A friend of the Watts family has reached out to CrimeRocket to publish the following Guest Post. The statement below has not been edited or redacted in any way.
It has come to the attention of the Watts family that portions of early materials and sketches from a book Kathleen McKenna Hewtson is working on with them have been passed around in social media platforms before the first word of the eventual book has even been laid down.
The Watts family is shocked and appalled that this has happened.
This has been made possible because it is Mrs. Hewtson’s practice to write on a continuum with her subjects, who are encouraged to take part in molding her finished product. She has to capture their voices accurately and to try to say what they would say. To Mrs. Hewtson, what she is writing isn’t a “story” at all; what she wants to reflect, as best she can, is the reality of her subjects’ lives.
Luckily, her materials and sketches themselves haven’t been leaked, only a skewed version of what she is trying to achieve, based on assumptions she has played no part in informing.
This leak came as a surprise to the Watts family, as what was released in some parts of social media – and subsequently to Reddit – was in no way a reflection of the book itself, or of the Watts’ intentions for it.
Reddit is an extremely large and well-informed network, so the fact that this portion has been leaked on a platform that big comes not without its interest. But it has certainly taken the Watts family by surprise, as sometimes media interest runs ahead of the family’s wishes, and of its best interests. And so the Watts are still trying to digest and embrace the impact that a release of this magnitude can have.
We all love a good crime story, but at the end of the day we must remember that it’s not a “crime story” to those who suffer from the crime; it’s their daily reality. So we should never forget the victims, who find themselves repeatedly effaced by those who seek to rewrite the truth they are living in agonizing detail hour by hour. They are not participating in a tacky made-for-TV reality show; they are living their actual lives, and having to come to terms – slowly and painfully – with the sledgehammer that hit them the day the crime went down.
There have been so many misconceptions about the events leading up to the murders. For instance, Jamie was not present during the visit on the afternoon of July 8th 2018 where it has been said that she was placing a bowl of nuts in reach of Cece and Bella that very afternoon. On the contrary, Jamie dropped off her children at her parents home with Cindy, Shanann, and the girls that morning between 10am and 11am in order to tend to a work emergency. She then left immediately to get to her patient. She never returned to the Watts residence that day. This is just one of many misapprehensions out there on social media continuously bringing hatred and shame upon anyone other than Chris Watts himself.
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