The murder of Shanann Watts, who was pregnant at the time, and her two daughters, Bella aged 4, and 3-year-old Celeste, had sent the entire in a wide shock. The brutal crime left everyone filled with rage but what horrified everyone the most, was the fact that the murder was carried out by her husband, father of the daughters, Chris Watts, a resident of Colorado.
Shanann, Bella & Celeste went missing
On 13th August 2018, a friend of Shannan lodged a missing complaint about her when she couldn’t track her whole day and Chris too acted unaware about her whereabouts or their daughters. Acting upon the complaint, the local police launched a search for all the three meanwhile Chris went in media to appeal to the community for their help in locating his wife and daughters.
The investigation
The investigation was in progress when Chris’s story started changing from time-to-time raising suspicions amongst the police forces. And when on 15th August 2018, Chris failed the polygraph test, suspicions of the department got cemented and he confessed having an affair with his co-worker and committing the murder of his wife.
Picture: Getty Images
He had fabricated a false story wherein he blamed her dead for killing their daughters before her death in a fit of rage when Chris asked her to get separated. With Chris’s directions, investigators located Shanann’s body buried in a shallow grave on the oil field where he worked, and the bodies of his daughters were in two separate oil tanks on the field.
So, on August 21, 2018, Chris was officially charged with the murder of his wife, however, it was not until 6th November, when he confessed murdering all the three.
What really happened?
In a five-hour interview with the investigators in February 2019, Chris finally confessed the whole truth and admitted the brutal crime that he committed. He accepted murdering the girls for the first time since the investigation. He revealed that he had a fight with Shanann that morning as he wished to separate from her post which he strangled her to death in their bedroom. And as he was trying to bring her corpse downstairs, his daughters, Bella and Celeste, woke up and started questioning him.
Narrating the further course, he said that he loaded the girls, who were alive that time, and their mother’s body on the backseat of his truck and drove to the oil site, and smothered the girls one by one to death before disposing of the three bodies on the oil field.
What happened to Chris?
Picture: Getty Images
Chris was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences in prison with no possibility of parole along with another 48 years sentence for the unlawful termination of the pregnancy. He will serve two additional life sentences for the first-degree murder of a child under the age of 12, and an additional 36 years for three charges of tampering with a deceased body.
Now, Lifetime has created a documentary on the horrifying murder case, Chris Watts: Confessions of a Killer. However, Shanann’s relatives have reportedly denounced the movie stating that the movie doesn’t correctly depict Shannan or her two daughters.