The 42 minute documentary starts off with a very dark, poignant scene. We see a man with his truck [headlights on] shoveling sand. The voice-over is Shan’ann’s, saying how the man digging her grave is “the best thing that’s ever happened to me…”
It’s powerful. It’s not a bad start, but from a technical perspective, it’s not a great start either.
In the opening montage, a man is digging in a nondescript landfill-type setting. It’s not the well site; it looks nothing like it, and there appears to be a big tree somewhere in the picture. Going into the documentary I was wondering whether Anadarko would be mentioned, and if so, how? This very first scene seems to answer that question. The Anadarko stuff will be blacked out and pushed out of the frame.
Now, I like true crime dramatizations. They remind us to think practically about a particular crime scene, and they force us to consider what’s plausible and what isn’t. In the above image the shirt might be close to the right color [pink…orange], and the jeans and boots are right, but it’s doubtful Watts would have dug a grave with the car lights shining on him. There was enough ambient light right then, just after dawn, to know what he was doing without artificial light.
The Trinastich video footage also confirms just how light it was out when Watts pulled out of his driveway, and remember, it was going to be almost another hour after he left before the head of the shovel in the truck nosed into the sand at CERVI 319.
We see a montage of images from Shan’ann’s social media, and a clip from the Sermon on the Porch where Watts speaks into the camera asking Shan’ann, Bella and Ceecee to “just come home…” An image of Watts with Kessinger appears onscreen within the first minute, then some strange dude appears, and then District Attorney Michael Rourke is the first heavy-hitter to make an appearance. Rourke says Watts was saying all the right things, he just wasn’t saying them right. He was just too cold.
Next the program promises to “explore the transformation” Watts made from family man to monster for the next hour [well, 40 minutes and change].
I like the way Diane Dimond refers to Watts early on as “a dichotomy of personalities”. Another way of saying that is a TWO FACE, right? Next large red text appears above another montage.
DOUBLE LIFE REVEALED
After showing the title [at the 2 minute mark], the scene opens with a pump jack and a well site. It’s August 13th, 2018 according to white text superimposed over a local traffic scene.
And then Dimond begins taking the viewer through the spiel – from Nickole Atkinson’s point of view. We see another strange and rather unattractive interloper [playing the role of Nickole] and then we see Steve Wrenn, fingers folded, baseball on his desk, apparently in his office.
Wrenn provides a scintillating insight. “Things weren’t right.” Think about this for a moment. You have the District Attorney appearing in the first minute to say Watts wasn’t acting right, and that everyone could see that [well yes, they could]. Not his deputy is confirming that things weren’t right [yup, that’s what Nickole thought, and…?]
Next the narrative reverts to Rourke. Rourke provides a little insight now. Nickole worked with Shan’ann, for the same company, and they sold the same product. Which company was that? Which products were those? Rourke doesn’t say. This documentary has promised to show how Watts has transformed into monster, right?
A voiceover [flashing to an aerial shot of Phoenix] mentions a business trip and Le-Vel, but that’s it. Nothing about the kind of company, or that it’s a MLM.
Next the narrative deals with the pregnancy and health issues. Now we have another reporter, this time from the Denver Post, providing more overview. Then it’s back to Rourke. Rourke explains what Nickole was doing. Checking her phone, wasn’t Shan’ann supposed to be at a doctor’s appointment, this and that. There’s a lot more to it than that, but this is just lightly ticking the narrative boxes – and 4 minutes have already blown by.
Where’s Nickole though? Is she not giving interviews?
Then there’s a dramatization of Nickole arriving at the Watts home. The Watts home isn’t used, and Nickole’s son and daughter aren’t in the frame. The make of the car [Hyundai Elantra instead of a Mazda GT] looks wrong, where its parked is wrong, but the color is right.
The clothing the Nickole stand-in is wearing is similar to the camouflage shirt Nickole wore, the white glasses propped on her forehead are a match, and the busy-on-the-phone vibe, but where’s her son Nicolas?
Just before 5 minutes, Wrenn is back to tell us Chris Watts worked in the “oil field industry”. Wow. Nice and vanilla.
“He was a supervisor and typically visited various well sites…throughout the day.” Cue a nondescript pump jack.
So far no mention of Anadarko, or the fact that Watts work involved the maintenance of fracking batteries. So far, we’re still getting the vanilla version, an ultra superficial version simply recapping the basic case, with prosecutors interspersed with reporters doing the job of a narrative run-through. Some of the reporters are not terribly affiliated with this case.
Next Nickole’s actual 911 call is played. It’s not the first time it’s even been on television but kudos for at least having something authentic and not necessarily easy to get hold of onscreen.
Then we dive into bodycam footage, with Nicolas appearing but his face smudged out. At 6 minutes, Rourke is back to provide some insight. Coonrod can’t just kick down the door and walk in, and so on and so forth. So far there has been zero reference to any actual text messages or the times they were sent. That’s 6 minutes, that’s enough. Let’s hear some of your thoughts and observations, and if need be I’ll post a follow-up on the rest of the documentary.
We do know that according to Ronnie, Watts let them know he intended to separate from Shan’ann while he was in North Carolina [during the first week of August, two weeks before the murders].
What’s less clear is whether Watts told his parents about Kessinger. It stands to reason that he did, but is it confirmed anywhere? When Watts told his father during the interrogation in mid-August about the affair, his father didn’t seem surprised. The discovery [page 1076] notes:
Watts told him [Ronnie] he failed the polygraph test and that he admitted [to the cops] to having an affair…
A major area of disagreement between TCRS and the mainstream media version of events [and Chris Watts’ 1st and 2nd version of events] is this idea that there was an argument, or an emotional conversation, that either played out just before or led directly to the murders.
The idea of an argument makes sense. God knows there was a lot to argue about. She was pregnant, he was having an affair, they were losing the house, his parents had been booted out of the family circle and there was that $68 charge he still had to explain…
It also makes sense that something very real had to trigger a triple murder. It seems less likely on the face of it that Watts would out of a silent scenario simply decide to kill his family.
At 4:49 in the clip below Watts is confronted with the idea of an argument. This happens roughly 24 hours after the incident, on the morning of August 14th, a Tuesday.
It’s worth hovering the cursor over 4:49 and playing it back a few times to catch the subtlety in the answer, and all the micro-expressions.
You’ll notice Watts looks up at the ceiling and also sways and smiles while saying they had didn’t argue, they had an emotional conversation “but”, then he smiles openly when he says, “I’ll leave it at that…and I just want them back.”
You either believe him on this score or you don’t. If you believe him, then you’re part of the crowd who believe the crime was a sort of a rage murder, an impulsive crime of passion. Something crazy happened in his head and he just snapped.
If you don’t believe him, then you’re figuring Watts as a coward who didn’t have the balls to confront his wife. Not about an affair, nor about a divorce. He just couldn’t do it.
And if that’s the case, the murder was premeditated. If Shan’ann’s murder was premeditated, so were the children. On this hinge, everything changes.
It’s not science, it’s semantics, and it’s what Rocket Science refers to as “colorful language”. Colorful language is intuitive, so to one person it kicks up a red a flag, to another its meaningless. In OBLIVION I discuss the significance of “walking on eggshells”. But here’s another.
The term “sick to my stomach” occurs four times in the Discovery Documents, and I seem to remember Watts saying something similar during his flaky Sermon on the Porch. It’s a telling aphorism because pregnancy would make a woman sick to her stomach, and so would drowning in oil. If Watts felt sick to his stomach he didn’t look it. So where did the expression come from?
On August 8th, the same day Watts told Shan’ann he didn’t want the baby, Shan’ann tearfully offloaded to Sara Nudd how [understandably] sick she felt. She desperately tried to have sex with Watts in a bid to smooth things over and sort things out. His rejection confirmed her worst fears, hence the sickening feeling [which proved totally justified] in the pit of her stomach.
On the afternoon of August 13th, Watts used the exact same expression to describe how he felt about his missing family.
Even then Watts claimed to be “praying”. It does make one wonder whether Watts picked up the phrase from Shan’ann’s iCloud and adopted it as the “right-sounding” way to express concern, or alarm. We know throughout the aftermath Watts not only failed to shed a single tear, but seemed unable to muster the appropriate emotion. When reminded of this after his failed polygraph, Watts melodramatically sniffed [just once] – his version of showing grief.
Watts also used the term [twice in rapid succession] when FBI agent Coder reminded Watts that what they were doing was looking for his family. In the context of Watts worrying about how things looked, and how he looked, he fielded the terms – as if using the right words was like waving a magic wand [like the Thrive promoters did], and that was enough.
In the preview of Family Man, Family Murder [Murderer?] [the cover is either a misspelling or the tweet is] Diane Dimond can be heard saying off camera that we haven’t heard the truth from Watts “until now”. In other words, the Second Confession is finally the truth of what happened.
Really? It is?
What’s the truth? That the murders weren’t premeditated. And after having sex with Shan’ann, Watts murdered her but she didn’t struggle, she just sort of silently prayed?
That’s how ridiculous these documentaries are.
We're giving you an early look at Family Man, Family Murder: An ID Murder Mystery.
The word “block” appears 19 times in the Discovery Documents, many of these references to suburban address “blocks”, but also to Ceecee’s “blocked” tear duct and Shan’ann’s intention [on the day before her death] to block out family time for Watts to improve her marriage. There’s also the instance where Watts “was attempting to block…Officer Coonrod’s view of Nate’s TV when footage showed Watts walking around his truck.”
Shortly after the disappearance, Watts also tells FBI Agent Coder the house is a “concrete block” and doesn’t want to sleep in it – a symbolic reference to a millstone around his neck.
But what we want to address here are at least half a dozen references to blocking on Facebook.
Simple question:
Did Shan’ann block Watts’ parents, or did they block her?
According to Cassie Chris’ parents blocked Shan’ann.
According to Shan’ann Chris’ parents blocked Shan’ann.
According to the Rzuceks Chris’ family blocked them.
But Shan’ann also communicated the intention and the desire to block Watts’ parents, not only on Facebook but in real life.
Prison officials have “no legal basis for removing the photographs from Christopher Watts,” the Wisconsin Department of Corrections said in a statement obtained by People. Watts was transferred to Wisconsin late last year for safety concerns.
While arguably tasteless, the photos don’t technically break the rules.
There is a bleakness to the reality that many artists are valued more in death than in life; that what they offered the world was not truly cherished until it became preciously finite. It is hard to think of what the man who sold only one painting in his lifetime would thinkof the €40-60,000 predicted price tag on his suicide weapon. While many a person would jump at the chance to be one of Van Gogh’s posthumous patrons, the acquisition of the gun he chose to end his suffering with seems to be an entirely different desire. But perhaps not. Perhaps it’s not dissimilar to the purchasing or beholding of one of his heartfelt works- especially with the understanding of the emotional turmoil that swam through him- where one can sense the will of a troubled man in his journey to find and create beauty despite all his sorrow. Perhaps the prospective buyer wishes nothing more than to feel a closeness and an understanding of that intangible wonder: the will of Van Gogh.
Would a rusty weapon imputed as a suicide tool bring someone closer to knowing the “will of Van Gogh”? Perhaps. Perhaps the rust destroying reality over time is a code, after all, for something useful.
What would Vincent van Gogh think of this business of this gun fetching so much money, given his art when he was alive, could not? My guess is he would be hopping mad. More proof of that is in The Murder of Vincent van Gogh.
…director Julian Schnabel makes us feel what it’s like to live as his Van Gogh. As one might expect, it’s a stressful experience. All the more so since the film is shot on a handheld camera, its jerky motion mirroring the artist’s febrile state. The palette is polarised, either dazzling us with the bright colours of the south, pushed to the extreme, or subduing us with a melancholic blue-grey filter. No even keel for Vincent, or for us. When his ‘frenemy’ Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac) asks ‘What’s the rush?’ during another frenzied painting scene, Vincent’s answer is to reel off a list of masters – Franz Hals, Goya, Velázquez, Veronese, Delacroix – who all ‘paint fast, in one, clear gesture’. Long, continuous takes make the film feel correspondingly immediate and organic, even dizzying.
But the flip side to enduring the stress of being Van Gogh is of course the beauty; of seeing the world through his eyes (which the camera often simulates): the wind through wheat or a line of poplars; craggy rocks in a landscape; the texture of scuffed leather boots and terracotta tiles. We’re down in the dirt with him as he lies in a field, smearing earth over his face with relish. And this is the point of Schnabel’s film – why else the need for another Van Gogh biopic, of which there have been three notable versions already.
At Eternity’s Gate focuses on the tumultuous last two years of the artist’s life, spent mainly in Arles and in Auvers-sur-Oise.
Thirty-one seconds – that’s how long Oscar Pistorius was silent for when asked by Prosecutor Gerrie Nel if he heard Reeva Steenkamp scream after he fired the first of four shots that killed her. Late on the second day of what has been a sustained and brutal cross-examination, Nel said: “Are you sure, Mr Pistorius, that Reeva didn’t scream after you fired the first shot?”
Oscar slumped back in his chair and kept quiet for 31 seconds. Court GD in Pretoria was utterly silent. On the audio recording, all that can be heard is Nel again asking “Are you sure?” after five seconds of silence had passed. Eleven seconds later, a man can be heard taking a deep breath and slowly exhaling. Surprisingly, it is Nel who breaks the silence to come to Pistorius’ rescue, saying: “My Lady, I’m giving the witness time to console himself, he is distressed”.
“I wouldn’t have done that,” said an experienced former prosecutor. “I would have kept quiet and counted and then when he finally said something, I would have said: ‘That took you four and a half minutes. What were you thinking about?’’’
I thought that was the moment he was going to crack, the former prosecutor added. This piece of evidence is key. If Pistorius’ ears were ringing and he? couldn’t even have heard himself scream after the shots, as he had testified, then he can’t tell the court that three other witnesses didn’t hear her scream during the shots.
Saving Pistorius from his silence was a rare show of mercy from Nel, who during a turbulent two days of cross-examination compared a photograph of Steenkamp’s bloodied head to an exploding watermelon, called the athlete a liar and laughed openly at one of his responses. Before his 31 seconds of silence, Pistorius twice became emotional as Nel carefully picked apart the improbabilities in his story.
If Nel hadn’t have given Pistorius a break, Oscar would likely have become more emotional, allowing Judge Masipa a chance to call a recess. Nel didn’t want that to happen either. So it was a careful chess game between pushing the accused and getting him emotional, but not so emotional that the Judge intervened on his behalf…
What is the TCRS take on Oscar Pistorius’ Murder Trial? The 5-Part Book Series is available at this link.
April 11th, 2019
1. Give it until 2:30 for this video on Chris Watts to get going. Valid points raised regarding Watts being informed from the outside about what’s being said and vaunted on social media. Interesting that “Nut Gate” was a term first raised on social media as well.
During the Presidential election last year, he published tens of thousands of hacked e-mails written by Democratic operatives, releasing them at pivotal moments in the campaign.They provoked strikingly disparate receptions. “I love WikiLeaks,” Donald Trump declared, in exultant gratitude. After the election, Hillary Clinton argued that the releases had been instrumental in keeping her from the Oval Office.
Shortly after Trump’s Inauguration, I flew to London, to visit Assange—the first of several trips, and many hours of interviews, to better understand how he runs WikiLeaks, how he has been living, how his political views have changed, and what role Russia has had in his operation. Even as a new inquiry opened into possible collusion between Trump-campaign operatives and Russia, “the WikiLeaks connection,” as James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, put it last year, remained obscure.
Assange is not an easy man to get on the phone, let alone to see in person. He is protected by a group of loyal staffers and a shroud of organizational secrecy…
Julian Assange will be taken to Westminster Magistrates court this afternoon. He has been arrested under a US extradition warrant for conspiracy with @xychelsea for publishing classified information revealing war crimes in 2010.https://t.co/vvbZBOgCwL
NEWS: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested in the UK, and UK authorities have confirmed he's also been arrested by the United States and is facing extradition https://t.co/y76fgnnVtL
As the catalogue for “Vincent van Gogh: His Life in Art,” a momentous new show at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, puts it: “It was most likely a combination of deep disquiet that Theo might no longer be able to look out for him, a growing sense of loneliness, and fear that his nervous attacks would return that drove van Gogh to shoot himself in the chest on July 27, 1890, with the intention of ending his life. He died of his injuries two days later, with Theo at his bedside.”
The mainstream motive for why Van Gogh committed suicide is that he didn’t want to be a burden to his brother [who had just started a family]. Even the Van Gogh Museum support this idea. It makes sense except – how was committing suicide [and botching it up so he took 30 hours to die] lessening the burden? If Van Gogh didn’t want his brother to be troubled by his existence, then Theo rushing to his brother’s aid during a life-and-death emergency, only to watch his brother die, and have to pay for his funeral [suicide was regarded as disgraceful in 1890’s France] didn’t achieve that goal.
Van Gogh’s funeral and the disgrace around his suicide was a huge burden, financial, societal and emotional, that his brother and family had to bear.
A US private investigator who worked undercover at the holiday resort where Madeleine McCann vanished has made claims that appear to cast doubt on the controversial parental checking system Kate, Gerry and the Tapas 7 told police they were conducting on the night the three-year-old vanished.
In a remarkable interview on the Maddie podcast, Boston-based investigator Joseph Moura claimed a bartender and waitress who served the McCanns and their friends at the now infamous tapas restaurant on May 3 told him “nobody left the table that evening”.
Lauded as the “the most famous weapon in art history,” the corroded, legendary revolver was discovered in 1965 by a farmer in the field where then-37-year-old Van Gogh was struck in the stomach by the bullet that killed him on July 29, 1890, in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise north of Paris.
The seven-millimeter gun, reportedly kept by the family that owned the Auberge Ravoux inn where the artist lived for the final months of his life, was put on public display for the first time during the 2016 exhibition On the Verge Off Insanity at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The farmer who found it presumably gave it to the owners of the inn, whose descendants are now selling it.
“The severely corroded weapon is a Belgian-manufactured Lefaucheux pinfire revolver, which was among the most popular civilian handguns in the second half of the 19th century,” writes the Art Newspaper. “It remained in production until 1893.”
According to the auction house, there are several pieces of evidence to prove it was Van Gogh’s suicide gun. “It was discovered where Van Gogh shot it; its caliber is the same as the bullet retrieved from the artist’s body as described by the doctor at the time; scientific studies demonstrate that the gun had stayed in the ground since the 1890s.”
But is it – forensically speaking – the actual killing/murder weapon?
April 7th, 2019
1. Mitch Summers, an ex-classmate of Chris Watts in high school [now a video producer] released this prom photo of Watts.
Following an investigation by nine.com.au, a formal request from one of the world’s leading DNA scientists has been lodged with London Metropolitan Police for access to 18 complex DNA samples which are potentially loaded with vital clues about Madeleine McCann’s disappearance.
There is hope that Dr Mark Perlin’s powerful computational DNA testing methods could blow open the cold case by successfully cracking the 18 samples which frustratingly stumped a UK lab in 2007.
In Dr Perlin’s email to Detective Chief Inspector Nicola Wall, who heads up Operation Grange, the UK strike force investigating Madeleine’s disappearance, he confirmed he would conduct analysis of the 18 samples for no cost. Scotland Yard’s Operation Grange, launched in 2011, has cost British taxpayers more than $20 million and it has recently requested further funding from the UK Home Office.
The Sun pretends here to analyse seven different theories about what happened to Madeleine McCann. In the middle of the list of seven theories is the theory of the lead detective. The Sun refers to this theory as a “crackpot” theory, the only one of the seven theories to be singled out in this manner. Why do you think that is? An unlikely theory, or a newspaper pandering to their cash cow?
[Mrs Fenn] refers to the day of the 1st May 2007, when she was at home alone, at approximately 22.30 she heard a child cry, and that due the tone of the crying seemed to be a young child and not a baby of two years of age or younger. Apart from the crying that continued for approximately one hour and fifteen minutes, and which got louder and more expressive, the child shouted “Daddy, Daddy”, the witness had no doubt that the noise came from the floor below. At about 23.45, an hour and fifteen minutes after the crying began, she heard the parents arrive, she did not see them, but she heard the patio doors open, she was quite worried as the crying had gone on for more than an hour and had gradually got worse….That night [Fenn] contacted a friend called EDNA GLYN, who also lives in Praia da Luz, after 23.00, telling her about the situation…
Recently, however, speculation that he was actually killed accidentally by two boys playing with the gun have been fueled by the artist Julian Schnabeland the screenwriter of Schnabel’s Van Gogh biopic At Eternity’s Gate. The pair believe that the number of paintings the artist produced in his final months does not match up to someone who was suicidally depressed, and their film shows this alternative ending to the troubled artist’s storied career.
But the auction house dismisses this suggestion. “The new theory about the killing is based on testimonies given several years after Van Gogh’s death,” the AuctionArt spokesperson says. “It has been deeply criticized by all the Van Gogh specialists, among them the Van Gogh Museum and Alain Rohan, who wrote a book about the gun.”
€40,000–60,000 is on the line if the weapon was used by Van Gogh in a self-inflicted gunshot. And if he was murdered? How much would the gun be worth then? Double? Or zero?
Art experts are squabblingover whether a set of previously unpublished drawings are the work of Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam says the sketches are complete fakes. Welsh-Ovcharov, a Canadian professor of art history and Van Gogh specialist, told reporters she was convinced the sketches were authentic, describing the discovery as an “OMG moment.”
“I started to look through all the drawings and each one had his fingerprint,” she said. But according to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, they are mere imitations and contain no trace of the Dutch master.
In POST TRUTH, the 100th True Crime Rocket Science [TCRS] title, the world’s most prolific true crime author Nick van der Leek demonstrates how much we still don’t know in the Watts case. In the final chapter of the SILVER FOX trilogy the author provides a sly twist in a tale that has spanned 12 TCRS books to date. The result may shock or leave you with even more questions.
SILVER FOX III available now in paperback!
“If you are at all curious about what really happened in the Watts case, then buy this book, buy every one he has written and you will get as close as humanly possible to understanding the killer and his victims.”- Kathleen Hewtson. Purchase the very highly rated and reviewed SILVER TRILOGY – POST TRUTH COMING SOON.
TCRS MERCH available now – just in time for Christmas!
Book 5 – ALL NEW! “I have thoroughly enjoyed this audiobook…” – Connie Lukens. Drilling Through Discovery Complete Audiobook
Read the entire 9-Part TWO FACE series, the most definitive book series covering the Chris Watts Case
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Book 4 in the TWO FACE series, one of the best reviewed, is available now in paperback!
“Book 4 in the K9 series is a must read for those who enjoy well researched and detailed crime narratives. The author does a remarkable job of bringing to life the cold dark horror that is Chris Watts throughout the narrative but especially on the morning in the aftermath of the murders. Chris’s actions are connected by Nick van der Leek’s eloquent use of a timeline to reveal a motive.”
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