The Discovery Documents are like a giant haystack, a Mount Everest of evidence, yet the mountain itself seems to obscure the fact that there’s nothing there. Important needles that should there are missing. There are no crime scene photos, for example, released by official police photographers, in fact, it’s still not even clear where the “crime scene” was in the Watts home.

There is also no certainty about time of death, order of death or even motive. If this wasn’t problematic enough, in the aftermath of the status conference [which ended up being a “surprise plea deal”] the defendant’s mother took to the media to bang the drum that her son was coerced into taking the plea deal, and was doing all she could to “scuttle the plea deal before it was too late”, as one 9News reporter put it.

That narrative also swirled into nothing. Just as suddenly as it manifested it swirled quietly down a drain and disappeared.

In hindsight we can see that despite Cindy’s attempts in the week before the sentencing hearing, the plea deal wasn’t scuttled. In court Cindy’s lawyer/representative said the media blitz she’d initiated was because they were “misinformed”. Judge Kopcow accepted that, he decided the plea wasn’t co-erced, Chris Watts maintained a mute though slightly tearful silence in court, and the rest – as they say – is history.

The history of this case is filled with weird mismatches, incongruencies and downright deceits. Let’s examine 7 Serious Inconsistencies, starting with Shan’ann Watts herself.

1. “Shan’ann Watts was excited and happy to have children” versus “I don’t want to have this baby…I’m not happy”

2. “Chris Watts wasn’t excited or happy about the third pregnancy” versus “Little Peanut! Love her/him already!!!”

It feels like it’s taking things too far to suggest Shan’ann’s expropriation of Watts’ social media extended to making declarations of his joy and happiness at the arrival of the third baby on his behalf. And yet she did indirectly do exactly this by posting screengrabs of his reaction and letting the whole world know about it. She was also adamant in her pregnancy announcement posts that the pregnancy was all his idea.

If that’s the case, and it probably was, then Watts clearly had a change of heart almost immediately after the baby was conceived. It’s not like that’s never happened in human history. And the seed for the family holocaust that followed began with the announcement – ultimately – of an unwelcome arrival at an “inappropriate” time.

Shan’ann’s excessive social media posting, including about the pregnancy, placed him and her in a bind. Now that the whole world, including the Thriver cabal, knew about the pregnancy, they were both locked-in. They couldn’t back out even if they wanted to, unless they wished to court a social death for the mortal sin of giving up their child or aborting it.

3. Nichol Kessinger claimed she didn’t know Shan’ann’s name “for a while”. How long and when exactly was that “while”?

More pertinent is once Kessinger did know about Shan’ann, then what? Did she see Shan’ann’s happy family fairy tale spiels on Facebook and dismiss them, or did she cynically think they were just part of vacuous Thrive promotion, and held no actual meaning [which has evidently proved to be the case].

4. Nichole Kessinger maintained that she didn’t know Shan’ann was pregnant, and found out via the media around August 14th, after her disappearance.

Kessinger also claimed when she found out about the pregnancy [sometime in August after the disappearance] and confronted Chris Watts, he told her the baby wasn’t is. But what if she did know? How could she not know when Shan’ann posted the first video on May 29 and the changed her profile picture to “Oops we did it again” on June 11th.

What if she did know before the murders that Watts’ wife was pregnant?

A cursory glance at Shan’ann’s public Facebook page during June and July [when Kessinger’s affair supposedly began] would have confirmed not just a happy family narrative, but the fact that Shan’ann was happily pregnant too.

If Kessinger did know about the pregnancy, why did she persist with the affair?

5. If Kessinger was aware of the pregnancy, then she HAD to have seen red flags, including seeing herself as potentially creating one by the process of actively tearing her partner away from his newly pregnant wife

5. Shan’ann’s parents say they had no clue Shan’ann’s marriage was falling apart

Sandi claims she had no idea Shan’ann’s marriage was falling apart, even though Shan’ann and Chris Watts slept in their home for several days during the first week of August, Watts refused to touch his wife and Shan’ann slept alone. Shan’ann also claimed, during that week, that she cried herself to sleep each night. Did her parents not know this?

Sandi also told her colleagues at Hair Jazz that the couple were definitely separating.

6. Shan’ann was a very controlling, OCD type personality. 

Her personality as a factor that may have caused Watts [wrongly of course] to assume he couldn’t “come clean” to her about the affair, or about not wanting the baby, was likely an important factor in the underlying dynamic that made him feel locked-in.

7. Does the DA know the motive or doesn’t he?

Does the DA know the motive and won’t tell, or does he not know why this crime happened? Which is worse? \

It’s difficult to imagine the DA can’t have a clear motive, even though the cops, CBI and FBI were on the case, and Watts confessed and struck a plea deal with the DA.

There are other factors that don’t make sense, such as the secrecy surrounding the autopsy reports, the rushing of the legal process and avoidance of a criminal trial, and the strange argument around avoiding the death penalty when everyone knows the death penalty was never any issue to anyone in the first place.

So why is the Chris Watts case so peculiar in so many respects?