Category: Chris Watts (Page 8 of 16)

Spot the Differences: Another Exercise in Intertextuality

February 28, 2019 / crimerocket_pmfrt4 / 8 Comments

Think the Watts Family Murders are bad? How about a quadruple murder involving a brother stabbing his brother’s wife and children to death, shooting his brother multiple times in the back and head before setting his brother’s house on fire.
The Watts case and the Caneiro case are nothing alike, right?

From the Daily Beast:

Outside the mansion, Keith’s body was found on the front lawn, with a gunshot wound on his lower back and “four shots into his head.” Jennifer Caneiro, who was found inside on the stairs leading to the basement, also sustained a gunshot wound to the head as well as “multiple stab wounds to her torso.” Sophia was found on the stairs leading to the second floor, while her brother’s body was in the kitchen. Both sustained fatal stab wounds. “This one is the most brutal cases that I’ve seen in my experience here,” Monmouth County Prosecutor Christopher J. Gramiccioni said in a press conference at the time.

It takes a little digging to get to some of the basics, such as that an email was the trigger and the fact that the crime was executed at night. From app.com:

Keith forwarded that email to a relative about 7 p.m. the night before he was found dead with his family, according to the affidavit.

About seven hours later [approximately 02:00], neighbors’ surveillance cameras captured headlights and a white colored SUV, believed to be a Porsche, leaving Paul Caneiro’s Ocean Township home and arriving back two hours later at about 04:00. Authorities allege that’s the night Paul Caneiro, 52, traveled to Willow Brook Road in Colts Neck where he killed his brother and his brother’s family and left the secluded mansion ablaze.

So our ballpark figure for when this crime happened is around midnight to 01:00. Agreed? So we have two parents and two young children [Jesse, 11 and Sophia, 8] inside the house when they were attacked. And it’s late at night. Were any of them murdered in their beds? I can guarantee you the perpetrator would like you to think so.
Without even looking at the merits of the case, we can see a similar defense emerging as the one Watts used. How was Caneiro involved? Why he was at the house trying to save the family! [Just as Watts was innocently heading up the stairs when he saw Shan’ann murdering his brood, and he only killed her to “save” them.]
And sure enough, Googling “Paul Caneiro save” you get this, from app.com:

Family members of Paul J. Caneiro may describe for a judge his efforts to save them from the fire he is accused of setting at their Ocean Township home just hours before his brother and his family were found murdered at their Colts Neck mansion, his attorney said.

Defense attorney Robert A. Honecker Jr. said he plans to meet with his client’s wife and two daughters either Monday or Tuesday to discuss the possibility of their testifying at a detention hearing designed to determine whether Caneiro will remain in jail without bail to await trial.

“If they do testify, it’s anticipated they will describe the events that they observed in the early morning hours of Nov. 20,” Honecker said. “It’s anticipated they will describe his efforts to save his family from the fire.”

Authorities have not yet released the cause of death of the wife and two children, and Honecker said he hasn’t learned anything more about how they died.”His arrest was related solely to the alleged arson at his residence.”

Whereas Watts concealed his family in oil and dust, Paul Caneiro used flames. Like Watts, Caneiro was initially ~~charged with~~ suspected of a lesser crime at first. But there’s something else glaringly obvious that these two crimes have in common. Do you see it?
You don’t even have to look closely.
Below are two images of two houses. Anything about them that’s sort of similar? That’s true crime intertextuality for you.

More: Bullets, money trouble and a bloody glove: Affidavit lays out Colts Neck quadruple homicide

[scribd id=400472643 key=key-7Ag4gm9wy2T75kg6fIbO mode=scroll]

Meet Thrive LeVel founders Jason Camper & Paul Gravette

February 27, 2019 / crimerocket_pmfrt4 / 16 Comments

Nichol Kessinger's Tears on August 16th – Fake, or the Most Harrowing Moment in the Watts Case?

February 23, 2019 / crimerocket_pmfrt4 / 33 Comments

It may be that the original audio was edited down in the media to cut out Kessinger’s tears and emotion. Many – understandably – may not be interested in that story.

For those interested, three minutes of raw emotion from the two hour interview on August 16th are worth listening to.
Start at 1:32:06 for context. It starts to get emotional at 1:33:37 and then ticks up at 1:37 until 1:39:32.

Detective Baumhover's Review of Ring Doorbell Footage [58th Tranche]

February 20, 2019 / crimerocket_pmfrt4 / 72 Comments

The date of Baumhover’s legal warrant to look into the doorbell footage is worth noting. November 14 was just 5 days prior to the sentencing hearing, and after the plea deal had been signed. This suggests the detective gave some credence to the possibility that Shan’ann’s BAC may have indicated she’d arrived home inebriated.

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#ShanannWatts

A post shared by Nick van der Leek (@nickvdleek) on Feb 19, 2019 at 7:56pm PST

The Wounds of Violence and War – Cindy McLeod Watts Genealogy [Prepared by a TCRS Reader/Researcher]

February 19, 2019 / crimerocket_pmfrt4 / 27 Comments

Cindy McLeod Watts’s mother was Gertrud Schoettner McLeod, born in 1925 in Radisfort, Czechoslovakia.
Gertrud died in 2015 in a nursing home in Fayetteville, NC. Her obituary is very short; this is unusual in that it doesn’t list any family except Cindy Watts and Cindy’s sister, Linda and that there are four grandchildren and 8 great grandchildren, all unidentified.
Obits like this sometimes indicate some degree of family estrangement, but not necessarily so. It contrasts with obituaries from the Rzucek family which are much more loving toward the deceased and contain more extended family names and relationships. (Overall, the Rzucek and Watts families seem contrasted in that the Watts family seems impoverished somehow whereas the Rzuceks appear more connected and loving, but that’s just what is seen from here.)
Gertrud’s documents say that she was stateless. This could be from any number of reasons. I won’t speculate about that here, but her status could have been a decided disadvantage to her in Czechoslovakia. and later, in Germany.

Radisfort is near Trebic where there was a Jewish community of about 300 in the 1930s. (formerly 1500 people lived there in 1890s) The Jewish people living there in the ’30s were taken to the German concentration camps and killed. Only 10 came back to the area after WWII.
Gertrud’s papers show that she and Herman Dalton McLeod married in Landshut, Germany in 1951. Gertrud’s and Herman’s first daughter, Doris L(inda) McLeod was born in Germany; Cindy was born at Fort Bragg, NC.
Herman’s online documents show that he served in the US Army 1943-1963. The U.S. Army maintained facilities in Landshut until 1968. Herman died in 1991, having served 20 years in the US Army.
Gertrud’s physical description on her naturalization application is age 30; weight 136; 5 feet 3 inches tall; hair blonde; eyes blue. (I thought of Cece.)
The family was living in Hodgenville, Kentucky when the naturalization petition was filed. Hodgenville is 25 miles from Fort Knox, the US gold repository. They moved to North Carolina at some point, likely to the Fort Bragg area where Herman McLeod could have been stationed.
That area is where Cindy grew up.

Landshut, Germany is the location for the Dachau Concentration Camp, opened in 1933 to hold political prisoners. We don’t know at what point Gertrud moved to Landshut. Possibly she was there during the time Dachau operated. She would most certainly have heard the stories of what happened there. Since Herman was in the military by age 22 in 1943, he likely was sent to the European theater of war and could have been part of the US forces that liberated Dachau in 1945, but this is just speculation.
This Wikipedia link about Dachau goes into detail about what happened there
Since Gertrud lived to 2015, and lived near Chris and his family in North Carolina, he could have had regular contact with her. Did she talk about her experiences in World War II era Czechoslovakia and Germany? Did she tell stories about Dachau? Could she have sparked an interest in Chris in the concentration camps?
I thought of the Stephen King book, Apt Pupil, where a young boy becomes friends with an old man living in America who was once a concentration camp prison guard. The man gradually begins to tell the boy of the atrocities in the camp, and the boy becomes obsessed – asking the man to tell him about the “gooshy stuff”, details of the horrible things that went on in the camp. Eventually, the boy turns to murder as a way to keep his own demons at bay.
Chris’s grandmother may have lived in a town where some of worst crimes against humanity in history occurred and it is possible that she lived there when the camp was operating. There is no way of knowing if Gertrud talked to Chris about this unless someone in the family says she did.

GREELEY CO – NOVEMBER 19: Cindy Watts gets emotional after addressing the court during her son’s sentencing at the Weld County Courthouse on November 19, 2018 in Greeley, Colorado. Christopher Watts was sentenced to life in prison for murdering his pregnant wife, daughters. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

One final thought: Cindy’s background had this connection to mass violence and murder. Ronnie Watts’s family was wounded by violence as well. Ronnie’s direct ancestor was a soldier in America’s greatest killing spree – the Civil War, Confederate side. There are other Civil War soldiers in those family lines. The official numbers for the Civil War dead are in the range of 700,000 total for both sides.
Living people today revere their Civil War soldier ancestors and many Southerners are still angry about the outcome of the war. I see this in my own family. The current rise is neofascism in this country has appropriated symbols of that war and in some cases, they blend the Nazi swastika with the Confederate flag image.
North Carolina was torn apart more than some areas by the war, with the brother against brother and neighbor against neighbor killing amounting to a war within a war. The movie and book, Cold Mountain, is a good depiction of this.
All that said, the Watts family is a closed system. Endless speculation as I have done really doesn’t add much because a direct connection to Chris’s deeds in 2018 is just not there and unlikely to be proven.
Sources:
Kentucky, Naturalization Records, 1906-1991
The National Archives at Atlanta; Atlanta, Georgia; Petitions for Naturalization, compiled 1906 – 1978;
NAI: 1275754; Record Group Title: Records of District Courts of the United States; Record Group Number: 21
Wikipedia articles about Dachau, Landshut, and Trebic

Additional Information on Bella Watts' Autopsy

February 18, 2019 / crimerocket_pmfrt4 / 55 Comments

Bill Finley, who runs the 411 YouTube channel, is one of the better, more informed commentators on the Chris Watts case. Finley apparently sent in a public records request shortly before sentencing in November 2018, and received the autopsy reports via FedEx which included several photos. It also appears the report he received had slightly more information than the one in the discovery file.
The relevant excerpt is provided below:

At 15:47 in Finley’s YouTube spiel, he brings up an element that isn’t in the autopsy report as we see it in the Discovery Documents. It has to do with Bella’s so-called “defensive wounds”:

[Reading from the report] “There is exterior evidence of injuries [to Bella]. There is a 13×3 cm area of vertical lacerations on her buttocks…and she had several defensive wounds on her hands [back sides] and forearms [outer edges] and the backs of her heels…also discoloration [bruising] of upper left shoulder…as well as a cut on the head. The autopsy report speculates that the cut on the head and missing hair is when Watts tried to shove [Bella] into the tank.”

Finley reckons the opening of the thief hatch was 15 inches. But this seems to be an error on his part.
I did contact Finley directly [see below tweetgrab] in an effort to get more information on the autopsy reports. While I don’t wish to leak photos, I would like to see them so that I can describe them, or get a description directly from Finley. Finley, as far as I can tell, doesn’t describe the images beyond saying “they ain’t pretty”.
Perhaps some of you might have have better luck getting a response than I did.

@billyrayfinley Hi Bill, are the reports you referenced in this video the same as those in the discovery files? https://t.co/KnY7lnpbXL

— Nick van der Leek (@HiRezLife) February 17, 2019

"I told them how overbearing Shan'ann could be…" – David Colon's Letter to Chris Watts [Approximately mid-October, 2018]

February 16, 2019 / crimerocket_pmfrt4 / 14 Comments

8 Simple Questions for a True Crime Guru Badge + Book Giveaway [#6]

February 16, 2019 / crimerocket_pmfrt4 / 6 Comments

What separates the gurus from the rest is that at some point – whether by reading or research – they find out for a fact whether something is this or that. By far the majority won’t know something, but then form an opinion based on hearsay or what’s in the media, and then their speculation is driven by that opinion. That’s not Rocket Science, it’s waffle and gossip.
Getting the information right isn’t easy, as I hope this post illustrates. Simple questions are devilishly complicated to answer.
I’ll be posting something shortly on Amber Frey, but before I do, let’s see who has got their headspace in the right place in terms of the mistresses “voluntariness” in this case versus the Scott Peterson case.

If you can provide a link or source to your answers, all the better. In terms of the Amber Frey question, my trilogy on Scott Peterson also dealt with this issue.
The most correct answers stand a chance to win Book 6 in the series. If you’d like a chance to win used #Kindle in your comment [regret this is not open to Amazon.co.uk readers].
Here we go.
1. Did Amber Frey [Scott Peterson’s mistress] approach the cops? If she did, when did she come forward?
2. Who is Hazel Heckers?
3. When was Detective Baumhover introduced to Nichol Kessinger for the first time?
4. Nichol Kessinger and Chris Watts exchanged texts on Tuesday, August 14 about the paternity of the unborn child.
WATTS: It’s not mine.
KESSINGER: It’s OK if it is.
WATTS: OK, then it’s mine.
Are these texts in the Discovery Documents?
5. Did law enforcement request assistance in the investigation of the Chris Watts case, or did [some other entity] offer it? Do you know when this request/offer occurred?
6. When District Attorney Michael Rourke addressed the court he spoke for approximately 13 minutes. Did he mention Nichol Kessinger during the sentencing hearing?
7. Nichol Kessinger was asked to provide her Verizon phone logs. Until what date were those phone logs and when did she give them up?
8. When was the last text message sent between Watts and Kessinger and what did it say?

Detective Baumhover's Interrogation of Nichol Kessinger on September 4th, 2018 – Report [57th Tranche]

February 16, 2019 / crimerocket_pmfrt4 / 35 Comments

Shan’ann had a plan to deal with the debt situation – but Chris Watts wasn’t going to like it, not one bit

February 15, 2019 / crimerocket_pmfrt4 / 198 Comments

If Shan’ann was in financial difficulty previously [and she was], the solution seemed to be fairly simple. Move someone in and scrimp. She did this in 2015 when they went bankrupt. She moved in her parents for 15-16 months. Presumably this “saved” money in child care fees, and by pooling resources, food and meals could be cheaper when the expenses were shared by four rather than one or two.
How would you like to live with both your in-laws for over a year?
When Shan’ann had neck surgery, Cristina Meacham came to stay for two months in 2017.So in 2018, when they were scraping the bottom of the barrel again, there was an easy solution in the offing. Do what she’d always done. Move someone in and piggyback until things improved.
That someone turned out to be Josh and Cassie Rosenberg, just another family of Thrivers [a mom and pop team, and their kids], who could pool their resources. This plan wasn’t just theoretical. We know this because on Saturday night [August 11] when Watts was wining, dining and [doing other things] with Nichol Kessinger, Josh Rosenberg sent Watts a text to ask if everything was okay – could they still come and stay at the house.
Josh had good reason to be uncertain if the plan was still in the offing, He knew because Cassie knew that Watts and his wife were arguing. If they arguing, where did it leave them?
Watts didn’t respond to Josh until the next morning – Sunday [August 12] – and when he did he said it was cool [even though it wasn’t cool at all]. Watts said they could move in, but wanted to know when.
Watts then lied to Josh about something else – he pretended he knew what it was like at the Rockies game.

It’s important to see the texts between Shan’ann and her pals Nickole and Cassie in context to get a real sense for how the idea of moving in with Shan’ann [to provide support, perhaps help pay the bills and take care of the kids] came about.
It’s clear – and to some extent understandable – that Shan’ann, Nickole and Cassie had formed a formidable alliance of three, and they meant business. Fuck him was the general theme of it. Fuck him and take the house. Even though the house was in Watts’ name, they figured they could sort of bully their way into it and taking charge, and at the very least, taking the kids and getting half of what the house was worth.
Fuck him!
Perhaps under normal circumstances Watts would have crumbled and turned the house over to his wife and whoever she wanted to stay over/rent/cohabit or whatever. But these weren’t normal circumstances. This situation this time around definitely wasn’t going to work for him and his mistress.
The red arrows and circles in some of the final texts below point out specifics of the conversation to move in to casa Watts, and also how Weld County deals with alimony and splitting the house, even if it is in the husband’s name.

“I have enough to worry about with the world out there I’m not going to worry about family. I will just remove it.”

These images are of a for sale sign on the lawn of the Trinastich residence. It’s also possible if the for sale sign was on the lawn during the six weeks Shan’ann was away, Watts could have been nudged – almost on a daily basis – to contemplate whether he could keep his home. And we know where that calculus took him, once he took time to do the math.
Fullscreen capture 20190215 211556 Fullscreen capture 20190215 221928
Below is Shan’ann’s final ever message on her phone:
On iPhones do text messages and WhatsApps [or messages via the internet] appear on the same screen? If so, then why did Watts’ message at 07:40 not appear on Shan’ann’s phone? Could it be because the phone was off, or because the router wasn’t connected, or is there another explanation?