The Rzuceks want the public to stop talking about the Chris Watts case. 27 years after West Memphis 3, 25 years after the OJ Simpson case, 23 years after JonBenet Ramsey, 17 years after Laci Peterson, 15 years after Steven Avery, and 12 years after Casey Anthony – there’s a need that the Watts case receive special treatment. That no one report on it.
Less than two years after the Watts Family Murders the Rzuceks want the coverage of the case to…well…go away. They want people to move on.
I’ve said this before, Shan’ann Watts public profile on Facebook has provided ongoing fodder for the media and social media. If the Rzuceks really wanted coverage of the Watts case to go away, they could simply shut down Shan’ann’s Facebook, or else set the account to privacy. They haven’t. Instead, they seem to have taken over Shan’ann’s Thrive account.
One wonders whether these folks petitioning against freedom of speech [to think and express oneself freely] live in a fantasy bubble. If they wanted rumor control, they ought to have followed due process of the law and allowed this case to play out at trial. That wouldn’t have changed the interest in this case, but at least it would have carved certain undisputed facts in stone. It was always ill-advised for the victims’ family to give the perpetrator what he apparently wanted so easily – a plea deal – without making sure law enforcement knew exactly what happened. Almost two years later we still don’t, and that’s the problem. It’s this uncertainty that continues to feed the colossal hamster-wheel of public curiosity around this case.
But reading between the lines, the issue doesn’t feel as much about concerns over storytelling around this case, but the Greeley-based legal eagles being left out of the storytelling projects going on, and more pertinently, the money making. Isn’t that their job in the first place? Aren’t they there to collect any revenues made through Chris Watts as part of the civil suit settlement? Chris Watts has agreed to pay them $6 million, but that money can only be made if Chris Watts participates in a production, or a book, one way or the other, and he hasn’t done that. In Cherlyn Cadle’s case, Watts simply wrote letters to the author and left her to spin these into something.
The Rzuceks and their legal representatives need to actually produce something themselves if they wish to profit in some way, rather than focussing on either shutting other productions down or trying to piggyback or interfere with independent productions. If they have a story to tell, they should tell it. That’s the best way of influencing a narrative.
Like all high-profile cases, this one can’t be controlled but it can and should be more authentic than the storytelling circus its become.
I thought it was odd that Shanann’s Instagram page got taken down quickly and yet her Facebook page still lives on. That thrive stuff was on her Instagram page as well. so why shut one down but not the other ?
I am sure the Rzuceks do have control of the Facebook page as it has changed to a ‘remembering Shanann’ page.
Even Shanann’s twitter page is now private.
I don’t get the inconsistency either, of wanting the money but then wanting the case to go away. I remember hearing a few months back that they wanted what Shanann would have earned had she not been murdered, and thinking how tacky that was. What does that have to do with them. I could understand if Shanann was helping monetarily to support their family, or provide for her children had they not been murdered, or stopping Chris for making money off the murders, but other than that why? He confessed to the murders and will be serving life in prison, case closed. So then if they truly want it all to go away, how does a civil suit achieve that? I often wonder if there were other reasons they didn’t want a trial other than the need to put it behind them. Perhaps they didn’t want details about Shanann’s or their family’s personal life exposed for the world to see. Avoiding the airing of dirty laundry perhaps.
I’m a bit surprised why the Rzucek family would believe Chris Watt’s second confession – that the girls were killed at Cervi 319. Isn’t that a more painful scenario to contemplate? The district attorney originally stated he thought the girls may have been killed on the 12th, before Sha’nann arrived home. Certainly dosing them with a powerful drug would have been a far more peaceful way to have them pass than he states in his second confession – tears, chaos, mayhem, daddy no. Watts deleted a search for not 10, not 40 not 60, but 80 mg of oxycodone. Why is it such a stretch to believe if it were used on his pregnant wife, that it wouldn’t be used on his children. He said he premeditated the murder – but not the murders?
This is odd – watching the Detective Baumhover and Officer Coonrod bodycam footage again when Baumhover enters the Watts bedroom he looks through the bedding on the floor and at 3:05 picks it up and sort of shakes it. He’s shaking the sheet with the gray squares. Officer Coonrod says he already checked the bedding on the floor and “there’s nothing on there.” I had assumed when Det. Baumhover arrived the sheet and pillow cases were already in the trash but that wasn’t the case. Watts put them in the trash Monday night while he was cleaning the house. Wouldn’t Det. Baumhover and Officer Coonrod, with his flashlight, have seen and or smelled something odd on the sheet, something that goes along with the stain after the sheet and pillow cases were fished out of the trash? There also appears to be a pillow on the floor with the comforter as well, which Officer Coonrod takes a picture of – with the pillow case on it. We’ve never heard what the substances were on the sheet and pillow cases. But now seeing that the sheet was on the bedroom floor first, that lends credence to me that Shan’ann had not gone to bed and was strangled there.
Since Watts used one of the sheets to transport her body, couldn’t he have thrown away the pillow cases and the other sheet because he had no use for them anymore. And whatever substances were found on them were either from that coffee container or something he poured on there. Because if it were otherwise, Baumhover and Coonrod would have smelled it and noticed it. The reason I think now that Watts changed her out of her street clothes and into the first thing he found, the nightgown, wasn’t to stage her going to bed then leaving the next day after an argument, he didn’t think the body would be found. Why change her and then bury her? He changed her because of what happened when her body released fluids. He pulled those clothes off her and got rid of them, put something else on her so those fluids wouldn’t get anywhere else. Did anyone else assume the sheet was put in in the trash in the early morning hours of Aug. 13 before Watts left?