Chris Watts Avoids Execution—Murdered Wife, 2 Daughters,Unborn son—HIS LIFE IN PRISON could be worse
Mr. Watts, why did you kill your wife and two children?
Mr. W, did you confess?
It was the 13th of August, 2018 in Frederick, Colorado, a suburb north of Denver, built on farmland that had been fields a few years before.
The house at 2825 Saratoga Trail, sat on a quiet street in a development called Windham Hill.
Five bedrooms, new construction, the kind of house young families bought when the oil money was moving through the county.
Inside that house lived Christopher Watts, 33 years old, a field operator for Anadarko Petroleum, along with his wife, Shannan, 15 weeks pregnant with their third child, and their two young daughters, Bella and Celeste.
Shannan had come home from a business trip a few hours earlier, dropped off by a friend just before 2:00 in the morning, caught on the family’s own doorbell camera walking up to her front door.
By half 5 that morning, she was dead in her own bed.
Her husband did not call for help.
Instead, he loaded her body into his work truck, still warm, still wrapped in their own bed sheet.
Then he woke his daughters, put them in the back seat with their blankets, and drove all three of them 40 mi out into open country to an oil site where he worked.
By sunrise, Bella and Celeste were gone, too.
For the next two days, Christopher Watts stood in front of television cameras and asked the public to help him find his family.
He gave interviews on his own front porch.
He said his daughter’s smiles lit up his life.
He said he had come home to nothing.
Vanished, he told the world.
Nothing was there.
He was the only person on Earth who knew exactly where they were.
It took a neighbor’s security camera, a polygraph test, and a mistress who went to the police herself to bring the truth out.
First, a lie that blamed his wife for the deaths of their daughters, and then 6 months later, a 5-hour confession from a prison cell in Wisconsin that undid every word of it.
But to understand how an ordinary man with no criminal history, no history of violence, and a wife who called him her rock became responsible for wiping out his entire family in a single morning.
How a struggling marriage, a secret relationship, and a mounting pile of unpaid bills turned into the deaths of four people, including a son who was never born.
We have to go back to a boy who grew up quiet in North Carolina.
Back to a marriage that looked from the outside like it had everything.
And back to the summer of 2018 when he carried a broken gas meter over to a coworker to get it fixed.
The moment everything else in this story started to come apart.
We go back to the very beginning.
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Christopher Lee Watts was born on 16th of May 1985 in Cumberland County, North Carolina, and grew up on Vass Road on the outskirts of Spring Lake, a small town north of Fagatville.
The house was modest, set back from a road that ran flat and straight through Pine Country.
He was the second child of Ronnie and Cindy Watts.
His sister Jaime had been born 6 and 1/2 years earlier and helped raise him.
Ronnie worked as a parts manager at a Ford dealership, a quiet man with a slow southern way of speaking and hair that went white early.
Cindy worked as a secretary and a notary, and she was the talker in the house.
Jaime took after her mother and knew everyone.
Chris took after his father.
He waited at the edges of conversations rather than pushing into them.
When something bothered him, he did not say so.
He held it and worked through it alone.
And by the time anyone thought to ask, he said nothing was wrong.
What he had with his father filled most of his childhood.
Ronnie took him to basketball in the winter and football and baseball in the summer.
They went to more than 200 NASCAR races together, including the Daytona 500, driving long distances to get there and long distances home.
Ronnie taught him to work on cars, and he had a natural feel for it.
He could listen to an engine and tell what was wrong with it.
And his father never had to explain anything twice.
At school, he was neither a target nor a standout.
He was not bullied and he was not popular.
He wore braces and a bull haircut.
He kept a small number of friends close and had no interest in belonging to any group larger than that.
People knew his name, and that was as far as it went.
He got into one fight in his entire school career in the third grade.
He and another boy tore each other’s shirts and both ended up crying.
After that, he settled into a role he kept for years.
The one who calmed situations down, who stood between two arguing people and lowered the temperature.
One thing about him did not fit the rest.
He could build a story and hold it.
In grade school, he told a teacher he had spent his summer in Asia.
He had not left North Carolina.
He wrote out a full account of the trip with detail and handed it in and the teacher believed him.
Nobody ever caught it.
His mother, Cindy, gave him affection and asked constantly how he was feeling.
He answered the same way every time.
He said he was fine.
Nobody in the house pushed hard enough to change that.
And by the time he finished high school, it was fixed.
In the spring of 2003, he graduated.
He was 18.
He packed up and moved out of the house on Vass Road, and he did not move back.
He took work where he could find it, mostly around cars and engines, the one trade he already knew.
The hours were long and physical, and they suited him.
He showed up, he caused no trouble, and he did not talk much on the job, which supervisors read as seriousness.
His sister Jaime moved in and out of the family home repeatedly over those years.
Chris did not.
He telephoned his parents and he visited, but he had drawn a line under living in that house.
His father struggled after he left.
Ronnie started using a white powder his family believed was cocaine.
Money went missing and could not be accounted for.
And his mother Cindy’s first assumption was that her husband was having an affair.
Ronnie lost weight.
His nose bled.
Everyone around him could see it.
Chris confronted him.
One of the few times in his life he raised something difficult with another person directly.
He told his father he was throwing his life away.
Ronnie changed the subject the way he always did when a conversation went somewhere he did not want and Chris let it drop.
Something in it landed.
Ronnie stopped and the two of them never discussed it again.
His relationships followed a pattern.
He dated but not for long.
The longest lasted around 6 months.
He did not pursue women and was not comfortable being pursued.
By 2010, he was 25, living in North Carolina, working in training and spending his free time much as he had at 17.
That year, a woman named Shannan Katherine Rzuchek sent him a message on Facebook.
She was a year older, born on the 10th of January, 1984, and had grown up in Aberdine, about an hour west of Spring Lake.
Her father, Frank Erzuchek, was quiet and steady, of the same generation and temperament as Ronnie.
Her mother, Sandra Honor Urzuchek, was the force in that household, direct, and she said what she thought.
Shannan had a younger brother, Franker Zutek Jr., known in the family as Frankie.
She was warm and funny and immediately familiar with strangers, physically expressive when she talked.
She organized the people around her, made plans, and made everyone else keep to them.
She had been married once and that marriage had ended.
She told her family her first husband was too much like her mother and that two people who both needed to run things could not run the same house.
She had also been ill.
Doctors diagnosed her with lupus, an autoimmune disease in which the body’s defenses attack healthy tissue.
It brought exhaustion, joint pain, and flares that arrived without warning and put her on her back for days.
It raised a question over whether she would ever carry a pregnancy.
She had worked the same job for 9 years and the illness ended it.
So when she messaged him in 2010, she was rebuilding, living in Aberdine, sorting out her health, deciding what came next.
They met in person and it did not go the way either of them expected.
She told him afterwards plainly that he was not her type.
He kept calling.
It was the first time in his life he had chased anything of the kind.
Persistent in a quiet way without pressure, she started answering.
What won her over was not conversation.
It was the way he handled the parts of her life other people found inconvenient.
She had a complicated regime of medication, tablets at set times in set combinations, and the list changed when a flare came.
Chris took over her pill box, laid the doses out week by week, and kept it current.
He made no announcement about it.
He simply did it.
A few months in, she had a colonoscopy.
He drove her, sat through it, and took her home.
She told him afterwards that this was the moment she knew he was worth keeping.
Not the dates.
The waiting room.
Her father took to him for a similar reason.
Her car broke down while they were dating, and Chris fixed it in the driveway using what Ronnie had taught him.
To Frank Rzuchek that said everything about a young man that needed saying.
Her mother Sandy noticed something else.
She had always told her daughter she would marry a man like her father.
Quiet, uncomplaining, content to let someone else steer.
That was what Shannan had found.
She made the decisions and Chris went along and neither of them found any fault in it.
He liked it and he said so.
He had spent his life avoiding the front of the room.
And here was someone who wanted it and was good at it.
He could stand behind her and be useful.
They became a couple through 2010 and 2011.
He met her family and they took him in.
She met his.
That was where the first difficulty appeared.
Cindy did not warm to Shannan and did not hide it well.
She formed the view that Shannan was holding something back about her past, that there were parts of her history she had not been straight about.
Whether there was anything in it or not, Cindy believed it and she said so.
Shannan understood exactly what was happening.
She was not a woman who missed that kind of thing and not a woman who absorbed it quietly.
Jaime sided with her mother.
Between them, they reached a shared conclusion that Shannan was pulling Chris away from the family, taking him somewhere they could not follow.
In the narrow factual sense, they had a point.
Shannan had plans and those plans involved leaving North Carolina.
In 2012, Chris proposed and she accepted.
From that point, the relationship between his mother and his fiance stopped functioning.
They agreed on nothing.
Every subject became a position to defend.
He made his choice in the bluntest terms he had ever used with his own family.
He told them he did not need them anymore because he had Shannan now.
He swore at his mother.
He said things to his parents and his sister he had never said to anyone and he did not take them back.
They married on the 3rd of November 2012 in Meckllinburgg County.
Shannan planned it and paid for much of it on credit cards.
Almost nobody from his side came.
His parents did not attend.
Jaime did not attend.
The only member of the Watts family in that room was his grandmother.
During the groom’s dance, he had no mother to dance with.
He danced with his grandmother and then with the mother of one of his friends.
They were 27 and 28.
They were carrying wedding debt.
They had no immediate way to clear.
And they had decided they were not staying in North Carolina.
Within weeks, they packed what they owned and drove west to Colorado.
They landed in Broomfield on the northern edge of the Denver metropolitan area and rented there for about a year while they worked out where they wanted to be.
The country north of Denver was in the middle of a boom.
Weld County sat on top of one of the most productive oil and gas fields in the United States, and money was moving through the region.
Housing developments went up on farmland in a matter of months.
For a young couple with bad credit but two incomes, it was possible to buy something new.
In 2013, they did.
The house was at 2825 Saratoga Trail in Frederick, 20 mi north of Denver, in a development called Windham Hill.
Five bedrooms, four bathrooms, 4,177 square ft across two stories, and a basement.
Nobody had lived in it.
They paid $392,79, financed almost entirely.
The mortgage came to nearly $3,000 a month.
The house on Vas Road would have fitted inside it more than once.
Chris took work at Lmont Ford back in the trade his father, Ronnie, had taught him.
When he was paid, he handed the check straight to Shannan.
Early on, he had sold a four-wheeler for less than he still owed on it.
And that settled the question of who handled the money in that household.
The accounts were hers.
He did not have banking access on his phone and did not ask for it.
Shannan found a job at a call center for Children’s Hospital Colorado earning $18 an hour.
Between them in 2014, they brought in around $90,000.
It was not enough.
The mortgage took most of it.
Car payments took 600 a month.
Fixed outgoings ran to about $4,900 before food or fuel or anything unexpected.
Behind that sat the wedding debt on the credit cards, student loans, and medical bills that kept arriving.
Her lupus generated appointments and prescriptions, and there was money owed to a chiropractic service to Kaiser Permanente to Good Samaritan Medical Center.
Every month the money came in, and every month it went out, and nothing accumulated.
Then Shannan became pregnant.
She had been told this might not happen.
Lupus makes conception harder and pregnancy riskier, and she had gone into her marriage understanding the odds were not with her.
Her brother Frankie said his sister beat every odd she was given.
On the 17th of December 2013, their first daughter was born.
They named her Bella Marie Watts.
Chris took to fatherhood without hesitation.
He fed her.
He got up in the night.
He read to her.
He said more than once that being a father was the best thing that had happened to him.
Shannan documented it.
She had a Facebook account and used it constantly.
And now she had a subject.
The pregnancy, the birth, the first weeks, the first foods, the first steps, long captions, and short videos.
It was what a great many young mothers were doing in 2014.
She simply did it more and with more energy than most.
The bills kept coming.
Bella got sick the way small people do and each illness generated another one.
The mortgage did not move.
The credit card balances did not move.
By the middle of 2015, they had run out of room.
In June 2015, they filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection.
The filing laid it out in plain figures.
Liabilities of $448,820.
Year-to-ate income of $40,491.
Savings accounts holding less than $10 between them and a joint account under $870.
Among the debts were $11,245 in student loans, $2,612 to Good Samaritan Medical Center, $1,31 to Kaiser Permanente, and $740 to a recovery agency in Ohio.
They listed their assets, too.
The house, the vehicles, and the family dog valued in the paperwork at $5 filing, and that most of it had been credit card debt from the wedding, along with doctor’s bills from the girls being sick, and that they had fallen behind on the mortgage.
For Shannan, it was different.
She had spent 5 years building a version of her life in public, the house, the family, the holidays, the recovery from illness.
And she had built it in front of thousands of people who knew her by name.
The document filed in Denver said something else entirely and it said it permanently.
She did not post about it.
By then, Chris had left the dealership for Anadarko Petroleum, one of the largest oil and gas operators in Colorado, working as a field operator at around $61,500 a year.
He drove a company truck between well sites scattered across rural Weld County, checking equipment, taking readings, fixing what needed fixing.
He could go most of a shift without speaking to anyone, and it suited him completely.
On the 17th of July 2015, weeks after the filing, their second daughter was born.
They named her Celeste Catherine Watts, and almost immediately she became Cece.
Now there were four people in the house and one income supporting them because Shannan had left the call center to be at home.
The arithmetic had got worse.
What changed it was a product called Thrive.
Thrive was the flagship line of a company called Lavell founded in Texas in 2012 and built entirely on direct sales.
There were no shops and no shelf space.
There was no advertising in the ordinary sense.
Everything moved through individuals, one conversation at a time.
And almost all of those conversations happened on social media.
The people doing the selling were called promoters.
A promoter signed up, bought product, and sold it on to their own contacts, friends, family, neighbors, anyone in their feed.
They earned a margin on those sales.
They also recruited other promoters.
And when those people sold, the person above them earned a percentage of that, too.
Recruit enough and the earnings from the people below could exceed anything a promoter made selling directly.
That structure is what separates direct sales from an ordinary sales job.
Income depends not only on how much a person sells, but on how many people they bring in and how hard those people work.
The company carries no salaries and no shop fronts.
The promoters carry the cost of the stock, the time, and the risk.
The range itself was straightforward.
There were capsules taken in the morning, a powdered drink mix, and adhesive patches worn on the skin.
The product the company built its identity around.
Different patches were marketed for different purposes, mainly energy, appetite control, and weight management.
The routine was sold as a three-step program to be completed within the first half hour of waking.
Lavell promoted it as a lifestyle rather than a supplement.
And the marketing language ran heavily on transformation.
Before and after photographs, testimonials, people describing how much better they felt.
Promoters were encouraged to share their own results, which meant the product and the person selling it became difficult to separate.
Selling Thrive meant putting your own body and your own household on display as evidence.
The company rewarded the ones who did it best.
There were rankings to climb and thresholds that unlocked bonuses.
There was a vehicle program that paid toward a car once a promoter hit a certain level.
And there were all expenses paid trips for the highest performers and their partners.
It was a model that suited a particular kind of person.
Someone sociable, tireless, comfortable in front of a camera with a wide network of people who already paid attention to what they said.
Shannan was extremely good at it.
She was likable at speed.
She had a large and engaged following built up over years of posting about her family.
She worked by her own account, 65-hour weeks, and she believed in it.
She took the products herself and talked about them the way people talk about things that have worked.
Money came in and then more.
Lavell ran incentive schemes and she qualified for them one after another.
She reached the company’s $80k club.
She earned a Lexus through their vehicle program and posted a photograph of it.
The trips came with it, all expenses covered.
Over 2 years, she and Chris went to New Orleans, Toronto, Puntaana, Porto Viarda, Las Vegas, and San Diego.
She wrote on Facebook that they had qualified for trips they could never otherwise have taken.
2 years after the bankruptcy, the outward picture had reversed.
The big house was full.
There was a Lexus in the driveway.
The family flew to the Caribbean.
Underneath, nothing structural had changed.
The mortgage remained on a loan in Chris’s name alone.
HOA payments had been going to the wrong address for a full year and were quietly accumulating as a rears.
Thrive income rose and fell monthto-month with no floor under it and depended entirely on Shannan’s capacity to keep working 65-hour weeks while managing lupus and running a household.
There was one more pressure that had nothing to do with money.
For 16 months, her parents, Frank and Sandier Zuchek, moved in with them.
It meant help with the girls and company through the day.
It also meant Chris and Shannan had almost no time alone together.
He did not object.
He never objected.
He went to work, came home, worked out in the basement, ate and did what was asked of him.
And every few weeks, Shannan pointed a camera at the family and pressed record.
The videos were part of the business.
Lavell promoters sold a lifestyle as much as a product, and Shannan understood that a family on camera converted better than a woman talking alone.
So Chris appeared in them.
He hated it.
He never told her.
He worked out that saying so would start an argument he did not want.
So he stood where she put him, said what was needed, and let her post it.
He was in frame with a patch on his arm and his daughters around him, and every clip went out to thousands of people.
He used the products himself.
There was a patch in the range called Duo Burn, and the effect was immediate.
His watch registered him as exercising through the entire day because his heart rate stayed elevated.
It felt like being midworkout from morning to night.
He slept about 3 hours.
The next day he put another one on.
Anodarco promoted him.
He came off the roving field work and became a field coordinator which changed the shape of his days.
As a rover, he had been alone in a truck across open country.
As coordinator, he spent most of his time at the office in Platville around desks and colleagues and conversation.
At home, the household ran on Shannan’s schedule.
The calendar, the accounts, the girl’s appointments, the trips, the business.
He did what he was told and did not push back.
There was no violence between them.
He never hit her and she never hit him and he did not feel belittled.
She was the dominant one and he was content in the back row, but he was never relaxed.
He said he always felt nervous around his wife, that he planned what he was going to say before he said it, that he watched his words.
He was performing a version of himself that took effort to hold and he had been holding it for years without telling anyone.
Bella was quick and observant and noticed everything in a room and said so.
Celeste was smaller, funnier, more physical.
Celeste had a serious nut allergy, managed carefully in the house and policed by Shannan without apology because the consequences of getting it wrong were severe.
In the winter of 2017, Shannan posted about their fifth anniversary.
She called Chris her rock and said the years with him had the best of her life.
In the spring of 2018, she found out she was pregnant again.
It happened fast.
Within about 2 weeks of them starting to try, which for a woman with lupus who had been told she might never carry at all, was remarkable.
She was thrilled.
Chris was not.
He was surprised and frightened and it showed on his face in a way people noticed.
He put it down to money.
Another person in the house meant more cost and the finances had never actually recovered.
They found out it was a boy.
Shannan chose Nikico, an Italian name she had always liked.
Chris said he preferred the spelling Nikico, and she said no.
He had not chosen either of his daughters names either, and he had told her he liked them, which was easier than the alternative.
They announced it the way they announced everything.
Shannan filmed a reveal and put it out on Facebook Live.
Chris did not want to do it and said nothing.
By early summer, the pressure was building from several directions.
Shannan was pregnant, managing lupus, and still working 65-hour weeks.
The mortgage was behind.
The HOA arers had surfaced, and the association moved to recover what was owed.
The house that looked like success on camera was on paper sliding backwards.
They started talking about selling.
Shannan emailed a realtor named Anne Meadows.
The plan was to buy in Brighton, a town 10 mi south, which would keep the girls inside the Adams 12 school district.
Meadows advised them to get preapproved on the next house before putting this one on the market.
In June, Shannan took Bella and Celeste to North Carolina to stay with her parents.
She planned five weeks there.
Chris would join them for the sixth.
He drove them to the airport, watched them go through, and drove back to a house with nobody in it.
Around 1 June 2018, a gas meter on one of Anadarko’s sites stopped reading correctly.
Chris pulled it and took it back to the office to be repaired.
The person who dealt with it was a woman named Nicl Kessinger.
She was 30, worked as a contract environmental technician, and had come to Anadarko relatively recently.
She had a science background, a small circle of friends, a dog, and an apartment she rarely let anyone into.
He handed over the meter.
They talked about it.
That was all.
Over the following days, they ran into each other around the office four or five times and talked first about work and then about other things.
During one of those conversations, he mentioned that they had moved out from North Carolina.
She asked him who he meant by they.
He took out his phone and showed her a photograph of his daughters.
On his lock screen was a picture of Shannan.
Kessinger knew from that moment that he was married and had a family.
He was not wearing a wedding ring.
He had lost weight and the ring had become loose enough to fall off.
So, it had gone away to be resized and he had not got it back.
She texted him while he was out in the field and he replied and after that they were texting every day.
Within a short time, the messages moved past work.
He would later describe it as flirting that he did not expect to lead anywhere.
Kessinger raised the idea of meeting up.
Chris told her he had a trip coming with Shannan to San Diego from 22 to 26th June.
It was a lavel trip paid for, one of six they had qualified for.
He and Shannan flew out and spent the days there.
While they were in San Diego, he talked to a friend called Mark about a woman at work.
He did not tell him everything.
Mark had been through something comparable and might have had useful advice, but Chris said only part of it and stopped.
He came home.
Shannan and the girls went on to North Carolina and on his first free evening he met Kessinger at a park in Thornton.
From that point it moved quickly.
He asked her to a film at a cinema off 144th.
It was sold out so they walked for 2 hours and talked instead.
She wanted to visit a Shelby car museum in Boulder.
So they went and he enjoyed it more than he expected.
They went to a drag race at Vandermir Speedway and the noise and the smell of it took him straight back to being a boy at a racetrack with his father.
They went camping at Great Sand Dunes National Park, something he had wanted to do for years and never done.
He started staying at her apartment through July.
He was there almost every night.
He would finish work, drive home, work out, eat, and then drive to Kassengers.
The house on Saratoga Trail was empty.
There was nothing in it to remind him of being a husband or a father.
And he later said that was exactly why the arrangement worked for him.
Being away from home meant he did not have to think about either role.
He kept it separated with some care.
Shannan checked his personal phone so he communicated with Kessinger on his work phone.
He downloaded an application called Secret Calculator which presents as an ordinary calculator and hides files behind a passcode.
And he moved photographs into it.
He found something in Kessinger’s company that he had not had in 8 years.
He did not have to plan his sentences.
He did not have to check himself before speaking.
She asked his opinion and waited for the answer.
She asked what he wanted to do and then did it.
He said he felt more in control with her than he had felt in a long time and that he could be himself in a way he never could at home.
He also said that every time he opened his phone and saw the photographs of his wife and daughters, he asked himself what he was doing.
He kept doing it anyway.
On the 4th of July, he woke up at Kessinger’s apartment.
It was a holiday and he had the day off.
Shannan and the girls were 2,000 m away in North Carolina, 3 weeks into a 5we stay at her parents’ house, so there was no reason to go home.
When he picked up his phone, there were 10 missed calls on it from his wife.
He went outside to ring her back.
He did not want to make the call where Kessinger could hear him.
Shannan was angry.
She wanted to know where he was.
He told her he had been asleep.
She said that was not an answer.
She said she did not know where he was or what he was doing.
And then she hung up on him.
He went back inside and told Kessinger he had to go.
His wife had already run once that morning and he wanted to be at his own house if she rang again.
Kessinger asked if he was coming back.
He said no.
That was the day Kessinger understood what she was really in.
She told him she was always going to be second.
She said his wife would come first every time and that she would always be the one waiting.
He tried to study it.
He told her that him having to leave did not mean she should pull away from him.
She said she thought it was better if they did not see each other for the rest of the day.
He drove back to Saratoga Trail.
The house was empty, the way it had been for weeks.
That evening, Kessinger went to a baseball game.
When she got back, she messaged him and asked him to come over.
He went.
They did not fight after that, but there were times he had to calm her down.
She got worked up over things that did not seem worth getting worked up about.
And he talked her round.
He was good at it.
It was the same thing he had been doing since he was a boy, standing between people and lowering the temperature.
She was also trying to work the situation out on her own without telling him.
She searched online for what to do when a man says he is going to leave his wife.
She searched for whether relationships that begin as affairs ever turn into real ones.
She was asking a search engine the questions she was not asking him.
Around the same time she set up dates through a dating app.
The men did not turn up.
Chris did not find out she had been seeing anyone else until weeks later.
She told him he was different from other men.
He fixed things around her apartment without being asked.
A loose fitting, something that had stopped working.
whatever needed doing.
She said nobody had ever done that for her before.
She hardly let anyone into that flat.
It was hers and she kept it closed.
She let him in because her dog liked him and because she had decided he belonged there.
She did not have many people around her.
There was one longstanding friend called Jim who worked in the oil field.
Apart from him, she kept to herself.
That was one of the reasons nobody found out about the two of them.
In North Carolina, Shannan and the girls were staying with her parents.
Chris flew out to join them for the final week.
It did not go the way anyone had planned.
His parents lived a couple of hours away in Spring Lake and had not seen their granddaughters.
A visit was arranged and during it, something happened involving Celeste and Nuts.
His parents lived a couple of hours away in Spring Lake and had not seen their granddaughters in a long time.
A visit was arranged.
During it, something happened involving Celeste and nuts.
Shannan’s reaction was total.
Celeste’s allergy was serious.
Shannan had explained it to that family more than once, and she did not treat it as a small thing because it was not one.
She came away from the visit believing her mother-in-law had put nuts in front of her daughter on purpose.
Cindy’s position was the opposite.
She thought the allergy was not as bad as Shannan made out and that her daughter-in-law was making more of it than the facts justified.
The two women had been circling each other for 6 years.
Since the engagement, since the wedding, neither of Chris’s parents attended.
This was where it finally landed.
The argument happened in front of everyone in the house.
Neither of them backed down.
Chris stood there and said almost nothing.
It was what he had always done in that house and it was what he had always done in his marriage.
Afterwards, Shannan put a post on Facebook about allergies.
It was written as a general post how seriously families needed to take them, what could happen if they did not.
She said it was not aimed at anyone in particular.
Chris knew it was.
He said his wife always had a reason for the things she did.
Celeste’s birthday was on the 17th of July.
The family marked it in North Carolina a few days later at her grandparents house with Shannan’s side of the family around her.
His parents did not come.
After the post, nobody expected them to.
There was one more thing, and it stayed with him longer than the rest.
His father had taken the whole week off work.
Ronnie did not take time off for no reason, and he did not do it often.
He had booked those days specifically so he could spend them with his son and his granddaughters and he had been waiting on it for weeks.
Shannan booked the family for 5 days at the beach instead.
Chris did not say anything about it.
He went where his wife had arranged for him to go.
His father stayed at home with a week off work and nobody to spend it with.
Then Shannan told him his parents would never see the girls again.
She told him he was not to call them or speak to them.
He did as she said for 3 weeks.
There was nothing between them.
Chris did not argue with his wife about it, and he did not ring his father to explain.
He just stopped calling.
The whole time he was in his in-laws house, he was on his phone.
His parents had noticed the same thing when he was under their roof.
He was texting somebody constantly, and he did not put it down.
They asked him straight out whether there was someone else.
He told them there was not.
He and Shannan talked about their marriage during those weeks.
They had been apart for 5 weeks, and something had shifted while she was away.
Their conversations had got shorter.
Fewer messages came through.
The ones that did were less loving and more emotional than they had been.
He called it a disconnect.
He did not tell her what was behind it.
At the end of the sixth week, he flew back to Colorado with his wife and daughters.
He had spent most of the past month at Kessinger’s apartment, going there after work and staying until morning.
Now the house on Saratoga Trail was full again.
August began with things moving in two directions at once.
Shannan was pushing ahead on the move.
She and Chris talked about what they could afford and where they would go, and she worked on the numbers the way she worked on everything.
At the same time, Chris told Kessinger he had spoken to his wife about separating.
Kessinger took him at his word and started looking at apartments for him.
She suggested Brighton and Fort Lupton, places she thought he could manage on one income.
She did not suggest he move in with her.
They had been seeing each other about a month, and she said that was too soon.
On the 6th of August, he rang his parents.
It had been 3 weeks since he had spoken to his father.
Ronnie asked him questions and Chris answered around them, and neither of them said what the silence had been about.
On the 8th of August, he deleted his Facebook account.
Kessinger had told him she had mentioned him to her friends, and he did not want those friends looking him up.
His wife was visibly pregnant in the photographs.
On Saturday, 11th of August, his friend Jeremy Lindstöm asked him to a Broncos game that evening.
Chris said no.
He went out with Kessinger instead.
They had dinner.
He paid with the family credit card because he had used up the Anadarko gift cards he had been paying with and he was not going to ask her to cover it.
Shannan was in Arizona that weekend on a Leavell business trip with a friend and colleague Nicole Atkinson.
She was 15 weeks pregnant.
On Sunday, the two women started for home.
At 2128 that evening, Chris rang Kessinger.
They talked for 1 hour and 51 minutes.
The call ended at 2319, around the time Shannan’s flight had been due to land.
The flight was delayed.
The two women landed late and Atkinson drove her back.
She dropped her outside the house at about 1:48 on Monday, 13th of August, and a doorbell camera recorded Shannan walking up to her own front door, carrying her bag home after 4 days away.
Inside, Chris was in bed.
Bella and Celeste were asleep in their rooms.
Shannan came upstairs and got in beside him.
She had not taken her bra off and she had not washed her face.
He felt her get into the bed and felt her moving around next to him and he lay there and decided she knew about the affair.
She reached over and put her hand on him and they had sex at about half 2.
It did not feel to him like anything ordinary.
It felt like a test, something she was doing to find out what she was dealing with.
While it was happening, he was asking himself who he had become.
Then they both went to sleep.
He got up early, the way he always did, and got ready for work.
Then he went back into the bedroom and woke her because he had decided he had to say something before he left.
She had been sleeping face down.
When he came back into the room, she rolled over onto her back so she could talk to him.
He climbed onto the bed and sat across her waist, pinning her under his own weight.
She was lying flat on her back with him above her, and for a moment, she seemed to think he wanted sex again.
Then she told him he was hurting the baby.
He stayed where he was.
The conversation went on like that for 15 or 20 minutes.
Him sitting on top of his pregnant wife and talking, her underneath him, both of them speaking quietly because their daughters were asleep down the hall.
He did not start with the marriage.
He started with smaller things.
He asked whether they could cancel the trip to Aspen they had booked.
He asked whether they could sell up and move somewhere else entirely and get out of the house.
Underneath all of it, he was thinking about a receipt.
He had taken Kessinger out on Saturday night and paid with the family credit card.
Shannan checked the accounts.
She checked everything.
When that statement came through, she would see a restaurant charge from an evening he had told her nothing about and there would be nothing left to say.
She did not wait for the statement.
She told him she already knew there was someone else.
And she started to cry.
He denied it.
He looked at his wife crying underneath him and told her there was nobody and he felt guilt like nothing he had felt before.
Then he told her the rest.
He said he did not think the marriage was going to work.
He said the two of them were not compatible.
She asked him about the night before about the two of them hours earlier in that same bed.
He did not answer it.
He could not make himself say Kessinger’s name.
His own parents had asked him the same question weeks earlier and he had lied to them and now his wife was asking and he could not say it to her either.
So he said something else instead.
He told her he did not love her.
Shannan told him to get off her.
She said it again that she knew there was someone else.
She told him he was never going to see the girls again and she told him not to hurt the baby.
He put both hands around her neck.
He held on.
He could not say why he did not let go.
Time seemed to slow down.
He felt his own life disappearing in front of him.
And he could not stop what his hands were doing.
It was like having someone stand behind him, holding his hands in place.
Shannan did not fight him.
She did not scream and she did not struggle.
There was nothing on him afterwards.
No scratches, no marks, nothing to show tried to get him off her.
By the time he took his hands away, she was dead.
So was the son she was carrying.
He was shaking.
He did not know what had happened.
He did not feel in control of himself.
And he stood there in his own bedroom at 5 in the morning with no idea what to do next.
People asked him afterwards why he did not pick up the phone and call for help.
He said nobody knows what they would do standing where he was standing.
Then Bella came into the room holding her blanket.
The noise had woken her.
She looked at her mother lying on the bed and asked what was wrong with her.
He told her that her mother did not feel good.
Bella thought Shannan was sleeping.
He took the sheet off his own bed and wrapped his wife in it face down.
She was still in the shirt, bra, and underwear she had got into bed in a few hours earlier.
He tried to carry her down the stairs.
She was heavier than he could manage and he lost her grip on her partway down and he ended up pulling her the rest of the way.
Bella watched him do it.
She started to cry and asked again what was wrong with her mother and he told her the same thing a second time.
Bella was a quick girl.
He knew she understood that something was wrong.
But she did not touch her mother and she did not try to wake her.
She just followed him down the stairs.
He went out and backed his work truck into the driveway up close to the house so he would not have to go far in the open.
Then he laid Shannan on the floor of the truck behind the front seats.
When he came back inside, Celeste was awake and climbing out of her bed.
The sound of her mother being pulled down the stairs had carried through the house.
Both girls were light sleepers, and now both of them were up and moving around.
He picked up his lunchbox and carried it out with him.
Then he put Bella and Celeste on the bench seat in the back of the truck.
Each of them had a blanket.
Celeste had a stuffed toy with her, a dog that barked.
He put a petrol can in the back.
He was thinking about killing himself as well.
He did not think he deserved to be alive after what had happened in that bedroom.
But he decided against doing it at a well site because there were other crews working out in that country and he did not want to start a fire or set off an explosion that reached anyone else.
He did not own a gun.
He said nothing felt right that morning.
Before he left, he did several other things.
He threw Shannan’s phone and her Apple Watch onto the couch so it would look as though she had left them behind.
He took her wedding ring off and set it on the kitchen counter so it would look as though she had taken it off herself and walked out on the marriage.
There was a book in the house about repairing a marriage, and he put that in the bin so it would look as though she had given up on them.
At some point, he went down to the basement, most likely for bin bags.
The alarm on the basement door registered him going through it.
Before he pulled out, he put a bin bag over Shannan’s feet and another one over her head.
He did not want his daughters looking at their mother on the floor behind him.
As far as he could tell, they still did not understand what they were looking at.
Then he shut the doors, got in, and reversed out of the driveway.
It was around a quart 5 in the morning.
Windham Hill was dark and still.
He drove out of the estate and turned north and east and within a few minutes the housing developments ended and the road opened up into farmland.
He was heading for a site called Survy 319.
It sat in open country in Weld County about 12 mi northeast of Kingsburg and roughly 40 mi from the house.
It was an old well and it did not produce much, one of hundreds scattered across that landscape.
Chris was the operator assigned to it.
He knew the ground.
He knew the tanks.
And he knew when other crews were likely to be out there.
The drive took about an hour.
He was shaking the whole way.
He was not thinking about anything, and he did not know what was going to happen when he got there.
He knew only that his life had changed, and there was no version of the morning where it changed back.
Behind him, Bella and Celeste were dozing on and off, holding on to each other and lying across each other’s laps the way they did on any long drive.
They had been woken before dawn and put in a truck, and they had their blankets with them.
And after a while, they stopped asking questions.
At one point, Bella said that it smelled.
The roads got emptier the further out he went.
The last stretch was dirt track.
It was still dark when he arrived.
First light not yet up over the plane and there was nobody else at the site.
He parked and got out and opened the back door.
He took Shannan out of the truck, carried her a short distance and laid her on the ground near the spot where he meant to bury her.
The girls were still in their seats.
They asked him what he was doing with their mother.
He could not remember afterwards what he told them.
Then he went back to the truck.
He killed Celeste first.
He put her blanket over her head.
He had no sense of how long it took because he had no sense of time at all by then.
Bella was sitting right beside her sister and she did not say a word while it happened.
He carried Celeste to one of the oil tanks.
He climbed up, opened the hatch on top, and put her inside.
The opening was tight, and he had to work her through it.
Then he closed the hatch and went back to the truck.
Bella asked him what had happened to Cece.
Then she asked him in a soft voice whether the same thing was going to happen to her.
He was never sure afterwards whether he had said yes.
He put the same blanket over her head.
Bella said, “Daddy, no.”
Those were the last words she spoke.
He carried her to a second tank, a different one from her sisters.
Opened the hatch and put her inside.
She was harder to get through the opening than Celeste had been.
He never worked out why he used two tanks instead of one.
He had not been thinking about whether it made them harder to find, and he had not been trying to keep them apart from each other or from their mother.
He said everything happened too fast for him to have a thought that belonged to him.
Then he went back to where Shannan was lying and started clearing the weeds with a rake.
The rake broke while he was using it and part of it stayed on the ground where it fell.
He did not pick it up.
He dug a hole with a shovel and buried her.
The sun came up over the sight.
The blanket was still in the truck.
So were the clothes he was wearing.
He kept spare boots and clothing in the cab, and he changed into them and put the others in the back.
Then he started his shift.
He worked the site through the morning.
There were readings to take and equipment to check.
and he did the job the way he did it on any other Monday.
Other Anadarko workers were in the area.
Nobody noticed anything about him.
At 12:02, he texted Kessinger.
Around the same time he began making calls that had nothing to do with oil.
He telephoned the school where Bella was enrolled and told them she would not be coming back in the autumn.
He rang the realtor, Anne Meadows, about listing the house.
He was panicking and both calls were a mistake.
He knew it while he was making them.
He could hear himself and he knew he did not sound right.
At about 12:10 back in Frederick, Nicole Atkinson started trying to reach Shannan.
Shannan had a doctor’s appointment at 9 that morning.
She was 15 weeks pregnant and she had not missed one yet.
She did not turn up.
Atinson texted her and got nothing back.
She rang and it went unanswered.
That was not how Shannan operated.
She replied to messages within minutes.
She posted several times a day.
She had been in a car with Atinson 12 hours earlier.
Atinson drove to the house on Saratoga Trail.
She knocked.
She rang the doorbell.
Nobody came.
Shannan’s car was in the garage.
She could see it through the window.
The girl’s car seats were still in it.
She rang Chris.
He was at work 40 mi away and he told her he did not know where his wife was.
Atinson would not leave.
She stayed at the house and she called the Frederick Police Department and asked for a welfare check.
Officer Scott Kunrod arrived in the early afternoon.
Atkinson explained it to him.
A pregnant woman with lupus, a missed medical appointment, no contact all day, her car in the garage, and nobody answering the door.
Chris drove back from the well site.
He arrived at about 2:00 in the afternoon.
Kunrod’s body camera was recording.
Chris went in through the garage.
He was inside for about a minute before he came to the front door and opened it for the officers.
In that minute, he went upstairs and moved around pretending to look for his family.
Coming through the garage, he opened the passenger door of Shannan’s car because Atkinson had mentioned the car seats.
Then he let the police in and the search of the house began.
Nothing in it made sense to anyone standing there.
Shannan’s handbag was in the house.
Her medication was in the house.
Her shoes were by the door.
Atinson’s son found her phone wedged down the side of a couch cushion.
Chris told the officers that Shannan had come home at 2:00 in the morning, that they had talked about a separation, that he had left for work at about a quarter 5, and that she had said she was taking the girls to a friend’s house for a play date.
He said he had not heard from her since.
He was calm.
He answered everything he was asked.
He did not raise his voice and he did not cry.
Kunrod asked about the neighbors.
Chris said the man across the street, Nate Trinastic, had a camera.
They walked over.
Trinastic had a security camera mounted on the front of his house.
It pointed across the road and covered the Watts driveway.
He put the footage up on his television and started scrolling back through the night.
Chris stood in his neighbor’s living room and watched.
He was sweating.
He moved around the room and did not settle.
The recording showed his truck at about a4 5 that morning.
It had been backed up into the driveway instead of parked in its usual place, and he had loaded something into it in the dark.
It showed nobody else.
Shannan’s car never moved.
Shannan never walked out of that house.
Neither did Bella.
Neither did Celeste.
Chris said he had been loading his tools.
Then he found a reason to step out of the room.
While he was gone, Trinastic turned to the officer and said that Chris was not acting right.
By that evening, the Frederick Police Department had had a missing person’s case involving a pregnant woman and two young girls and a husband whose account did not match his neighbor’s camera.
The department was small.
They called for help and they got it quickly.
The Colorado Bureau of Investigation came in.
So did the FBI.
The Weld County Sheriff’s Office joined.
By the following morning, there were dozens of people working the case, and an endangered missing alert had gone out for all three.
Investigators returned to the house with dogs trained to detect human remains and worked through the property.
Officers canvased Windham Hill door to door.
Volunteers gathered.
Chris did not stay in the empty house that night.
He stayed with a neighbor.
On the Tuesday 14th of August, television crews arrived on Saratoga Trail.
Chris told investigators afterwards that he had never wanted to speak to the media and that he thought reporters would keep knocking until he answered.
Atkinson rang him and told him a crew would be at the house at 10.
He stood on his own front porch and gave interviews to two Denver stations, KMGH and KUSA.
He spoke for around 8 minutes.
He said his daughters were his life.
He said their smiles lit up his life.
He said he had come home and walked into the house and there was nothing, that they had vanished, that nothing was there.
He asked whoever might have them to bring them back.
He kept his hands in his pockets.
He looked at the ground more than at the camera.
His voice stayed level throughout.
The interviews went out that day and were picked up nationally within hours.
Tammy Lee, a CBI agent, watched them.
What she saw made her want Chris Watts in an interview room as soon as possible.
He was brought in that day and questioned for hours.
He held to his account.
The separation conversation, the play date, no idea where they had gone.
He denied having an affair.
Two things came out of that interview that mattered to the people running it.
The first was his manner.
He was not distressed in a way that fitted the situation he was describing.
The second was his grammar.
repeatedly and without appearing to notice.
He spoke about his wife and daughters in the past tense.
That night, investigators went through his phone records and computer records.
They found Nicl Kessinger.
There were text messages.
There were phone logs.
There were emails.
There were cards he had sent her and photographs of the two of them together, including from overnight trips.
He had told them hours earlier that there was nobody.
While they were finding this, Kessinger was watching the news.
She had spoken to Chris on Monday, first by text and then on the phone.
He had told her he did not know where his family was.
She had said she thought Shannan had taken the girls somewhere.
On Tuesday, she started asking him strange questions by text.
She asked what his dog was called.
She asked which yoga studio he went to.
She said afterwards it was because she wanted to be certain she was talking to him and not to somebody holding his phone.
At 2 minutes past midnight, she typed the name Shannan Watts into a search engine.
She had never known the name until the case was on the news.
She had not known there was a pregnancy.
She told him it was the last time he would hear from her.
She said she was going to stay with a friend called Jim.
She told him not to contact her until it was over.
She told him to delete everything on his phone.
He did not delete everything of hers and he never explained why.
Then Kessinger deleted his contact details, their messages, and their call logs from her own phone.
And she went to the police.
She walked into the police station and told them who she was and what she had been doing since June.
She sat down for a recorded interview and laid out the whole thing for them.
She told them how it started at the office over a broken gas meter.
She told them about the park in Thornton, the car museum in Boulder, the drag races, the camping trip to the sand dunes, and the month of nights she spent with him at her apartment.
She told them she had known he was married with two daughters.
He had shown her photographs.
She had seen his wife’s face on his phone’s lock screen.
She said he had told her the marriage was already over and that a divorce was coming.
She said she had not known Shannan was pregnant and she had not even known Shannan’s name until it showed up on the news.
She told them about helping him look for apartments.
She said that in the first week of August, he had told her he had spoken to his wife about separating.
Then she told them about the last two days and this was the part that mattered most.
She had spoken to him on Monday night and he had been asleep.
She thought that was strange given that his wife and daughters were supposedly missing.
He had not sounded as worried as she thought he should.
When they talked, he seemed more interested in the two of them than in his own family.
At one point, she had video called him.
She noticed there were no sheets on the mattress he was lying on.
She told them plainly that she did not believe he had ever gone out looking for his family.
Now, the investigators had three things pointing the same direction.
A man who had lied to them about having an affair, a neighbor’s camera that contradicted his story about that morning, and a woman who had spent 2 days watching him up close and could not make his behavior add up.
They asked him to come back in on Wednesday, 15th of August, and take a polygraph test.
He agreed.
That morning, his father, Ronnie Watts, flew in from North Carolina to be with him.
They arrived at the police station together, and officers took Ronnie to a separate room to wait.
The test was set for 11:00.
CBI agent Tammy Lee ran it.
Before she even started the machine, she spent several hours just talking to him.
She asked about his marriage.
He talked calmly about the 5 weeks his wife and daughters had spent away in North Carolina and how the distance had changed things between them.
Fewer texts, shorter calls, less warmth, more tension.
He called it a disconnect.
She asked what he had done on Saturday night.
He told her about going to a Rocky’s game.
He knew right then what kind of interview this was going to be.
He understood he was not walking out of that room the same man who walked in.
Then the polygraph ran the same questions again and again.
He failed badly.
Lee stepped out and came back in with FBI special agent Graham Coder.
They told him something specific.
His affair had never been one of the test questions.
So whatever he had been lying about when the machine flagged him, it was not the girlfriend.
They already knew about her.
Coder had been gentle with him for hours.
Now his tone changed.
He told Chris he had lied to everyone he had spoken to and every single one of them had believed him.
He reminded him that his own father had flown across the country that morning and was sitting just down the hall and that he had lied to him too.
Chris said he was just a nervous person that he felt like he was going to say the wrong thing no matter what they asked.
Coder and Lee left the room and let him sit alone.
That was what finally worked.
Every time they walked out, he was left there with nothing but his own thoughts.
Then Lee came back and offered him something.
She suggested that maybe Shannan had done something to the girls herself.
Until she said those words out loud, the idea had never once crossed his mind.
He asked to speak to his father.
They brought Ronnie in and left the two of them alone.
The recording equipment stayed running.
Chris told his father he had done something.
Then he gave him the story Lee had just handed him.
He said he had told Shannan he wanted to separate.
He said he had gone downstairs.
He said that when he came back up, he looked at the baby monitor on his wife’s nightstand and saw her hands on Celeste and saw Bella on her own bed turned blue.
He said that was when he went into a rage and strangled his wife.
He said it all quietly.
He said she had hurt their daughters.
He said he was not going to protect her.
Ronnie sat there and took it in.
He asked his son one question.
Was that really what happened?
Then the investigators came back into the room.
And Chris repeated the same story to them.
He told them what he did afterward.
He said he loaded all three of them into the backseat of his work truck and drove out to a site where he worked as an operator.
He gave them the name Servy 319.
He said Shannan was buried there and that his daughters were inside the oil tanks.
Nobody in that room believed the part about Shannan killing the girls.
Not Ror, not anyone else.
But now they had a location.
Chris Watts was arrested that night on suspicion of murder.
The paperwork was finished at 10 minutes to 2:00 in the morning on 16th of August.
Anodarco fired him.
At first light, teams headed out to Survey 319.
Investigators, forensic staff, and oil field workers who knew how to open the equipment because nobody else could.
They found Shannan first.
She was in a shallow grave near the tanks wrapped in the sheet from her own bed.
A drone spotted the corner of the fabric sticking out of the dirt.
The pattern matched pillowcases and a top sheet that had already been pulled from the trash at the house on Saratoga Trail.
Part of a broken rake lay on the ground close by.
Then the teams turned to the tanks.
Bella and Celeste had been inside them since Monday morning.
Getting them out took hours.
Workers had to drain and shift the contents, and they needed protective gear to do it safely.
Both girls were recovered that afternoon.
All three were pronounced dead on the 16th of August.
The next day, the Weld County Coroner’s Office carried out the post-mortem examinations and confirmed who they were.
Shannan Catherine Watts, Bella Marie Watts, and Celeste Catherine Watts.
What the coroner found did not match the story Chris had told his father.
Shannan had died from strangulation.
There were marks on her neck and along the left side of her face.
There was nothing on her body to suggest she had fought back.
She was in her second trimester of pregnancy.
Bella and Celeste had not been strangled at all.
They had been smothered.
And the exam showed that Bella had injuries consistent with trying to resist because the girls bodies had spent four days inside the tanks.
The coroner could not pin down an exact time of death for any of them.
While recovery crews were still working the scene, the town of Frederick posted updates online.
By that evening, the whole country knew the man who had stood on his porch two days earlier, pleading for his family to come home was the one who had led police straight to their bodies.
On Monday, 20th of August, Weld County District Attorney Michael Ror filed charges.
There were nine felony counts.
Three counts of first-degree murder after deliberation, one each for Shannan, Bella, and Celeste.
two further counts of firstdegree murder of a victim under 12 by a person in a position of trust.
One count of firstdegree unlawful termination of a pregnancy and three counts of tampering with a deceased human body.
Ror filed them about 90 minutes before the arrest affidavit became public.
And he did that deliberately.
When the affidavit came out at just before 5 that afternoon, it contained Chris Watts’s claim that his wife had killed their daughters.
Ror wanted the charges on the record first so that there was no ambiguity about what the state believed.
The affidavit set out the rest.
It recorded that investigators had determined Watts was actively involved in an affair with a coworker, something he had denied to them.
It recorded the surveillance footage from his neighbor Nate Tronastic’s camera.
It recorded that he had told investigators he loaded all three of them into his truck and driven them to the well site.
The document went around the world within hours.
On Tuesday, 21st of August, Watts was brought before Judge Marcelo Copcow at the Weld County Courthouse in Gley for a formal advisement.
It lasted about 20 minutes.
He sat shackled, staring straight ahead.
When Copcow asked whether he understood the charges against him, he said, “Yes, sir.”
Those were the only words he spoke.
Shannan’s father, Frank Zuchek, and her brother, Frankie Zuchek, were in the courtroom.
When the judge read out the names, Shannan, Bella, Celeste, they broke.
Watts waved his right to a preliminary hearing within 35 days.
He was held without bond.
Under Colorado law, first-degree murder carried a mandatory life sentence at minimum.
It also remained a capital offense.
Ror had 63 days from arraignment to give notice of whether the state would seek the death penalty.
Watts’s defense was led by John Walsh of the Colorado State Public Defenders Office.
They filed early on the forensic question.
Their client’s account was that Shannan had strangled the girls, and if that was true, there would be evidence of it.
They asked for a DNA expert, Richard Eichelinboom, to be present at the post-mortems to take swabs from the girl’s necks.
Illanboom stated he had extensive experience recovering samples from bodies after strangulation.
Copcow denied the request.
The autopsies answered it in any case.
The girls had not been strangled.
Roughly 2 weeks after his arrest, Chris told his own attorneys what had actually happened.
He told them the truth about the morning of 13th of August.
They sat and listened and wrote it down and said very little.
They told him they would not judge him and that they appreciated his honesty.
They also kept preparing the case around the story he had given at the police station because that was the defense available to them.
On the 1st of September, a funeral mass was held at Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church in Pinehurst, North Carolina for Shannan, Bella, Celeste, and Nico.
It was streamed online by the funeral home.
Hundreds attended in person, and many thousands watched.
In Colorado, the house at 2825 Saratoga Trail stood empty.
Nobody had turned the lawn sprinklers on, and the grass had begun to die.
In Spring Lake, Chris’s parents, Ronnie and Cindy Watts, stopped speaking to reporters and began receiving correspondents from strangers around the world.
Some of it told them their son was a monster.
Some of it told them he had been set up.
A good deal of it concerned the Thrive patches and made the claim that the products were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration and were capable of altering a person’s mind.
They started to believe it.
Through September and October, the case built in two directions at once.
The prosecution assembled the evidence for a capital trial.
The defense prepared motions, and behind both, a negotiation began.
Watts’s attorneys approached district attorney Michael Ror about a resolution.
They asked their client a question first.
If a plea were offered that took execution off the table, would he take it?
He said he would.
He said he wanted it ended.
They asked him again and again.
By his own count, they asked him something close to a hundred times whether he was certain.
They told him they had a long list of motions ready to file and that they were prepared to fight.
They never told him he had to accept anything.
He told his attorney, John Walsh, that he did not want him fighting for a version of events that was not true because that would only make it worse for everyone.
He said he did not want his lawyers spending 2 to four years telling a story he had invented in an interview room.
He also refused to look at the photographs from the site.
Walsh told him that if a case went to trial, he would have to look at them in advance so that he did not react when they were put on a screen in front of a jury.
He would not do it.
He asked whether Shannon’s parents, Frank and Sandy or Zuchek, had seen them and was told they had not.
Ror, meanwhile, had a decision that was not his alone to make.
In October, he and another prosecutor flew to North Carolina and sat down with Frank Zuchek, his wife Sandra Zuchek, and their son Frankie Arzuchek.
He laid it out honestly.
Colorado had reinstated the death penalty in 1975 and had executed one man since, Gary Davis, in 1997.
In 2013, Governor John Hickinlooper had granted an indefinite reprieve to Nathan Dunlap, who had murdered four people at a restaurant in Aurora in 1993, and that reprieve had frozen the system.
There were three men on the state’s death row, and none of them were moving toward an execution date.
Ror explained the delays, the appeals, the years, and what all of it would require from the family.
He asked them what they wanted.
They were strongly in favor of resolving the case short of the death penalty.
Sandy Zuchek put it to him in one sentence.
She said that Chris had made the choice to take those lives and that she did not want to be in the position of making the choice to take his.
Ror said afterwards that her words settled it for everyone in the room.
He went back to Colorado and made the deal.
Watts would plead guilty to all nine counts.
nothing would be dismissed and nothing would be reduced.
Ror said he was not willing to entertain any further concessions.
The sentences would run consecutively.
On Tuesday, 6th November 2018, Chris Watts was brought into a packed courtroom in Gley.
Frank, Sandy, and Frankie Orzuchek sat in the front row.
Judge Marcelo Copka read the charges one at a time.
Nine counts.
Watts answered each one.
His voice shook.
He said the word guilty nine times and between them he could be heard sniffing.
He had told his parents the night before that he was pleading guilty and that he had a reason for it.
Afterwards, Ror held a press conference with the Zuchek family present.
They did not speak.
Ror did.
He said Watts deserved a life sentence for each and every act.
He explained the family’s position and quoted Sandy.
And then he spoke about the state of capital punishment in Colorado with visible frustration about the extraordinary delays that existed about a system that had produced one execution in more than half a century.
Sentencing was set for 19th of November.
There was no suspense left in the hearing.
The sentence had been agreed.
What remained was the part where people spoke.
On Monday 19th of November, the courtroom filled again.
Chris Watts’s attorneys had told him he needed to show some emotion in court because otherwise he would look like a cold man.
He sat at the defense table with his head down and his leg moving.
His parents, Ronnie and Cindy Watts, came.
They had returned to North Carolina after the plea, and he had not expected them to be there.
Days earlier, they had given an interview to a Denver station in which they questioned the plea deal openly.
His mother, Cindy, had said she asked her son not to confess to something he had not done and that his attorney had shut her down.
She said she wanted him to fight.
She said she wanted him to plead not guilty to the girls.
By the day of sentencing, they had changed course.
A representative read a prepared statement on their behalf.
They did not ask for leniency.
The statement said the killings should never have happened, that nothing about it was condonable and that it was something the family would never get over.
Cindy told her son she loved him.
Then Shannan’s family spoke.
Her father, Frank Zuchek, stood and addressed the man his daughter had married.
He asked how he could have killed people he was supposed to protect and then disposed of them the way he had.
He said he had trusted him to take care of them, not to kill them.
He called him a heartless monster.
Her mother, Sandier Zuchek, spoke about her daughter and her granddaughters.
Her brother, Frankie Orzuchek, could not read his own statement.
So, District Attorney Michael Ror read it for him.
He had written that he could not sleep.
Ror addressed the court and asked the question everybody in the building had been asking for 3 months.
He asked how a seemingly normal husband and father annihilates his entire family and what for.
He told the court about Shannan’s death.
He said that the absence of significant injury indicated that it had not been quick and that strangling a person to death takes between 2 and 4 minutes.
He described what had been done to Bella and what the examination had shown.
He described where the girls had been placed.
He said it had appeared to investigators that Watts intended to begin an entirely new life clean of his wife, his daughters, and his unborn son with the woman he had described to them as the love of his life.
His coworker Nicl Kessinger.
He also addressed the toxicology results because they had already been reported publicly and he did not want them misunderstood.
Shannan’s blood had shown a reading of.128.
He told the courtroom plainly that this was not because she had been drinking.
It was a consequence of the state her body had been in by the time it was found.
A natural process, not a choice she had made.
He wanted the record to say so in her own defense since she was not there to say it herself.
Judge Marcelo Copcow turned to the defense table and asked Chris Watts whether he wished to make a statement.
Watts stood.
He said, “No, sir.”
Those were the only words he spoke in the courtroom that day.
His attorneys had already put out a short statement on his behalf, saying he was devastated, that he knew words were hollow at this point, and that he was sincerely sorry.
Copco had sat on the bench for 17 years.
He had handled thousands of cases in that time.
He told the courtroom that this was, in his own words, perhaps the most inhumane and vicious crime he had ever dealt with.
He said anything less than the maximum sentence available to him would depreciate how serious it was.
Then he passed sentence.
Five life terms without the possibility of parole.
Three of them would run one after another.
One for Shannan, one for Bella, one for Celeste.
Two more would run alongside them.
On top of that, he added 48 years for the unlawful termination of the pregnancy and 12 years for each of the three counts of tampering with a body.
Copcow said one more thing before he left the bench.
He said that what stayed with him most out of everything in the case was the way the bodies had been disposed of.
That to him was the most despicable part.
10 days later on 29th of November, the Weld County District Attorney’s Office began releasing the case file.
More than 2,000 pages went out in response to public records requests along with photographs, audio, and video.
It was one of the largest releases of its kind Colorado had seen in a murder case.
And it happened because the case had ended without a trial, and there was no longer any jury to protect.
Everything was in it.
There was the body camera footage from 13th of August.
Officer Scott Kunrod at the door, the walk through the house, the minutes in neighbor Nate Trinastic’s living room with Chris standing in front of the television watching his own driveway.
There were the interrogation videos from the 14th and the 15th.
There was the polygraph.
There was the moment CBI agent Tammy Lee suggested Shannan might have done something to the girls.
There was Ronnie Watts alone in a room with his son hearing him say it.
There were the interviews with Nicl Kessinger.
There were the text messages between Chris and Shannan across the summer and the messages between Chris and Kessinger and the phone records and the photographs recovered from the secret calculator app and the cards he had sent her.
There were the autopsy reports which the coroner had petitioned to seal and which had been fought over by the Gley Tribune and other outlets until Watts pleaded guilty and the argument became moot.
And there were the letters.
Since his arrest, women had been writing to Chris Watts.
Prosecutors released dozens of them.
One woman wrote that she felt a connection to him.
Another sent a photograph of herself in a bikini and said she found herself thinking about him a lot.
The release turned the case into something that ran on its own.
Within weeks, the footage was on YouTube, cut and recut and analyzed frame by frame.
The polygraph interview alone ran to hours and people watched all of it.
Some of what came out raised questions the office then had to answer.
In the phone data review of Kessinger’s device, an entry appeared showing a search for the name Shannan Watts dated 1st to September 2017, nearly a year before the affair began.
Other entries reference searches in January 2018, and deleted searches for Chris Watts going back to August 2017.
Reporters asked about it.
A record supervisor at the Frederick Police Department said the September 2017 entry was a typographical error and should have read September 2018 and referred further questions to the district attorney’s office.
Ror’s office was asked to explain the other entries and could not fully account for them.
Ror said the matter was not a witch hunt.
Kessinger had never been charged with anything.
Investigators had concluded she had no involvement in the deaths.
In December, the Colorado Department of Corrections moved Chris Watts out of the state.
He had been at the Weld County Jail and then at the Denver Reception and Diagnostic Center where he went through intake.
He was given 11 separate tests, including one for cognitive ability, and came out of it with a figure somewhere around 135 to 140.
In the county jail, the entire unit had to be locked down for him to walk down a corridor.
He never actually saw another inmate.
He heard them.
They shouted at him from their cells at night, telling him how he could kill himself and what they would do to him if they got the chance.
Everyone in the building knew who he was and why he was there.
He heard there was a contract on him.
He believed he would last about a week in the Colorado prison system.
He prayed to be moved out of the state.
One evening after dinner, he was told to change his clothes.
He was put in a van without being told where he was going.
On the 3rd of December 2018, he arrived at the Dodge Correctional Institution in Wapan, Wisconsin.
Wisconsin had agreed to take him under an interstate agreement for his own safety.
The Colorado Department of Corrections informed the Rzuchek family that he had been moved.
He settled into it quickly and he preferred it.
Nobody in Wapan locked down a corridor for him.
He was not shouted at through the walls.
He kept his head down and drew no attention.
And he said he enjoyed being there far more than he had enjoyed the county jail in Colorado.
He was allowed to telephone his father, his mother, and his sister.
He was given access to mental health staff.
A woman came round and asked him how things were going and whether he needed any medication.
He declined all of it.
Most of the men in his unit were on something.
He was not.
The letters followed him from Colorado.
They arrived constantly, many with no return address.
He was permitted to read them, but not to keep them in his cell.
One person in Broomfield wrote to him four times a week and asked to visit.
Others told him he was a monster.
Journalists wrote.
Strangers asked him for spiritual guidance.
He worked out a rule for himself.
If someone wrote once, he did not reply.
He kept the supportive letters and threw away the ones he found strange.
He did not write back to anyone connected to the media, and the prison declined the television requests that came in for him.
He had never read the Bible before he was arrested.
In Wisconsin, he read it from beginning to end.
He had a good memory and he found he could hold scripture in it.
So he began writing out passages, a couple a day for his parents and more for other inmates who asked him for them.
An aunt and uncle who were missionaries told him they were amazed at how far he had come with it.
In his cell, he kept photographs of his wife and daughters on the wall.
He talked to them every morning and every night.
He had a book in there, the same book he used to read to Celeste, and he read it aloud to them along with scripture.
Meanwhile, his parents were working from North Carolina on a different premise.
They had never accepted the plea.
On their bad days, they told their son on the phone that he should fight it and that there was a chance he could get out.
His mother lost her composure often during those calls.
His father would tell her not to raise it because afterwards Chris would go back to his cell and think about it all night.
They talked to him about complex post-traumatic stress disorder and about the argument that he had been in an emotionally abusive marriage and had been damaged by it.
They talked about the Thrive patches.
They had been told the products were not FDA approved and could alter a person’s mind.
And Chris had in fact reported sleeping three hours a night on the duo burn patch with his heart rate elevated all day.
He could see how parts of it fitted.
He told them it did not make up for what had happened.
They sold his toolbox to pay for the travel to come and see him.
Christopher Lee Watts remained at the Dodge Correctional Institution in Wapun, Wisconsin.
His plea had closed every door behind him.
By pleading guilty to all nine counts, he had given up almost all of his rights to appeal, and there was no mechanism for early release, sentence reduction, or parole.
Three of his life sentences ran consecutively, which meant that even the arithmetic of the thing left nothing open.
He did not become a prisoner who caused trouble.
He kept a low profile, declined psychiatric medication, and asked to be given work.
He stayed in a maximum security facility a long way from anyone who had known him.
He kept writing.
The letters went out constantly filled with scripture over the years.
He corresponded with a number of women and a number of them wrote back regularly.
One of them said she had first written to him in 2022 and that he had told her he had become a Christian in prison.
What he wrote to them changed as the years went on.
He described himself as a new man.
He quoted a verse about anyone in Christ being a new creation, the old having passed away.
And he said that this was him.
He wrote that God did not see him as a man who had killed his family, but as a child of God.
He said he had confessed his sins and been forgiven, and that the hardest thing he had ever had to do was forgive himself.
He wrote that he had always taken full responsibility for what he did.
and in the same breath that he had been misled by a wicked woman.
In a letter addressed to God, he wrote that he had been tempted by a harlot, that he had been weak and fooled by an evil woman who led him from the path of righteousness, and that she would be judged one day.
To the woman who had written to him since 2022, he wrote that God had a plan for him and wanted him in prison, that it was God’s will in the same way it had been God’s will for Jesus to die, and that God wanted to bring people closer to him through his suffering.
He wrote that he would never fully understand what Christ went through on the cross, but that his own trials had given him a glimpse of it.
In late 2025, he told her they could not be together.
He wrote that in a different time he believed he could have been with her, but that God had other plans for his life.
He turned 40 in that prison.
This case is remembered because four people never got the chance to be anything more than a case.
Shannan Catherine Watts, Bella Marie Watts, Celeste Catherine Watts, and the son they never got to meet, Nico.
They are the reason this story gets told, not the man who ended it.
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