Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
At about 1:48 in the morning on August 13, 2018, a friend’s car pulled up outside a five-bedroom house on Saratoga Trail in Frederick, Colorado, a quiet commuter town north of Denver.
Shanann Watts got out with her suitcase. She was 34, she was 15 weeks pregnant with a baby boy she and her husband planned to name Nico, and she was coming home from a work trip to Arizona.
Inside, her two daughters were asleep. Bella was 4. Celeste, who everyone called CeCe, was 3. Her husband, Chris, was home too.
It was the last time anyone outside that house saw Shanann alive.
A family that looked perfect online
Chris and Shanann met in 2010 and married in North Carolina in November 2012. They moved to Colorado, bought the house in Frederick in 2013, and had two girls.
Chris worked for Anadarko Petroleum as an operator in the oil fields of Weld County. Shanann sold a wellness product called Thrive from home and posted constantly about her family on Facebook: the girls, date nights, how lucky she was.
What she didn’t know was that her husband had been having an affair with a coworker since that summer.
The friend who wouldn’t wait
The friend who drove Shanann home that night was Nickole Atkinson, a colleague from the same business. By late the next morning, Nickole was worried.
Shanann had missed a doctor’s appointment for the baby. She had missed a business meeting. She wasn’t answering texts, and that wasn’t like her at all.
Around noon, Nickole drove back to the house. Shanann’s car was in the garage. Nobody answered the door. She called Chris at work, and then she called the Frederick Police Department.
At about 1:40 p.m., an officer arrived for a welfare check. Chris drove home to let him in.
Inside, everything was where it should be, except the people. Shanann’s phone was found wedged between the couch cushions. Her purse was there. Her car was in the garage, with the girls’ car seats still inside. Her wedding ring was on the nightstand.
Chris told the officer he and Shanann had had an “emotional conversation” that morning before he left for work. He thought she might have taken the girls to a friend’s house.
What the neighbor’s camera saw
One of the neighbors, Nate Trinastich, had a security camera pointed at the street. He offered to pull the footage.
On a police officer’s body camera, Chris and the neighbor stand in front of a TV and watch the video: his own work truck, in the dark, early that morning.
The footage showed his truck backed up to the house before dawn, and Chris going back and forth to it, loading it. On the officers’ cameras he paces, fidgets and stammers through his answers.
Another frame from the same body camera shows Chris standing in front of the screen with both hands on his head as the video plays.
“My kids are my life”
The next day, August 14, Chris did something many people later found impossible to watch. He stood on his front porch and gave interviews to two Denver TV stations.
He said he just wanted his family back. “My kids are my life,” he told reporters.
His voice stayed flat, and he stood with his arms crossed.
By then, he knew exactly where they were.
The polygraph
On August 15, two days after Shanann came home, Chris went to an interview room with investigators from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the FBI and the Frederick police. He agreed to take a polygraph.
He failed it. Then he asked to talk to his father.
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