What’s the definition of a Perfect Murder? Simple – it’s where there’s no evidence there was a murder committed in the first place.
Within hours of the Watts Family murders, Chris Watts was the subject of intense public scrutiny, then suspicion. He had little choice when he was arrested just three days after the murders to confess.
Due to [what appears to be] a quick conclusion to an “open and shut” case, followers of true crime have since been banging the same drum. Chris Watts is a dumb criminal, they say, and his crime – though monstrous – was daft. Because he was caught so soon, his crime was badly executed. Also, because he was caught so “easily” it probably wasn’t a premeditated murder [or murders], it was a spur of the moment.
Intertexuality Defined
We use Intertextuality to test these “obvious” assumptions. Intertextuality is the narrative consistency between crimes and criminals, and is a TCRS-ism straight from the Rocket Science Toolbox.
To test the assumptions of the Watts Case we need to travel 15 hours by air, 6,126 miles West to East, drawing our smiley face across the globe en route to Istanbul, Turkey
What does the triple murder in a quiet subdivision of Wyndham Hill, Frederick, Colorado have to do with the mysterious disappearance of a Saudi national called Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul Turkey, halfway around the world? More than you might think.
If there’s a contemporary poster child for the perfect murder, it’s the ongoing, and still unsolved Khashoggi Case. Officially, at the time of writing, Khashoggi remains a missing person. He vanished.
That’s rule number 1 for a perfect murder: It’s not murder, the person is simply missing.
According to USA Today the Saudi position, as told to the media [the equivalent of Watts’ Sermon on the Porch in other words] is that:
[they/the Saudis]…have denied any wrongdoing in Khashoggi’s disappearance and claim that he left the consulate [through a back door], where he had gone to obtain official documents before his upcoming wedding, shortly after his arrival.
A critic of the Saudi regime living in self-imposed exile in the U.S., Khashoggi has not been seen since that day.
Turkish media on Wednesday published the names of 15 Saudi nationals who traveled to Istanbul the day Khashoggi disappeared. One of them is the head of a forensic department in Saudi Arabia’s intelligence services. Others appear to be Saudi agents of one kind or another, according to Turkey’s Sabah newspaper.
If what you want is to pull off the perfect murder, you’d probably send along the head of forensics in your intelligence services to let your team of hit men know what to do, when, and how, and how to clean up all the forensic evidence.
So what does the perfect murder look like:
- It’s premeditated
- It involves the murder behind closed doors at a prescribed time and place, with a prescribed victim and perpetrator
- The crime scene needs to be a secure location where the murder can be executed without being seen, without being heard, without interference and without unfriendly witnesses [in other words, the issues isn’t necessarily that there aren’t witnesses, but more pertinently that if they are they won’t talk. One witness in the Watts case is Deeter].
- It involves a “getaway vehicle” and a plan to remove the body from the crime scene to a defined “burial” location which is also secure
- The vehicle is backed up to the entrance to allow for ease of transfer of the body, and also to minimize DNA transfer to the ground
- The perpetrators have a ready explanation for the crime: they don’t know where the victim went, he disappeared. It has nothing to do with them
- There are no traces of the victim at the crime scene
I’ve maintained all along that the Watts murders were not only premeditated, they were carefully calculated and scheduled. They also check all seven of the above points. So why wasn’t the Watts case a perfect murder? For the same reason the Khashoggi Case isn’t. Unbeknownst to the Saudi’s, the Turkish government had bugged the embassy and placed CCTV cameras inside and outside the building. It wasn’t so much that the Saudi’s executed poorly, they failed to take into account they were being watched – just like Chris Watts.
So the same thing that busted Chris Watts essentially busted the Saudi’s. And here it is:
Khashoggi enters the embassy at exactly 13:14:37 on October 2nd.
When Khashoggi enters, a black Mercedes Vito with tinted windows is visible over his shoulder, parked on the sidewalk opposite the entrance. Khashoggi has no way of knowing it, but in a short time he will be dead and his dismembered body transported in that black van along with his killers.
Interestingly, at 12:12 the Mercedes Tito backs up to the entrance of the embassy, possibly in a “test-run” to see how close they can get the van to the door.
It’s unknown whether the body was loaded here or at the back entrance. If the back entrance was available, they likely would have used it especially since Kharshoggi’s fiance was waiting outside/probably had line-of-sight of the front entrance.
By 15:08 the crime is complete and the vehicles leave. It’s taken just under two hours to murder, dismember, ready his remains for transport and clean-up the crime scene.
In the Watts case, Shan’ann arrived at 01:48 and Chris Watts left the residence shortly after 05:27. Chris Watts didn’t have a 15-man assassin team helping him, and he had three bodies to process and transport not just one, which is why he took almost twice as long as this hit squad to get ready.
Why is the black Mercedes parked at the entrance when Khashoggi arrives. Plausible deniability. It’s in plain sight, moving to the consul’s home in plain sight. It was just the consul doing what he always did, going from work to home. Nothing to do with the murders…
Three minutes later the convoy of six cars [all with diplomatic license plates] bot only one containing Khashoggi’s remains [in the black van] arrive at the consul’s house.
It’s a secure location, just like CERVI 319, where the murderer can maintain control and security over the remains.
The black van pulls into the rear entrance, so that the transfer of remains can take place without anyone watching.
Here’s the same timeline with narration and video. It also shows the arrival of the hit squad at the air part, checking in, and which hotels they stayed at. Just as in the Watts case, there was also a schedule flight and transfer from the airport that had to be factored in.
Like the Watts Case, the Khashoggi Case also has its version of Nickole Utoft Atkinson, the concerned witness waiting at the door, looking at her phone but getting no answer, and ultimately calling the police. Hatice Cengiz waited 4 hours to call the cops, Nickole Utoft Atkinson waited approximately the same time period [Shan’ann missed her appoointment at 10:00. A check well-being call [CWB] was disptatched at 13:40 – 3 hours 40 minutes after Shan’ann went missing.
The only differences at this stage between the Khashoggi Case and the Watts Case, is a) the cadaver dogs confirming that there were dead bodies involved [and thus it was a murder investigation, not a missing person’s case] and b) the bodies in the Watts case were recovered because Watts told investigators where they were.
In the Khashoggi Case the 15 man hit squad are probably scrambling to get themselves to safety, and also to remove the evidence from the consul’s house, before the Saudi’s “confess” to a crime having taken place.
Once again, it will be adapted from a missing person’s case to a “confession”, except that the confession is a “botched interrogation”. If you think about it, that’s the same confession Chris Watts used; that he was talking to his wife about separating and thus, arguably, the murders were also a “botched interrogation”.
See, that wasn’t such a long walk half way round the world after all. That’s Intertextuality for you.
POSTSCRIPT:
Below is a brief timeline of what transpired in the Khashoggi Case. For those who have read TWO FACE, bear in mind the timeline presented there and in context, to this one.
According to ABC:
May 2018: Khashoggi meets Hatice Cengiz, a 36-year-old Turkish Ph.D. student, at a conference in Istanbul and she soon becomes his fiancée.
[Also involves a mistress/3rd party]
Sept. 28: Khashoggi visits the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul for the first time to pick up a permission document to marry Cengiz. He’s told come back later.
[Also involves the changing of marital status]
Oct. 1: He returns to Istanbul from a trip to London.
[Also involves return flight at a predetermined time]
Oct. 2: He goes back to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Cengiz waits for him outside for four hours, but he never comes out and is told by consulate staff that he left out a back door. Cengiz contacts the Turkish police.
[Cnegiz performs the same role as Nickole Utoft Atkinson. She’s told beforehand that things aren’t 100% kosher, she has a vested interest, she alerts the police]
Oct. 7: Saudi government officials deny involvement in Khashoggi’s disappearance after reports that he was killed.
[Watts initially denied involvement in his families disappearance]
Oct. 8: Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., warns the Saudis of consequences if the government is found complicit in Khashoggi’s disappearance.
[Watts was likely warned of “consequences” is he didn’t confess and give up the remains. He was likely also shown inculpatory evidence just as the Saudi’s have been]
Oct. 9: Cengiz writes an op-ed in Washington Post, saying her husband-to-be had applied for U.S. citizenship and that his reason for visiting Turkey was to take care of all necessary paperwork for them to marry before he returned to Washington. She urges President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump to “help shed light on Jamal’s disappearance.” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said of Khashoggi’s disappearance, “We’re not going to make any judgments about what happened to him. We don’t know what has happened to him. We don’t have any information on that.
[Behind-the-scenes in the Watts case also involves paperwork, admin and debt issues]
Oct. 10: Trump makes his first comments on Khashoggi’s disappearance, saying he contacted the Saudis and invited Cengiz to the White House. “We’re demanding everything,” he said. “We want to see what’s going on here. That’s a bad situation. And frankly the fact that it’s a reporter you could say in many respects it … brings it to a level. It’s a very serious situation for us and this White House. We do not like seeing what’s going on.”
[The Weld County DA’s office have also been treating this crime with such seriousness, the autopsy reports have been withheld]
In Sum:
Both cases involve the “vanishing” of the murder victims,
Both cases involve the transfer by car to another location where the remains are secretly buried/concealed.
Although it hasn’t been proved yet, and the reason I believe the autopsy reports have been withheld, I believe the children were also dismembered and/or processed in some way. If so, then both cases have the dismembering of the remains as part of the premeditation, postmeditation and cover-up.
Finally, in both cases unexpected CCTV monitoring caused the best laid-plans to go awry.
Ergo, the Watts Family Murders aren’t nearly as amateurish as many believe, and the prosecution isn’t going to be the slam dunk many assume it will be either.
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