When Shanann Cathryn Watts arrived in the passenger’s seat of a friend’s car from a business trip and went inside her home in Frederick, Colorado, on the early morning of August 13th, 2018, she could not have imagined that she would be doing so for the last time.
Inside the house was her family: her husband, Christopher Lee Watts, and her two daughters, four-year-old Bella and three-year-old Celeste.
She carried an unborn son in her womb: Nico, with whom she was fifteen-weeks pregnant.
By midday, her friend Nickole Atkinson (who had dropped her home earlier) was worried about her because she missed a doctor’s appointment to check her pregnancy status, and she wasn’t answering her text messages.
This prompted a call to the police that would end in Chris Watt’s arrest two days later.
Hop along as we review ten facts about a mass murder that shocked America only a couple of years ago.
10 /10 Chris Didn't Commit Suicide
Maybe the most shocking fact, for both investigators and experts in familicide (and people with some degree of belief in common decency), is how Chris Watts didn’t commit suicide after what he did.
Speculation, supported by available data, has concluded that he was a killer of the anomic, self-righteous type.
He murdered his own family because they didn’t serve their interests anymore and felt that his wife had somehow betrayed him. There had been some reports on their relationship being strained before the fateful day came.
9 /10 He First Accused Shanann
At first, his confession was of solely killing Shanann, his wife, who allegedly killed their children after asking her for a divorce. According to this early confession, he would have killed her in revenge for her murderous actions.
This is a typical pattern of those killers who have self-righteous motivations, as they tend to blame their victims for their murders. It was later revealed that he killed Shanann first of all.