Nancy Grace is right. In order to study a case, to really get to grips with it, you have to spend a lot of time reading, listening and thinking.

When asked her opinion on the Watts case Nancy answered:

“He had it all,” she said. “He had this gorgeous wife, Shanann. He’s got the children, Bella and Celeste, beautiful. They always wanted a boy. They’re having baby Nico. He’s on the way. Beautiful home.”

She noted from the outside it looked perfect.

“It looked like a postcard,” she said. “It was perfect. When you look at somebody like Chris Watts in court, this picture perfect setting, it’s hard. It’s like the mind is tricking the eye. You’re seeing one thing but the evidence tells you something different, that he in fact is a cold-blooded killer who killed his own children, so I think that’s the fascination. It’s like trying to put together a Rubik’s Cube. You can’t sort it out in your head.”

All of that may be true, but all of that is the surface layer stuff, the optics,the artifice, the superficial.

I get what she’s saying that one can’t put the dichotomy, the duality together, but given enough analysis and thought, we can figure it out, and arguably TCRS already has. In the first Rocket Science book, published in September 2018, only weeks after the crime, we were already looking at a different portrait of the Watts family.

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To understand these crimes and these case we have to get away from projection and transference. We have to stop imposing ourselves onto these cases. We have to let the cases and criminals speak for themselves.