True Crime Analysis, Breakthroughs, Insights & Discussions Hosted by Bestselling Author Nick van der Leek
#1 Original Floor Plans
1st floor
2nd floor
Basement [Unfinished/original plan]
Ancillary Sketch
#2 Upstairs Landing where Shan’ann’s Cell Phone was found on the couch
This image courtesy Piktor
#3 The Balcony Where Chris Watts barbecued on Sunday evening, the night before the murder/s
#4 Revisiting the Windows
Someone left an off-the-wall comment on a YouTube video saying how sorry they feel for Deeter. He never seems to get any attention, does he?
What about the children?
This question is for the mothers out there. There are plenty of videos and photos with the kids in them. Do they seem generally happy to you? Were they normal, healthy children? Did Shan’ann’s autoimmune disease make her overly anxious as a mother, in terms of how she treated her daughters’ health?
What impact does social media addiction in the home have on small children, especially excessive focus on social media and selfies? What impact would the constant shepherding of kids as Thrive props have on their relationship with their mother. It’s now no longer fun and games, or spending time with mom in the kitchen, it’s the colder and more mercenary business of performing for and with mother towards a device – constantly.
My impression is that the children quickly began to associate the camera negatively. Just as children can be jealous and possessive of a parent, they can also feel their space impinged by the things that distract attention from themselves, especially the wholesale distraction which is social media.
The disastrous Christmas video is an excellent example of how this fixation on social media can spoil something as special and important for children as Christmas. Truth be told it can spoil it for everyone.
Social media seems to have had an above normal impact on the Watts home. It wasn’t just the photo taking, it was the extended videos on a daily basis, some lasting more than half an hour on a Saturday morning.
This continual distraction, especially of their primary care-giver, could have made them desperate to get their mother’s attention. In some videos one or both of the children are screaming, but Shan’ann continues recording regardless.
Another aspect is the napping of the kids. They both took regular naps with clockwork regularity, and Shan’ann often said they were napping while she was elsewhere in the house recording her sales pitches. As mothers, does this raise flags that they may have been sedated?
What’s your experience, and your observations? Do two and three-year-old’s easily nap together in the day.
Finally, well-balanced and attentive parents are better able to raise well-balanced children. Not always, but generally. Did an unbalanced family dynamic in the Watts home cause the children to feel more anxious and unsettled than they otherwise would, causing them to act out? Because of Shan’ann’s “health challenges”, did the children inherit poor health by default?
I guess the question we’re asking here indirectly is: Was Shan’ann a good mother?
Please leave your thoughts and impressions in the comments below. Additional examples from Shan’ann’s social media to illustrate your answer will be appreciated if you can find them.
In the last 10 years of Shan’ann’s life, between October 2002 and January 2012, she appears to have moved an astonishing 20 times. That’s twice a year every year for 10 years. Over a similar if slightly shorter span of time, Chris Watts moved 7 times, averaging about a move per year.
“I’ve pretty much had to work every Christmas since I can remember, because I was either waiting tables, um…in retail, or in the medical field. And all three of them are open on holidays.”
https://youtu.be/BsxGooLEOZQ?t=1072
Meanwhile below Shan’ann talks a pretty big game – they’ve donated $500 000 to breast cancer awareness, she says. She says they’re shooting to donate another $500 000.
https://youtu.be/fkrUWWW7zqc?t=305
Consider that and the rags-to-riches evolution of Shan’ann’s journey to owning her own home.
Below is a list of 21 addresses Shan’ann lived in or worked in on her way to #2825 Saratoga Trail, in Frederick, Colorado. Images below show the map reference and the distance of the Watts family home outside Spring Lake. Note the sudden change in the neighborhood/type of home when Chris and Shan’ann move in together.
Information courtesy Fastpeoplesearch.com:
(12/15/2002 – 3/4/2004) Map 175 Sister Ln Cameron, NC 28326-6135 (12/15/2002 – 12/15/2002)
Elect Ladies Ministry Methodist Church 2725 Raeford Rd Fayetteville, NC 28303-5435 (12/5/2005 – 6/3/2007)
Below are a list of previous homes of Chris Watts [besides Vass Road where he lived until January 2004, and the homes he shared with Shan’ann in Belmont, Broomfield and Frederick]:
1.900 W Wilson Ave, APT 807 Mooresville, NC 28117-5218 (1/8/2004 – 4/8/2004)
2. Map 119 Lynch Cir Mooresville, NC 28117-6915 (3/9/2006 – 6/25/2007)
3. 405 Park Ave, APT 108 Davidson, NC 28036-5507 (8/24/2007 – 12/23/2010)
2011 appears to be the year things started to change for both of them – in terms of the class of home they were living in. 2012 was the year they married, and the bankruptcy followed 3 years later.
It was Chris Watt’s high school teacher, Joe Duty, who first revealed on August 16th where his former pupil grew up – Vass Road on the outskirts of a small town called Spring Lake, in North Carolina. The question until now has been exactly where – which house – on Vass Road?
Thanks to a tip left overnight on a post dedicated to where Watts grew up on Vass Road, that mystery has been solved. The tip turns out to be correct. Although it was obvious that the houses up and down Vass Road are modest, especially compared to the mint-new two story mansion + basement the Watts family were living in on Saratoga Trail, it was important to establish the specific house.
And now we have.
Before I take you through the corroboration process, let’s zoom in on the house in question.
Now the street view. Below, that’s the view from 1107 Vass Road across the street. One of the neighbors appears to be fairly well off; they even have a boat, and a decent-sized home. The house next door with the collapsed boundary fence is in less great shape.
Also, notice the 45 mph sign beside the road.
This is the Watts home seen from Vass Road
It appears to be single story, and it’s so small it’s barely visible behind a single large tree. Notice the drainage ditch in the foreground, on either side of the driveway.
Below is the same image zoomed in slightly.
Is that a temporary pool peeking out of the back garden? Are those pink and green shapes kids’ cars?
Now the confirmation. The mail box has the word WATTS printed in white letters on it right outside the house. Again, notice the drainage ditch behind the mailbox.
Below is a photo taken by Shan’ann of Ronnie Watts, Chris Watts’ father shoveling silt and dirt from the drainage channel in front of the Watts family home on Vass Road.
Notice the 45 mph sign behind him, the redbrick house with white pillars, and the collapsed boundary fence in the right corner.
Shan’ann posted a picture of Ronnie inside the house on Saratoga Trail on Father’s Day June 27th, 2018.
Both Shan’ann’s dad Frank and his son Frankie commented on the post, wishing their brother and father-in-law respectively a Happy Father’s Day. It’s not clear whether Chris Watts or Ronnie responded. If they did their responses have been removed.
Why does the house on Vass Road matter? In TWO FACE I fielded a theory that Chris Watts [and Shan’ann to some extent] had come from very humble beginnings. Nothing wrong with that. But when contrasting those humble beginnings with the picture-postcard fairy tale house they were living in in Frederick, then those humble beginnings do matter.
They matter because they ask a few ordinary and obvious questions:
We didn’t really need to see this house to know the answer. The bankruptcy filing in 2015 and the Watts’ colossal debt answers these questions definitively. But seeing the house raises the spectre that regardless whether Chris Watts could afford the house or not, whether he deserved it or not, one can see how much he was likely to want to hold onto the new house, no matter what.
What do you think? Did the big fairy tale house in the prairie play into the motive to murder?
More on this subject: Getting to know Hair Jazz, Shan’ann’s mother’s work place in Aberdeen, and the surrounding neighborhood
Psychology is the real Rocket Science behind True Crime Crime Rocket Science. So let’s put the money where it matters. The key enigma in the Chris Watts case is his mysterious sexuality. Unlock that and the real face of Chris Watts is revealed. So let’s do that.
The first step in true crime science is to acknowledge when we don’t know something. Unless you’re bisexual, the odds are you can’t begin to know who or what you’re dealing with. So we begin by admitting that what we want to know we don’t know, and what’s more, we’re wholly unfamiliar with it.
The next step is to study, research and find out what we don’t know. A great guide to begin this journey into criminal psychology is via cultural anthropologist, and Pulitzer prizewinner, Ernest Becker.
In Becker’s The Birth and Death of Meaning he refers in a chapter dealing with The Inner World to “all objects [having] interiority, even trees.” Objects with the least interiority, Becker states, are rocks.
Is it a coincidence that Shan’ann used precisely this term in ALL CAPS, with an exclamation mark, to refer to Chris Watts and her love for him on May 5th?
As Becker puts it:
…probably they [rocks] would have no more inner life than the idling of their atomic structures, but in these, as physicists have taught us, there is anything but repose…
The timing of Shan’ann’s ROCK! comment is worth noting in context. It came 2-3 days prior to her boosting him with #helovesme on Facebook, with a shot of him at work mowing the front lawn. Interestingly, he’s not even looking at her when she snaps the photo.
I’ve previously gone to some length to explain why May 7/8 is an incredibly significant moment in the Watts story. It’s the day – I believe – Shan’ann set up her pregnant video + t-shirt reveal. She posted it more than a month later on June 11th, but I believe the video itself was shot within days, almost immediately after conception.
In the collage below one sees the location of the mowing lawn image in relation to the “my ROCK!” ego stroke. Thrown in the middle is a nod to World Lupus day and a call to “hustle”.
What does Shan’ann’s pregnancy, and whether Chris Watts was really her rock or not got to do with the psychology of bisexuality? Well, everything potentially.
If you have a partner with a different sexual appetite to yours, then in particular circumstances it may be necessary to secure or anchor him [or her] into a particular role. How do you do that? Well, by giving him [in this case] a role. By giving him a t-shirt to wear, and by recording him in various role plays, by getting him to dance to your tune.
Like this:
Recorded on June 11th, here [ABOVE] Shan’ann has her husband posed in a “Super Dad” shirt, demonstrating a patch on his arm, and advertising Thrive to promote her business. How is he being advertized? As a man eager to do housework. He vacuums, he mops, he does whatever Shan’ann tells him to do [although that’s no acknowledged here, even though it’s implicit].
In another instance 9 days later, Chris Watts is dressed again in a shirt given to him to wear and pose with. The shirt defines not just who he is, but his role: he’s a proud dad, not just that but a dad of two awesome daughters. It’s a message to her flock but it’s also a reminder, and perhaps an admonition, to Chris Watts directly.
Think about how these messages might play in the minds of a mistress, male and female? He’s someone else’s rock. He’s a proud dad? He’s doing his domestic duties at home?
If he has another life, if he wants another life, these broadcasts are potentially the death knell to them. Well, wasn’t that their purpose in the first place, to send a few messages in one, to hit the bisexual birds out there with one stone?
We haven’t even attended to the science or psychology of bisexuality, but what’s immediately clear is there may be a psychology in response to it too. If your spouse, your lover, the father of your child had a sexual orientation you were unclear, confused or insecure about, wouldn’t you want to nail it down? Wouldn’t you want to be clear on his role, and more, want him and the world to be clear about it?
Is that what this is?
According to Becker “we come into contact with the world through our exteriors” yet each of us walks about carrying with us a secret self. As Becker puts it:
We are somewhat split in two, the self the body…
But what if the body, the sexuality of the body, is part of the self. Well then, the self is even more secret, and the secret even more excruciating [or perhaps intolerable] as a result.
It was while researching the Ramsey case that I developed the science to figure out unknown unknowns. Although it seemed unknowable at the time, it turned out child sexuality isn’t an unknown unknown, but rather a known unknown. Bisexuality is the same.
Bisexuality is a matter of scientific fact, according to Justin Lehmiller, a social psychologist and Kinsey Institute Research Fellowwho blogs at lehmiller.com:
1.) Bisexuality is real, and it’s not the same as being gay or lesbian. A lot of people deny the existence of bisexuality and assume that everyone who identifies as bisexual is secretly gay…
2.) Women are more likely to identify as bisexual than men/men are less likely to identify themselves publicly as biseuxual. It is also worth noting that the percentage of American men and women who identify as bisexual appears to be on the rise in recent years. This doesn’t necessarily mean that bisexuality itself is increasing; rather, it probably reflects growing comfort with acknowledging this identity.
3.) Bisexuals experience prejudice from heterosexual persons, as well as gays and lesbians. Bisexual persons are frequently the targets of prejudice, particularly bisexual men.
4.). Bisexual people do not necessarily have higher sex drives than everyone else. One of the most common stereotypes about bisexuals is that they are an extremely horny bunch.
5.) Being bisexual does not mean [being] equally attracted to both men and women. Being bisexual involves a capacity for attraction to men and women, but attraction to each sex does not necessarily have to be equally strong.
What does this mean in terms of the Watts case?
If bisexuality was a factor, it was likely not insignificant. The scale of the crime demonstrates that.
Many discussions on the Watts case repeat the same myth: he could have gotten divorced. Well, maybe you could. Chris Watts may have felt that if he’d gotten divorced Shan’ann couldn’t be trusted to keep his sexuality secret, and it was critical to him, I believe, that it be kept secret. Since their entire life was a constant soapie on Facebook, and since Shan’ann was constantly providing penetrating private insights into who he was, this threat had to be ongoing and very real to him. If he did have mistresses out there, for how much longer could they be kept in the dark if they were also on social media? And what if something leaked out from them? Their Thrive business was entirely predicated on perpetuating this happy family myth.
The other side of the equation is that Chris Watts wanted to divorce, wanted to leave, but felt locked-in. If leaving meant the whole world would find out about who he really was, then he couldn’t leave. But that didn’t mean he wanted to stay. And so, what could he do to resolve this impasse?
Remember, the oil industry is a masculine industry, one that might not so easily forgive or overlook the stereotypes of less than masculine men, let alone bisexual men. Who knows, perhaps Watts felt his boss wouldn’t like to find out his employee, and perhaps the dude his daughter was seeing, was “one of those” either.
Although the science indicates that bisexual men have normal sexual appetites, it doesn’t take into account normal human nature, or normal sexual appetites. Whether normal or not, a bisexual man in a heterosexual marriage is likely to feel one of his appetites repressed, and this may well lead to an above average drive in that area. Does that make sense?
Finally, and this I think is the key question in the Watts case, was he more attracted to women or men? If men, then the sense of impasse, of entrapment, of repression, had to be a lot more agonizing than if his was oriented to women sexually.
Since I’m not bisexual, I’ll put the question out there:
If you’re bisexual and in a marriage, and your partner isn’t “doing it for you” [as a person, as a partner, in bed, on the balance sheet etc], and if the experience is sufficiently negative, chronically off-putting, couldn’t this cause a bisexual person to gravitate more to the opposite sex of the spouse?
If this was happening in the months leading up to August 2018, and if Chris Watts’ exercise and weight loss and improvement in appearance and attractiveness fed into that, and if he was enjoying succor increasingly outside of marriage, then we can see how he would have wanted out not just as a husband, not just as a father, not just as a man, but as a bisexual man.
When the Columbine shooting happened in Colorado, just 41 miles due south of the Watts home in Frederick, it was the worst high school shooting in U.S. history. Although there were 15 deaths [including the two perpetrators] and 21 non-fatal gunshot injuries, the shooting was later defined as a botched and badly implemented terrorist bombing.
None of the bombs rigged with detonators went off. As bad as it was, the Columbine massacre was a lot less than it was intended to be. Harris and Klebold had intended their attack on their high school to rival the Oklahoma City Bombing which killed approximately 169 Americans.
Because of the poor execution of the crime, there was initial speculation that the shootings weren’t premeditated, or if they were, that little initial planning was involved. In fact during the year prior to the attack, Harris and Klebold both kept journals and compiled a series of video messages with statements of intent, including 30 minutes before the attack on April 20, 1999.
The same speculation dogs the Watts case currently – that because his crime was poorly executed, Watts must have “just snapped”.
On April 20th, 2004, five years to the day after Columbine, Slate published an analysis with a promising blurb:
At last we know why the Columbine killers did it.
Five years ago today, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered their classmates and teachers at Columbine High School. Most Americans have reached one of two wrong conclusions about why they did it. The first conclusion is that the pair of supposed “Trench Coat Mafia outcasts” were taking revenge against the bullies who had made school miserable for them. The second conclusion is that the massacre was inexplicable: We can never understand what drove them to such horrific violence.
Thanks to the genius of the FBI and their expert psychologists, the true motive for the massacre was revealed.
That’s an incredible assessment – that two kids harbored no resentment of their peers – but wanted to kill them in an unusually extreme and colossal manner simply to make a statement. It wasn’t personal, the FBI said, and I guess when they committed suicide afterwards, that wasn’t personal either. It shows just how clueless the FBI and law enforcement can be when it comes to interiority.
10 years after Columbine the motive [at least as far as the mainstream media were concerned], still remained unclear. This was despite the extensive notes and statements of intent left behind and communicated by the killers. It was also in spite of the FBI’s expert assessment that the kids were just trying to make a big statement, nothing more.
Almost 20 years later the rationale behind what happened at Columbine remains a matter of controversy. Bullying has been alternately discounted and counted as an important factor. Social climate has been discounted and counted as an important factor. Ditto Goth subculture, video games, antidepressants, teenage internet use, movies like Natural Born Killers and music. Craziest of all, almost two decades after the massacre, no one seems to agree on the most basic question of all: were the killers outcasts or not?
In Slaughter, I profiled 8 mass shooters, and along the way examined the Columbine case. The test in every massacre is the same. Where there’s an extreme amount of violence [sadism] it’s contingent on an imputed sense of insignificance [humiliation]. Where you find a massacre, you will always – without exception – find social death plaguing the shooter.
The same applies to true crime, but the psychology is more nuanced and subtle where a single person extinguishes the life of one other individual.
In the Columbine case, the FBI succeeded in seeing an intention to make the biggest and loudest possible statement. But they failed dismally in linking why they felt the need to do this as strongly as they did.
Much of these basic issues also apply to the Chris Watts case. But if these simple questions around why or what caused young men to act out the way they did weren’t answered then, what chance is there the same simple questions will be answered in the Watts case?
When criminal cases are placed under the microscope in the glare the media and the all-seeing-eyes of America’s social media, it seems inevitable that the truth will eventually emerge, doesn’t it?
But the truth hasn’t emerged in the Columbine case.
It hasn’t emerged in the JonBenet Ramsey case.
In the Aurora shooting, which played out in 2012 [the same year the Watts family moved to Frederick] that shooter [James Holmes] was sentenced to 3 318 years in prison, but the jury felt Holmes didn’t deserve the death penalty.
At the time, the Aurora Cinema attack had the largest number of casualties in one shooting in modern U.S. history. That attack was blamed on mental illness. A huge coup for his defense during trial was thanks to Holmes’ diary [which contained meticulous calculations of the attack] being protected by physician–patient privilege. The judge ruled it inadmissible because Holmes later mailed it to his psychiatrist.
When one looks at Frederick, Columbine and Aurora on a map, it appears as an upside-down Y. And right now, the record for figuring out the Y is pretty upside down.
On October 6th, 2018, the Greeley Tribune noted of the Watts case:
In the motion filed Thursday, Steve Zansberg — a First Amendment attorney…who represents The Tribune and its media partners — argued the Weld County Coroner’s Office…is the official custodian of the autopsy reports because they were “made, maintained or kept” by that office.
In his 22 years representing Zansberg said he can remember only one instance, the Columbine High School massacre, in which a judge ruled the release of autopsy reports would adversely affect the public.
[The Greeley Tribune] fundamentally believe in a democratic society that the records detailing actions undertaken by officials who serve that society must be public. In the absence of such transparency, we cease to live in an open society. The last time a Colorado judge ruled the release of autopsy reports would adversely affect the public was the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, 19 years ago.
Is the Watts case really the worst incident in Colorado since Columbine, even worse than the Aurora shootings?
Will the outcome of this case – in terms of why – be better than those that have come before?
If he has two faces, does the same apply to his sexuality? Is Chris Watts bisexual or isn’t he?
Looking at the tabloid media narrative, two mistresses – a man and a woman – have already come forward claiming they were in secret affairs with Chris Watts. Not so secret now, but how do we know if either are true or not?
Tabloids are tricky. They do spread a lot of gossip and innuendo, but where this is done maliciously, they can be sued. As such they have to tread a fine line.
Looking at the semantics, it’s often a quick study to find out if the tabloids are cynically trying to milk a story, or whether there’s real smoke somewhere, and all they’re doing is trying to fan the flame of interest for all its worth.
Tabloid coverage of high-profile cases isn’t the fake news many people believe it to be.
While researching the JonBenet Ramsey case, I was surprised by how much tabloids pay private detectives to get some purchase on a high-profile case.
Tabloids can be a valuable resource for information, the difficulty is being able to separate the wheat from the chaff and yes, there’s plenty of chaff to sequestrate.
With that in mind, let’s briefly look at the two mistresses that have come forward so far.
The Other Woman [besides the co-worker]
‘When we had sex, it was very animalistic. He just zoned out into a different person.’ This alter ego scenario matches the idea of a perfect picture family man, and a murderer. One moment we see a neat, presentable husband and father smiling while lying to the media about his vanishing family on his porch, the next he’s in an orange jump suit.
‘He wasn’t the kind of guy who would cuddle and watch a movie.’ But there is evidence of intimacy or warmth between Shan’ann and Chris Watts, as well as between him and the children. He’s also generally seen as likable but reserved.
Nevertheless there is a pattern of warmth alternating with standoffishness. Chris Watts could be warm and loving one moment, and off the next. We saw that right in the beginning, in his not-quite-right demeanor on the porch contrasting with the unemotional, deadpan man in court. But others have commented on it too, including Michele Greer, the witness who saw the couple at Myrtle Beach weeks before the annihilation.
And Nickole Atkinson, who said “Chris wasn’t his usual loving self.” We see a similar pattern of emotional disconnect from Scott Peterson in the weeks prior to Laci’s death. This is a clear sympton of premeditation, where the murderer has not only thought about what he intends to do, but begun to prepare himself emotionally, cutting himself off from the flak of inevitable feelings once the damage is done.
Although a second mistress is hardly needed to corroborate whether Watts was cheating when he admitted he was actively cheating with a co-worker, the question is whether the tabloid article is trustworthy. Is it? Are the tabloids on our side?
https://youtu.be/NtVBqsgueRs?t=164
The Other Man [besides the other woman, and the other mistress]
Although the other man in this equation seems to fit the bill for saucy tabloid gossip, if anything this aspect is more credible on the surface than the second mistress, not less. Crimeonline, HLN and CNN have covered Trent Bolte’s alleged link to Watts.
Below we’ll deal with CrimeOnline’s interrogation of Trent Bolte:
The ten months suggests the homosexual aspect wasn’t insignificant, assuming it’s true. The Fort Collins reference doesn’t seem to be right. Wasn’t Bolte from Casper, Wyoming? Irrespective, even the distance to Fort Collins creates an impression that Watts went to some trouble to keep his “dirty laundry” hidden, or some minimum safe distance from his happy home. On the other hand, it may be that there were no available gay men in the small town of Frederick, and so Watts had to look further afield. The distance to Casper seems quite far though, a factor that raises some doubt about the credibility of the claim.
So what is the #tcrs assessment: is Chris Watts bisexual or not? At this point, it’s too early and too close to call. There doesn’t appear to be sufficient direct evidence to support Bolte’s affair as fact. At the same time, there appears to be some circumstantial evidence to suppose that Chris Watts may have been bisexual [with Bolte or with other men]. There’s also the fact that Chris Watts had made a concerted effort to groom himself and improve his appearance, especially in the months leading up to the murders.
Was there a high degree of licentiousness in Watts’ life? It appears so, doesn’t it? The same thing was true in the Peterson case. Scott Peterson denied the affair until Amber Frey came forward, and the tapes were made public. The licentiousness speaks to the idea of a double life, and of living a lie. Besides that, licentiousness is an eloquent mirror for the idea of repeatedly doing things in secret that you’re not supposed to do and getting away with it. This builds confidence and can set the stage for a criminal act.
Perhaps the biggest clue that something was rotten in the state of Denmark is the fact that Watts first denied then admitted to being actively involved involved in an affair with a colleague. In true crime, you never see suspects volunteering incriminating information about themselves unless it’s to distract from other even more incriminating information.
The Ramsey Ransom Note is a classic example of volunteering of useless information. It’s job, spanning three pages, was to do exactly that – to distract from something worse. And for all intents and purposes it worked.
So if Chris Watts didn’t have to volunteer this information about an affair with a colleague, why did he? What was the smokescreen for?
My guess is a) the co-worker would have volunteered the information if he didn’t, especially if her father knew about it too and b) the volunteering of the affair was meant to hide other affairs, and quite possibly affairs with other men as well.
The other aspect to consider is a familiar pattern in true crime. Theories in the run up to trial inevitably abound, but they often peter out just as quickly as they rise up. What we’ve seen here is the simultaneous reinforcement not only of one affair but three, and one of those affairs is an admission by the suspect himself.
His use of the word “actively” is also an important flag. Actively is unnecessary to add unless it’s to create the impression that he’s so busy in one affair, how could he be active in several?
Finally: Is Watts’ idiosyncratic introversion just a coincidence, or was it based on heightened privacy concerns? Facebook and social media tend areas where secrets like sexual orientation can and inevitably do leak out, sometimes with devastating consequences. His barely functioning social media wasn’t the problem though. Was hers?
Did Shan’ann have her finger on that trigger when she was murdered? Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. #tcrs
https://youtu.be/1M44hQ2Xls8?t=1463
When retired Detective Karen Smith went on HLN on October 4th, she didn’t go further than to say Shan’ann probably didn’t hide her phone behind the couch cushions, Chris Watts did. He put it there.
True, but if he did, then what?
Assuming he testifies in court, Chris Watts might say:
What’s the view of #tcrs?
According to the arrest affidavit, the phone was left behind in the loft area between the upstairs bedrooms in the loft area.
There appear to be two large cushions, grey and white [or tan] on the leather couch.
Where did HLN source their image of the couch? The “decor” in that image reappears elsewhere in the house too as indicated by the red arrows above.
Without an accurate floor plan it’s difficult to be absolutely certain whether the area indicated is the loft or not, and thus whether this couch is the right couch. But let’s assume for the sake of argument, the information HLN has and the location for Shan’ann’s phone is correct.
The sketch in TWO FACE BENEATH THE OIL provides a detailed explanation for where the crime scene happened [where Shan’ann was killed]. It’s not upstairs.
If the sketch is correct, then it suggests after committing the crime, Chris Watts went upstairs with Shan’ann’s phone and put it under the cushions in the area closest to the landing; there it could be plausibly present but nevertheless hidden from plain sight.
A much murkier question is: did Chris intend for her phone to be found, or was he planning on discarding it later? If he planned to get rid of it, why didn’t he dump it during his long outbound trip before dawn to CERVI 319? There was clearly the opportunity, and no one to see what he was doing, so why not?
Also: why not destroy the phone?
It’s unclear whether her phone was on or off [Nickole Atkinson might know], but if Watts wanted to delay discovery, then he probably knew her phone needed to be around to mislead people that she was still alive. Sometimes Facebook and WhatsApp can lead [or be used to lead] friends and followers to believe someone is online or around when they’re not, the phone is simply on.
In the Scott Peterson case Laci’s phone was found in her car, not turned off. The battery had run down over several hours. Scott Peterson seemed well aware that by calling Laci he was allowing himself to be tracked not only by cellphone tower pings, but by leaving messages. He appeared to do this deliberately to establish plausible deniability.
There is another possibility too. Perhaps Watts’ original plan was to return home and to send messages from her phone, leading others to believe not just that Shan’ann was alive when she wasn’t, but perhaps that she was going somewhere, or would be going offline for a period, when she was already dead.
Since Chris Watts said he sent several messages to Shan’ann’s phone when he knew she was dead, it makes sense that the idea of leaving misleading digital breadcrumbs must have occurred to him [just as it did to Jodi Arias, Oscar Pistorius, Casey Anthony and the murderer of Meredith Kercher*].
And just as it makes sense for him to say he saw what was happening on the baby monitor while downstairs [in other words, he wasn’t upstairs when the children were murdered], by placing her phone upstairs, he also places her elsewhere to where he probably was when she was killed.
If Shan’ann was murdered at the foot of the stairs, then a claim that she’d fallen down and landed beneath the stairs would also pass the evidentiary test.
QUESTION: Where do you think the murders took place, and why? #tcrs
*On the same night Kercher was murdered, Knox and Sollecito [the original suspects and both twice convicted in the murder] both turned off their cell phones. In addition Kercher’s two phones were removed from her room and disposed of outside the house. It later transpired that someone had attempted to use her phone to hack into her British telephone banking account. Only someone very familiar with Kercher would have known about this account. #tcrs investigated the Knox case in a series of narratives, licking off with Despicable.
Being unequally yoked in the contemporary biblical sense means your marriage and relationship is doomed for disaster. It’s a catchy truism because it is true.
The origin of this epithet is commonly thought to be the Christian bible, with one of the oldest surviving recorded references to this unequal yoking business going all the way back to Papyrus 46 from approximately 175AD.
But the bible doesn’t have the monopoly over the idea, even if it has monopolized the phrase over the centuries. Unequal yoking is rooted in the rise of agrarian societies about 10 000 years ago. Farming was a relatively new idea then, like the wheel, and our ancestors then were amateurs at pretty much everything.
People had to be told not to yoke strong animals [like an ox, say] with smaller, weaker beasts of burdens [like donkeys]. Over time these prescripts achieved a symbolic importance, and went from applying to effective farm animal management to marriage advice.
The reasoning was sound: having a strong person [such as someone with a strong faith in God] married to a weak person [an unbeliever] was likely to cause your relationship to go around in circles, and potentially unravel completely.
While one can debate whether believers or unbelievers are stronger or weaker relative to one another, what’s clear is the principle itself is sound: people who are strikingly different to one another, especially in their beliefs and orientations, aren’t likely to maintain strong relationships. Happy with that?
Intuitively it’s clear Shan’ann and Chris Watts weren’t equally yoked. Given what happened to this family, someone was pulling a heavier load. Someone found the burden they were carrying unfair.
In reality, when animals pulling a plough are unequally yoked, everyone is worse off. The stronger animal finds the yoke constantly chafing at its neck no matter how halting its pace. The stronger animal finds its time is being wasted, and its energy squandered as it waits in the field, the sunning burning a hole on its back, as it waits for its partner to catch up.
The weaker animal is always being prodded, pulled and pressured to exceed it’s own boundaries. And the farm, and the farmer suffers as a result of this mismatch.
Everyone loses!
In the Watts case, we have some idea now that issues of interiority were at play, and we have some idea they had something to do with the obvious stuff that impacts all relationships: financial pressures, work life, home life, family dynamics etc.
By applying Symbolic Specificity to our interrogation, we get a lot closer to the operative psychology in the Watts case. So let’s do that. How did unequal yoking affect the MLM side of things? Was sexuality or sexual orientation relevant? How about temperament? Finances? What impact does an affair have on how one is yoked inside a marriage?
Let’s examine each of these now one by one, using the implement of unequal yoking as a guide and a benchmark.
1. Le-Vel vs Andarko
Just looking at the optics, Le-Vel feels like a vibrant, colorfully branded, socially active party. There are exotic trips, cakes and chocolates, luxury cars, and the convenience and fun [supposedly] of making hay from home, building your business empire one Facebook Live video at a time.
Anadarko on the other hand, feels gritty and dirty. It involves physical work, outdoors, with hazardous chemicals, dust, grease and grime. It’s not colorful work unless one counts oil and rust as colors. It’s not social either, unless one considers a screwdriver, rigs, nuts and bolts as companions. Unlike the relative variety at Le-Vel, an operator;s work is stock standard. It’s the same deal, the same equipment, every day. It’s get the oil to where it needs to go.
What we can say with some confidence then is that the stay-at-home job is quite cushy, even easy compared to the up-at-dawn siege that is plying one’s living as an entry-level operator in the oil business.
In the work sense, in terms of what they did each day, were Shan’ann and Chris Watts a little unequally yoked, or a lot?
2. Temperament
Shan’ann appears to have evolved from her high school days, to a shy, awkward and picked-on kid to an attractive go-getter who got herself a house by age 25, and three children, in spite of her “health challenges” with lupus.
In 2018 her temperament seems to have gone from being relatively withdrawn to unfailingly gung ho about “Thrivin'”and even pushy. It’s fair to say then, that Shan’ann’s temperament transformed a great deal during their marriage. Thrive was making her more and more of an extrovert, and perhaps less and less of the woman Chris Watts thought he married.
Chris Watts, on the other hand, seems to have remained “straight as an arrow” as a former college friend described him on HLN. Even during his marriage, Shan’ann describes him as an introvert, and in her videos, he’s always in the background and never says much.
Shan’ann’s social media compared to Chris Watts’ social media is like chalk and cheese. One might argue this stands to reason, because she had to active on social media. True, but Chris Watts was also signed up to Le-Vel. In more ways than one he appeared to be a “silent partner” in the way they were yoked to Le-Vel.
The most we see of Chris Watts unfiltered, isn’t anywhere on Facebook, it’s his notorious Sermon on the Porch. In that moment he doesn’t appear to be particularly introverted, but that seems to be an act for the cameras, borne out later by how poorly the public decided he’d accounted for himself. By contrast, Scott Peterson was a better and more charming liar.
In the temperamental sense, and this is really only limited to her growing extroversion versus his ongoing introversion, were Shan’ann and Chris Watts a little unequally yoked, or a lot?
3. Finances
This remains a critically important area, but still a known unknown. We know how precarious their finances were in 2015, and that then Chris Watts was carrying by far the bulk of the financial burden, despite the acquisition of an expensive house and new babies on the way.
According to the Denver Post:
The Wattses appeared to be going through a rocky period when they moved from North Carolina to Colorado in 2012. Bankruptcy records describe a series of financial setbacks.
Byron Falls, who bought Shanann’s house in Belmont, N.C., west of Charlotte, said Thursday the Watts family had been in a hurry to sell and left behind the furniture as part of the sale.
The Wattses filed for bankruptcy two years after moving into their five-bedroom, 4,177-square-foot home at 2825 Saratoga Trail in Frederick. They paid $399,000 for the home, according to public records.
The list of creditors included Ford Motor Company and Toys “R” Us. Their list of assets included their home valued at $400,000, a 2006 Ford Mustang with more than 97,000 miles on it, wedding rings and a dog, which they valued at $5. In one filing from June 2015, the couple reported that they had $9.51 in their savings accounts and about $860 in their checking account.
Their debts included $11,245 in student loans, according to Denver U.S. Bankruptcy Court records. Choice Recovery in Columbus, Ohio, was seeking to recover $740 for health and chiropractic services.
Is it likely the finances had improved or worsened after three years, and after Shan’ann’s “success” as a MLM promoter? If the finances had worsened, then someone was either a little more unequally yoked, or a lot – who do you think that might be?
4. The Yoke of Another Pregnancy
One has the impression from Shan’ann that she thought she couldn’t and wouldn’t ever have children, because of her health challenges. That’s one thing, but what if her husband thought the same thing? What if he got married assuming there wouldn’t be any kids?
Did he have any say in the conception of his third child? In Shan’ann’s pregnancy video he appears to be happy initially, but a moment later, when he steps back and asks, “So pink means…it’s gonna be girls…” he surprise seems darker and more burdened.
Off camera Shan’ann’s voice sounds clipped, as if she’s putting him on the spot. Well, isn’t she?
Does a pregnancy [in this case a third child on the way] add to the level of burden in a family that’s already burdened, already unequally yoked, or subtract from it? This is an interesting question, because for one spouse there may be the idea that the burden will be lessened – on them. What about the other?
5. Game vs No Game
When Shan’ann told her friend and colleague Amanda Thayer that Chris had “no game”, she meant in the romantic sense. When Thayer remarked on this, sitting beside her own husband, she laughs derisively.
Whether Shan’ann is correct or not is less relevant than the inference. According to Shan’ann, she had game [her Thrive spiels are endlessly about her gameness] and he didn’t.
What is it like to hear that though? If you’re the donkey in the equation, what’s it like to be stepped on, squeezed and dragged along by the ox. Not only that, to have the pace set for you while being nagged, dismissed and undermined throughout.
6. Good Looks
If Chris Watts’ personality hadn’t changed much since high school, his appearance had. During his Sermon on the Porch he presented himself as a neat, well-groomed, all-round nice guy. Although this wasn’t different from his performances as a family extra in Shan’ann’s Facebook Live videos, what was different over the years was the grooming.
Watts’ weight loss was significant – 44 pounds [20 kilograms] – in a few months. Although Shan’ann had also lost weight and transformed her appearance somewhat, his game in the weight loss and fitness area was clearly ahead of hers.
Besides this, just as he was reaching peak fitness, actively working out at home, doing outdoor and physical work for Anadarko, and also jogging every day, she was pregnant and putting on weight by day. As he was becoming more physical active and physically attractive, she was becoming less active due to the pregnancy.
Putting that dynamic into the joke, suddenly we see him edging ahead of her in the key area that matters for a beast of burden – actual labor in the field. #tcrc
7. Sexuality
Just as the Watts finances are a known unknown, so is Chris Watts’ sexuality. Is he bisexual?
If he is, or if his sexual appetite is different to Shan’ann’s, then this too would have an impact on the yoking equation. Seen literally, imagine if a yoked donkey is horny, and sees another donkey wandering by on the edge of the field [male maybe, maybe female, who knows] and then tries to head off in that direction?
Does that have a small or massive impact on the yoking situation in a marriage?
8. An Affair
You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. That’s a derivative of the unequally yoked bible version. It tends to be true relative to your point of view. If the other person is the dog or the bitch, then you’re the one that’s right in the yoking equation, not so? The problem is, everyone is going to see themselves as right and their partner as possibly not right enough, especially when the shit hits the fan.
And shit did hit the fan.
We don’t have to know precisely what Chris Watts’ sexual proclivities were. Irrespective of his sexual preferences, the fact that he was actively involved in at least one affair while getting his wife pregnant, suggests his sexual appetite was significant. Significant enough to be a factor in the yoking equation, certainly.
There are some suggestions that Watts had an animalistic approach to sex. Although an anonymous source quoted by Radar online is hardly credible at this stage, the notion seems to fit in with the very hands-on and physical side of Chris Watts and his work.
One can imagine there would be pent up aggression merely in the aspect that he was a bottom-dweller in the career sense, and in terms of his relatively low income compared to their large home and lifestyle.
Does an affair shift the yoking dynamic in a marriage? it’s perhaps the most fundamental symptoms of a couple who are unequally yoked – the third party draws the one constantly away from the other, creating a chafing tension that can become excruciating, criminal, sometimes even homicidal.
9. His House?
In whose name was the house in Saratoga Trail? This is arguably the most important question surrounding this case – it attends to the crucial interiority, it also answers the question [potentially] of what the prize was behind committing the crime.
If both of them shared ownership of the largest and most valuable asset, then unequal yoking still comes into play in terms of their respective income/debt burdens. The stereotype MLM scenario suggests Shan’ann was not unable to meet her financial obligations. If true, then despite all appearances to the contrary, financially speaking he was the ox in the ox-donkey yoking equation, not Shan’ann.
Since we already know the Wattses were in trouble with the Wyndham Hill Master Association, there was clearly the threat that they could lose their home. Now imagine if one spouse begins to blame the other for something as significant as causing them to lose their home.
Whatever the truth of this matter, the burden of the yoke that had the Watts’ family in its grip, the weight of it, was directly related to the enormous debt burden the one or both of them faced.
Living beyond one’s means does that to a yoke, it makes a yoke unbearable beyond one’s means.
10. Her Health
Perhaps the greatest yoke of all was the one only Shan’ann was burdened with. What’s a greater burden, a heavier load on a young mother’s shoulders than a chronic and systemic autoimmune disease?
In upcoming TWO FACE narratives I explore the health dimension in more detail. For now, it suffices to note that by placing this aspect in the ox/donkey scenario, no matter which animal is bigger or stronger, having one of them fatally undermined by a serious disease is going to have a huge impact of the suffering of both animals.
If they’re already unequally yoked, and we know they were, then Shan’ann’s sickness was a major factor preventing her from being able to pull her end of the plough through their respective fields of dreams.
In the Watts family, the believer might represent the economically viable spouse, and the unbeliever, the one trying to do a con job on her success. The irony is how this arrangement is inverted by true crime.
Now we are the believers or unbelievers of whatever Watts says about himself, and his marriage, and we are the believers or unbelievers of whether Shan’ann’s world was as Thrivin’ as she claimed.
We do true crime a disservice if we apply our minds to just one side of the yoking equation. Can you see that? We have to know both sides to know how each experienced the other. That’s the true part of true crime, and to get to meaningful answers, we have to have the courage to ask tough questions about the murderer and his victims. As long as we do so with humanity, humility and compassion, the real truth will out.
#tcrs
As a full-time true crime writer, how do I measure the success of a book, or a particular author? Amazon’s true crime categories are a great place to look at who’s who and what’s hot.
In Hoaxes and Deceptions, the heads of state in true crime are all there listed and updated hourly according to popularity. Imperfect Justice, Jeff Ashton’s book on Casey Anthony has been riding high of late, even visiting the #1 spot a few times this year. Ashton’s book has been reviewed over 600 times.
Frank Abagnale’s famous story Catch Me If You Can is also in the top 50 of Hoaxes and Deceptions, with over 700 reviews.
War Dogs, recently released as major motion picture by the director of The Hangover and starring Jonah Hill, is also there. So is Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Run of his Life [The People v. O.J. Simpson] and now a senior legal analyst at CNN.
Ann Rule, the grand dame of this genre, is a dominating presence with no fewer than five of her books in the top 100. Lying in Wait, ranked at #47, has over 400 reviews. Her book The Stranger Beside Me about her firsthand encounter with serial killer Ted Bundy was a breakthrough for her. That book, a #1 New York Times bestseller once upon a time, has been reviewed a staggering 1 112 times.
I’ve always measured my efforts and the popularity of my work against Ann Rule, believed by many to be the foremost crime writer in America. Her bio takes credit for creating the true crime genre as it exists today.
As an author her solid background in law enforcement and criminal justice gave her an authoritative credibility that many others lacked. Her education includes a BA in Creative Writing with minors in Psychology and Criminology. The fact that her grandfather was a Michigan sheriff didn’t hurt either.
Rule’s output was also prolific. Until her death in July 2015, she’d produced 33 books in 30 years, that’s a rate of just over 1 book per year.
So Rule has always been a great model to measure my efforts in true crime against.
As of this writing, True Crime Rocket Science has 11 books in the top 100, including TWO FACE and TWO FACE II [Chris Watts], Blood & Seawater and Night Before Christmas [Scott Peterson], Treachery and Treachery II [Casey Anthony], and The Craven Silence, The Day After Christmas and Black Star Over Bethlehem [JonBenet Ramsey].
With True Crime Rocket Science in your Kindle, all your true crime bases are covered. Every aspect is exhaustively interrogated. With #tcrs you know you’re in good hands!
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