watts. In August 2018,

• 2:49Vanessa Richardson?

  his wife, Shanann, who was 15 weeks pregnant and their daughters, four-year-old Bella and three-year-old Cece, disappeared from their home in Frederick, Colorado. Within a day, the search for them was national news. And the man on television pleading for their safe return was the same man investigators were already watching most closely.

• 3:11Tristin Engels?

  As Vanessa goes through the story, I'll be talking about things like how interrogators use a face-saving story to get a suspect talking, and why Chris took the one he was offered, why Chris was willing to blame his murdered wife for their daughter's deaths in front of his own father, and what researchers mean by the term "family annihilator", where Chris Watts fits that pattern and where he doesn't.

• 3:36Vanessa Richardson?

  And as always, we'll be asking the question, what makes a killer?

• 3:46Vanessa Richardson?

  On the morning of Tuesday, August 14, 2018, 34-year-old Shanann Watts, who was 15 weeks pregnant, had been missing for more than 24 hours along with her daughters, four-year-old Bella and three-year-old Cece. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation had issued endangered missing person alerts for all three of them. After finding some concerning items during the initial search the day before, police returned to the Watts' home on the 14th, this time with K-9 units. Investigators wanted to know whether Shanann and the girls had died inside that house. Cadaver dogs are trained to detect the smallest traces of human remains. When a person dies, the body begins to release

• 4:28Vanessa Richardson?

  a distinct chemical signature almost immediately. Even after a body is moved, the odor lingers and the dogs can find it. While the dogs worked, 33-year-old Chris Watts stepped out onto his front porch and gave interviews to the local news. He stood with his arms folded across his chest. He admitted that he and Shanann had an emotional conversation before she disappeared. He didn't say what it was about. He said he was worried and that all he wanted was for his wife and daughters to come home. The plea aired across Colorado, but not everyone watching believed it.

• 5:04Tristin Engels?

  I touched on this in episode one, but there's no reliable behavioral template to measure someone's level of grief, fear, anxiety, trauma, shock, guilt or innocence. Because some people cry, some become emotionally flat, some appear calm, some become focused on practical details, some become distraught. Arms crossed, having a limited affect or an unusual tone of voice cannot tell us that someone's guilty. That doesn't mean that they don't tell us something either. I mean, Chris's interviews have a mismatch between the situation and the emotional urgency that people expected to see when your pregnant wife and your two young daughters are missing.

• 5:49Tristin Engels?

  People expect someone to be frantic, distressed, panicked in a situation like that. And he's relatively calm and composed. As a forensic psychologist, I'm more interested in the content and the context of what he's saying rather than his body language. The only time I really pay attention to body language is if it's telling me something with regard to the person's mental health and their functioning or my safety. And with Chris, he's been carefully managing his language. He said that he and Shanann had a "talk", not a fight. That's a distinctive term. And that's something that I likely would have noted,

• 6:32Tristin Engels?

  and not because it's evidence of something on its own, but it might be meaningful if there's a broader pattern of distinctive language like that that supports it. And he's publicly acknowledging an emotional and personal conversation, but he's also withholding the content of that conversation. So firstly, is that even necessary for the public to know? What was he seeking to gain there? That's the other aspect I'm always considering. What was the goal of that? It again reads as if he's already supplying explanations that weren't asked of him. And now the public is left to fill in the gaps. Did she leave because you had a "talk" or an emotional conversation? Or did you do something? Or did you have a fight? We have the benefit, of course, of hindsight bias.

• 7:17Tristin Engels?

  His demeanor may seem suspicious in retrospect, but it's still not evidence of guilt. And that alone would not uphold in court. The discrepancies between what he says, what investigators can independently establish, and what the physical evidence shows are what does uphold in court.

• 7:38Vanessa Richardson?

  Shanann's mother, Sandra Rusek, was watching from North Carolina, more than 1,500 miles away. She studied Chris's face and listened to his words. Something in his voice chilled her. There was a casualness to it. He didn't sound like a man whose family was missing, like you said, Dr. Engels. Her suspicion hardened when she got him on the phone later and Chris told her he couldn't talk. He had to get back to work. His wife, his daughters and his unborn son were missing and he was going back to the oil field. To Sandra, only one explanation made sense. Chris had done something to them and he needed to get back out to that site to cover it up. She called the police and told them what she suspected. She told them Chris and Shanann

• 8:22Vanessa Richardson?

  had been having problems all summer and that she thought her son-in-law was responsible for her disappearance. Investigators were already leaning that way. And with Shanann's own mother telling them the same thing, they decided to pull Chris's phone records. What they found was an endless stream of late-night calls, text messages and intimate photos between Chris and 30-year-old Nicole Kessinger. The affair he'd denied to Shanann and then to the police was sitting right there in the data. Just like that, Chris was the prime suspect. Investigators didn't have to track Nicole Kessinger down. She came to them. She'd seen the news, confronted Chris over the phone and cut off contact with him. Now she was afraid

• 9:07Vanessa Richardson?

  the man she'd been planning a future with was lying about something far worse than his marriage. She sat down with state investigators and FBI agents. Although she had already deleted his texts, call logs and contact information from her own phone, they wanted everything. How she'd met Chris, what he'd told her, and whether it was possible she and Chris had planned to get rid of his family together. Nicole sat for multiple voluntary interviews over the following days. She believed she was dating a nearly divorced father of two. When she found out his pregnant wife and daughters were missing, she wanted nothing to do with him and everything to do with helping the police. After hours of questioning, investigators were satisfied

• 9:51Vanessa Richardson?

  that Nicole hadn't been involved. But what she'd given them was something the case had been missing, a motive. Chris Watts wasn't just a husband in a failing marriage. He was a man who'd already started building a new life and his family was in the way.

• 10:10Tristin Engels?

  The affair by itself doesn't explain the murder, so. Plenty of people cheat, plenty of people fall in love with someone else, and plenty of people decide that they want an entirely different life with that person. Almost none of them annihilate their families. And for that to happen, several things have to change psychologically. The people in the old life have to become less important than the life that they want. Their needs, their rights, their suffering, even their lives have to become secondary to their own. And I think that has been happening slowly for some time with Chris. They then have to be capable of morally disengaging from what they're considering,

• 10:54Tristin Engels?

  and in some way, begin viewing their family as obstacles rather than people. And I want to circle back to patterns with Chris that we've discussed in episode one that become relevant again here. He has a pattern of avoiding conflict and difficult interpersonal realities. He couldn't confront any conflict with his parents. He couldn't tell Shanann that he wanted out of the marriage. He couldn't tell Nicole that he was still married and his wife was pregnant. Instead, he concealed, avoided, and created different versions of reality for different people. And he constructed an entirely new version of himself with his life with Nicole. But the problem with that is, even if he divorced Shanann,

• 11:39Tristin Engels?

  he couldn't actually leave that old life completely. They had two daughters and another child on the way. There would be custody, child support, financial obligations, co-parenting, and continued contact with Shanann. Divorce would end the marriage, sure, but it wouldn't erase his responsibilities to his family, nor would it erase the confrontation and conflict that he would have to face. And there would likely be ongoing confrontations for at least 18 years as they raise their kids separately. That doesn't seem tolerable or even imaginable to someone like Chris. So for him, eliminating the conflict and the consequences of his choices

• 12:21Tristin Engels?

  seemed to be the only tolerable solution to avoid confrontation and those consequences within the interpersonal realities he had. But obviously, murder comes with consequences that are far greater than an affair or a divorce. So to make that choice over that, he had to have believed on some level that he was going to get away with this, which is wild. But none of these traits on their own explain why someone would annihilate their family. Conflict avoidance doesn't make someone a murderer. Neither does selfishness, infidelity, resentment, or even wanting to leave your responsibilities or escape them.

• 13:06Tristin Engels?

  The psychological shift that he had here is very extreme. And there has to be underlying pathology that's contributing to this as well.

• 13:16Vanessa Richardson?

  Chris later said that being with Nicole felt like having a blinder over his eyes. Is that a real psychological state, or is that just an excuse he used?

• 13:26Tristin Engels?

  I think both can be true. We talked about limerence in episode one. But what stands out to me more about that characterization that he made is how that doesn't seem entirely new for him either. We've seen periods of him having very narrow or intense focus throughout his life, or at least it's been reported. So when he was younger, he was pretty intensely focused on cars. It was also a focus on his routine and how he ate. And then early in his relationship with Shanann, he pursued her until she responded to him. And I also wonder if he would have characterized her similarly back then. But then it was his physical transformation that became a major focus. And now it's Nicole.

• 14:09Tristin Engels?

  I don't want to suggest, you know, that all of those are all psychologically equivalent, because they're not, of course they're not. But there does seem to be a pattern in which something becomes very important to Chris. And then he maybe disproportionately fixates on it, or his attention just gets organized around it. So blinders does sound like a fairly good description of this pattern of behavior of his and then his experience while he's in it.

• 14:41Vanessa Richardson?

  Chris didn't know it yet, but the two lives he'd been keeping apart had just collided inside the Frederick Police Department. And on Wednesday, August 15th, investigators asked him to come back in. He agreed. He later said that walking into that room, he already knew he wasn't walking out. Under questioning, Chris admitted to the affair. He didn't hedge. He talked about Nicole like he was somewhere else entirely, telling investigators she'd taken his breath away, that he'd never felt this way about anyone. But when the subject turned to his family, his tone changed. He swore he had nothing to do with their disappearance. The affair and the disappearance were two separate things. Terrible timing, nothing more.

• 15:24Vanessa Richardson?

  He said he wanted his wife and girls home. So the detectives made him an offer. If he was innocent, if he had nothing to hide, would he take a polygraph? Chris said yes. The test was administered by Colorado Bureau of Investigation Agent Tammy Lee. She was warm and casual, dressed in a striped sweater, chatting with Chris like a neighbor. She explained the process in plain terms and told him this was simply a way to clear his name. Then she said something that landed differently. She told him she fully expected the results to rule him out, because nobody guilty would be foolish enough to sit for a polygraph. So he must be innocent, right? Chris shifted in his chair. His breathing got heavier.

• 16:09Vanessa Richardson?

  But backing out now would look worse than anything the machine could say. So he stayed. The questions were simple. Did you cause Shanann's disappearance? Did you lie about the last time you saw her? Do you know where she is now? Agent Lee reminded him to stay calm. He tried. His voice shook. He said it was hard to relax under the circumstances. Lee nodded, sympathetic, but she could already see what the chart was telling her. Chris wasn't just failing. His results were among the worst she'd ever seen.

• 16:44Tristin Engels?

  Well, a polygraph doesn't actually measure whether you're telling the truth. It measures physiological arousal. So things like changes in heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, and sweating while you're answering questions. And the assumption is that deceptive answers may produce a physiological response. But anxiety produces a physiological response, too. Fear also produces one. So does anger. So that's one reason that polygraphs aren't considered a direct measure of deception. The machine isn't detecting a lie.

• 17:22Tristin Engels?

  The examiner is just interpreting patterns of physiological activation while they ask questions. That said, I actually think Chris agreeing to take the polygraph makes sense for him. If he believed he could get away with murdering his family, why wouldn't he believe that he could get through a polygraph test and pass it? Up until this point, lying had worked for him. He had maintained an affair while his wife suspected, but couldn't confirm. He had convinced Nicole that he was separated and then divorced. And after his family disappeared, he continued lying to friends, police, investigators, and even the media.

• 18:03Tristin Engels?

  And he had been confronted with suspicion, and he continued to deny everything. And he knows he can't back out now. That would be incriminating. And it would threaten the identity of the innocent man that he's been creating for everyone. So he chose to stick it out, which also indicates that he has pretty good cost-benefit analysis. So I also think there could be some overconfidence here. Chris was accustomed to withholding information. He's been suppressing what he felt for most of his life. So it's possible that he believed that staying calm was something he was good at and therefore could, you know, quote, beat a polygraph. But that's not helpful for a polygraph,

• 18:47Tristin Engels?

  because looking calm and being physiologically calm are not the same. You can appear calm, but you can't control certain involuntary functions necessarily, like sweating, respiration, your heart rate, and just stress. And especially after what Agent Lee strategically said to him right before administering this test.

• 19:17Vanessa Richardson?

  Chris didn't know yet how badly he'd failed. He sat in that room, waiting, still holding on to his story. But while he waited, investigators out in the oil fields east of town were finding what he'd left behind.

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  Ghosts aren't real. At least, that's what journalist Tristan Redmond always believed. Sure, odd things happen in his childhood bedroom, but ultimately, he shrugged them off. Until he discovered that he wasn't alone, that everyone who lived there after him also had bizarre experiences they couldn't explain. And it gets even weirder. It just so happens that his wife's great-grandmother was murdered in the house next door. Is this ghost somehow connected to her murder? He decides to go where no son-in-law should, digging up a cold case and asking questions that nobody wants answered. Like, could his wife's great-grandfather have gotten away with the perfect crime? This is a podcast about family secrets, overwhelming coincidence, and the things that come back to haunt us.

• 21:03Speaker 05

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• 21:20Vanessa Richardson?

  On the afternoon of August 15, 2018, 33-year-old Chris Watts was sitting in an interrogation room at the Frederick Police Department. He had just failed a polygraph about the disappearance of his wife, 34-year-old Shanann, and their daughters, 4-year-old Bella and 3-year-old Cece. He'd admitted to the affair with Nicole Kessinger. He still denied everything else. While Chris sat in that room, other investigators were retracing his steps from the morning of August 13. His work truck had a GPS tracker. Detectives followed its path to a remote oil site owned by his employer about an hour east of Frederick. They put drones in the air. The land was flat and empty in every direction,

• 22:06Vanessa Richardson?

  nothing but dirt roads and oil tanks. Then around 4:15 that afternoon, a drone operator spotted something. Fabric moving in the wind. When investigators reached it on the ground, it was a bed sheet. It was the missing top sheet from Chris and Shanann's bedroom. That information made its way back to the station. So did something else. Investigators had learned what Chris did on the morning his family disappeared in the hours before anyone knew they were gone. He'd called Bella and Cece's school and told the staff the girls wouldn't be coming back. Then he'd called a realtor about putting the house on the market.

• 22:48Tristin Engels?

  This is certainly unusual behavior because there's no rational or reasonable explanation to do this. There's no urgency. Even if he genuinely thought Shanann had taken the kids, let's just say that's the case. It's the day they went missing. There's no deadline to unenroll them from school or list the house the day they've gone missing. But once again, this is fitting Chris's pattern. When he wants his life to be different, he doesn't necessarily confront the reality that he's currently in. He starts living in the reality he wants instead. His family has only been missing for hours, but as soon as businesses and schools open,

• 23:31Tristin Engels?

  he starts taking actionable steps into a reality in which they are simply no longer part of it. His girls don't need their school anymore. His family doesn't need this house anymore. It's almost as though his behavior moves into the new reality before the rest of the world has caught up to it or before the rest of the world knows what that reality is. And he didn't even hesitate.

• 23:55Vanessa Richardson?

  Back in the interrogation room, the tone had changed. Hours earlier, detectives had been gentle, giving Chris room to tell his story. Now, Agent Lee and FBI Special Agent Graham Coder were direct. They told him he'd failed the polygraph, and they knew he was lying. They pointed out that in two days, he hadn't shed a single tear for his missing daughters. Chris stammered and deflected. He said he'd told them everything he knew. They showed him a photograph of Bella and Cece. He later said that picture got in his head. Still, he held on. Then Agent Lee offered him a way out. She asked whether Shanann might have done something to the girls and whether Chris had reacted by doing something to Shanann.

• 24:40Vanessa Richardson?

  It was a lifeline, a version of events where Chris was a victim too. That was when he started to break. He asked to see his father. Ronnie Watts had flown in from North Carolina. Chris had picked him up at the airport that morning. He later said he knew, sitting in that car, that it was probably the last time he'd see his dad on the outside. Ronnie had wanted to talk about sports. Now investigators brought Ronnie into the interrogation room and left the two men alone. The cameras kept rolling. Chris sat with his shoulders slumped, his voice low. He told his dad he'd failed the polygraph and that they weren't going to let him leave. Ronnie asked gently whether there was a reason they shouldn't.

• 25:24Vanessa Richardson?

  Chris said he'd admitted to the affair. Ronnie leaned in and asked if there was anything else. Chris hesitated. Then, almost in a whisper, he said he was done protecting Shanann. He told his father that Shanann had smothered Bella and Cece after he told her he wanted a divorce, and that when he saw what she'd done, he lost control and strangled her. Ronnie sat in silence. Then he reached across the table and took his son's hand. When detectives came back in, Chris repeated the story. He admitted to killing Shanann, but he insisted he'd only snapped after seeing her hurt the girls. He said he'd watched her smothering Cece on the baby monitor

• 26:08Vanessa Richardson?

  with Bella already lying still in her bed.

• 26:13Tristin Engels?

  Agent Lee is smart. That's twice now that she's effectively gotten into Chris's head. She's offering, or did offer him, another explanation. One that allows Chris to preserve his self-image and his innocence, or at least part of it. But I think what makes this particularly effective, this method or this, you know, alternate explanation, is that it's coming from her. She's the investigator. She's the person with the power and authority in that room, and she's essentially communicating to Chris that this is a version of events she could believe. So to him, there's now a path forward where he maintains self-preservation

• 26:58Tristin Engels?

  while simultaneously disclosing a partial truth. And that's really what this was designed to do. She's giving him somewhere to go other than continuing to deny absolutely everything. It's allowing him to disclose, and it works. He takes the explanation she gives him, and for the first time, he admits that he killed Shanann, and he also alludes to how the girls were killed.

• 27:24Vanessa Richardson?

  Chris said he asked for his dad so he could tell him that he loved him one last time. Do you believe that? Or do you think Ronnie was maybe just a prop?

• 27:33Tristin Engels?

  I actually do. I don't, I don't think he was a prop. I think he knew that this would be the last time he saw his father outside of a jail or prison, and I think he genuinely did want to see his dad. But more importantly, it was allowed by investigators because they know that suspects are more likely to disclose to a trusted individual than to them. And also, in this particular case, Chris's family had conflict with Shanann, and they did not like her. And remember in episode one? They didn't attend their wedding. Shanann had an argument with his mother when she fed something in ice cream to Cece that she was allergic to. And there were loyalty conflicts there that were longstanding. And I think on some distorted level,

• 28:17Tristin Engels?

  Chris may have believed that he would be validated when he disclosed to his father that he killed Shanann, as if his parents, of all people, would understand and support him for what he did because of their feelings for her.

• 28:35Vanessa Richardson?

  Investigators didn't believe a word of it about Shanann. Everyone who knew her described the same woman, a mother who put her girls before everything. The polygraph, the GPS, the sheet, the phone calls, his behavior for two days. All of it pointed at Chris and Chris alone. But half a confession was on the table now, and it raised the only question that mattered that night. Where were they? Detectives asked Chris multiple times whether he was comfortable with the public believing that Shanann had murdered her own children. He said he was because, he said, it was true. Then he added something new. Shanann may have killed the girls, but he was the one who'd hidden the bodies.

• 29:20Vanessa Richardson?

  When detectives asked where, he wouldn't say. He seemed too overwhelmed to answer. So they left him alone with his father again. And once more, it was Ronnie who got it out of him. Chris told his dad that he'd buried Shanann at the oil site and that he'd put Bella and Cece inside the oil tanks. Ronnie was devastated. Chris was his son. Those girls were his granddaughters. Detectives watching the feed from outside the room had suspected Chris from nearly the beginning. Hearing it out loud still stopped them cold. They walked back in and slid an aerial photograph of the site across the table. Chris pointed to two places,

• 30:03Vanessa Richardson?

  where he'd left Shanann and where he'd put the girls. Around 11:00 PM, Chris Watts was arrested for the murders of his wife, his two daughters, and his unborn son. Overnight and into the morning of August 16th, investigators recovered Chris's family. Shanann was in a shallow grave. Bella and Cece were inside two separate oil tanks, exactly where Chris had pointed. The hatch at the top of each tank was eight inches across. At the opening of one, investigators found a tuft of blonde hair.

• 30:40Tristin Engels?

  The way an offender treats a victim's body can sometimes tell us something about their relationship to that person or their psychological state at the time. But it's not always symbolic either. A body can be moved, it can be concealed, dismembered, or buried for completely practical reasons. For example, and for a moment, I'm going to detail the callousness of Chris's possible thinking here, so forgive me on that. But it was probably easier for him to carry Cece and Bella and put them inside the oil tanks because they were much lighter. They weighed less. Shanann is a fully grown adult woman who is also pregnant. So it feels more practical, honestly, how he disposed them.

• 31:24Tristin Engels?

  And it also feels rushed. And I don't think we need to know why he separated them to tell us something psychologically because just the fact that he was capable of doing this to them at all instead of calling the police or giving them a proper burial speaks volumes. This is dehumanizing. He is treating them as things he needed to conceal. He could dig a shallow grave for Shanann and force each of his daughters through an eight inch opening of an oil tank. Whatever emotional attachment that he had that existed before was not there then to stop him from doing this. And to me, that's much more telling

• 32:07Tristin Engels?

  about him psychologically than anything else. The disposal is instrumental. It's practical. His attention is focused more on the problem that his family created for him and how he needs to make them disappear. They were obstacles and they were not being viewed as people who loved him.

• 32:29Vanessa Richardson?

  In the prison interview, Chris said that just thinking about the oil tank made him want to throw up. What do you make of that?

• 32:37Tristin Engels?

  Given what we know about Chris historically, his behavior has been largely about impression management and preserving his image. So that makes me question how much of that statement is another form of impression management? Because think about what that statement communicates to us. It's like saying that even he is disgusted by what he did and he can barely tolerate thinking about it. And that creates, again, psychological distance between the Chris that is speaking in that interview and the Chris who was capable of doing that in the first place. But they're still the same person. And I'm not saying he couldn't possibly feel disgusted now and he couldn't possibly feel like throwing up now. He very well could.

• 33:21Tristin Engels?

  But I think overall, telling us about that disgust now and not when he did it, when he still was denying it and when he still was trying to preserve his image, I think it's serving him more, honestly.

• 33:37Vanessa Richardson?

  The news spread across Colorado and then across the country. Neighbors, friends, and total strangers grieved for a woman and two little girls most of them had only seen in Facebook videos. And then, as Shanann's parents and brother tried to bury their family, something else started.

• 34:02Speaker 06

  Jeffrey hears his mother's screams from the household intercom. He finds his brother Christopher standing over his mother's body. His brother says, "I've killed mom and dad." But Christopher also dies in the same manner as his parents. And suspicion falls on Jeffrey. Did he kill Christopher in a fit of rage? Or did Jeffrey murder all three of them? Who killed Stephen and Helen Gillum? Christopher or Jeffrey? Join us as we go over all of the evidence from multiple trials and even statements from family members. Perhaps you can determine who killed the Gillums and why. Listen to the Gillum Family Murders episode right now from Generation Y, where we look into the why of true crime, wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 34:48Vanessa Richardson?

  On August 16th, 2018, three days after they disappeared, 34-year-old Shanann Watts and her daughters, four-year-old Bella and three-year-old Cece, were recovered from an oil site east of Frederick, Colorado. Her husband, 33-year-old Chris Watts, was in custody. He had confessed to strangling Shanann. He was still insisting she had killed the girls. The following week, prosecutors filed nine counts against Chris, five counts of first degree murder, one for Shanann, and two each for Bella and Cece. Because Colorado charges the murder of a child under 12 by someone in a position of trust as a separate count, one count of unlawful termination of a pregnancy,

• 35:31Vanessa Richardson?

  and three counts of tampering with a deceased human body. Because Shanann had lived so much of her life online, there were hundreds of hours of her, videos, live streams, posts about her marriage and her kids, and a vocal corner of the internet started picking through all of it. They judged her personality. They picked apart her parenting. They called her controlling, manipulative, a narcissist. Strangers who had never met Shanann Watts decided she was responsible for her own murder. It didn't stop with her. Her parents and brother were flooded with speculation, insults, and conspiracy theories while they were still planning funerals. Even after the plea,

• 36:16Vanessa Richardson?

  Chris's own parents would publicly question whether their son had really killed the girls and suggest Shanann might have been the one.

• 36:25Tristin Engels?

  There's a psychological concept called the just world belief, which is essentially this need that we have to believe that the world operates according to some kind of moral order. Good things happen to good people. Bad things happen to bad people. So when something horrific like this happens to someone who didn't deserve it, that can be really uncomfortable for people because it challenges the idea that if we do everything right, we'll somehow be protected from something horrific like this happening to us. And one way people tend to resolve that discomfort is by finding something the victim did

• 37:07Tristin Engels?

  that somehow caused or contributed to what happened to them. Because now there's a reason. She was controlling. She was difficult. She's manipulative. She embarrassed him. She put too much of their life online, whatever it is. Now there's something that you can point to and say, "Okay, I wouldn't do that." And that gives people some sense of control or safety. And unfortunately now, in the digital era with social media or even televised trials, people can be particularly vulnerable to this kind of scrutiny.

• 37:42Tristin Engels?

  But there is no such thing as a perfect victim. And for argument's sake, Shenan could have been all the things people accused her of, and it still wouldn't explain or excuse why Chris murdered her and their children and her unborn child. He could have made literally any other choice but that. He could have left. He could have filed for divorce. He could have told her about the affair. He didn't. The choice he made was murder. And this behavior toward her affects her family too, like you said. They're already experiencing a traumatic triple loss. And they actually pleaded with people to stop attacking and degrading Shenan.

• 38:25Tristin Engels?

  They're enduring harassment and conspiracy theories. She wasn't even there to defend herself. And I often wondered if the attributional shift started from Chris when he tried to make Shenan responsible for what happened. And it definitely didn't help when his family jumped on that. He insisted that he killed Shenan because she killed Bella and Cece. This kind of shift can happen, and it does, just based on things just like that. It happened with the Idaho murders, and it's happening right now in a high-profile case as well.

• 39:02Vanessa Richardson?

  What would you say to someone who finds themselves doing this? Dissecting a murder victim's life for clues about what she did wrong?

• 39:10Tristin Engels?

  I think anytime we're dissecting a victim's life, whether they're a murder victim or not, to look for clues about what they did, even when we believe we're doing it for an altruistic reason, we need to pause and ask ourselves, am I trying to understand what happened to this person? Or am I trying to find something this person did that would make what happened to them feel more understandable or preventable? Because those can look very similar. And we're watching this happen, like I said, in real time in other cases. Sometimes it gets framed as advocacy, like we're protecting women, we're protecting mothers, we're exposing something everyone else, including law enforcement and forensic experts, missed.

• 39:53Tristin Engels?

  And the intention may genuinely be altruistic. But altruistic intent doesn't prevent victim blaming. If the end result is that we're combing through a victim's behavior, looking for the thing that they did that caused or invited or explained someone else's actions, then we've still shifted responsibility onto the victim. We've just given ourselves a benevolent reason for doing it. And in this case, they were clearly looking for reasons with Shenan, and they were finding them, all to blame her for what happened to her and her girls and her unborn child.

• 40:33Vanessa Richardson?

  This harassment went on for months. Then on November 6th, 2018, Chris pleaded guilty to all nine counts. He still hadn't admitted to killing his daughters, but the plea covered every charge, including their murders. In exchange, prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty. That decision came down to Shenan's family. They didn't want another death. Her mother said Chris had taken everything from them, but she did not want the state to take his life in return. In court, Chris said nothing as the charges were read. Prosecutors didn't need him to speak. They didn't want him repeating his story about Shenan.

• 41:17Vanessa Richardson?

  They wanted the record to say what was true. She was a victim, not a killer. Two weeks later, on November 19th, Weld County District Judge Marcelo Copcaw sentenced Chris to three consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole, plus two more life sentences to run concurrently. On top of that, 48 years for the unlawful termination of Shenan's pregnancy and 36 years for what he'd done with the bodies. The judge told the courtroom that in 17 years on that bench, this was perhaps the most inhumane and vicious crime he had ever handled. From disappearance to sentencing, the case had taken just over three months.

• 42:02Vanessa Richardson?

  Chris was moved to a prison out of state in Wisconsin for his own safety. Investigators believed the case was closed, but the question everyone kept asking had never been answered, not by the polygraph, not by the plea, not by the sentence. Why?

• 42:19Tristin Engels?

  The why is important for the reasons we just covered. This is a psychologically terrifying crime. A man annihilated his family, and he has nothing to say for it. Every single person listening has some version of what Shenan had, whether it's marital, extended, adoptive, friends as our family, whatever it may be. We have people we love and trust, people we build our lives around, people we assume are safe. And if someone can go from being your husband, your father, the person eating dinner with you, or putting your children to bed, to murdering your entire family with you included, we want there to be an explanation for that.

• 43:04Tristin Engels?

  Because an explanation gives us something that separates that family from our family, from that situation from our situation. We want something we could recognize so that we can tell ourselves that this won't happen to us. Otherwise, it leaves us with uncertainty, and uncertainty is frightening in cases like this. But I also sadly don't think that if Chris finally tells us why, it's going to be enough to make something like this make sense, because it's just so senseless.

• 43:38Vanessa Richardson?

  On February 18th, 2019, Agent Tammy Lee, Agent Graham Coder, and the lead Frederick detective on the case sat down with Chris in a Wisconsin prison. He agreed to talk. The interview lasted five hours. This time, he told them what happened. Shenan got home around 2:00 AM. Chris felt her get into bed, and he sensed she knew he was cheating. He'd used their joint credit card to take Nicole to dinner while Shenan was away, and he figured that was the last straw. But Shenan didn't confront him. She reached for him instead. She was still trying to save the marriage. Around 5:00 AM, he woke her up to talk.

• 44:23Vanessa Richardson?

  He climbed on top of her, straddling her on the bed, and told her he didn't think the marriage was going to work. Shenan told him he was hurting the baby. She said she knew there was someone else, and she cried. Chris denied it. He told her he didn't love her anymore. Shenan told him he would never see the girls again. She told him to get off of her. She told him not to hurt the baby. Chris put both hands around her neck and strangled her. Then Bella walked in, holding her blanket, and asked what was wrong with mommy. Chris told her mommy didn't feel good. He wrapped Shenan in the top sheet, dragged her down the stairs while Bella watched, and loaded her into the back of his truck.

• 45:07Vanessa Richardson?

  He put both girls in the backseat with their blankets, their mother's body at their feet. The drive to the oil site took nearly an hour. The girls dozed against each other. At one point, Bella told him, daddy, it smells. At the site, he took Shenan's body out first. Then he smothered Cece in the backseat with her blanket over her head and put her in an oil tank. Bella asked what had happened to her sister and whether the same thing was going to happen to her. Chris said her last words were, daddy, no. He put Bella in a second tank. He dug a hole and buried Shenan. Then he went to work.

• 45:51Vanessa Richardson?

  Chris said he didn't know whether he'd already decided to kill Shenan before he climbed on top of her. He described it as something that had been implanted in his mind, something he had no control over. He said he'd been angry since July, when Shenan told him his parents would never see their granddaughters again, and that the anger went back further to the wedding they'd refused to attend. He called it a long fuse that had finally burned down. He said he'd never been angry before in his life, and this was the epitome of anger. He said he'd always dealt with things alone, and that maybe growing up that way had left him with feelings that built until they took hold of him. He also admitted the things he'd done afterward deliberately.

• 46:35Vanessa Richardson?

  He put Shenan's wedding ring out so it would look like she'd given up on the marriage. He threw away the relationship book she'd given him for the same reason. He tossed his clothes and the girl's blanket in a construction dumpster on the way home from work. And when detectives suggested that Shenan had killed the girls, he'd never considered the idea before that moment. He just went with it. Later that year, in letters to an author, Chris reportedly went further still, claiming he tried to end Shenan's pregnancy weeks earlier by slipping medication into her drink. That claim has never been independently verified, and his accounts have shifted more than once.

• 47:15Tristin Engels?

  And this is why Chris will forever be an unreliable narrator. His story is always shifting. He grasps onto whatever makes him look the best, whatever's tolerated best, or whatever he thinks will actually work or be accepted by the people around him. He's adapting moment by moment. And even here, his explanations conflict. He says he snapped, that something's been implanted in him and that he had no control. But he also describes anger and resentment building for weeks, like this fuse, because he had spent his life keeping everything inside. And I think that part is plausible. I do. Because people can suppress anger, avoid conflict, and allow resentment to accumulate. And that can result in displacing your anger.

• 48:00Tristin Engels?

  And we've talked about that pattern with Chris throughout this story. But that doesn't mean that you lose the capacity to make choices, which is why his explanation about snapping falls apart for me, at least, because he had many choices before this point. He woke her up at 5:00 AM. And there didn't seem to be some precipitating event for doing that, other than he had a taste of what life would be like realistically without his family for five weeks. And now they are back. And he's stressed back into his actual reality rather than the one he wants to live in. But even if we accepted that, he snapped with Shanann, it doesn't explain what happened afterward.

• 48:45Tristin Engels?

  Bella and Cece were alive during an almost hour-long drive. There were repeated opportunities for him to stop. And according to his own account, he didn't. He continued. And there's a difference between losing control in a moment and then continuing to choose not to stop once that moment has passed, once you've snapped. So Chris had a taste of a new life in practice. And I think he just did not want to live another moment in his old one.

• 49:19Vanessa Richardson?

  Like you said, Chris had options. He had choices. And he later said that he realized there were several moments he could have gotten out. Is that hindsight? Or do you think those exits really existed for him?

• 49:32Tristin Engels?

  They really existed for him, except I just think he didn't want them to exist. I think that he, like with other things, had his blinders on, as he says, and he was in too deep. His girls saw it. They're young, they're innocent. They'll repeat that to someone without understanding what it is that they saw or what they're implicating him in. So I think there's also this component that they were, sadly, collateral damage, too.

• 50:01Vanessa Richardson?

  The confession was released to the public in March 2019. It confirmed what investigators, prosecutors, and everyone who knew Shanann had said from the start. She never hurt her daughters. She was a mother trying to hold her family together, right up until the moment her husband decided he'd rather end it than leave it. Chris Watts has never gone to trial. No court-ordered psychiatric evaluation was ever conducted. Neither prosecutors nor his own defense ever requested one, which means the only account we have of his mind is the one he's given himself, and it's shifted more than once.

• 50:42Tristin Engels?

  While we can classify him as a family annihilator, and I know I use that term a few times, and I realize I haven't explained what that is yet to those who may not be familiar. A family annihilator is someone who kills multiple members of their own family, typically a spouse or partner and one or more children. And it's usually during a single event or within a very short period of time. And he's somewhat atypical because most family annihilators commit suicide after, and he did not. There was no evidence that he was even suicidal. But there has been research done on family annihilators, and there are patterns there that have been discovered.

• 51:26Tristin Engels?

  And they are overwhelmingly male, often in their 30s. And the murders frequently occur at a point where there's been a lot of disturbance in the family, like a relationship is ending, financial problems exist, or there's an affair. And psychologically, there are themes that show up repeatedly with family annihilators. So these are often men whose identity is heavily invested in the family and their role within it. And you've already characterized him. He was devoted husband and father. And sometimes they see themselves as, I'm the provider, I'm the successful family man. And when that identity is threatened through separation, or conflicts, or financial hardship,

• 52:07Tristin Engels?

  or failure of some kind, humiliation, or some other crisis, the family can come to represent everything they feel they're losing, symbolically, in one. So in some cases, there are feelings of shame and failure. And in others, there's anger and grievance, or entitlement, or a need for control. And then there are also instances where the family itself is experienced as an obstacle to the life they want instead. And what's particularly unsettling is that many family annihilators have no prior record of serious violence and can appear completely normal or conventional from the outside.

• 52:51Tristin Engels?

  They're often described as quiet, responsible, and even passive. And that sounds a lot like Chris. And that brings us back to the question we started with. Why didn't he just leave? He's not incapable of leaving. He was already leaving psychologically. He was having an affair, and he was looking toward another life and planning for it with her, with Nicole. He was distancing himself from Shanann. What he apparently didn't want were the realities that came with leaving, because leaving meant telling Shanann the truth. It meant being the person who ended the marriage while she was pregnant.

• 53:32Tristin Engels?

  That could threaten that family man image or identity, because remember, he compartmentalizes them. So with her, with Shanann, he's devoted father and husband. So it meant divorce, custody, financial consequences, continued responsibility for three children, and a co-parenting relationship for years to come. And Chris repeatedly avoided difficult confrontation. He withheld what he was actually thinking and feeling. He allowed resentment to accumulate rather than address it. He allowed anger to accumulate rather than address it. And he was the type of annihilator that saw his family as an obstacle. Even if he chose a nonviolent option like divorce, let's say, he still would view them as an obstacle, which is scary.

• 54:17Tristin Engels?

  And I think he became rigid in that thinking personally after he had those five weeks apart, and he got to see what his life would be like without the responsibility of being a father and a husband, even if he was separated, and only being boyfriend to Nicole.

• 54:35Vanessa Richardson?

  Is there anything in the research that would have flagged Chris before August 2018? Or is that the terrifying part, that there just wasn't any warning?

• 54:44Tristin Engels?

  That's the terrifying part, because no. And I think that's one of the most disturbing things about this case. There were things going wrong in Chris's life that we can recognize now as circumstances that commonly surround family annihilation. And that's his marriage was deteriorating, there were financial problems, he was having an affair, there was resentment, and he certainly wanted a different life. But most of those things were happening in secret. And those things happen in many relationships, and they don't lead to murder. And Shanann may have known about the affair, but she didn't know about his resentment, or that he wanted a different life and no longer wanted his current one, because he never admitted it out loud.

• 55:28Tristin Engels?

  There was no known intimate partner violence in the relationship, which again, is not common with family annihilators. And there's no pattern of behavior that suggests violence risk on its own. He was clearly thinking about it, though, maybe potentially fantasizing about it. I doubt that he came up with their disposal location on a whim, and that's the terrifying part. There may have been a homicidal process occurring internally that nobody else could see. But based on what was observable to the people around him, we don't have a clear behavioral warning signal that would have allowed someone, anyone, to predict what was going to happen.

• 56:08Tristin Engels?

  And that's what makes these cases so scary and terrifying and difficult to process.

• 56:15Vanessa Richardson?

  Shanann Watts was 34 years old. She'd survived a bad marriage, an illness with no cure, and a bankruptcy, and come out the other side still convinced she could fix things by working harder than everyone else. She built a business. She built a following. She built a family she was so proud of she couldn't stop filming it. Bella was four. Her grandmother described her just like her father, shy, cautious, and careful. Cece was three, and by the same account, fearless, a ball of fire who wanted to run everywhere she went. The baby was going to be a boy. Shanann had already picked his name, Nico Lee.

• 56:58Vanessa Richardson?

  They were killed by the one person who was supposed to protect them on a morning that should have ended with Shanann hearing her son's heartbeat for the first time. That's who they were. And that's what was taken.

• 57:25Tristin Engels?

  Before we get out of here, it's time for the Angles Angle, where I'll tell you three pieces of advice I'd give our subject if they were my patient. This is for educational and entertainment purposes only. This is general psychological commentary, not therapy, treatment, diagnosis, or individualized mental health advice, and it does not establish a psychological patient relationship. With those ethical disclaimers out of the way, here's what I'd tell Chris Watts if he came into my office. Number one, learn to tolerate conflict. Addressing conflict is healthy. It's a necessary part of any relationship, and it's a critical part of emotional regulation.

• 58:10Tristin Engels?

  You have to be able to identify when you're angry, hurt, resentful, or unhappy, and communicate that before it takes root and it grows into something that you struggle to contain. Avoiding conflict might make things more comfortable in the moment, but it doesn't actually resolve anything. The feeling is still there, the problem is still there, only now the other person doesn't even know there's something that needs to be addressed. So why put yourself through the distress of unmet needs when you don't need to? Number two, emotional suppression is not emotional control. Sure, it's great being capable of staying calm under pressure, but never being angry,

• 58:52Tristin Engels?

  never complaining, and never expressing how you feel is not the hallmark of someone who's regulating their emotions. Being able to regulate your emotions actually requires knowing what you're feeling, understanding why you're feeling it, and then dealing with it appropriately, like I discussed in number one. So if you're constantly suppressing your anger because you don't want anyone to see it, or you don't even know about it, then you're not actually processing it at all. Number three, take those blinders off. When you get tunnel vision again, and it starts consuming you, force yourself to slow down and look at everything else and ask yourself, what are you ignoring?

• 59:37Tristin Engels?

  And who is being affected by it? And what consequences are you not thinking about? Sometimes, when we really want something, we become very good at only seeing the things that reinforce that something we want. And that's all I've got to say for Chris Watts. So, thank you for joining me, and I will see you over on Instagram in the comments section.

• 1:00:15Vanessa Richardson?

  Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next time for a deep dive into the mind of another murderer.

• 1:00:21Tristin Engels?

  Serial Killers and Murderous Minds is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on all social media at @CrimeHouse. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow Serial Killers and Murderous Minds wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference.

• 1:00:45Vanessa Richardson?

  And to enhance your listening experience, join Crime House Plus and get both parts of every story dropped on the same Monday completely ad-free. No waiting three days for part two, plus Crime House bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com, or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap "Try Free" at the top of the Serial Killers and Murderous Minds page. Serial Killers and Murderous Minds is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson, and forensic psychologist Dr. Tristin Engels, and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Serial Killers and Murderous Minds team: Max Cutler,

• 1:01:25Vanessa Richardson?

  Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Lori Marinelli, Natalie Pertsofsky, Sarah Camp, Alyssa Fox, Mara De La Rosa, Claire Swartzlander, and Carrie Murphy. Thank you for listening.

• 1:01:43Vanessa Richardson?

  If you're looking for your next podcast, check out What the Fact with Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum and Carter Roy. Every week, they take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen, or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.