00:00 – 03:14 of 21:56
CINDY: I wake up every-every morning just crying, you know [voice breaks] thinking this is not gonna be…[paddles with her hand]…what’s gonna happen every single day…[with emotion] it’s just so hard to get through it. Mm…[voice breaks, sniffles] I just don’t know how to get through it. [Sighs].
REPORTER: Tell me about his childhood. Did he play sports, was he in scouts, what kinds of things…did…
CINDY: Yeah.
REPORTER:…did he do?
CINDY: Yes, he played sports…he played sports from the time he was five years old, up until he was seventeen. And he was in basketball, he was in baseball, he was in football. And uh…loved NASCAR. He and his dad went to the NASCAR races all the time. Uhm…loved sports. Loved sports. And he had…he was a good kid. Uh…had…two best friends. And…that’s who he grew up with and still are friends with them today. And uh…there’s nothing…nothing that would have…predicted any of this [shakes head rapidly] could have ever happened.
REPORTER: Yeah.
CINDY: Nothing. Nothing in his childhood…at all. I would’ve never thought in a million years something like this could happen…to him…[licks lips] at all.
REPORTER: Yeah. You didn’t see things like him get into fights or…
CINDY: No. No fighting. He was…quiet…and he…got along with people. And he didn’t start anything. And he…was the perfect teenager to tell you the truth [laughs]. He did not even rebel. [Sniffs] He wanted to go to NASCAR-Tech. We…made that possible for him.
REPORTER: What did he do after he finished school.
CINDY: He worked at the dealership as a service technician…and…was making good money, and…loved it. He…bought a uh…toolbox…and he started buying his tools…and uh…um…[shrugs] enjoyed it. He was [shakes head] doing well.
REPORTER: When and where did he meet Shan’ann?
CINDY: They met and [looks down with sadness]…he liked her, she liked him but I don’t think [sneering] it was love at first sight [jolts head] or anything, [sighs] they took a little while and I guess got to know each other…and you know, dated. Um…it was always a little…a little strange…that [asymmetric curl of lip] she always said a lot of things about Chris in front of me [nods with conviction] that…I didn’t like.
CINDY: Like this isn’t the kind of person I would date. Uh, he doesn’t know how to…do this…or he doesn’t know to do that [leans in one way, leans in the other to give sympathy and emphasis]. Um…he looks like a skater-boy. Look at his hair. Look at how much stuff he puts on his hair. It’s just…it was just on and on and on and I just got a bad feeling.
It’s worth breaking in here to note that Cindy’s experience with Shan’ann parallels that of Amanda Thayer. Shan’ann also told Amanda that she doubted her husband was having an affair because “he had no game”. And Amanda laughed when she repeated this during an interview. When she did, her husband Nick sitting beside her sighs uncomfortably at this compromising and undermining disclosure.
If Shan’ann was undermining of him to his mother and their best friends [and on Facebook], it suggests she was probably very undermining [rightly or wrongly] to him directly.
When Cindy quotes Shan’ann saying this isn’t the kind of person I would date I don’t think it was as much a comment on Chris Watts’ personality, temperament or looks, but his social status. Shan’ann’s first husband, Leonard T. King, was an attorney. That’s quite a status slide – from legal professional to mechanic, and in that sense then, in the social status sense, Shan’ann seemed to think she was better than he was, or that he wasn’t good enough for her.
Maybe she was right. But maybe if she didn’t think that things may have turned out differently. Maybe.
When this class divide forms the backdrop to a relationship, it can be fatally undermining, like someone putting you in a cage. And we know even before Watts met Shan’ann, all his school and college buddies described him as a very diligent, hard-working type. It appears that he brought this same work ethic into the marriage, and into his child-raising, and it was his efforts that paid the bills. But one has a sense – somehow – that no matter what he did it was never going to be good enough. It wasn’t going to get them out of their colossal debt situation, but more significantly, how it felt to him was nothing he did was ever going to be good enough in her spiel. And that I think was the source of his rage, against her, then against the pregnancy, and then while babysitting all weekend, against his entire family.
Source: 9News.com, November 15, 2018
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