SECRETS & MURDER
When Shanann Watts and her girls went missing, her husband Chris pleaded on TV for their safe return. Then came his twisted confession to police
Why Chris Watts brutally killed his wife and daughters
For more than 48 wrenching hours, those who love Shanann Watts and her two girls, Bella, 4, and Celeste, 3, pleaded—to police, on social media, in TV news interviews—for help finding the trio after a friend reported them missing from their Frederick, Colorado, home at 1.40 PM on Aug. 13. “Please say a prayer,” Shanann’s younger brother Frankie Rzucek wrote on Facebook. “Please ... bring her home to us,” tweeted her cousin Lu Valentino. But only Chris Watts, the handsome husband and father starring in scores of Shanann’s social-media posts—“i couldn’t imagine a better man for us,” she wrote on Instagram on April 21; “My Daddy is a hero, he helps me grow up strong,” Bella sang in a June 14 Facebook video—spoke of his family in the past tense. Appealing for their safe return in a television interview on Aug. 14, he told Denver 9News, “Bella was going to start kindergarten.” A day after that appearance, Chris was in jail, accused of killing both his daughters as well as Shanann, who was 15 weeks pregnant with the baby boy they planned to call Niko. “It’s beyond belief,” says family friend Kris Landon, 49. “They seemed the perfect couple.”
The reality was unimaginably grim. On Aug. 20, Weld County District Attorney Michael J. Rourke formally charged Chris with the deaths of Shanann, 34, and their daughters, along with three counts of tampering with a body and a count of firstdegree unlawful termination of a pregnancy. Court documents state all three bodies were found on the property of Anadarko, the Denver-area oil-and-gas company where Chris worked until he was fired the same day as his arrest. Addressing reporters at the press conference, Shanann’s father, Frank Rzucek Sr, said tearfully, “Keep the prayers coming for our family.”
At press time, Chris, 33, had yet to enter a plea, and his lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. But according to an arrest affidavit, he confessed to police that he had strangled Shanann—but claimed he had only done it in a rage after he saw her strangling their daughter Celeste and observed Bella’s body “blue” and “sprawled” on her bed.
The affidavit also states that police learned Chris had been “actively involved in an affair with a co-worker” and that he told them that when Shanann returned home from a business trip in the early morning hours of Aug. 13, he informed her he “wanted to initiate [a] separation” and later “they were both upset and crying.”
Just two days earlier, Shanann had been in high spirits during sales training in Arizona for Le-vel, the direct-marketing company for which she sold health and wellness products. Delighted about her pregnancy, she told fellow attendees that she was eager to return home for a Monday obstetrician appointment and was planning a party to reveal the baby’s sex the following Saturday. But Shanann’s return was delayed, and it was 2 AM Monday by the time her friend Nickole Atkinson dropped her at home. “She went inside, turned around, waved at me and shut the door,” Atkinson told ABC News.
According to friends and family, Chris was happy about his wife’s pregnancy and already a doting father. Home videos show him giggling along as they played a pie-in-the-face game and praying with them before meals. “Whenever they wanted him to play monster, he would play monster,” says close friend Nick
Thayer. Shanann donned an “Oops, we did it again” T-shirt to show him her positive pregnancy test back in June. “That’s awesome! I guess when you want to, it happens,” he said in a video of that intimate moment, one of many Shanann shared on social media. It was Facebook, after all, that had brought them together after Chris sent her a random “friend” request more than eight years earlier when they were both living in North Carolina. She later recalled clicking “accept”: “I was like, ‘Ah, what the heck, I’m never going to meet him.’ ... Well, one thing led to another ... ”
The couple wed in 2012 and three years later they were living in a $400,000 house in the Denver area. Chris started with Anadarko in 2014, while Shanann worked at a children’s hospital call centre. Money may have been an issue. They filed for bankruptcy in June, 2015. But by earlier this year, Shanann was selling Thrive, Le-vel’s line of health supplements and energy patches, and she and Chris were taking extravagant paid holidays with the company to places like Punta Cana, in the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. “They always had their arms around each other and were having fun,” says Thayer, describing Chris as otherwise “pretty quiet” while Shanann “was
the more outgoing one.” Adds Landon, “They were the couple that you’d look at and then turn to your husband and be like, ‘ Why aren’t we like that?’ ”
After Chris’ arrest, friends considered whether they had missed red flags. Atkinson told ABC that Shanann had confided to her that her husband “wasn’t being the loving Chris that he normally was, he wasn’t touching or hugging.” And Thayer’s wife, Amanda, told CBS News that Shanann had considered the possibility that Chris was cheating. When Chris—who could face the death penalty—spent the night before his arrest at their house, Amanda told ABC, “He never once cried.”
Now Shanann’s family in Aberdeen, North Carolina, are left raw with anguish and fury. “I just want 30 seconds alone with that heartless psychopath,” Shanann’s brother Frankie wrote in a blistering Facebook post on Aug. 16. But along with that rage and ache to understand the incomprehensible are happy memories. Shanann, Frankie recalled, took him to her prom when he didn’t have a date. “I tried my best to keep boys away from her. She was smart and beautiful, so it wasn’t easy. But that’s what brothers do,” he wrote, adding that he clings now to the six weeks he had this summer with her, his “Bella Bean” and Celeste. “I wish I could go back in time and be there to keep you safe from harm. Sorry uncle couldn’t save you.”
“[Shanann and Chris] always had their arms around each other —friend Nick Thayer