“And then I killed her”
Ronnie Watts had flown in from North Carolina to support his son. He sat down across the table from Chris, and the investigators left the room. The camera kept recording.
Chris told his father a story. He said he had told Shanann he wanted a separation. He said he had then seen, on the baby monitor, Shanann strangling Celeste, and that Bella was already blue. He said he went into a rage and strangled his wife.
The girls, he said, were already dead. He had only killed Shanann.
It was a lie, but it was the first time he admitted that anyone was dead at all. He was arrested that night.
Cervi 319
Chris told investigators where to look. On a photo of the oil field, he marked the spots.
The site was called Cervi 319: a remote Anadarko tank battery out on the plains of Weld County, one of the sites Chris looked after for work. Two beige 400-barrel crude oil tanks stood on a gravel pad.
Shanann was buried in a shallow grave nearby.
Bella and Celeste were inside the tanks, one girl in each. Their father had pushed them through hatches on top that were only about 8 inches wide.
Recovering the girls took a specialist hazmat team. The tanks held crude oil and dangerous fumes, so crews had to drain them and open them up at the base, wearing breathing equipment.
The charges
On August 21, 2018, prosecutors charged Chris Watts with first-degree murder for Shanann, Bella and Celeste, with additional counts for killing children who were in his care. He was also charged with unlawful termination of a pregnancy and three counts of tampering with a deceased human body.
Colorado still had the death penalty. Prosecutors could have pursued it. But Shanann’s family asked them not to, and prosecutors agreed.
On November 6, 2018, Chris Watts pleaded guilty to every count.
Five life sentences
He was sentenced on November 19, 2018.
The judge gave him five life sentences without the possibility of parole, three of them to be served one after another. On top of that came 48 years for the death of his unborn son and 36 years for what he did with his family’s bodies.
Two weeks later, Chris was moved out of Colorado for his own safety. He is serving his sentences at a prison in Wisconsin.
What he admitted later
In February 2019, investigators traveled to Wisconsin to interview him again. This time, with nothing left to bargain for, he gave up the story he had told his father.
Shanann had not killed anyone. He had killed all three of them himself. And his daughters had been alive in his truck on the drive to the oil site.
In letters written from prison years later, he went further and said he had been planning it for weeks.
The Weld County District Attorney’s Office released more than 2,000 pages of documents, photos and videos from the case, including the body camera footage and the interview room video shown here.
Shanann Watts was 34. Bella was 4. Celeste was 3. Nico was never born.
The day after he killed them, their father stood on the porch and told the cameras his kids were his life.
