Chris Watts and the Frederick, Colorado Family Murders

Shanann Watts was 34. Bella Watts was 4 and Celeste Watts, called CeCe by her family, was 3 (NBC News, Nov. 19, 2018). The CBI’s 2019 report records Celeste as “CELESTE ‘CECE'” and gives Bella’s age as four (CBI report I2019-2, case 2018-273). Shanann was 15 weeks pregnant with a boy the couple planned to name Nico (NBC News, Nov. 19, 2018). Watts told CBI agents in 2019 that Nico was an Italian name Shanann had always liked (CBI report I2019-2, case 2018-273).

At the November 19, 2018, sentencing hearing, Shanann’s father, Frank Rzucek, called his son in law a “heartless monster” and told him: “You thought you would get away with this. You carried them out like trash.” Her mother, Sandy Rzucek, told Watts she had not wanted him put to death “because that’s not my right” (NBC News, Nov. 19, 2018). Shanann’s brother asked the court: “What kind of person slaughters the people they love the most?” (NBC News, Nov. 19, 2018).

Because Watts pleaded guilty, there was no trial and no jury. The nine counts he admitted are the legal record of what happened to each of them: three counts of first-degree murder, one for each of Shanann, Bella and Celeste; two further counts of first-degree murder covering the deaths of a child under 12 by a person in a position of trust; one count of unlawful termination of pregnancy for Nico; and three counts of tampering with a deceased human body (Weld County District Attorney, Nov. 6, 2018; CNN, Aug. 20, 2018).

Watts told the CBI that he met Nichol Kessinger around June 1, 2018, at Anadarko, when he brought her a gas meter that needed fixing. Around their fourth meeting he mentioned that “we” had moved from North Carolina and showed her a picture of his daughters; she also saw Shanann’s picture on his lock screen (CBI report I2019-2, case 2018-273). Kessinger, then 30, later told The Denver Post that Watts had told her he was finishing his divorce and, a month into the relationship, that it was final (NBC News, Nov. 19, 2018).

According to the Greeley Tribune’s account of the CBI recording, the two first met outside work at a park in Thornton after Watts returned from a June 22 to 26 trip to San Diego with Shanann. Through July, while Shanann and the girls were visiting family in North Carolina, Watts stayed at Kessinger’s apartment almost every night (Greeley Tribune, Mar. 7, 2019). The relationship came to light only after his family vanished. Police learned he had lied to them about it, and that lie helped collapse his story (NBC News, Nov. 19, 2018).

In the 2019 interview, agents also asked Watts about two other people who had told police they had sexual encounters with him. He denied both and said Kessinger was his only affair (CBI report I2019-2, case 2018-273; Greeley Tribune, Mar. 7, 2019). Those claims were never proven and TDSH does not repeat the names.

Shanann, 15 weeks pregnant, stopped answering texts and calls that Monday (CNN, Aug. 20, 2018). Her best friend, Nickole Atkinson, went to the house. Watts told agents he had just finished burying Shanann when his phone alerted him that someone was at his front door in Frederick (Greeley Tribune, Mar. 7, 2019). Atkinson asked police for a well-being check (CNN, Aug. 20, 2018).

According to the arrest affidavit unsealed on August 20, Watts let Frederick officers into the house. They found Shanann’s cell phone, purse and wallet still in the house (CNN, Aug. 20, 2018). Watts told detectives he had talked with Shanann about separating that morning and left for work just before 5:30 a.m. He suggested she had taken the girls to a friend’s house (NBC News, Nov. 19, 2018).

On August 15, Watts agreed to a polygraph examination and failed it when asked whether he had caused his wife’s disappearance (NBC News, Nov. 30, 2018). Police had also learned he lied to them about his affair (NBC News, Nov. 19, 2018). Videos the DA later released show him first admitting to his father, Ronnie Watts, that he killed Shanann, then telling investigators (Denver7, Nov. 2018).

His first confession was a lie. The affidavit says he claimed he saw Shanann strangling one of the girls, and that he then “strangled Shanann to death” in a rage (NBC News, Nov. 19, 2018; CNN, Aug. 20, 2018). In other words, he blamed his dead wife for the murder of their children. Prosecutors said after his sentencing that the story was false and that he had killed all three (Denver7, Nov. 2018). Watts himself admitted in the 2019 interview that he killed both girls (CBI report I2019-2, case 2018-273). He was arrested on August 15. Anadarko fired him that day (NBC News, Nov. 19, 2018).

On August 20, 2018, the Weld County District Attorney formally charged Watts with nine counts (Weld County District Attorney, Nov. 6, 2018; CNN, Aug. 20, 2018):

• Counts 1 to 5: murder in the first degree (class 1 felony). Three counts are for the deaths of Shanann, Bella and Celeste after deliberation; two additional counts charge the death of a child under 12 by a person in a position of trust.
• Count 6: unlawful termination of pregnancy (Nico).
• Counts 7 to 9: tampering with a deceased human body (class 3 felony), one for each victim.

Watts, 33, was held without bond (CNN, Aug. 20, 2018). The case went before District Court Judge Marcelo Kopcow, who denied a defense motion asking that the girls’ necks, throats and hands be swabbed for DNA, ruling: “The court cannot order the prosecution and/or coroner how to conduct their investigation” (CNN, Aug. 20, 2018). That motion fit the false story Watts was telling at the time, that Shanann had killed the girls.

At the November 19 hearing in Greeley, Judge Kopcow sentenced Watts to three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole for the murders of Shanann, Bella and Celeste, plus two more life sentences, served concurrently, for the counts covering the deaths of children under 12. He added 48 years for unlawful termination of pregnancy, to run consecutively, and 36 years, consecutively, for the three tampering counts (NBC News, Nov. 19, 2018). The CBI later summarized the total as three consecutive life terms “(+84 years) without the possibility of parole” (CBI report I2019-2, case 2018-273).

Rourke told the court that Watts strangled Shanann and smothered Bella and Celeste, and that he had loaded their bodies into his truck calmly and deliberately, “not in a hasty or disorganized way” (NBC News, Nov. 19, 2018). Watts’s own parents, Cindy and Ronnie Watts, told the court the murders “should have never happened” (NBC News, Nov. 19, 2018).

On February 18, 2019, CBI Agent Tammy Lee, FBI Special Agent Grahm Coder and Frederick Police Detective Dave Baumhover interviewed Watts in prison in Wisconsin for about five and a half hours. The CBI’s redacted report, I2019-2 under case 2018-273, was approved on February 22 and released on March 7, 2019 (CBI report I2019-2, case 2018-273; Greeley Tribune, Mar. 7, 2019).

This interview is where Watts finally gave a full account of killing his daughters, much of it quoted in the murders section above. He said he had been segregated in the Weld County Jail and had listened to other inmates pounding on the walls at night telling him what they wanted to do to him (Greeley Tribune, Mar. 7, 2019). He said the killing of the girls came from “an anger with SHANANN that he took out on everyone in front of him that morning”, and called it “the epitome of being angry” (CBI report I2019-2, case 2018-273). He denied having planned the murders (CBI report I2019-2, case 2018-273). He also said: “Right now, I would have a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old and a 1-month-old beautiful boy. And now it’s just me” (Greeley Tribune, Mar. 7, 2019).

• American Murder: The Family Next Door (Netflix, September 30, 2020). Built almost entirely from Shanann’s own social media videos, text messages, police body camera footage and interrogation video.
• Chris Watts: Confessions of a Killer (Lifetime, January 26, 2020), a scripted film in Lifetime’s Ripped from the Headlines series.
• Criminal Confessions (Oxygen), season 3, episode 1 (December 2019), with the investigators who interviewed Watts.

For how true crime streaming shapes a real case, see TDSH’s analysis of Netflix and the Ed Gein story. For other cases of a parent killing a whole family, see the Cedar Grove familicide and the Karolkiewicz family annihilation on Riverside Trail; for a family killing that went the other way, children killing parents, see the Menendez brothers case. Colorado’s best known earlier murder case history includes Ted Bundy’s 1977 escapes from custody in Aspen and Glenwood Springs, covered in the Ted Bundy victims timeline.