Frederick

Today, we begin our deep dive on Chris Watts.

In August 2018, his wife, Shanann, who was 15 weeks pregnant, and their daughters, four-year-old Bella and three-year-old Cece, disappeared from their home in Frederick, Colorado.

Within a day, the search for them was national news, and the man on television pleading for their safe return was the same man investigators were already watching most closely.

As Vanessa goes through the story, I'll be talking about things like how a lifelong habit of swallowing conflict can shape the way someone handles a marriage in crisis, why the lies Chris told his girlfriend kept growing and what they reveal about the future that he was building in his head, and how investigators and psychologists read a person's behavior in the first hours after a loved one disappears.

Loyalty testing and withholding affection or love can become a means of control.

Well, in the short term, Shanann's pregnancy seemed to brighten things for the newlyweds.

Before the baby came, they visited Colorado and fell in love with it, specifically a small town of about 12,000 people, 30 miles north of Denver, called Frederick.

They found a five-bedroom house for roughly $400,000.

Today, we're concluding our deep dive on Chris Watts.

In August 2018, his wife Shanann, who was 15 weeks pregnant, and their daughters, four-year-old Bella and three-year-old Cece, disappeared from their home in Frederick, Colorado.

Within a day, the search for them was national news, and the man on television pleading for their safe return was the same man investigators were already watching most closely.

As Vanessa goes through the story, I'll be talking about things like how interrogators use a face-saving story to get a suspect talking and why Chris took the one he was offered, why Chris was willing to blame his murdered wife for their daughter's deaths in front of his own father, and what researchers mean by the term family annihilator, where Chris Watts fits that pattern and where he doesn't.

So blinders does sound like a fairly good description of this pattern of behavior of his and then his experience while he's in it.

Chris

didn't know it yet, but the two lives he'd been keeping apart had just collided inside the Frederick Police Department.

And on Wednesday, August 15th, investigators asked him to come back in.

And it was something I carried with me throughout my career.

On Monday 13 August 2018, at around 1.40pm, Officer Scott Coonrod was sent to 2825 Saratoga Trail in Frederick to carry out a welfare check.

It was the home of Chris and Shanann Watts and their two daughters, Bella, aged 4, and Celeste, aged 3.

A friend of Shanann, Nicole Atkinson, had called the police out of concern.

At the same time, he asked residents to provide footage from any CCTV cameras they may have had.

He also circulated a welfare bolo for Shannon and her children, meaning other officers in the area knew to be on the lookout for them.

Shanann's phone was transported to Frederick Police Department for examination.

By the end of Monday, Police hadn't located Shanann, Bella or Celeste.

Today, we begin our deep dive on Chris Watts.

In August 2018, his wife, Shanann, who was 15 weeks pregnant, and their daughters, four-year-old Bella and three-year-old Cece, disappeared from their home in Frederick, Colorado.

Within a day, the search for them was national news, and the man on television pleading for their safe return was the same man investigators were already watching most closely.

As Vanessa goes through the story, I'll be talking about things like how a lifelong habit of swallowing conflict can shape the way someone handles a marriage in crisis, why the lies Chris told his girlfriend kept growing and what they reveal about the future that he was building in his head, and how investigators and psychologists read a person's behavior in the first hours after a loved one disappears.

Loyalty testing and withholding affection or love can become a means of control.

Well, in the short term, Shanann's pregnancy seemed to brighten things for the newlyweds.

Before the baby came, they visited Colorado and fell in love with it, specifically a small town of about 12,000 people, 30 miles north of Denver, called Frederick.

They found a five-bedroom house for roughly $400,000.

That's so sad

... and suffocating their daughters, four-year-old Bella, three-year-old Celeste, in Frederick, Colorado.

You remember this story?

Oh, that was so sad.

She's competent.

What are we waiting for? Next, nearly eight years after Chris Watts murdered his pregnant wife Shanann and their daughter Bella and Celeste here in, uh, Frederick, Colorado, his parents are speaking at length about the case and revealing a letter their son asked them to take to the grave of his victims.

Ronnie and Cindy Watts spent four days speaking with Melissa G. Moore, the daughter of serial killer Keith Jesperson, for a new Daily Mail feature.

Now, during a visit to the, uh, Bethesda Cemetery there in Aberdeen, North Carolina, where Shanann and the children are buried, they carried a letter Chris wrote from prison dated January 10th of 2020.

So after a long day of traveling, Nichol drove both of them home from the airport.

She dropped Shanann off at her home in Frederick, Colorado, she made sure that she got inside safely, and then she drove home.

Little did Nichol know that she would essentially be the last person to ever see Shanann alive.

Because just two days later, on August 15th at 11:00 PM, Shanann's body was found in a shallow grave near an oil drilling site.

So let's start with the morning of the murders.

A neighbor reported seeing a truck very similar to the one that Nicole owned, and the neighbor said that she saw it outside of the Watts family home.

At that same time this neighbor saw the truck, Nicole's phone pinged at a tower in Frederick, Colorado, which is where the Watts family home was, and it pinged at 6:16 AM.

But Nicole lived 25 minutes away.

Con el tiempo, la familia se mudó a Colorado.

Allí compraron una casa en Frederick, en una comunidad residencial llamada Saratoga Trail.

From the outside, life seemed stable, two girls, a dog, a father who worked and a very active mother on social networks and in the business of welfare products that she promoted from home.

In the publications of Sanán appeared a united family.

y esperaron a que regresara su madre.

El vuelo de Sanán se retrasó.

Su amiga Nicole Atkinson la recogió en el aeropuerto y la llevó de regreso a Frederick.

Una cámara de seguridad del vecindario registró la llegada aproximadamente a la 1 y 48 de la madrugada del 13 de agosto de 2018.