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Does it?
It was HLN who made an open records request to Weld County for the doorbell camera footage of Shan’ann arriving home at 01:48.
Around the same time HLN contacted Weld County Courts, so did I. On February 20th I received a response to a request for Return Date of Summons [for the August 24th court appearance]. This was the email response I received:
There’s a fair bit of information I’m looking for since I have three more books to complete in this series. In no particular order:
Anything you would like to add to this list?
For those who would like to submit their own records requests, please download and print this form, or leave your address and I will email you the attachment:
This is a screengrab from the Ring doorbell camera at 2825 Saratoga Trail. In her left hand, Shan’ann is holding her phone. Over her shoulder Nickole Atkinson is backing down the drive. Once inside the door, Shan’ann waved and Atkinson drove off. What happened next remains unknown.
Is the shirt she wore the one she was buried in?
It wasn’t in the original release, but in the second release of documents [around December 7th] texts revealed that it wasn’t just the father that was hesitant about bringing another baby into the family.
Six days before Shan’ann was murdered, on August 7th, she texted her friend and fellow promoter Addy Molony:
“I can’t do this alone with 3 kids.”
I’m not happy.”
“I can’t do this.”
There is something heartbreaking and mournful about a grave and a graveyard. It has an inevitable, unbreakable, unreachable, suffocating, claustrophobic permanence about it, doesn’t it?
The the area that was green and bursting with summer when they were buried is brown, grey and forlorn today.
The area in front of the gravestone has a Merry Christmas appeal to it, given the red and silver bows interspersed with the green.
It should be noted on the tombstone that Shan’ann’s name is spelled Shan’ann [the same convention followed by this blog and the narratives surrounding it]. Almost six months after her tragic death, even her staunchest defenders, as well as numerous media pundits still can’t get the spelling of her name right.
With that being said, while Shan’ann’s name on the grave is correct, the spelling of her unborn son’s name is incorrect. Incorrect because in Shan’ann’s own text messages she repeatedly used “Niko”.
Shan’ann used this spelling as recently as the last completed day of her life [August 12, 2018] in a message meant for her husband [sent to Addy Molony at 21:13]:
Shan’ann confirmed the same spelling on August 9th at 21:12 in a message to Nickole Atkinson and Cassie Rosenberg.
When it takes this long to get the kindergarten stuff right in a high-profile true crime case, it’s no wonder it’s so difficult for a society to ever get to grips with far deeper darker and more complicated questions – like why.
Shan’ann Watts was live [below] on January 9, 2017 at 4:35 PM.
https://youtu.be/cc-kyX-cWM8
https://youtu.be/vU0khnPmPRE
https://youtu.be/5bg37qoxr0A
At 13:37 on August 9th, Shan’ann sent a photo of her final love letter to her husband. The letter is undated, and the pages following the first page are missing. The original letter, so far as we know, has never been found.
The text of the first page of Shan’ann’s last letter reads:
My Dearest Chris. [Heart] [Dearest was originally written “deerest” and the second “e” later overwritten with an “a”.]
I don’t know where to begin….I am so lost for words [at a loss for words]. I can’t even explain how hard this pain is. The last 5 weeks have been the hardest. I missed everything about you. I missed your morning breath, your touch, your lips/kisses, I missed holding you! I missed smelling you in the sheets, I missed talking to you in person. I missed watching you laugh and play with the kids. That I love so much about you. I missed seeing you naked and on top of me making love to me. OMG I missed having you around when I felt alone and upset. I just flat out missed the hell out of you. we haven’t been away from each other that long since 2012.
The second paragraph has a clear change in tone compared to the first.
I really don’t know how “we fell out of compatibility” or if that is someone elses words. the only thing that change this month was everything going down with you family. IO can’t change what happened, but I can ‘ try to wor k thing s out with you with them. But there has to be a mutual respect for everyone. I definitely deserve an apology because of Celeste. I can suck up her going against everything I said to our kid. But our daughters life…
Shan’ann left the letter on the counter for Watts on August 10th, and asked him to write a letter back to her.
Further reading: Chris Watts Love Letters to Nichol Kessinger: “I love how your booty smells and tastes”
Various sources confirm an unusual trait about Shan’ann – she had Obsessive Compulsive Discorder [OCD].
When Nickole Atkinson gave an interview to ABC, she was adamant that she knew something was wrong with Shan’ann because it wasn’t like Shan’ann to go somewhere without her car, or phone, or to leave the kids’ beds unmade [let alone her own].
Atkinson told ABC:
“The girls’ beds weren’t made [looks at the ceiling, then to her left]; Shan’ann was very OCD. Everything in her house had a place. Everything was labelled. If something was out of the ordinary, it was very out of the ordinary, for her…”
Shan’ann’s OCD is a big deal. It was a big deal to Nickole, and yet the term OCD appears only six times in the Discovery Documents, a relative rarity given how instrumental this was to Shan’ann’s personality, and identity.
OCD was largely who she was. It made her somewhat controlling, somewhat overbearing, somewhat regimented in how she ran her household, and in terms of scheduling her life and those around her – Shan’ann ran a very tight ship. But how much somewhat are we talking about here, really?
The combination of OCD and MLM is also central to the operative psychology of the Watts case. In September 2018 I dealt with this aspect in a post titled:
What impact did THRIVE have on Shan’ann’s marriage?
Of course it’s one thing to say someone is OCD [or a narcissist], it’s another thing to know what that means – to experience it. Nickole did, and we get a little sense of what she means by looking into Shan’ann’s pantry, and her home. But is it enough?
At the bottom of this post, Shan’ann’s Pinterest profile provides insight into the scale and scope of her OCD. You can see the size of it at a single glance.
But, as I’m often at pains to emphasize in my books, when it comes to personality traits and dynamics, we can’t be told what they are – we have to be shown them, we have to experience them – like the Matrix – for the truth to really resonate.
Before showing you though, the OCD aspect deserves a little tell, too.
Shan’ann’s OCD was likely rooted in anxiety primarily about her health problems. Shan’ann had other anxieties too, but her health issues were fairly significant. The OCD was thus a response – arguably an over-response – to control her environment. That environment included her spouse. Now here’s the rub. OCD can also be rooted in narcissism, and aggravated by narcissism.
The table below from psychcentral.com provides some cursory coverage of the difference between OCD + NPD [NPD = Narcissistic Personality Disorder] and vanilla OCD.
Notice the aspect at the bottom of the table:
No concern or empathy for how their OCD behavior negatively impacts others
When there is vanilla OCD on the other hand:
Constantly feels bad for how their OCD behavior impacts others
Thus far Shan’ann’s narcissism, especially as it relates to her OCD, has been completely missing from the media narrative, or any narrative surrounding this case. The accusations that Chris Watts’s narcissism stands alone, and is central to the murders rings hollow because we haven’t contextualized it: his narcissism compared to whose? Yours? Society’s? What about Shan’ann’s?
If we refer to Shan’ann’s social media, there are countless instances where she describes her husband as someone who does whatever she tells him to do. Shan’ann has no concern for how this makes him feel; it’s simply the way things work in their marriage, and he gets it, because he gets her. That’s great, except we can tell – intuitively – that over time being a pawn on someone’s OCD board game – even within a loving marriage – has to get old at some stage.
https://youtu.be/1M44hQ2Xls8?t=529
Narcissism is a popular catch-term in true crime now, dropped by all the big hitters – Nancy Grace, Dr. Phil, HLN and so on. And the more it is used, the more it gets reused.
Most of the folks using the ‘N’ word don’t really understand how narcissism works, and even less how it relates to true crime. They have a vague sense that’s it’s a particularly ugly form of conceit, and selfishness. And so I guess Chris Watts was a particularly conceited and selfish husband and father to do what he did. Well, except before he committed the crimes no one – especially not Shan’ann- would accuse Watts of being either conceited or selfish, in fact quite the opposite.
No one, naturally, wants to talk about Shan’ann’s narcissism. That would be distasteful, wouldn’t it? Victim blaming. But here at CrimeRocket we’re not trying to win a popularity contest, or trying to use the same catch-terms as the talk show hosts.
We’re here to find out what the fuck happened, and who these people really are, at least, that’s why I’m here. Now when I say this, I say it with the greatest of respect; if you’d rather talk about only certain aspects of a case, and feel uncomfortable talking about other aspects which you feel should be off limits, please fuck off and go be schizophrenic in your selective reality on your own time, somewhere else.
For the rest, let’s answer the question: is OCD related to narcissism, and if so, how so?
According to healthyplace.com:
The narcissist’s very pursuit of Narcissistic Supply is compulsive…[and] in many respects, narcissism can be defined as an all-pervasive obsessive-compulsive disorder.
So we see OCD and Narcissism are related, and that Narcissist Personality Disorder [NPD] actually exacerbates OCD. OCD and NPD aren’t the same thing however [a video at the bottom of this page explains how they differ]. But going back to additional reinforcing aspects from psychcentral.com’s table, we see there are some pretty ugly traits associated with OCD and NPD, especially exploitation, entitlement and arrogance.
How much of this is “evil” in the conventional sense of the word? In some ways, none of it is evil. It’s simply the habitual psychology of control, or the efforts at control, and how that is exerted is by putting the world [and people] into box, with nice neat labels on. The world is also reduced to timetables and schedules, along with everyone in them. So the OCD-Narcisisst may not be aware of the terror they unleash on the world in their efforts to control every conceivable aspect, they’re simply doing their thing trying to organize their shit.
On the other hand, is it okay for one person to exert a fucking tyranny over another? In that sense, it’s not evil, but it suggests there is a flagrant lack of self-awareness. In other words, do I realize that what I do habitually can cause pain to others, or do I simply not care?
Shan’ann’s nut meltdown is a good example demonstrating how difficult it may be to know where to draw the line between tyranny, OCD and common sense.
Which is it?
Shan’ann’s Pinterest profile below shows the extent of her OCD. Not all OCDs are created equal, just as there is a spectrum to narcissism and NPD. But clearly, sometimes OCD is on a vastly different scale to what could be considered “normal”.
The above profile comprises the following categories:
*In the Love category, Shan’ann highlights various ways couples can express their love to one another, including 10 Ways to Strengthen Your Marriage, a Couple’s Appreciation Journal and 58 Creative Ways to Cheer Up a Love One. The category also includes The best days of our lives – plates with all the significant dates in a marriage. For Mother’s Day, that’s exactly what Chris Watts gave her.
Many have criticized Chris Watts for Googling when and how to say I love you. Such criticism is fine, as long as you compare it to the other side of the equation: Shan’ann and yourself.
Further reading: OCD and the Death of the Christian
This happened five short days before the murders…
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