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Think You Know the Chris Watts Case? In Which ROOM Does HE Say The Murders Took Place?

October 18, 2018 / / 59 Comments

In which room is the crime scene at 2825 Saratoga Trail? According to Chris Watts it’s an upstairs room, but which one? Is it a) the kid’s bedroom, b) the loft lounge or c) the parents’ bedroom?

The affidavit places Chris Watts in his bedroom. It’s about as safe a place to be as any, right? This is inferred from him stating he “returned” to his bedroom after discussing a separation with Shan’ann [presumably in the bedroom].

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The affidavit implies a single baby monitor, but there were nevertheless two cameras, one for each child, and one for each room, beamed to the same monitor. The children didn’t sleep in the same room.

https://youtu.be/UgX9bBiWFwo

According to the affidavit, Chris Watts goes downstairs “for a moment” [to drink a glass of water, to eat something, whatever he needs to be doing to not to be upstairs], and then returns an undisclosed time later. Does he make it all the way downstairs, or did he make a u-turn on the stairs? He doesn’t say. What he does say is he returns to his bedroom and while there, witnesses a murder taking place in another room on camera, presumably Celeste’s room.

In other words, Chris Watts places himself everywhere but in the rooms where the children are killed.

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In his version, Chris Watts firstly places himself in his own bedroom, and secondly downstairs and/or on the stairs when Bella’s murder takes place.  When he returns to his bedroom, that’s when he sees Celeste’s being murdered.

Thirdly, it sounds like Chris Watts confronts Shan’ann in Celeste’s room and kills her there, from his description.

What I find dodgy about this version of events is the going downstairs and coming back the same way. In his description, he places himself in neither-here-nor-there land, while something very specific is happening in another specific location.

There are at least two other crimes where we see a similar running around in circles, a sort of directional much-ado-about-nothing. The one is the Oscar Pistorius case, where Oscar gets up, closes the open balcony door and curtains, advances on the bathroom, then returns to the balcony and opens the doors and curtains. In the Amanda Knox case she also heads around the outside of the house to look into Meredith’s window, then heads out a second time. In both instances she’s racing around only to end up back at Meredith’s door, which she somehow never succeeds in opening [someone else has to do that]. Below is an extract from Waiting to be Heard:

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Probably the most absurd version I’ve heard to date is Henri van Breda who basically has himself in the same room as the axe murderer, but he’s basically like an

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invisible zombie. He’s there, but he’s not there. And the axe murderer sort of does what he needs to do and doesn’t bother with Henri. Eventually, in a magical moment, the ax

e murderer notices Henri, the two tussle briefly and Henri removes the axe from axe murderer so easily it’s like taking candy from a baby. Then the axe murderer flees, forgetting to step in blood on his way out and leave any traces of himself. Henri someone manages

to step through the crime scene and not leave any footprints in blood too – like the axe murderer.

In Henri’s version, he’s where the axe murders take place when his brother and fa ther are murdered, but he’s somewhere else [standing like statue in his own room] when the women of the house are murdered. Needless to say, Henri was convicted on all charges.

Now, back to the Watts case. When everyone is dead, Chris Watts  returns to his own bedroom and strips the bed sheets, dumping some of the bedding later in the trash.There’s no mention of him trying to perform CPR on anyone.

 

 

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Does the stripped bed mean the crime happened on the bed? It could. It didn’t in the Oscar Pistorius case. In the Jodi Arias case the bed was also stripped, and bedclothes stuffed into the washing machine, but the crime didn’t take place in the bed or the bedroom.

In the Watts case, we know Detective Baumhover found no blood, and no obvious signs of foul play on the bedding. Chris Watts also chose to bury his wife using a sheet from their bedroom. Presumably this sheet was meant to temporarily cover the corpse and seal in the smells.

If Chris Watts version is to be believed, then all three murders took place upstairs in the children’s bedrooms, and Shan’ann was murdered in Celeste’s room.

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But should Chris Watts’ version be believed? If not, what’s the alternative?

Shan’ann’s Phone Was Left HERE – and what it means

October 7, 2018 / / 38 Comments

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:

  1. Shan’ann and him sat on the couch for a few minutes while having a civilized conversation early that morning. They were discussing his idea of a separation when the phone slipped out of her pocket…
  2. Another possibility is that there was a tussle right there, and that the phone fell between the cushions between an altercation. Since the children’s bedroom is upstairs, and Chris Watts’ version contends that he went from downstairs back upstairs to confront her after seeing her on the baby monitor strangling the children, the upstairs landing area makes sense.
  3. In the same way that Casey Anthony fielded a second defense long after the investigation started, Chris Watts might claim he pushed Shan’ann and she fell down the stairs. In other words, he killed her but “it was an accident”.

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.

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There appear to be two large cushions, grey and white [or tan] on the leather couch.

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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.Fullscreen capture 20181007 151003

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.

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