True Crime Analysis, Breakthroughs, Insights & Discussions Hosted by Bestselling Author Nick van der Leek
In POST TRUTH, the 100th True Crime Rocket Science [TCRS] title, the world’s most prolific true crime author Nick van der Leek demonstrates how much we still don’t know in the Watts case. In the final chapter of the SILVER FOX trilogy the author provides a sly twist in a tale that has spanned 12 TCRS books to date. The result may shock or leave you with even more questions.
SILVER FOX III available now in paperback!
“If you are at all curious about what really happened in the Watts case, then buy this book, buy every one he has written and you will get as close as humanly possible to understanding the killer and his victims.”- Kathleen Hewtson. Purchase the very highly rated and reviewed SILVER TRILOGY – POST TRUTH COMING SOON.
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Book 4 in the TWO FACE series, one of the best reviewed, is available now in paperback!
“Book 4 in the K9 series is a must read for those who enjoy well researched and detailed crime narratives. The author does a remarkable job of bringing to life the cold dark horror that is Chris Watts throughout the narrative but especially on the morning in the aftermath of the murders. Chris’s actions are connected by Nick van der Leek’s eloquent use of a timeline to reveal a motive.”
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This seems like a very strange case. If Harley was simply seeking adventure, he did so in a very solitary way. No one would have seen him go down the chimney, if he was hoping to live through the experience and have something he could tell his friends he had done. It doesn’t seem like a smart thing to do. And his parents said he had high-functioning autism, and was an intelligent child – who also had ADHD, which indicates he would have had problems concentrating in school. Perhaps the adventure was climbing up on a roof, then when he looked down the chimney he fell in. If he was running away or upset over breaking his phone and not getting a new one there would have been other ways to get into that house to hide out for a few days, and make his parents sorry for not giving him a new phone, other than trying to shimmy down a chimney. For some reason this reminds me of Nora Quoirin.
If only this little boy would have had a working cell phone on him. That thought will probably haunt his parents for years. Certainly, his parents did not expect that his lacking a phone would ever put him in danger, and making a rule that a kid has to earn back a replacement for a carelessly broken, expensive item, is actually fairly decent parenting.
But I just keep wondering how different things might be, had he had his phone. Harley reminds me of my youngest at that age, and just wow…nobody expects this kind of thing.
There is something that doesn’t add up here that has an oddness to it as in the Nora Quiorin case. Nora supposedly climbed out an open kitchen window. For someone who had difficulties dressing herself and keeping up with others for some reason chooses to climb out of a window and go off on her own – or navigate down scary stairs at night if one believes that scenario. Harley’s parents said he often went to school on a Friday and didn’t return until Saturday. That was normal? Then there is the notion that he was perhaps lost for days – lost to his parents at any rate. Did Nora get lost too and if she did how is it that no one saw her leave. There is also the feeling here that both families were otherwise occupied when their children wandered off – one struggles out of a window into a jungle, the other struggles to climb a roof and into a chimney – before school. Not all who wander are lost – we just don’t know what their intentions were.
A week ago Plunder suggests that Harley may have liked entering the abandoned house, may have felt safe there, and this particular time when he tried to go in the windows were locked and he couldn’t gain entry, so tried the roof. What we know is Friday morning he didn’t want to go to school and said he wasn’t feeling well – in addition he had recently broken his phone. His mother ordered him to school. Not unusual in families, kids don’t want to go to school and they are made to go. Looking back on a video Harley had made where he says he isn’t quite 13 and he’s been permanently banned from the library, he seems like such a sweet earnest child – and slightly depressed. But the way in which he interacts with his one sub, Matthew, is so tender and thankful for having someone on his live chat. His mother suggested after he went missing that they check his girlfriend’s house but they said they haven’t seen Harley for two weeks. Might not having his girlfriend have contributed to his state of mind, breaking his phone, no way to make more videos, not feeling well Friday morning, all of it drew him to the empty house, and possibly he just wanted to hole up there for a while and contend with all of his feelings. I don’t think he wanted to have a great adventure, he wanted to be alone for a while, and I don’t think it was the first time he had gone into that house, only this time it wasn’t so easy to get in.