Two Face- the Man Underneath Christopher Watts

by Nick van der Leek

  Less than an hour after interviewing Chris, Coonrod makes a call to Detective David Baumhover. He asks the detective to head to the location and check things out. Baumhover arrives at 14:35, less than an hour after Chris arrived home, and two hours since Nickole first arrived at the residence. In total four hours had already passed since Shan’ann’s missed doctor’s appointment.

  The detective does a strategic search of the house, probably with Chris’s consent, and finds Shan’ann’s purse, phone and medication. If she’s somewhere else with the kids, why’s her car still here, her phone, her meds and her purse? And if she’s gone for a walk or with friends, why’s she still missing through lunch?

  It’s at this point that Chris begins to explain that he and Shan’ann had actually discussed separating that night. Yes, after waking up at 05:00 they’d had an emotional conversation, Chris said, and then while Shan’ann went back to bed, he loaded his tools [reversed his truck to do so] and headed to work.

  Maybe she’d taken the kids to a friend?

  But abandoned her car, phone and purse?

  Who’s the friend she was going to? Chris says he doesn’t know, and seems okay with that. There’s a revealing snippet of reverse psychology going on right here. Chris’s explanation for why Shan’ann and the kids are gone is that they’ve gone to stay with a friend. The friend’s identity is unknown, or secret, and this seems perfectly reasonable to Chris. Why is that the case? Because the inversion of this is that Chris has taken their lives so that he can “stay with a friend”. Not so?

  In Chris’s fantasy world, it’s perfectly reasonable and plausible that someone might disappear [or be made to disappear] because of some third party. But to the cops, and perhaps Nickole listening on, it doesn’t make any sense.

  Why would she leave everything and vanish? Chris’s answer is a shrug. He doesn’t seem concerned and tellingly, he doesn’t feel like he needs to solve the question. People have secrets. People disappear. Who can say why? This seems to be what he’s saying, reading between the lines. And Deeter is yapping raucously throughout.

  Tuesday, August 14

  “I’ll tell you the truth after speaking with my dad.” ― Chris Watts prior to his arrest. According to arrest documents

  Detective Baumhover doesn’t like it. The suitcase at the foot of the stairs. The pair of women’s shoes lying the way they are by the door. The bedding in the master bedroom stripped off the mattress and lying on the floor. Besides this, the rest of the house is neat.

  Baumhover walks through the scene. Downstairs the kitchen’s clean, dishes washed. Upstairs the kid’s bedrooms are tidy, with toys neatly packed in place. The floors are swept, tables clean. The décor on the walls is polished. The lawn outside neatly trimmed and tidy. The plants in their beds watered, green and healthy.

  This untidiness at the door and in the bedroom doesn’t wash.

  Something doesn’t feel right.

  At this point Baumhover doesn’t notice several pillow cases and a top sheet stuffed into a kitchen trash can. This stuffing of soft material into the glistening black plastic of the can is a mirror for what Chris has done with his missing wife and small children. Baumhover’s cursory search misses this detail but he’s still uneasy.

  Any problems in the marriage? Any arguments? Any mistress we should know about?

  Chris insists they’ve been a happy family until now. It was a happy marriage until now. No, he’s not been cheating on Shan’ann.

  The detective asks the pregnant woman’s young husband if he can take Shan’ann’s phone to the police department. He wants to examine it, find out if she’s missing, and if so, why and to whom she may have gone to. Chris shrugs and says sure. What else can he say?

  At 19:40 on Monday night, Nicole Utoft Atkinson posts the following message on Facebook:

  Yes I was the last one to see Shanann last night. I know all of you have many [questions] right now. I don’t have the answers and I need to walk away from my phone right now. I called the police. I just can’t right now. I’m sorry. Just pray that her and her babies are ok.

  First thing Tuesday morning the investigation is gathering momentum. By 07:00 it’s clear Shan’ann and the two girls hadn’t returned home that night. They’re missing.

  They’re gone.

  Detective Baumhover requests that a press release regarding their status be sent out. This is also how media are alerted that morning, and how and why they mass on #2825 Saratoga later the same morning. Baumhover also alerts the Colorado Bureau of Investigation [the CBI] as well as the FBI.

  By mid-morning Tuesday the number of cops running around the neighborhood has multiplied. Cops and officers are coming out of the woodwork. Some knock on neighbor’s doors, others are called to pick up Deeter, while others at the station continue to inspect Shan’ann’s phone. There’s no outgoing activity after 01:48. No arrangements to meet anyone, or calls from anyone to make arrangements, other than a flood of texts in those initial hours from Nickole.

  Then, another early breakthrough. Video surveillance from a neighbor’s dashcam shows Chris backing into the drive at 05:37, loading something, and then driving off. The same camera doesn’t show anyone else arriving or Shan’ann leaving. If she’d arrived at 01:48, then how could she have left without being seen before noon hours later?

  Baumhover decides they’re going to have to talk to Chris again, and probably get the dogs in, see where the mother went if she went anywhere. And if the tracker dogs didn’t pick up a trail beyond the front door, then this was serious.

  In media footage, a black Alsatian can be seen sniffing the sidewalks along Saratoga Trail. It’s not clear whether this is a cadaver dog, but another dog wearing a red harness clearly is.

  The K-9 trackers pick up no scent of Shan’ann wandering out of the house. While Chris Watts is guilelessly giving his infamous interviews on the porch outside the front door, K-9 search teams are seen scuttling in and out of the Watts home. Incredibly, when asked by another dog handler, Chris deadpans and gives his consent verbally. This is recorded by the video camera microphone of the media hovering nearby.

  Perhaps he figured any scent found here meant nothing given that the bodies were somewhere else. What he didn’t realize was the science behind the scent of death.

  When the K-9 officer tells Chris he’s “free to say no” [to the cadaver dog search] Chris can be heard answering coolly, “No, you’re good. Yeah, go ahead.” Now, if Chris’s lawyers argue that the search was illegal, or that he never gave his consent, well, the media were there to record this exchange. The recording could be – and probably will be – used in court.

  At just over 1 minute into KDVR.com’s video, a dog sniffing the porch near to where Chris is giving his extended interview barks and springs up. When this footage is played to another cadaver dog handler, he describes it as appearing to be “an active alert”. The alert in question appears to be on the underside of one of those blue and white cushions on the porch. Furthermore, the pattern of the cushion lifted is out of sync with the cushion adjacent to it.

  At the moment [1 minute 25 seconds in the video] Chris Watts is saying: “I…in my heart I believe she is somewhere…I hope that she is safe…” a dog can be heard barking so loudly it’s deafening.

  Alerting.

  Chris doesn’t know it, but that dog wearing a red harness is a cadaver dog. Any alerts from this animal means life in prison, and possibly the death penalty, and it sounded like the dog was alerting all over the place.

  Wednesday, August 15

  Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called ‘Ego’. ―Friedrich Nietzsche

  Although Chris Watts spent Monday night at home [he described the house the next morning to the media as “a ghost town”], by Tuesday #2825 Saratoga is a crime scene. It’s cordoned off. It belongs to the police now and perhaps indefinitely. So Chris spends Tuesday night at the home of Nick and Amanda Thayer even though he’s just told the media he doesn’t want to go anywhere for c
omfort in case his family come home.

  Just as he spent most of Sunday night awake, on the prowl and feverishly covering his tracks, it’s unlikely Chris sleeps very well Tuesday night. It would be good to get confirmation of this from the Thayer’s.

  Imagine the irony in his mind having wiped out his wife and children less than 48 hours earlier, and then having the red carpet promptly rolled out by another family.

  It’s a good thing not everyone watches the news.

  If he has any inkling that things are unravelling, this gesture gives the 33-year-old suspect a confidence boost. He sleeps in a bedroom across the hall from the Thayer’s little girl. Her name is Emily. The doorway to her bedroom is opposite his. Does he get up in the night? Does he turn the light on? Does he sleep at all?

  Probably Chris is keenly checking his phone and surreptitiously reading what’s being said about him and the case online. Perhaps he WhatsApps a girlfriend, or blocks a boyfriend. Maybe he answers some messages from family and associates, even his boss, wondering what’s going on, but soon finds he has to ignore or block almost all of it. If he sleeps at all, he hears loud barking in his head, and tries not to think about what it means.

  The next morning Emily wakes up to see “Mr.Chris” in the next room. Emily’s unaware what he’s done to her little friends, or where he’s dumped their bodies, but how about the cops and the cadaver dogs? Have they gotten any wiser through the night?

  The next morning Nick Thayer bathes his daughter and wonders whether to tell Emily her best friend’s missing. Emily is going to a sleepover at Bella’s, but where is Bella? They speak to Chris but for a quiet, closed up guy, he’s even more noncommittal the next morning. Does he know yet that his goose is being cooked after the porch interview hours earlier? Do they? Do they make suggestions that Chris try calling Shan’ann’s family? Does he?

  On Wednesday Chris doesn’t give any more interviews, at least not to the media. Meanwhile, social media is going nuts. Overnight, America has cottoned onto the television interview and have been tearing it to pieces like rabid dogs. Often in cases like this there’s a modicum of “innocent until proven guilty”, but in this case, Chris Watts’ impression on camera reeks of guilt and duplicity. Incredibly, some “experts” called by the media to assess Chris’s interview early on describe him as a “convincing liar” to the “untrained eye”.

  As a result of rising public outrage, on Wednesday morning Frederick Police Department’s Sergeant Ian Albert steps forward to update the media. Before 09:48 the Daily Camera quotes a report that “two officials” have already told Denver7 they “believe they know” where bodies of the mother and the two children are and “were in the process of recovering them.”

  What this suggests is that while Chris was sleeping [or lying in bed wide awake] at the Thayer’s, the cops and the dogs were feverishly working and sniffing for more clues through the night. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to put the big puzzle pieces that were already out there, together.

  cadaver odor in the home + the dashcam footage showing Chris’s truck backing into the garage + all three victims gone the next morning = they had to be where Chris’s truck went that morning

  And where had he gone? Well, as he told the media, he’d gone to work. That turned out to be an oil site identified as CERVI 319 with GPS coordinates 40.21624374, -104.36667. Did Chris voluntarily reveal this location early on? That’s unlikely, but the cops knew wherever Chris went on Monday morning was where the bodies were. So what could his employer – Anadarko Petroleum Corp* – and his boss, and his colleagues, say about where he that morning?

  This is what Sergeant Albert was referring to when he said they were “in the process of recovering them”. They knew they were dead, and they had a good idea where they were, so it was just a matter of time. In his press conference Sergeant Albert also remarked that there was no danger to the public. When he stepped away, a reporter asked:

  “Why is there no danger to the public…?”

  After 48 hours the cops clearly believe they have their man. Now it’s just a matter of collecting the evidence and nailing Chris Watts.

  If Chris hadn’t seen any peril in letting the cops inside the house, or the dogs, telling the cops where he was Monday morning was a different story. The bodies were there, and Shan’ann’s wasn’t going to be that hard to find if someone went snooping there, especially with the damn dogs. So on the issue of location, where he drove Monday morning, Chris isn’t very helpful.

  Since the Daily Camera refers to the cops saying there are 20 plus officers working “around the clock” before 10:00 Wednesday morning, that suggests the cops and dog teams were out all night, but without success. But the Camera’s coverage of the press conference also suggests confidence that the cops expect to have the remains by the end of the day. The police promise an update at 18:00.

  The cops at #2825 Saratoga meanwhile have made a distressing discovery. They’ve found pillow cases and a top sheet stuffed into the trash can in the kitchen. They bag the evidence and send it to the station for forensic testing.

  Meanwhile Shan’ann’s pal Nickole Utoft Atkinson, the woman who basically set everything in motion, finds herself on Wednesday playing catch-up to the furore that’s rapidly building online – building and not abating. By Wednesday evening Nickole posts a brief bulletin on her Facebook page with a picture of Shan’ann and her name [misspelled], as well as the two girls. In small white letters in a black band at the top of the picture are three discreet words: MISSING – FREDERICK, COLORADO.

  Alongside the picture, Nickole’s brief message reads:

  Shanann Watts if you can see any of our posts please let someone know you are ok…My heart is ripping apart right now. I know you and this is not like you.

  Has Nickole spent less time cobbling together this post than her daily promos for Thrive?

  At 16:15 police investigators initiate a drone search at the oil and gas site where they believe the remains of Chris’s wife and children have been dumped. Clearly the drone search suggests someone besides Chris has given a “ballpark” area where Chris was stationed, or likely to have been Monday morning. Chris clearly isn’t co-operating with the cops when it comes to where he was Monday.

  Tuesday and Wednesday are gusty days in Frederick. Wednesday is bright and sunny with gusts reaching 12 mph. The drone picks up something flapping against the ground. It drifts lower and whirrs closer.

  It looks like a bed sheet.

  When the cops arrive at the scene, they secure the site, cordon the road and bring in a CSI to photograph the sheet. While more CSI’s process the scene, others rush to #2825 Saratoga and the station to check the pattern on the pillow cases. It’s a match. This links the inside of the house to the remains. Chris Watts officially becomes a person of interest.

  According to the Coloradoan, police on scene also notice “fresh movement of dirt consistent with a clandestine grave near the oil tanks.” During his interview with the media on Tuesday morning Chris made a seemingly throwaway remark:

  CHRIS: I-everything that’s happening in the last-last few days is…it’s-it’s [glances up and to the right]…earth-shattering.

  When Chris buried Shan’ann, wrapped in a bedsheet from their bed in a shallow grave, that’s what he had to do to the earth to cover her up. Shatter the hard earth with a spade. The earth was hard enough to resist his sweaty efforts. When he buried her, he did a rush job, which is why they found her so easily.

  In addition to this, the scene of oil tanks, dust and digging before dawn on Monday conjure a sense of a ghost town, another colorful reference Chris uses when talking to the media. It could also be if Chris killed the kids relatively early over the weekend when Shan’ann was away, then living alongside their corpses, especially at night, may have felt like a ghost town. These descriptors are often overlooked by detectives, but they tend to be revealing clues to the sights and sounds known only by the murderer himself.

  It’s Wednesday evening
. 18:00 comes and goes, but the waiting media aren’t provided with an update. The cops seem to be scrambling. Reporters murmur amongst themselves that the cops have taken Chris in and they’re interrogating him. They’ve found Shan’ann, but they’ve not been able to find the two girls. That’s what they’re asking Chris.

  Where are they?

  Chris is told the bed sheet at his work site matches the bed sheet in their home, and that surveillance shows he’s the only one who left the home that night. So there’s no doubt.

  We know you did it. We know.

  Why’d you do it? Why’d you kill your wife? Why kill your kids?

  By Wednesday evening investigators know Chris has been actively engaging in an affair with a co-worker at Anadarko.

  Why did you lie to us about Nicole Kessinger?

  Finally, approaching midnight, Chris breaks.

  “I’ll tell you the truth after talking to my dad.”

  Just before 23:00 Christopher lee Watts is arrested on triple murder charges, as well as three additional charges of tampering with dead bodies. The cops have a confession**, but there’s a problem: he says Shan’ann strangled their children, not him.

  *Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, with a revenue in 2017 of over $200 billion, has been the subject to several massive environmental contamination cases, including the largest settlement for environmental damage in American history in 2014. According to the San Diego Tribune:

  A company Anadarko acquired in 2006 has left behind a long legacy of environmental contamination: polluting Lake Mead in Nevada with rocket fuel, leaving behind radioactive waste piles throughout the territory of the Navajo Nation, and dumping carcinogenic creosote in communities throughout the East, Midwest and South.

  **It was Shan’ann’s younger brother Frankie who confirmed the confession, posting a message to Facebook at 07:00 on August 16th that began: “I just want to know why…” At the time law enforcement had not confirmed the confession.