On the night of August 14, CBI agent Greg Zentner was dispatched to Boulder to interview the most crucial witness in the Watts case. The transcript below is an excerpt from a 72 page document spanning 3223 lines of text.
CrimeRocket is the first to reproduce and analyze this critical transcript in-depth. The entire transcript has been broken down into 15 sections.
Nickole describes the circumstances around Watts going to the “Rockies Game” [a lesser crime in the scheme of things but one he couldn’t get away with either].
Shan’ann’s also received security alerts from the house on her phone, so she knew when Watts was home and when not.
The fact that Shan’ann asked Watts to save the receipt means he had to have known he would have been busted shortly after Shan’ann returned home.
During one of Shan’ann’s last conversations with her husband he told her he didn’t want to talk to her because he needed to “work out”.
Nickole describes Shan’ann being in “a lot of [emotional] pain on the plane”, during the flight home. This suggests Shan’ann intended to confront Watts when she got home, and probably wouldn’t have been able to sleep even if she’d tried to sleep.
The audio for the above transcript is available here.
The twelfth part deals with Nickole’s knowledge of the Watts’ finances.
Have you noticed, months after the murders, people are still split on the Watts case? Some say he was a shit and she was a saint, others blame her and say she drove him to cheat. A lot of these pronouncements are projections and transference made by folks who are married, or cheating [or both] or once were [married, cheating or both].
This means rather than an appreciation of the actual people involved [besides and apart from who you and I are] and what was going on in their hearts and minds, the crowds are really cheering for themselves.
But that’s not really what decent or intelligent true crime is about or tries to figure out. We’re not here to make sides, choose sides or pick a winner. We’re not here to feel better about ourselves or our sins. We’re simply here to figure out what the fuck happened.Believe it or not, that’s a very difficult question to answer accurately and authentically and very few even try.
To do so takes time and effort. Fixing a fuck-up also takes time and effort.
One way to test our bias is to find an analogy to the Watts case where the people are completely different, but the situation is identical. I managed to find one. It’s an anecdote about infidelity from a woman’s advice column. No one was murdered in this scenario, but the pressure and intensity of the dynamic is nevertheless absolutely plain to see.
Read “Lala’s” salacious cautionary tale at this link.
A few obvious impressions we draw from the story are:
1. Cheating in our society is very common. When cheating leads to a child, a less common but deadly serious occurrence and one fraught with life changing consequences, it’s very difficult to know what to do, let alone to actually do the right thing.
2. Many of us learn the skill of duplicity in our society. Few learn the technique [or have the courage] to admit small mistakes, let alone admit to giant gut-wrenching betrayals of those closest to us.
3. We live in a society that is about maximizing profit and so it’s natural to want [or feel entitled to] the best possible deal for ourselves. This includes the mate we choose, the lifestyle we search and settle for, and the kind of sexual behavior we engage in. Sometimes in our desire for safety and security [the big house, the secure lifestyle] we make trade-offs in terms of the likability of our partners [or they do in terms of us].
4. Our greed and materialism is also reflected in a desire for experiences. Once we have the treasure side of things sorted, we still want to be excited. We want to be stimulated. If our partners don’t give us what we want, we may feel tempted if not justified in getting what we want elsewhere. Does it do any harm if it’s a secret?
5. In the same way that Lala got what she wanted from her husband, she didn’t like his approach to strict schedules. She felt bored and burdened. Being bored seems like a dumb reason to gamble one’s life, to risk one’s home, and yet people everywhere are doing it all the time. The reason? Boredom is like a living death. Risking an experience is like coming alive again. Everyone wants to feel alive, but feeling alive can come at a price.
6. Like Shan’ann, Lala’s husband Michael traveled often. Like Watts, Lala didn’t mind Michael being away as this gave her [him] a chance to indulge in her [his] Other Life.
7. When the indulgence leads to a pregnancy, the original fairy tale becomes a nightmare. That’s why it is so hard to give up. Most people want tohold onto the fairy tale. And most people who believe in fairy tales don’t like to own up to being responsible for a nightmare that will end it.
8. When the nightmare is real, do you acknowledge it and deal with it, or do you refuse to believe it?
9. If you could lose everything simply by saying a few words [the truth], by the same token you could save everythingby simply not saying those words [lying].
10. Even with expert advice, the outcome is not guaranteed, and the process is likely to be messy, let alone expensive, stressful and unpleasant. Still think you’re be the first one to own up to your sins?
If you’re cheating on your husband, and the infidelity leads to your falling pregnant, the answer is simple, right – just tell your husband what you did.
It is actually that simple. If you’re not attached to your home, your lifestyle, many of your friends and possibly even your job, it’s as easy [and as difficult] as that. Just say what you did and possibly [probably] lose your home, your lifestyle, your friends [especially mutual friends] and possibly your job.
The alternative is to be a coward and not to say anything. And you get to have your cake and eat it. Still think it’s so simple? Still think Chris Watts could have “just gotten a divorce”…?
On the night of August 14, CBI agent Greg Zentner was dispatched to Boulder to interview the most crucial witness in the Watts case. The transcript below is an excerpt from a 72 page document spanning 3223 lines of text.
CrimeRocket is the first to reproduce and analyze this critical transcript in-depth. The entire transcript has been broken down into 15 sections.
Nickole describes Watts “tell her” [presumably Shan’ann] that he didn’t want the baby.
Nickole describes Josh Rosenberg and Watts as “bros”.
Nickole describes a woman calling her [perhaps Agent Tammy Lee] and wonders if the status of the case has changed from a Missing Persons case to something else.
Nickole sends texts to the officers phone so that he has the contact details of Shan’ann’s friends [Cristina, Addy, Cassie and Josh].
The audio for the above transcript is available here.
Chris Watts was so dumb it took the cops three to four days to find the bodies of his victims, even though they had the GPS data and knew exactly where he went that day.
He was so dumb cadaver dogs couldn’t find any clear cadaver traces in the home, or any other clear and unambiguous evidence.
He was so dumb even today we can’t say when, where, how or why the murders happened. Compared to other high-profile true crime, Watts outscores almost everyone else in almost every department.
Seriously.
Think about all the other ultra dumb moves in true crime…
1. JonBenet Ramsey Ranson Note
Patsy Ramsey’s three-page, ahem, I mean someone’s Ransom Note. It was called the War and Peace of Ransom Notes, it didn’t make much sense and whoever wrote it forgot to kidnap or collect the ransom. If there was a kidnapper, even if JonBenet died in their custody, the ransom could still have been collected. So why is there a Ransom Note, no kidnapper, no kidnapping and no ransom?
Patsy herself, a former Miss West Virginia, forgot to change the clothes she was in that night.
Easily missed in terms of the Ransom Note, Patsy also forgot to leave her fingerprints on it. Even she didn’t write it, if she picked it up to read it [and she said she did], why aren’t her fingerprints on it?
2. Jodi Arias’ Camera
After driving thousands of miles from Yreka California to Mesa Arizona and back to murder Travis Alexander in secret, Jodi left a camera at the crime scene. The camera contained timestamped photos of herself cavorting with Travis Alexander and also over 11 minutes chronicling his murder in the shower stall and hallway.
3. Oscar Pistorius “screams like a woman”
He shot his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp to death four times through a locked toilet door, then said he’d fired by accident and mistook her for a burglar. Pistorius claims the sounds of a woman screaming [heard by five different witnesses] was actually him screaming like a woman. Dumb as this was, the judge actually believed his testimony and found him not guilty of murder.
4. Henri van Breda’s 20+ minute EMS call
Although three of his family members were already dead, Van Breda’s younger sister was still alive when he called to report the emergency. Van Breda was on the line for more than twenty minutes despite the fact that his sister Marli, having sustained serious head and neck wounds from the same axe, lay upstairs hanging onto her life by a thread. It also appeared Van breda smoked three cigarettes while on the call, and some thought it sounded like he was chickling when he said his family were dead. Marli ultimately survived her brother’s axe attack.
5. OJ Simpson’s Bruno Magli shoes…
Had the “shoe evidence” been used at his original trial, would OJ still have been acquitted? Who knows. One glove was found at the crime scene and a matching glove at his residence in Rockingham, covered in blood and containing the genetic markers of Simpson and both victims, but that wasn’t enough. The shoeprint and circumstances around the shoe size was certainly overwhelming.
The list goes on and on, but the point is, all of these criminals either made silly mistakes in leaving behind evidence, or came up with cockamamie explanations about the evidence, or both.
Crime itself is stupid. It’s a stupid solution. But when we see crime that way we miss the most important thing – the human element. It’s the human element that leads to these terrible crimes being perpetrated, and it’s through the human element that we can understand them.
Like Watts, Amanda Knox also confessed to what seemed like a semi-bogus scenario [suggested to her by the cops] after a few hours of interrogation. Like Watts, Knox also courted a media storm because of her seemingly weird behavior after the crime.
In the list above, as dumb as all of these criminals’ ideas, executions and explanations are, more than half of the suspects implicated in these cases got away with it.
Think about that.
Of course, if there were elements of the crime that were executed well in the Watts case [such as the cover up inside the home] there were other elements that were just plain lazy.
The bed sheet left in the open field at CERVI 319 is an example, but then Watts couldn’t have imagined the cops catching up to him as soon as they did, or that they would use a drone to gain access to the remote area. Still, one has to wonder, how did the bed sheet get away from him?
Perhaps the dumbest thing about Watts Family Murders wasn’t so much the logistics but the crime itself. It may be that because his motive is so simple and simpleminded we regard this crime as so stupid, and this case with such contempt.
Besides that, Watts’ ability to stand up to scrutiny [in front of his neighbors, the media cameras, and in front of law enforcement] is probably the area where he lacked the most game.
Having performed for years with his wife to a captive multi-level marketing audience [not the most discerning audience in the world], perhaps he’d allowed himself to believe he was a convincing actor. The real world is quite different from the fictitious stew of Thrive on Facebook, however, where the only people buying what they’re selling are the promoters. Social media is an echo chamber at the best of times, but an MLM-themed echo chamber seems designed to addle the mind, and perhaps it did.
In the list mentioned above Jodi Arias, Oscar Pistorius and OJ were involved in similar stuff as the Watts family; Jodi in MLM, Oscar and OJ performing endless stunts as brand ambassadors for wellness brands/sponsors – but all eventually becoming actors in their own respective fairy tales.
Although Shan’ann was the leading actor in the Watts family, Watts eventually took that role over from Shan’ann. His Sermon on the Porch had to feel weird where he was the starring figure, as it were, after years of playing the extra to Shan’ann’s spiels. That morning she was the extra and this time he was talking for himself, and on her behalf, leaving out the stuff [like her pregnancy] that didn’t suit him so that he could sell his spiel.
When the fairy tale becomes real enough, a nightmare can’t be allowed to exist. What happens when a nightmare starts to infect a fairy tale? Can it simply be acted or pretended away, spoken out of existence by choosing the right words? It’s not just criminals who like to think so. The reality is we’re all trying to make our lies and fairy tales amount to something in the face of our own inevitable extinction.
DRILLING THROUGH DISCOVERY is the most expensive of the 5 TWO FACE books, but at 259 pages, it’s also the longest. It was by far the most difficult to write simply because so much information had to be assimilated, filtered, transcribed and then analyzed.
Sometimes when you analyze information there’s nothing in it. There’s an aspect to that in Watts’ interview with the FBI. Large segments of monologue start to feel like circular hogwash that doesn’t get you or take you anywhere. It feels bland, even boring.
What made the fifth narrative so difficult was not simply rehashing everything we already know. Instead I wanted to look for new information hiding [or withheld] in the discovery. I wanted to see the negative space between the stars and dots of data and see if something was hiding there.
What was incredibly compelling, was approaching the FBI interview and the subsequent interrogation from the perspective of law enforcement. How much did they really know and how soon did they know it? What didn’t they know? How did they decide to deal with this guy? What was their strategy? When exactly did they decide to tell him what [or some of what] they really knew? How should they say what they needed to say to get him to start giving them something they could really use, instead of endless bullshit?
It was also weird how I initially regarded Agent Coder as the “bad cop” in the interrogation, and Agent Lee as the friendlier, more benign “good cop”. But as the interrogation goes on, Coder seems to soften, and Lee seems to harden. It’s amazing to follow and watch, and readers are recommended to click on the many links provided at crucial parts of the questioning process.
The other aspect that was difficult but very meaningful was putting the timeline pieces into place. This contextualized the puzzle and makes many things that are puzzling or strange, less odd. For example, Watts seems to be one of the dumbest criminals in high-profile true crime history. But a cursory look at the timeline reveals an obvious and understandable reason for why he made some elementary mistakes.
It was also interesting to see where the research took the original theories, such as the contentions that the children were murdered first, and that Shan’ann was murdered earlier in the morning, not later.
It’s taken a long time, and it should, but after five narratives we’re only starting to figure out the enigma that is Chris Watts. What I didn’t expect was for a psychological symptom many of us are [or were] very familiar with to reappear in this story. It seems all this talk of narcissism has blinded us from something else all of us know all too well, not only about ourselves but each other.
On the night of August 14, CBI agent Greg Zentner was dispatched to Boulder to interview the most crucial witness in the Watts case. The transcript below is an excerpt from a 72 page document spanning 3223 lines of text.
CrimeRocket is the first to reproduce and analyze this critical transcript in-depth. The entire transcript has been broken down into 15 sections.
Visit Patreon for the Audio Analysis of part 9 in more detail and more indepth:
Shan’ann promotes Thrive as this great freedom giver, but on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day she’s still actively promoting Thrive. How many people want to [or feel they have to] work on those days?
Shan’ann also states explicitly that Celeste is allergic to cashew nuts which are a kind of tree nut.
On the night of August 14, CBI agent Greg Zentner was dispatched to Boulder to interview the most crucial witness in the Watts case. The transcript below is an excerpt from a 72 page document spanning 3223 lines of text.
CrimeRocket is the first to reproduce and analyze this critical transcript in-depth. The entire transcript has been broken down into 15 sections.
In true crime we often don’t see the wood for the trees. It’s always useful to get some perspective on what we’re looking at, and to make sure we’re not too close to or familiar with our case, by looking elsewhere [either the real world or other analogous true crime cases].
This post by Ralph Oscar does that. It not only humanizes Shan’ann and Chris Watts financial circumstances, but personalizes how they may have responded to them:
I was pondering the financial angle, which I feel is the wild, drunken elephant in the room in this case. I was talking to a new acquaintance online, who revealed that he was twice divorced. Something he said brought to mind the Watts case, and so I’ve been quizzing him about the finances of divorce
He and his first wife divorced in a state with *permanent* alimony. Even though his ex now has a really good tech sector job, he still must pay her alimony. He’s asked if they can change this; she says no. Who would turn down free money? He remarried, had two daughters. His financial situation has never recovered – he’s been unable to set aside anything for his two daughters’ college. He lives paycheck to paycheck, and meanwhile, there sits his first wife, who is earning good money, receiving permanent alimony. He describes the two divorces with child support/alimony leaving him with “virtually nothing”. Some of his observations:
“It’s virtually impossible to stop or modify the alimony as long as she wants it. I’d attempt to talk to her and she’d say things like ‘would you stop taking money if you didn’t have to?’”
“It can get pretty bad financially when you’re busting your ass at work and doing well but still taking home as much as if you were working for minimum wage. The wife getting alimony … lives in a paid off home with her mom.”
“Meanwhile I can’t save to retire although I can modify or stop the alimony when I’m ready to. The catch 22 is that I can’t save to retire but that’s the only way to stop it.”
“Many angry men and a few women in my shoes. Very frustrating but you need to make it work somehow.”
“I can’t honestly relate to the idea of killing someone to avoid giving them money but I do understand how another might get there. I also can’t honestly say I’d mourn her passing if that did happen. I’ve joked about loosening the lugs on her car wheels but that’s just out of frustration, etc.”
“I haven’t been able to recover financially. I’ve gotten raises at work and the dollar amount of my commissions increase but never enough to pay bills without having anxiety about next week or next month.”
“I had two daughters with my second wife and haven’t been able to save anything towards college.”
“The person making the payments becomes nothing more than a source to enable the other to be ok with no consideration regarding its affect on the payer.”
“The ex who receives the alimony seems to feel fully entitled to my money to this day. If I bring it up in any shape or form she will move away or discontinue the conversation immediately.”
While Colorado is not a permanent alimony state, in 2014 a new law went into effect that prescribed a formula for how to determine spousal maintenance payments: 40% of the higher-earning spouse’s income minus 50% of the lower-earning spouse’s income. Shan’Ann would finally have incentive to come clean about how much she was *not* making on her “business”, or at least there would finally be an accounting of just how much it was *costing* her to make that income amount (which means that’s not the actual income). If she’d been making $80K/yr in actual income, they’d have been paying their bills. That’s all there is to it.
While my acquaintance would never countenance murder (he has two daughters from that first marriage), he is clear that the financial fallout of his two divorces, particularly that first one with the permanent alimony, has changed his life for the worse. His perspective is that the financial situation for the Watts family was likely a very important factor in Chris Watts’ deciding to do what he did.
If Chris and Shan’Ann had won the lottery the day before the murders, I’m confident there wouldn’t have been any murders.
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
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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.”
DRILLING THROUGH DISCOVERY is the most expensive of the 5 TWO FACE books, but at 259 pages, it’s also the longest. It was by far the most difficult to write simply because so much information had to be assimilated, filtered, transcribed and then analyzed.
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