I knew less than zero about the horrific murders of pregnant mother, Shanann (Rzucek) Watts, 34 and her unborn baby boy, Nico, and her two daughters, Bella, 4, and Celeste, 3, at the hands of no-good-piece of shit, supposedly happily married father and husband, Chris Watts, the morning of Aug. 13, 2018.
Up until June 2021 upon my watching the Netflix crime documentary, “American Murder: The Family Next Door” (2020), I was thankful I didn’t know all the depressingly grisly details.
Unlike everyone else who apparently can’t get enough of all these so-called regurgitated investigative documentaries, made-for-cable tabloid movies of the week about mass murderers, serial killers and sexual predators I avoid most all these programs almost as much as a diabetic with a death wish avoids taking their insulin daily. (Not me of course)!I do know sometime during the early morning hours of Aug. 14, 2018, chances are I did hear something about a missing 15-weeks pregnant mother of two somewhere in Anytown, USA as I browsed the internet and had “Good Morning America” on in the background.
I was so oblivious to the news segment that I didn’t know the piece-of-shit the drive-by media interviewed was the killer himself (before law enforcement along with the rest of the country, if not the world, learned the truth).
Talk about this isn’t going to end the way you think!
I was so ignorant in my knowledge of the case that when I did watch the Netflix documentary in June three years ago, I thought the streaming service was promoting that current month’s original new programming. The streaming service, however, had an ulterior motive.
Much like I didn’t believe for one minute it was perfect timing that Netflix aired the Ebola virus thriller, "Outbreak" (1995), in March 2021 when the country went into lockdown at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was the service’s attempt to draw more viewers.
They pulled the same stunt last July airing "Titanic" (1997) a month after the OceanGate disaster. Don’t tell me it was a coincidence the service already had Cameron’s romance catastrophe already on their list of that month’s releases. They did the same thing again when O.J. Simpson died in April adding the 2016 ESPN documentary, "O.J.: Made in America" to their viewing list.
Netflix wanted to cash in on "American Murder: The Family Next Door" because of the media attention at the time on the Watts case thanks to a book author Cherlyn Cadle was working on about the murders who interviewed the confessed killer in prison, along with the Lifetime movie, "Chris Watts: Confessions of a Killer" (2020) which Shanann’s grieving family denounced.
“It’s a false narrative that does not accurately depict who Shanann was in life, who Bella was in life, who CeCe was in life,” family attorney Steven Lambert told "Inside Edition" back in 2020 when the film aired. “This is their tragedy, their story and it’s being taken away from them so when people go out and make things without their input and do the facts straight from the horse’s mouth, it does pain them, it does hurt them.”
The couple declared bankruptcy in 2015 with over $70,000 in debt despite a combined income of $91,000. The thought only infuriates me more questioning how people like the Watts couple were allowed to have a luxurious home in the best Colorado suburb, go on expensive vacations and raise two kids with a third one on the way at the time of Shanann’s and the kids disappearance and the rest of us with either bad credit and/or bank history can’t even be allowed to get near to buying a home.
During those 82 minutes, I felt uneasy watching the documentary as I already knew something foreboding was about to happen and could do nothing to stop it. I had the same feeling watching "United 93" (2006).
I wanted to yell at the flatscreen telling Shanann to turn around as house security cameras caught her making her way to the front door at 2825 Saratoga Trail the morning of Aug. 13 as she let herself in after friend, Nicole Atkinson, dropped her off following a weekend Arizona business trip.
I asked myself, why the hell didn’t Shanann fight back as Chris strangled her? Despite Chris telling her he wanted a divorce, admitting to an affair with co-worker Nichol Kessinger to which he wanted to start a new life with her, was the last thing Shanann expected was that the husband she thought she knew and loved would murder her and her unborn child? Was the shock of that alone the reason she couldn’t bring herself to fight back? (Chris had no injuries on him when arrested).
“Every time I think about it, I’m just like, did I know I was going to that before I got on top of her,” Chris Watts said in a 2019 prison interview. “Like, the whole-everything that happened that morning I just-I don’t know, like…like I try to go back in my head…I’m just like, I didn’t want to do this, but I did it…everything just kinda like…it just felt like it was. I don’t even want to say it felt like I had to, it just felt like there was already something in my mind that was implanted that I was gonna do it and when I woke up that morning it was gonna happen and I had no control over it.”
I still ask myself to this day, as I’m sure so many others do, especially those closest to the investigation, what causes a father to strangle his pregnant wife, place her lifeless body wrapped in the same bedsheets they slept in on the floor of the back seat of his truck. He then puts his two kids, still alive, in the back seat, proceeds to drive them to his worksite in the early morning hours to bury his wife in a shallow grave. Bella and CeCe are still alive all through this. Then go back to strangle first CeCe and stuffing her body in an oil tank. Then the same to Bella who when asked if her own father was going to do to her what he just did to CeCe, the words the four-year-old screamed were “Daddy, no!”“I don’t think there is a logical explanation for what he (Chris) did,” Nichol Kessinger told The Denver Post. “It’s a senseless act, and it’s horrific.”
I’m amazed at how just when I thought I’ve seen all the evil displayed by humanity today daily to the point I think nothing could surprise me anymore something like this atrocity happens.
“The man she (Shanann) loved choked the life out of her,” said Weld County District Attorney Michael Rourke at Watts’ sentencing in Nov. 2018. “What must Bella, age 4, and Celeste, age 3, thought as their father, the one man on this earth who was supposed to protect them snuffed out their lives?”
I couldn’t fuckin sleep for a week after watching that Netflix doc!
“You don’t annihilate your family and throw them away like garbage,” Rourke said. “Get a divorce!”
In a perfect world no good pieces of shit like Chris Watts would be erased from our minds like as though these monsters never existed upon their incarceration. Yet, their horror stories continue to be told by the fake news media as though something new about the cases has come out since the original investigation when it’s just repeats.
The lurid fascination crime enthusiasts have for Chris Watts is no more different from the public’s obsession with Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Robert Hanssen, Adolf Hitler, Osama bin Laden, Bernie Madoff and O.J. Simpson.
In the case of Chris Watts, legal commentator Nancy Grace summarized why the familicide case still haunts some of us six years after the murders along with investigators close to the case.
“He had it all,” Grace said. “He had this gorgeous wife, Shanann. He’s got the children, Bella and Celeste, beautiful. They always wanted a boy. They’re having a baby, Nico. He’s on the way. Beautiful home. It looked like a postcard. It was perfect. When you look at somebody like Chris Watts in court, this picture perfect setting, it’s hard. It’s like the mind is tricking the eye. You’re seeing one thing but the evidence tells you something different, that he in fact is a cold-blooded killer who killed his own children, so I think that’s the fascination. It’s like trying to put together a Rubik’s Cube. You can’t sort it out in your head.”
As much as I am for the death penalty depending on the case, such a sentence would have been way too lenient, too easy compared to what Watts, a supposed born-again Christian now, who calls himself a “servant of God” did to his wife, unborn child and two daughters.
Since his permanent place of residence serving five life sentences at Dodge Correctional Institution in Waupun, Wisconsin in 2019, it is that other than the reading materials short of the Bible (even Bernie Madoff had access to television and the prison library), family photos of his wife and children he murdered, and the letters he receives from and replies to female pen pals, the father killer spends 23 hours a day in lockdown.
“He knows exactly what he did,” said a source quoted in People. “He’s haunted by what he did. He can’t shake the memories of his family, and they haunt him. He is in his own psychological torment, every day of his life. He knows he deserves it. He knows that he made many mistakes in his life, and this is his punishment.”
What better life sentence could there be than to spend all one’s remaining days inside a prison cell staring at the pictures taped on his walls of the ones he killed wishing how much he could go back in time to take it all back?
©6/5/24
No comments:
Post a Comment