AMERICAN MURDER...
True story behind the slaughter of mum & kids by their dad
Sensing her marriage to the man of her dreams was in trouble, there was nothing pregnant mum Shanann Watts would not do to get it back on track.
Though juggling a well-paid new job that took her away from Chris and their two young daughters, she would spend hours planning romantic breaks.
Carrying their first son, she was still deeply in love with the man she had married in November 2012.
Amid their struggles, which included filing for bankruptcy, she texted him: “I miss and love you so much. I am still in shock that we are having a little boy. I am so excited and happy.”
Weeks later, on August 13, 2018, when a colleague dropped her at home following a business trip, it was the last time anyone would see her alive.
The next day, she and her daughters Bella and Celeste were reported missing.
Her husband was appearing on local news, pleading for his family’s return.
But Watts, then 33, already knew he would never see his family again.
Hours earlier he had brutally strangled his pregnant wife.
As he dragged her body down the stairs, the couple’s four- year- old daughter, Bella, asked her dad: “What is wrong with Mommy?”
After he laid Shanann in the footwell of his truck, he loaded Bella and Celeste, three, into the back seat and drove them to an oil site owned by his employers.
There, he used a blanket to smother his youngest daughter, who was nicknamed Cece, and dropped her in an oil tank.
He did the same to her sister.
“Is the same thing gonna happen to me as Cece?” Bella asked before she died, Watts later confessed.
Devastated family, friends and neighbours watched as the man they knew as a handsome, loving husband and father was arrested and charged with murder.
The harrowing case is told in a Netflix documentary by British director Jenny Popplewell.
Unusually, the film does not use interviews to tell the story.
American Murder: The Family Next Door uses social media posts and videos by Shanann along with text messages, police and news footage, all with her family’s blessing.
The 83-minute documentary begins with Facebook footage showing the family playing happily together.
Shanann introduces herself and the children before gushing about Chris.
It then cuts to the moment she returns home, unaware her husband was about to kill her. Shanann, 34, was
filmed by the doorbell camera at her home in Fredrick, Colorado, after getting out of her friend’s car at 1.48am.
The footage shows her colleague waiting until the 15 weeks-pregnant mum is inside her five- bedroomed house before driving away.
Shanann’s disappearance was first reported by Nickole Atkinson, the friend who dropped her off 12 hours earlier.
Nickole was worried when Shanann missed a doctor’s appointment that day,
saying: “She was going to get to hear the baby’s heartbeat.”
On the day of Shanann’s disappearance, Nickole also remembered going to talk to Watts and being struck by his failure to give a detailed explanation of his wife’s whereabouts.
He said she had gone to meet a friend but was unable to give a name.
As news of the disappearance spread, oil-field operator Watts spoke from his doorstep to news crews.
He said, as police officers searched the house: “In my heart, I believe she is somewhere, and I hope she is safe.”
The illusion held up for a day or so, at least on TV, but investigators were immediately suspicious after finding Shanann’s purse and keys still in the house. A day after Shanann’s disappearance, Watts’ colleague Nichol Kessinger contacted police after seeing him on the news.
She told investigators she had been dating him for several weeks.
She had been under the impression he was finalising his divorce and was moving out with his daughters.
“He lied about everything,” Kessinger later said.
Another source of tension in Chris’s life was Shanann’s anns feud with his mother Cindy, sparked when Cindy gave allergy sufferer ufferer
Cece ice cream eam containing nuts. s.
When a friend d l at er asked d Watts about the e fallout, he told them he was “done with LOVE STORY
Ill-fated wedding
Shanann”. So between his mistress and these family tensions, it was clear Watts wanted to start a new life.
Attempting to clear his name, Watts agreed to a lie detector test. His plan backfired terribly. He scored minus 18 on a test where anything below minus 4 is considered an indicator of dishonesty.
At times, Watts even referred to his daughters in the past tense, though at that stage the police investigation was still treating them as missing. Wat t s then th e n changed his story completely. He
claimed he had seen his wife strangling Celeste via the baby monitor, with a lifeless Bella lying on the bed.
He told police he then strangled Shanann in a vengeful rage before disposing of all three bodies.
When he changed his story for a final time, it was to confess to all three of the vicious murders.
He explained that he and Shanann had got into a heated conversation on the night of her death. When he told her he wanted a divorce, he said, she told him he would never see the children again – so he murdered her.
In November, he pleaded guilty to nine charges including murder, the unlawful termination of a pregnancy and tampering with a dead body.
He was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
In a sick twist to his tale, Watts now gets mailbags full of fan letters in prison, from women who believe he is somehow the “victim” in the case.
In court Shanann’s father, Frank Rzucek, said: “I trusted you to take care of them, not kill them.
“And they also trusted you. You heartless monster. You have to live with this vision every day of your life, and I hope you see it every time you close your eyes at night.”
What is wrong with Mommy? Is the same thing gonna happen to me as Cece?
BELLA WATTS TO HER FATHER BEFORE HE MURDERED HER