True Crime Analysis, Breakthroughs, Insights & Discussions Hosted by Bestselling Author Nick van der Leek
Shan’ann was buried face down. When she was exhumed she was placed on a clean sheet provided by the coroner. This sheet should not be confused with the sheet used to transport her to CERVI 319 [the fitted sheet that was discarded on the site and left in an open field].
https://youtu.be/qKffTrERftU
The K9 unit bodycam footage is abysmal. It’s so bad it’s almost unwatchable. Much of the jerky footage appears zoomed in and oriented towards the roof. This means the audio is probably more useful than anything else.
There is virtually zero footage of the actual dogs, so its hard to see where they are reacting, which is a crying shame.
What the bodycam footage does show, albeit in fleeting jerky, very poor quality glimpses, are snapshots of Chris Watts’ Man Cave. Compared to the rest of the house, this subterranean area is a complete mismatch. A black garbage bag is stuck against one window near a makeshift bed, which reminds somewhat of Adam Lanza’s bedroom.
The rest of the basement is a mixture of neat packaging, housing and ventilation pipes, wires, innards and clutter that invokes the Ramsey basement.
Immediately below are screengrabs from the K9 bodycam.
Fortunately we do have another source for footage of the basement. Although it’s also pretty bad, it’s significantly better than the k9 bodycam. Interestingly, even while in the basement, the officer comments about how “everything is in its place” and how neat “these people” are.
What’s also frustrating about the officer’s search downstairs is that he opens the large white refrigerator and looks inside, but doesn’t open the large black one right beside it.
https://youtu.be/uBsOJjNcY_c
And then there’s this…
If all Nichol Kessinger did wrong was have an affair, why was she fired?
According to the Times-Call:
During this interview, Kessinger gave Koback her phone and signed a waiver allowing him to look at phone calls and texts between her and Watts. While Kessinger questioned why investigators needed everything from her phone, she consented to let them search it. Much would have to be recovered, though, as she had deleted everything involving Watts after she discovered he was lying to her.
“Initially, you drew concern from me when you told me that you deleted everything from Chris,” Koback said, but it appears that concern dissipated. Toward the end of the interview, he told Kessinger to take her mind off the case for a while, suggesting she go out with a friend and relax.
But Kessinger was concerned about the long-term effects of her connection to the case. When Koback said she looked tired again, she said it wasn’t just because of the shock of what Watts did.
“I lost my job yesterday, so that’s where that comes from,” she said. Kessinger had worked for Tasman Geosciences, which contracted with Anadarko Petroleum Co. She told the company her situation a few days after Watts’ arrest, she told Koback, and at first they said it was fine. Aug. 22, a day later, they said they were letting her go because her contract was up.
“I have a feeling that trying to get by for the next five to 10 years is gonna be really hard,” she said.
Right at the end of the Trinastich clip, after Watts leaves, Trinastich confides to the officer that something’s not right with Watts. He mentions him swaying nervously, as if standing on a tilting ship’s deck. He also mentions that he’s hear Watts having “flat-out” rows with Shan’ann.
Watts has absolutely no ability to hide his body language cues. His key tells are folding his arms, swaying, and curling his lower lip.
https://youtu.be/ofqD_NkVPnY
https://youtu.be/QOiu90ZGV20
Link to Police searching house after reports of a woman seen going in the house.
The thief hatches are small, about the same size at the white hard hat of the man on the right, exiting the gangway. When one zooms to directly above the hatches, the perspective shifts and you can see just how small they are. Bear in mind, the opening inside tapers, which means the silver dome is wider than the opening underneath. In fact the exterior of the hatch – at 15.5 inches – is virtually twice as wide as the opening underneath.
Digging holes, burying bodies and dumping children into oil tanks is hungry and thirsty work. About an hour and a half later Watts was buying something to eat.
Interestingly, Watts has 3 different outfits on the same day.
There’s the orange shirt.
The black shirt [and apparently no cap].
And the long-sleeved grey shirt [sans cap]. The glasses below also appear not to have the orange tint of those in the first photos.
Video footage from the convenience store CCTV can be viewed at this link.
What does it mean that there was no activity on the main floor of the Watts home between 01:48 and 04:23? It means no one was on the main floor during that interval. Right?
When Shan’ann opened the door to her home at 01:48, did she set off the exterior sensor or the interior motion sensors? Remember she entered, kicked off her shoes, moved to the the bottom of the staircase and apparently left her suitcase there. Her purse was also found on the kitchen island. When did it get there?
When a house is armed, setting off motion sensors sets off an alarm, something she wouldn’t want to do – it would awaken the children [assuming they were still alive], and her husband, not to mention the whole neighborhood.
There is a way to set the exterior alarms while having the motion sensors inside disabled – so they don’t go off alerting to the people who live there. There’s also a way to disarm all the sensors so none of them go off. Exterior alarms will nevertheless send alerts to let the user know which doors or windows are open.
The system also cannot arm until these exterior sensors that are alerting have been closed/locked.
Remember, motion sensors are designed to alert to people breaking in and moving inside when the people who live there aren’t home. That’s when the alarm is set to Armed Away.
https://youtu.be/ORiWff8YLjA
What does it mean that there was no activity on the main floor of the Watts home between 01:48 and 04:23? Does it mean no one was on the main floor during that interval, or does it mean it was disarmed while the crime and cover-up was being committed?
If you wanted to commit murder in your home, and it was premeditated, would you do it with the motion sensors enabled or disabled? Would you commit a premeditated murder while your home security system was activated?
From Vivint blog:
Weekday mornings can be rough sometimes—preparing for the day, getting the kids ready for school, hurrying out the door to beat rush-hour traffic—and it is easy to forget that you armed your system the night before. Before you leave for the day, make sure to check the color of the home button on your panel to see if you need to stop and disarm your system. Here’s what each color on the panel means:
Red light: When your system is armed, the home button on your panel will turn red. There are two different arming types:
Green light: If the home button on your panel is green, your system is disarmed. You are able to leave your home without triggering an alarm, and your system is ready to arm.
I came across a discussion recently that had me scratching my head. It’s around the popular myth that Shan’ann arrived home, her murderer allowed her to enter the house, make herself at home, go to bed and even fall asleep. I’m not sure in this scenario whether they believe she brushed her teeth, took off her make-up and did some online shopping as well, they will know better than I do.
Presumably according to this theory Watts lay awake for several minutes or hours waiting for his wife to fall asleep so he could murder her in his bed after she’d lost consciousness. is that right? But if he moved to get up wouldn’t that wake her too?
And while murdering her, wouldn’t that wake the children and cause the Deeter to go nuts?
A bed of course is like a sponge for forensic evidence. Blood, saliva, sweat, DNA, touch DNA can be perfectly preserved between sheets and the mattresses. So it’s not the perfect place to kill someone, and in terms of a premeditated murder it’s the worst place, because the most logical explanation for a wife murdered at home in her bed with the whole family present is it had to be the other person who shared that bed. And who is the other person in this scenario? It’s the husband – Chris Watts. So why murder her in such an obvious place and have all the arrows pointing to himself?
Oh, you may argue, it wasn’t a premeditated murder, it just happened. Well, that’s a separate argument, even crazier than the murdered-in-bed theory, but let’s deal with theories one at time. Let’s put the murdered-in-bed theory to bed.
If Watts knew he had to be up at 04:00 and Shan’ann only got into bed at 02:00 [or 02:30 if she removed her make-up, bought make-up online etc] then him laying in bed waiting for her to doze off, when he had so little time to work with, had to be agonizing.
Personally, I can’t imagine Shan’ann falling asleep after spending most of Sunday worrying about what her husband was doing while she was away. What was that $62 transaction on her credit card all about?
Would she really have arrived home and not confronted him about it, when she’d spent the whole weekend distressed, depressed, wrecked and out of sorts about it [and let’s face it, she was right to be worried because he wasn’t at the Rockies game, he was in fact out with his mistress cheating on her just as she feared]?
All of that aside, let’s examine a piece of evidence and see where we’re at when it comes to our standards of perception and analysis when it comes to a crime scene.
It’s the circled patch of Thrive powder beside the bed. What does it mean?
In true crime we try to be guided by the evidence. That’s our first and best source. The crime scene is the origin, after all, of what happened, where, and how. But a crime scene can be manipulated so that what was originally there appears different. There may be cleaning, removing things, putting things there that weren’t there, even contaminating an area incidental to the crime to throw one off track.
So with that in mind, here’s the question:
What is the significance of the Thrive powder sachet beside the bed in the master bedroom?
Here’s some more footage to provide further context to the question [and answer].
Some have used the picture at the top and the Thrive powder to reinforce the notion that Shan’ann went to bed on Monday the the 13th. But that’s wrong. Chris Watts slept on the right side of the bed.
Besides that, the crime scene footage in the above screengrabs are all from August 16th, three days after the murders. It seems Watts himself either slept in the master bedroom on the night of August 13th after the murders, or he made the bed after stripping it. Either way, the way it was found on August 16th is nothing like the way it was after the murders.
Remember, officers on the scene early in the afternoon on Monday August 13 found the bed stripped, with sheets and pillows on the floor.
So if we’re going to play detective, it helps to be working with the original crime scene. it helps to get the basics right. Subsequent photos are helpful, especially where one identifies what’s been changed. It’s not helpful to look at crime scene photos that are a few days old and draw all our inferences solely from those. However, it does appear that the Thrive sachet is beside Watts’ side of the bed on the 13th as well.
So is the sachet irrelevant?
It seems to be irrelevant to whether Shan’ann slept in her bed that night. If anything, we need a good look at the bedside table on her side.
What we can say, however, is there seems to be a mismatch between Watts sleeping in the basement, and the baby monitors and Thrive powder on his side of the bed. This raises a few questions. When did he start sleeping in the basement? Why did he start sleeping in the basement? Did he do so by choice, and if so, was that part of the separation?
We also know – and this is important – that while in North Carolina, Shan’ann and Watts didn’t sleep in the same bed. This was witnessed by the Rzuceks, and Shan’ann’s mother told her colleagues that at Hair Jazz that they’d discussed separating. It was no mystery.
So riddle me this. If they weren’t sleeping together in North Carolina, why would Shan’ann arrive home and get into bed with him? Why would he be there? Why wouldn’t he be in the basement? And if he was in the basement, if that’s where he was living over the last days or weeks, how happy could he have been about that? The house was in his name, and here he is, sleeping in the basement while his wife and kids enjoy the luxury suites!
Do you see how this theory, this asinine insistence that Shan’ann was murdered in her bed with her husband initially asleep beside her actually shoots itself in the foot? It does because it completely ignores the actual dynamic surrounding the crime. That’s part of the crime scene fabric too, the emotional reality they were living, experiencing, feeling.
While I have my daggers out for sloppy armchair detectives, I’d like to raise a few additional gripes. I do so in the hopes of raising the bar of those who visit this site, and also those who speculate about the case without a second’s afterthought. True crime isn’t a simple or easy discipline, it requires second-guessing because criminals are doing their best to mislead you. A lot rides on them doing so successfully. They win their freedom and a happily ever after. So a lot of work goes into making things appear a certain way. But as we well know, appearances can be deceiving.
So, applying these lessons in what-you-see-isn’t-necessarily-what-you-get [which by the way is meat-and-potatoes in true crime], let’s see if the thinking has sharpened. Test you knowledge with three more simple questions:
1. Loading the Bodies
Did the surveillance video capture Watts loading the three bodies into his truck? Yes or no?
You’ve seen the surveillance video, right? Do you need to watch it again to be 100% of your answer?
https://youtu.be/e_gnRzdqSqs
The answer is no. The surveillance video doesn’t show Watts loading any bodies. It does show activity early in the morning. But at no point can he be seen carrying what looks like a body, let alone three, or loading a body, let alone three. He does appear to load a red gas can into the back of the truck on the camera side at one point, and he’s seen walking to and from the garage a few times, but that’s about all the footage really shows.
During the sentencing hearing, the District Attorney mentioned Watts loading three bodies into his truck. He said this was captured on the neighbor’s surveillance video.
In fact, Rourke’s actual words were, from the Coloradoan:
In the early morning hours of Aug. 13, a doorbell camera [recorded] Shanann coming home from a work trip [at] about 1:45 a.m [actually 1:48]. Chris Watts was seen on a neighbor’s doorbell camera about 5 a.m. backing his truck into the driveway and going back into the house and out to the truck three times, likely as he loads the bodies, Rourke said, though the bodies can’t be seen on the camera.
Likely is isn’t a statement of fact, it’s an inference, and I’m not sure Rourke saying he went in and out “three times” is even accurate or, for that matter, verifiable.
2. Confession
This should be an easy one. During his lengthy interrogation on the night of August 15th and the morning of August 16th, did Watts confess to the murders or didn’t he? It’s a yes or no answer.
It appears he only confessed to killing Shan’ann, never to killing his children, and an argument can be made that he didn’t directly confess to killing Shan’ann either. He said he “hurt” her, and that he no longer wished to “protect” her, and by inference, one can say he confessed. The words “killed her” appear only twice in the entire 1960 pages of Discovery Documents.
This was Chris’ confession:
The Discovery Documents aren’t a 100% accurate narrative record either. Ronnie Watts’ response wasn’t “Oh my God” but “God Almighty, Son.”
Where Watts does say “And then I killed her“, he says the words “killed her” so quietly the enhanced audio barely picks it up. So we can’t be certain he actually says it. You can hear the clock ticking louder, but you can barely hear what he says to his father. This is why the agents need to come back in, nail it down and make sure.
Even so, the Discovery Documents don’t record Watts ever saying “And then I killed her.”
You can watch that particular moment of the interrogation at this link.
So did Watts confess to murder? No. He confessed to “killing”, which is theoretically a justifiable homicide in the circumstances that he sketched. Even so, his confession was likely not true anyway, so in fact it wasn’t a confession.
3. “Framed” letter
What is the significance of the “framed” letter?
[I’ll leave you to figure that one out on your own].
More: Lie Spotting: Test your true crime lie detector nous with the Chris Watts case
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