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Cindy Watts Extended Interview Transcript [PART 1]

November 18, 2018 / / 20 Comments

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?

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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.

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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. 

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REPORTER: When and where did he meet Shan’ann?

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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.

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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.

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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

Chris Watts’ mistress claims their relationship was “never serious” – ANALYSIS

November 16, 2018 / / 21 Comments

Nichol Kessinger sketches a portrait of Chris Watts as a lying, duplicitous slimebag, who duped her into thinking he was divorced. She had no idea, she maintains, that Watts’ wife of eight years was a few weeks pregnant when they started sleeping together.

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But why would the finality of Watts’ divorce or the status of his kids be so important if their relationship wasn’t serious? And why did Chris Watts disable his Facebook a week before the murders if it wasn’t important to hide the truth from a serious relationship-in-the-making? And why would Watts ask her to help him [them?] find an apartment that “would be good for him” [them?]. And did she start prospecting for a new place for Watts to stay?

Remember this prospecting for a new place to stay also formed the backdrop to the murder and protracted disappearance of Casey Anthony’s daughter Caylee.

No matter how you cut it, if Watts was trading out of his family to start a new chapter with Kessinger, it’s difficult to imagine it wasn’t serious. Chris Watts believed their dalliance was serious enough to murder his pregnant wife and both daughters. Did he do something as serious and significant as commit triple murder because the mistress in the wings wasn’t serious?

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In the Casey Anthony case, Tony Lazzaro was a serious flame in her life at the time Caylee went missing. Ditto Scott Peterson. In fact Peterson was so fixated with him [and vice versa] he maintained serious contact with her for weeks after Laci’s disappearance. Wasn’t that relationship really serious too?

On the other hand, Nichol Kessinger may have had a point. She may have put the brakes on, letting Watts know they could take things to the next level once Shan’ann and the kids were taken care of. Not murdered of course, but no longer in the picture. If that’s the case, then Watts started calculating how best to go about that. Separation? Maybe. Divorce? Alimony? Custody? How about making them disappear literally…

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Kessinger wanting to take it slow and wanting Watts to take care of his daughters within the schema of a divorce suggests a deeper level of commitment to the relationship and his children than the impression of a “brief affair” with a dude she “barely knew”.

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It’s also worth noting that Watts worked at Anadarko from January 2015. The way Kessinger sketches it, each morning Watts gathered in an office break room and Kessinger walked through the operators – including Watts – to place her lunch in the refrigerator. Every day. But she never spoke to Watts until one day in the middle of June when he approached her.

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Really? But wasn’t he supposed to be shy, cautious and not having any game?

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If Bella and Celeste’s Bodies were Dismembered or Processed then a Plea Deal – if you’re Chris Watts – starts to make sense

November 14, 2018 / / 16 Comments

Chris Watts has maintained from the start that he had nothing to do with the deaths of his daughters. Shan’ann killed them, he claimed in his confession. Even to his parents he apparently maintained this psychological distance, telling them “after what she did” there was no way he was going to bury the three of them together.

If Chris Watts killed and dismembered – or chemically processed – the remains of his children, then we can see how this case going to court could play out very badly for him.  The dismemberment theory isn’t wild conjecture by any means; we’ve just seen the same scene [a missing person’s case become a premeditated murder case with missing dismembered remains] playing out in international media while the Watts case was in legal limbo.

Taking on the defense perspective [I realize many are allergic to even hypothesizing this, but at TCRS we explore all possibilities], if Watts is able to win some credit with a potential jury it may be through portraying Shan’ann as an obsessive, compulsive, controlling, abusive partner.

So he might win some sympathy with a jury. On the other hand, if he liquidated his own children it’s difficult to see there being a stitch of compassion for him, especially given the fact that he murdered his wife while she was pregnant as well.

Anything can happen at trial, of course. The Casey Anthony case proved that a slam-dunk case can be undone with a rigorous defense, especially if and when the parents come to the party. The Anthony’s managed to create “doubt” on two important aspects at trial that otherwise seemed certain. Remember the “odor of death” in the car becoming the odor of pizza? Remember the repeated Google searches for Chloroform that Cindy Anthony said she performed [even though she was at work at the time]? It was enough to create doubt in the jury’s mind, if no one else’s.

The two big difference between the Watts case and the Casey Anthony case are:

  1. Casey Anthony never confessed to anything. Not while being interrogated, not to her parents, not to the media, not at trial. Never. Casey Anthony was offered a plea deal and incredibly, refused to take it. Thus far Chris Watts has done all those things that Casey Anthony didn’t do.
  2. Caylee Anthony’s remains took around six months to recover by law enforcement. By the time an autopsy was conducted, the little girl’s remains were entirely skeletonized. This favored the defense case because it couldn’t be proven beyond a reasonable doubt [in the jury’s mind] that Caylee was murdered, or even how she was murdered. Was she given an overdose of chloroform or Xanax? If she was, the evidence [as the jury saw it] wasn’t sufficient.  In the Watts case the girl’s remains were located almost immediately, though crucially, it took four days to recover them even after authorities knew where they were.

We assume that the four days of recovery simply involved the time it took to drain the almost full tanks, but I believe that’s a mistake. Theoretically, if the bodies had been dumped intact from above through the thief hatch, they could have been fished out just as easily.

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Again, if the oil tanks were almost full, and the bodies were suspended whole inside, all one needed to do was stir the tanks slightly, or reach in with a noose, rope or lasso wrapped in plastic to prevent fiber contamination [CERVI 319 is situated on a cattle ranch] or a blunt curved object like a Bo Peep staff. And that’s if bodies don’t float naturally to the surface. Would they in the case of crude oil is the key question?

And if cadavers do float, wouldn’t Watts have wanted to prevent that from happening? If it was a premeditated murder, wouldn’t part of the thinking have involved preventing the bodies from becoming easily visible to a passing glance inside the tanks through the opened thief hatch?

Were they intact but anchored?

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In any event, it seems the District Attorney has withheld the autopsy reports for two reasons. One, to allow the hysteria around the case to die down. And two, to use it as a bargaining chip [potentially] with the defendant. To hold the reports in his hand, to tell him “we know exactly what you did to your children” and to offer him the opportunity to go to prison quietly, without disgracing himself or his family any further at a very public trial.

Watts pleaded guilty

Could Chris Watts Beat the Charges?

October 14, 2018 / / 10 Comments

Bella and Celeste’s corpses were submerged in crude oil for four days before authorities recovered them. The cadavers of these two children will implicate either their mother or father in their murders, or possibly neither. If their mother is implicated, Christopher Watts could beat the charges against him based on “justifiable homicide”.

But what if no DNA is found on the girl’s necks, and no contusions? In that case, the law tilts in Chris Watts’ favor. If there’s a lack of evidence in this area, there is also doubt, and arguably reasonable doubt that he didn’t kill his daughters.

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ABERDEEN, NC – SEPTEMBER 1: Shanann Watts, 34, her daughters Bella, 4, Celeste, 3, and unborn son Nico are at their final resting place at Bethesda Cemetery after services on September 1, 2018 in Aberdeen, North Carolina. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

Curiously, it’s been Chris Watts’ own defense team who’ve asked for DNA swabs to be taken from Bella and Celeste’s necks. That must mean they know [and Chris Watts knows] they won’t find DNA on their necks. This also suggests strangling may not have been the cause of death [although it doesn’t necessarily preclude asphyxiation].

According to CBS:

The motion filed…by Christopher Watts’ attorney, James Merson, asked that DNA swabs be taken from the girls’ necks. The request quotes an expert, Richard Eikelenboom, who believes the oil would not eliminate DNA and said samples can be obtained “after strangulation.” 

Eikelenboom also recommended taking DNA samples from the girls’ hands and the hands and nails of their mother.  Authorities separately announced that the Weld County Coroner’s Office had performed autopsies on Friday [August 17] and confirmed the bodies as 34-year-old Shanann, 4-year-old Bella and 3-year-old Celeste Watts.

Police have not released any information about how the mother and daughters died. More testing is planned to help determine that.

Although the autopsies were performed on August 17th, it’s not clear whether they were completed by then. Since the bodies were only made available for buried two weeks later on September 1st, it suggests plenty of time was spent examining the three bodies and potentially the fetus as well.  The bodies also had to be transported to North Carolina, so not all of the 14 days were spent doing tissue samples etc.

Still, it appears the corpses presented an unusual challenge to the coroner, and may have presented an enigma, especially if chemicals were being sought that had been altered or perhaps even preserved by the oil. It’s also possible that the oil that held the children in suspension was collected and tested.

In the same article cited above, we’re reminded that Chris Watts had been working at Anadarko since early 2015, iow for almost three years. Was he up for promotion after that length of time?

In June 2015, according to CBS:

Shanann Watts was working in a call center at a children’s hospital at the time, earning about $18 an hour — more for evenings, weekends or extra shifts she sometimes worked. But the family remained caught between a promising future and financial strain from debt and other obligations. 

During her second pregnancy and the Thrive years, did she earn more or less? Were her expenses [including the new Lexus and travel roster] adding more debt, or less?

Now, back to Watts’ defense. Irrespective of the autopsy findings, he will probably claim his right to a fair trial has been “substantially damaged”, and his prospects “wrecked as a result.

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Personally I doubt whether any right-thinking jury will buy anyone damaging Chris Watts’ case more than he damaged itself during his Sermon on the Porch.

The real question is this: If it can be proved, and let’s face it Chris Watts also admitted killing Shan’ann Watts, will a jury be able or allowed to make an inference that he also called his daughters, even if there is no corroborating evidence? If not, then could he conceivably beat not just one charge, but all three charges fielded by the prosecution against him based on reasonable doubt and a lack of evidence?

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