It’s been more than 3 years since the Watts Family Murders, and I just can’t let this case go.
For anyone who is interested in true crime, there are those cases that you come back to over the years, poring intensely over every available detail, wondering how it all went so wrong.
For me, that case is the notorious Watts Family Murders.
There’s a reason why I, and so many others, are fascinated by this horrible story. It only takes a cursory google of Chris Watts to find a plethora of online communities dedicated to dissecting and analysing the hell out of this tragedy. There are YouTube channels, podcasts, Facebook groups, Subreddits, True Crime forums. There are documentaries, news articles and even books. It’s official: we are hooked on trying to comprehend how the Watts family ended up the way they did.
The facts of the case are fascinating to begin with: you have the murderer Chris Watts, a reportedly mild-mannered married man and father of 2 (soon to be 3), whose pregnant wife and children go missing. Cue a series of very uncomfortable media interviews Chris did, the revelation that he had a mistress, and his stunning confession wherein he originally blamed Shannan for the murder of his daughters, claiming he killed her in revenge. Then a short-lived investigation. The discovery of the bodies. Chris’s ultimate confession and guilty plea.
There’s the abundance of real-time footage: of Shannan on the motion-activated doorbell camera the last time she entered her home shortly before her death. There is the neighbours home security footage of Chris suspiciously loading “tools” into his truck shortly after the murders. The police bodycam footage of a nonchalant Chris from later that very day, after Shannan’s worried friend requested authorities do a welfare check at her house. There’s hours and hours of footage of Shannan, a woman who had a prolific presence on social media. There are police interview tapes, the filmed court proceedings, the jailhouse interviews with Chris. There’s the enormous amount of discovery released, such as the text messages that document the unravelling of the Watts’ marriage. There’s the police interview footage of Chris’s secret girlfriend Nichol Kessinger as she fumbles and rambles her way through.
All this information leads us to feel we know these people. We all know a Shannan: a type-A go-getter. Described as bossy, organised, loud. And we all know a Chris- or, rather, a man who reminds us of who Chris seemed to be before he crossed the threshold from loving family man to family annihilator: Quiet. Gentle. Submissive.
Online, I see people posting videos from Shannan’s social media, trying to diagnose her as a narcissist, an abuser, a neglectful parent. Chris doesn’t escape this treatment, of course: he is a sociopath or psychopath depending on who you ask, a covert narcissist, a monster who pretended to be a man. But Chris is also seen by some as a victim, emasculated by his demanding wife, deep in financial strife at her irresponsible hands and pushed right to the edge.
Even as a murder victim, Shannan is somehow to blame, her children collateral damage.
I come back to this case again and again, thinking about how we’re so busy trying to label Chris and Shannan, to work out why, and how, and who, and what, and which conspiracies might be at play, and trying to find hidden meanings in Shannan’s Facebook Live streams, that we ignore a very upsetting truth: Chris was probably not a monster from birth. That he was capable of both goodness and great evil, and that the behaviour we categorise as monstrous is often perpetrated by the same kind of people that can be consistently generous and giving and, for lack of a better word, normal. That yes, he probably reminds us of that guy from down the road, and that makes us deeply uncomfortable, because we don’t want to live in a world where you might have someone like Chris Watts over for a barbecue and think of him as a nice, normal, relatable guy. We forget, or ignore, or simply can’t believe that the average person is sometimes capable of terrible, awful things given just the right circumstances, and the victims are always just that: victims.
Shannan Watts probably wasn’t perfect. Does that matter? Neither are you or I; we still don’t deserve to be murdered. Nobody deserves to have their entire life scrutinised to see if they deserve to qualify as a victim.
There’s a lot of speculation online about what drove Chris to murder his pregnant wife, his two little girls Bella and Celeste, and his unborn son Nico. It’s human nature to wonder, but I don’t think it ultimately matters why he did it.
What matters is that he did.
