What Netflix’s ‘American Murder’ Didn’t Tell You About Chris and Shanann Watts
Warning: Graphic discussion of family annihilation and toxic masculinity.
After watching American Murder: The Family Next Door more than once, I had questions. A lot of questions. For one thing, I didn’t feel like I was getting the whole story. If you’ve watched the Netflix documentary, you might know what I mean.
Call it women’s intuition, or simply the effects of having survived a few dysfunctional relationships myself, but I noticed several red flags that seemed to get glossed over in the film.
I took my interest in the tragic story over to Facebook, where a couple of friends echoed my concerns. As a result of those conversations, I spent an afternoon going down the rabbit hole of information about the 2018 murders of Shanann Watts and her two young daughters.
If you’re reading this story, I’m assuming that you’ve either seen the Netflix documentary, or you’re okay with the “spoilers” ahead.
In the Netflix documentary, we find out that within a couple of days of Shanann’s, Celeste’s, and Bella’s disappearances, husband and father Chris Watts’s story completely falls apart. After failing a polygraph test, Chris finally admits to killing his two children and pregnant wife — though not before he tries to blame his daughters’ deaths on Shanann.
After a lot more reading, here’s what I thought shouldn’t have been left out of the film.
Neighbors heard fighting between Chris and Shanann Watts for weeks before the murders.
Maybe you noticed how quickly one of the neighbors, Nate Trinastich said that Chris seemed suspicious. It was Trinastich’s security camera which showed that no one but Chris had left the Watts home. Trinastich told the officer on call — and on camera — that the husband was fidgety and talkative in a way he’d never seen before.
The same neighbor later told Dr. Oz:
“The other thing I thought that was definitely weird was he wasn’t watching the footage at all. He would look at it for a second then go back to his phone or look at it for a second and then look away and if my family was missing, I would be glued to that TV 100 percent to see if I could see absolutely anything.”
Of course, it was eventually discovered that Trinastich had caught Chris on tape as he awkwardly loaded his dead wife and two daughters into the cab of his truck.
The Denver news station KCNC-TV would later report that Trinastich also told the officer that he had “heard them full out screaming at each other at the top of their lungs” and that Chris “gets crazy” when the couple had fights. Later, Trinastich would say that he didn’t think the fights were any worse than any other couple.
Even so, Trinastich clearly recognized some red flags.
Another neighbor also commented on overhearing a noteworthy fight between Chris and Shanann. Melinda Phillips described an argument in the driveway between Chris and Shanann that same summer.
“Their body language was really angry, and they were just fighting back and forth. He was gesturing his hands and they were shaking their heads, and it was definitely an argument.”
“I didn’t really think much of it, because Lord knows that I’ve had the same arguments with my husband. They caught my eye and suddenly, everything changed. They stopped being so angry, and they started talking a lot more calmly. He even gave her a hug. Mind you, this was in the space of 30 seconds to a minute.”
“From a full-blown fight to hugs in less than a minute, it was incredible,” Melinda said.
Chris Watts tried to kill the children TWICE.
By far, the most chilling detail for me was that Chris had multiple opportunities to stop himself and save his kids. In the documentary, when Chris finally confessed to his dad that he killed Shanann, I thought it was strange how he mentioned the girls were smothered and choked. Wouldn’t it be one or the other?
As it turns out, Chris would later explain the horrendous details in letters to Cheryln Cadle. The two struck up a correspondence after Cadle approached him with a book idea. The letters shine a lot of light into Chris’s motivation and lack of remorse.
The first time Chris attempted to murder his two children, Shanann was still alive. In his own words:
August 13th, morning of, I went to the girls' room first, before Shanann and I had our argument. I went to Bella’s room, then Cece’s room and used a pillow from their bed (to kill them). That’s why the cause of death was smothering. After I left Cece’s room, then I climbed back in bed with Shanann and our argument ensued.
After Shanann had passed, Bella and Cece woke back up. I’m not sure how they woke back up, but they did. Bella’s eyes were bruised and both girls looked like they had been through trauma. That made the act that much worse knowing I went to their rooms first and knowing I still took their lives at the location of the batteries.
Let that sink in for a moment. Chris Watts killed his children before having the argument with his wife. He realized he was unsuccessful in killing the little girls after killing Shanann, and then proceeded to load his truck and drive them an hour away to the oil site where he’d end their lives once and for all. He dumped his girls in separate oil barrels so they couldn’t wake up again.
There are right no words for such brutality.
Chris Watts’s girlfriend lied about her knowledge of the married couple.
It’s hard not to be a little suspicious of the girlfriend, right? And I say that as a former mistress myself. It’s not that I think Chris Watt’s girlfriend was involved in the murders. I do find it infuriating that the documentary ignored her lies, however.
Nichol Kessinger told investigators that she met Chris Watts at work and they struck up a friendship in the late Spring of 2018. A few weeks later, she admits their relationship became sexual. Kessinger said they began dating seriously at the end of June.
Initially though, Kessinger said Chris told her his marriage was over and didn’t even mention having daughters. She also insisted he never revealed that he and Shanann were expecting their third child together. Her story changed multiple times.
Here’s a problem. When investigators examined her phone, they didn’t just find searches for sexy videos and sex positions —presumably due to her desire to impress her new boyfriend. They also found hours worth of searches for ‘Shanann Watts’ that went as far back as 2017.
According to the District Attorney,
“The dates to which you are referring — in 2017 where it appears she Googled or otherwise searched Shanann — was data that came off her phone.”
“It’s not a typographical error in the report. [The detectives] are reporting what was contained in the data from her phone. I don’t know the answer to the question of why or how those dates ended up in her phone.”
“Nichol Kessinger told us that she met and started the relationship with the defendant in 2018. So where that anomaly in the data comes from, I can’t answer it for you. I don’t know the answer to it.”
Was Kessinger scoping out Chris Watts long before they got together? That might explain why Watts said he was drawn to Nikki because he felt like she pursued him and not the other way around.
If Kessinger had simply looked at Shanann’s Facebook page, she would have seen that the couple was still very much together. She could have seen the pregnancy announcement too. And Shanann wasn’t the only noteworthy Google search made by Kessinger.
On July 24, 2018, she searched ‘Man I’m having affair with says he will leave his wife.’
Although Kessinger told The Denver Post they never spoke about long-term plans for their relationship, a review of her cellphone data suggests otherwise. On August 4, she searched for wedding dresses on the internet for more than two hours. She also Googled ‘marrying your mistress’ on August 8, 2018.
According to the police, Kessinger made a variety of other internet searches after the murders, like, ‘can cops trace text messages.’ She repeatedly searched for ‘Amber Frey,’ the mistress of convicted murderer Scott Peterson, and whether ‘people hate Amber Frey.’ Kessinger even researched Frey’s book deal.
Multiple reports have stated that Kessinger cooperated with investigators after she admitted to deleting texts and photos from her phone that she received from Chris Watts. But if you watch her interviews with investigators, she was clearly reluctant to share all of her text messages, and then she was resistant to police contacting a friend named Jim who could supposedly confirm her alibi.
When Chris Watts confessed, it essentially shut down the investigation into anyone else, including Nichol.
“It’s not fair. It wasn’t fair to me in the first place, it wasn’t fair to her in the first place, it wasn’t fair to any of us in the first place, you know.” — Nichol Kessinger
Shanann’s Facebook page is still active.
If you watched the Netflix documentary, you know there’s a ton of Facebook content included in the film. It turns out that the social media platform made Shanann Watts’ page a “memorialized legacy account.” This means that other Facebook users can view and share her posts, but they can’t like or comment on them.
I took a look through several weeks of posts before the murders and it’s definitely eerie. Shanann frequently posted photos of herself and her husband traveling for her work as a direct sales associate for Thrive.
Some of the comments are just heartbreaking as folks talk about how they wish Shanann had never returned home to reunite with Chris after their six weeks apart.
Again, it’s hard to believe that if Chris’s mistress Googled Shanann, she’d be in the dark about their real life.
Chris Watts might be a classic narcissist.
When you go online to read more about the case against Chris Watts, you’ll run into plenty of arguments that sound something like a men’s rights manifesto.
Some folks insist that Shanann was a demanding wife who “drove” Chris over the edge. In that light, people paint Chris as a victim of a bad marriage, the nice and quiet man who felt like he couldn’t do anything right.
I have a hard time buying that argument, but I do see it a lot among men who chronically cheat. Every time I see it, it strikes me as a classic mix of misogyny and narcissism.
Throughout the documentary, I wondered about that. On more than one occasion, Chris made a comment like, “Because she’s the woman.” Those comments weren’t inherently off-color, but they sure seemed like an odd and distant way to talk about your wife.
I’ve written in the past about how the one type of man I avoid at all costs cares so deeply about his image as a “good” man, that he hides his discontent and then blames his wife or family for his unhappiness. Guys like that seem to have this need to blame everybody else for their choices, because if something doesn’t turn out well, they don’t feel responsible. That’s the vibe I get about Chris Watts. I don’t think he felt responsible for his own choices.
In the documentary, we see how Chris initially lied in his confession and insisted that Shanann choked their children. Knowing what he’d done, he had no qualms about tarnishing his wife’s reputation after death.
Throughout the footage we see of Chris, he appears increasingly self-absorbed. After his confession, the police want him to tell them exactly where he hid the bodies. Instead, he asks, “What’s going to happen?” When an investigator says they’re going to get the bodies out of there, you get the sense that Chris was never asking about them.
Just himself.
Later, when he’s crying in front of investigators, he talks about how he always wanted to be a dad and have kids who loved him. See where I’m going with this? He appears to only have concerns about himself.
Given my personal feelings about his attitude, I was intrigued to find out that a psychotherapist named Lena Derhally wrote a book about Chris Watts in which she called him a classic narcissist.
Derhally specializes in trauma-informed therapy. She explains that narcissistic people are excellent at crafting a mask that is different from who they really are:
“They know exactly what to do to manipulate people, they know how to get people to like them. Often they can seem even nicer or more empathetic than an average person, which is really interesting.”
Some people scoff at the notion that Chris could have been a narcissist. As if he’s too wounded or sensitive for that to fit the bill. Yet, this is a man who brutally killed his pregnant wife and two small children. He wasn’t too sensitive to do that.
Besides, recent research on pathological narcissism among men suggests these men experience “significant distress and impairment, including interpersonal problems, a tendency toward chronic feelings of depression, and suicidality.”
Furthermore, “These men can alternate between grandiose needs to draw attention to themselves in the process of seeking admiration, and extreme vulnerability, in which they experience extreme sadness and low self-esteem.”
And in an earlier film about the murders, it’s said that:
“Chris feels that if the affair would have never happened and [Nichol Kessinger] would have never came into his life, that the murders would never have happened. He thinks that she had this strong control over him, that he describes like a ‘leash’ that he wasn’t able to get off of or get away from, and he thinks that that has played a role in what happened.”
Classic narcissism. Chris continues to make excuses and shift blame.
According to Shanann, Chris told her he didn’t want the third baby.
Text messages retrieved by the county’s district attorney revealed that Shanann Watts began confiding in friends about her marital problems on August 7, about a week before her death.
In fact, Shanann told one friend:
“Chris told me last night he’s scared to death about this third baby. And he’s happy with just bella and Celeste and doesn’t want another baby.”
In another set of texts, Shanann wrote:
“I grabbed his hand during ultrasound and he didn’t grab back. I cringed. He rejected sex night we arrived here. Only thing I can think of even though I don’t think he has it in him is another girl.”
The murders were most likely premeditated.
So, the Netflix documentary hints at a couple of strange things. It mentions that after the murders, Chris Watts called the girls’ school to unenroll them. He texted with a realtor about selling the house. And he texted with Nichol Kessinger about their future.
While those sorts of behaviors seem less like a natural reaction to sudden rage and more like a continued plan, the documentary sort of takes his insistence that this was a crime of passion at face value.
Watts repeatedly talks about the murder of Shanann as this moment where he snapped because she supposedly threatened to take the kids away from him. But the whole “act of passion” angle doesn’t make sense.
In reviewing his letters to Cheryln Cadle, you can see why.
August 12th when I finished putting the girls to bed, I walked away and said “That’s the last time I’m going to be tucking my babies in.” I knew what was going to happen the day before and I did nothing to stop it!
Watts has also confessed that he slipped oxycodone to Shanann several weeks before the murders, hoping to cause her to miscarry.
I thought it would be easier to be with Nichol if Shanann wasn’t pregnant.
According to Cheryln Cadle, Watts told her that his girlfriend wanted to be the one to give him a son. And in speaking about Shanann’s murder, he wrote:
Isn’t it weird how I look back and what I remember so much is her face getting all black with streaks of mascara?
All the weeks of me thinking about killing her, and now I was faced with it. When she started to get drowsy, I somehow knew how to squeeze the jugular veins until it cut off the blood flow to her brain, and she passed out...
I knew if I took my hands off of her, she would still keep me from Nikki. They asked me why she couldn’t fight back, it’s because she couldn’t fight back. Her eyes filled with blood; as she looked at me and she died. I knew she was gone when she relieved herself.
It’s unknown what happened to Chris Watts's mistress after November 2018.
Nichol Kessinger reportedly took a new job and moved out of state, but nobody online has been able to suss out her whereabouts. There’s been a lot of speculation that she’s in the witness protection program, though that seems far-fetched with Chris serving multiple life sentences in prison.
The last time the internet heard from Kessinger was in her 2018 interview with The Denver Post. She didn’t testify in court at Chris Watts’s trial, but she frequently expressed fears about her name and image being slandered.
“I would not be surprised if it’s going to be hard to go out in public sometimes for a couple of years.” — Nichol Kessinger
At least one other woman and two men claim to have been sexually involved with Chris Watts.
One thing the documentary never mentioned was that other people came forward to say they had been in relationships with Chris Watts during his marriage. All three people claim they met Watts online, but he denies these claims and says he only cheated on Shanann with Nichol.
The nature of Chris Watts’s private life and whether or not there were other affairs will likely remain a mystery, though such claims hardly seem surprising. After all, his story about the murders has changed at least three times already.
In the documentary, we hear Shanann explain how she met Chris on Facebook after he sent her a friend request. Sending random women Facebook requests… it happens, obviously. But it’s also indicative of a man who was looking for a relationship online.
She also talks about how Chris pursued her even when she tried to push him away and didn’t want a relationship. How he was there for her when she was at her sickest with lupus. Between that and the clip of Chris talking about relationship deterioration and repair, something seemed incredibly phony.
I looked up his “relationship speech” on YouTube and discovered it’s a presentation he gave for his communications class back in 2012. And, it’s strange. He mumbles for 9 minutes about relationships without ever seeming to grasp what he’s talking about. And when he talks about how a child can repair a deteriorating relationship? Well, it’s really no wonder his marriage didn’t turn out well.
Chris Watts now says he found Jesus.
Oh boy. If you’re curious what Chris Watts is currently up to in prison, he says he’s now an evangelical Christian.
He joins a long line of killers who claim to have found religion during their incarceration. In this case, it’s Watts’s newfound faith that he and others attribute his willingness to finally open up about the murders.
It’s also why Cheryln Cadle said Watts agreed to write back and forth with her for a book — he wants his story not to be about murder and family annihilation, but of redemption.
Of course he does.
