At 13:37 on August 9th, Shan’ann sent a photo of her final love letter to her husband. The letter is undated, and the pages following the first page are missing. The original letter, so far as we know, has never been found.
The text of the first page of Shan’ann’s last letter reads:
My Dearest Chris. [Heart] [Dearest was originally written “deerest” and the second “e” later overwritten with an “a”.]
I don’t know where to begin….I am so lost for words [at a loss for words]. I can’t even explain how hard this pain is. The last 5 weeks have been the hardest. I missed everything about you. I missed your morning breath, your touch, your lips/kisses, I missed holding you! I missed smelling you in the sheets, I missed talking to you in person. I missed watching you laugh and play with the kids. That I love so much about you. I missed seeing you naked and on top of me making love to me. OMG I missed having you around when I felt alone and upset. I just flat out missed the hell out of you. we haven’t been away from each other that long since 2012.
The second paragraph has a clear change in tone compared to the first.
I really don’t know how “we fell out of compatibility” or if that is someone elses words. the only thing that change this month was everything going down with you family. IO can’t change what happened, but I can ‘ try to wor k thing s out with you with them. But there has to be a mutual respect for everyone. I definitely deserve an apology because of Celeste. I can suck up her going against everything I said to our kid. But our daughters life…
Shan’ann left the letter on the counter for Watts on August 10th, and asked him to write a letter back to her.
Somewhere, somehow, someone has put out the myth that a mysterious person called Primrose school on the morning of the murders, and told the school “not to worry” about the disappearance. This mysterious figure could not have known the status of the children, unless she was an accessory. When a staff member challenged the caller, she remarked with indignation: “Excuse me for caring!”
Who is this mysterious caller? Is this the clue that will blow this case wide open? Did Chris Watts have a woman secretly helping him commit or cover up the murders?
All of these questions are breathtaking – breathtakingly silly.
On page 663 of the Discovery Documents it’s clear who made the call, and when.What’s more, and this takes just a few minutes to read to comprehend the context, it shouldn’t be that hard to figure out that there’s no conspiracy.
The caller is Shan’ann’s mother, Sandi Rzucek.
She called Primrose at 11:00-11:30.
Contextually it’s obvious she called the school after Chris Watts did [he called at 08:26].
When we follow the continuity of the timeline in the Discovery Documents, it makes perfect sense that Shan’ann’s mother called Primrose when she did. After Sandi [that’s how she spells her name of Facebook] spoke to Watts briefly three times between 10:28 and 10:44, Sandi called the school to begin her own investigation.
When Sandi called, she found out the girls weren’t in school, and clearly, the school informed her that the girls weren’t coming back either. This prompted Sandi to intervene, telling them:
“Everything is fine.”
What she meant, and what she assumed, was that the children weren’t dead, and would be coming back to school. In other words, she was asking Primrose to discard Watts’ instruction to them to unenroll the children. Furthermore, given the brouhaha between the various in-laws over recent weeks, Sandi asked the school not to tell anyone she’d called [and interfered].
At around 15:00 Sandi called the school again, following up, trying to find out if the girls were ever dropped off, or if anyone had seen Shan’ann. Clearly the staff wondered what this was all about, and this prompted Sandi to exclaim with justifiable indignation, “Excuse me for caring!”
The sections highlighted in blue and green above, reflect how poorly this aspect of the narrative is expressed. It appears as if certain aspects are repeated, when in reality, the writing is clumsily executed.
In sum, there is no conspiracy. Sandi calling Primrose when she did is exactly what you’d expect in the middle of the morning, when she realized Shan’ann was missing, and her son-in-law wasn’t being of much help to solve the problem. It’s also likely when Shan’ann missed her doctor’s appointment at 10:00, the ball started rolling in Nickole Atkinson’s mind, and she may have called Sandi to find out if she’d heard from Shan’ann. When she hadn’t, Sandi took over the baton and started to make calls. One of them was to the Primrose school. Make sense?
The latest review, posted yesterday [December 27th], is the 7th straight five star review for RAPE OF CASSANDRA. RAPE OF CASSANDRA is currently a #1 Bestseller in the Trial Practice category on Amazon, and #18 in the Hoaxes & Deceptions category.
One reason, I think, for the strong ratings, RAPE OF CASSANDRA is by far the most voluminous of the four books currently available in the series, and for that reason it’s also the most expensive.
While writing RAPE OF CASSANDRA the intention was to cover essential narrative territory, including the status conference [when the plea deal was announced] and the sentencing hearing. The idea was not to drill into the discovery. I wanted to leave that for the fifth book in the series. In the end, I decided to do some analysis from the discovery dump, simply because the books are meant to be the most current narrative available when they come out, so to not refer to the discovery in some detail would be a failure to do due diligence.
Unfortunately, dealing with the discovery meant sacrificing a fair amount of trial coverage and analysis. Even so, the discovery is only glimpsed at in RAPE OF CASSANDRA. The fifth narrative focuses entirely on the discovery; analyzing, filtering and organizing the information in an effort to make sense of it. That analysis goes way beyond the superlight coverage here on CrimeRocket.
RAPE OF CASSANDRA’s high rating isn’t bad, especially considering the string of poor reviews for the first book that have been coming through of late.
Many of the complaints about the first book are from folks who are only coming into the narrative now. The complaint is that there’s nothing new in the first book. Personally, I don’t think that’s true, especially the narrative around the dogs which even the Discovery Documents don’t deal with in detail, and much of the information around the dogs is muddled and unclear.
When the first TWO FACE was published on September 10th, the information and the chronology was brand new. The power of the first narrative – in my view at any rate – lies in its prescience. The crime scene and execution of the crime was intuited and three books later, many of those original intuitions still appear to hold water. So the complaint that the first book was written “too early” misses the point – it was intended to be written early for two reasons:
1. To meet the demand of regular Rocket Science [originally #Shakedown] readers who have come to expect and rely on rapid delivery of true crime narratives.
2. To test and challenge my ability to fathom a brand new case while being mostly in the dark about many, if not most aspects of the crime, crime scene and characters involved.
So, to be fair, the first narrative ought to be evaluated within those parameters.
It should also be mentioned that in order to enjoy these books, to get the most out of them and the series as a whole, it’s important to catch the narratives as soon as possible after they come out. Besides being the first narratives to bite at the various cherries in this case, many of the links referred to work early on, but over time are sometimes removed by the original source. That is one reason why CrimeRocket exists. It serves as an archive of content – including photos – for the narratives to refer to, without the risk of them being removed months or years later.
The Discovery Documents confirm that Ceecee’s reaction to true nuts was “getting worse” each time she went to see the allergist. This suggests the younger child had an underlying peanut allergy which aggravated over time to include a tree nut allergy.
It’s unclear whether the ingredients in Shan’ann’s Thrive products could have played a role in this.
In 2002 a medical team on the Isle of Wight found that around one in 70 children across the UK was allergic to peanuts, compared with one in 200 a decade before. (Grundy et al, 2002). A more recent follow-up study by the same group suggests a slight fall in cases (Venter et al 2010). The high rates of peanut allergy were acknowledged in a UK Government report in 2004, which put the figure among children in England at around 250,000 (House of Commons 2004). Similar trends for peanut allergy have been noted in the USA (Sicherer et al, 2010). A 2011 paper shows that tree nut allergy is more common in older age groups than among children (Venter and Arshad 2011).
Foods likely to contain peanuts or tree nuts include the following: Cakes, biscuits, pastries, cereal bars, confectionery, ice cream, desserts, vegetarian products, salads and salad dressings. This list is not exhaustive.
Peanut allergy was once thought to be lifelong in all cases, but studies show that about 20% of young children outgrow it (Hourihane 1998 and Burks 2008). Doctors are unable to tell which children will be the lucky ones, although blood tests taken in the early years of life may provide clues (Ho et al 2008). Some experts believe that if a child has not outgrown their peanut allergy before the age of ten, it is likely that it will persist.
As with peanut allergy, a proportion of people with tree nut allergy will outgrow it. Research suggests that 10% of young children outgrow tree nut allergy (Skripak and Woods 2008).
…about 35% of peanut-allergic toddlers in the U.S. have or will develop a tree nut allergy. Doctors often recommend that young children avoid tree nuts if they are allergic to peanuts. The FDA lists coconut as a tree nut. In fact, coconut is a seed of a drupaceous fruit. Most people allergic to tree nuts can safely eat coconut. Coconut allergy is reasonably rare.
Has the media forgotten about the Chris Watts case? Some would like to think so.
It’s hard to believe almost a month ago around 2000 pages of discovery were released [plus 3 terabytes of video footage]. It’s clearly not the case that the media have fully or completely mined that colossal archive, or that they’ve lost interest. Not even close. It’s the nature of the media beast that around this time of the year newsrooms virtually shut down.
I worked in a busy newsroom for two years, and the idea is to maintain a skeleton crew over the festive season. No one wants to be at work, no one wants to chase or file stories, no wants to do anything except the minimum. So the lights of the building are on, but no one is home, and those who are aren’t really there to work, they’re just there to keep the engine purring in idle mode.
Most of the journos take this time to get their R&R, and it makes sense. The festive season tends to be a “slow news cycle” time of the year. One reason for that is it’s also when the activities of almost everyone drops off precipitously.
Almost everyone. Dedicated true crime writers don’t take vacations, especially not with so much information that has yet to be analyzed. And let’s face it, Gotham never sleeps. Crime never goes away, in fact some crimes – like robberies – increase by 30% over Christmas.
In the lead up to Christmas, predictably, the saturation media coverage of the Watts case has dried up completely. For a few days the media was like a stuck record on Watts’ transfer to Dodge Correctional, and then for a few days after that, it was stuck on the monster’s mail – love letters from adoring female fans.
I imagine some folks are very happy about the media falling silent on this case, while for others – I won’t say who – this was “all part of the plan.”
What the media seem too dumb to notice, is the contradiction inherent in their own reporting.
Let me show you what I mean:
December 3rd, 2018 – SECRET TRANSFER:
For about two days, everyone was led to believe that there was good reason behind Watts’ transfer. He wasn’t safe in Colorado. If he was transferred elsewhere, somewhere unknown, he’d have a measure of protection. So that was why he was being transferred…
Exactly two weeks after Watts’ sentencing hearing on the 19th, he was being transferred to a secret location out of state. These are the key words – where Watts was going to be held would remain “undisclosed.” This was amid “security concerns” around his safety, and also – some averred – to protect the safety of his protectors. The special treatment Watts was receiving was – we were told – because he was an unusually high-profile criminal.
Of course the irony at the time, was that if Watts was on death row, he’d be automatically entitled to all these protections anyway. So by not being sentenced to death, Watts was sort of at risk of unofficially being sentenced to death, if you catch my meaning. Instead of a death sentence authorized by Weld County, it might be conducted by anonymous inmates in some far flung hellhole.
The other aspect that was implied by the transfer, was that by moving Watts out of Colorado, he’d suddenly enjoy some sort of anonymity. Do prisons outside of Colorado not have televisions?
December 5th, 2018 – TRANSFER FOR HIS SECURITY:
After just two days of top secret concealment, the surreptitious relocation of America’s most hated husband and father [presumably under a cloak of darkness] came to an end.
On December 5th, Radar Online revealed where Watts was.
So much for anonymity, secrecy, undisclosed locations and protecting him and his prison guards. Even so, the media now maintained Watts was moved for “security” reasons. [Apparently Colorado prisons aren’t secure, or are less secure than other prisons in America].
During this period, I posted two insightful interviews on CrimeRocket.com, both with former prison inmates providing “expert” analysis of the transfer. In one interview the former inmate said Colorado Corrections should feel embarrassed that they can’t provide security.
In another, Watts’ lifespan was being compared to that of another high-profile murderer, and the expert guessed Watts would be murdered first. Both those interviews have since been removed from YouTube.
December 8th – December 12th, 2018 – MORE LEAKS AND CANTEEN RECEIPTS:
Just days after Watts’ secret transfer, Radar Onlineknew the location of the prison that was holding Watts [in Waupun], and four days after that, they provided a sample of Watts’ purchases from the prison canteen. So much for the anonymity, protection and security of America’s most high-profile inmate!
December 19th, 2018 – LOVE LETTERS:
In a final demonstration of just how ridiculous the claims about anonymity, secrecy and protection really were, local and international media next began to cover the love letter angle.
If paramours of the convicted murderer knew how to get hold of the object of their sick obsessions, how hard would it be for a felon, who wanted to settle a score, to find him?
The Future:
Is Watts likely to be murdered in prison? It’s doubtful such a high-profile prisoner will be allowed to come to harm, simply because that will make this ultra-high-profile case even more high-profile.
So has the mission to keep Watts’ prison status a secret been a failure? It has, if anyone believes that was the real reason he was transferred. It wasn’t.
While the media have been in snooze mode over the past few days, I came across a short video blog posted on December 13 by Daniel Bishop. At 1:03 Bishop mentions “everyone wanting to know what happened to Shan’ann Watts’ car.”
https://youtu.be/4dHC3Xzken4
Bishop describes Shan’ann’s vehicle as leased, and given to her by Thrive as part of an “auto bonus.” Remember Thrive? How long has been since Thrive or MLM has entered the media narrative, or any narrative regarding this case? Too long in my view. I suspect Bishop’s contention that the Lexus was a lease is true, and have suspected that for some time, but is there any proof of this?
What the Discovery Documents say about Shan’ann’s Lexus
Lexus appears 69 times in the Discovery Documents, while the word car appears 87 times. And there it is in black and white:
Curiously, the wording isn’t even that Shan’ann had leased the Lexus, but that the “Watts family” had leased it. This suggests that technically it wasn’t “Shan’ann’s car” even in the family sense, especially if Watts was paying for the lease.
Now we don’t know that for sure, but consider what we do know:
The Lexus was usually parked inside the garage while Chris Watts’ truck was invariably outside [the vehicular equivalent of him not sleeping in his own bed, but in the basement].
Watts’ work truck was outside during a hailstorm, one Shan’ann filmed, while “her” vehicle was in the garage. According to Watts, be believed his vehicle had been vandalized or broken into, but left his toolboxes in the back unlocked to “see if anyone was trying to break into the truck” again.
Following a six minute call to Shan’ann, Shan’ann sent Watts an insurance identification card on the Lexus on July 30, the morning following his return from the Great Sand Dunes National Park. It seems Watts used this information to renew the insurance [another expense] effective from August 15 to February 15. It’s unclear whether the car was insured prior to these dates, and who was paying the insurance premium. The fact that Watts appears to have requested insurance information may indicate that they had defaulted on these payments, or that he intended to take them over once Shan’ann was dead.
Watts was not allowed to run errands in his work truck, which was fitted with a GPS and monitored by Anadarko. This means technically, neither Watts nor his wife were actually vehicle owners in their own right. It also meant he would necessarily need to use the Lexus himself, and Shana’nn’s Facebook does show Watts often behind the wheel, while she is in the passenger seat.
According to Bishop, the leasing company took back Shan’ann’s 2016 Lexus, and because it was too old to be leased out any further, they auctioned it off. So, CO 528-ZJV – like Chris Watts – is gone.
Over the past month or so, Chris Watts has been villainised [not without good reason] and Nichol Kessinger villified, particularly on social media. But one entity has come out of this debacle with barely a speck of blame. Let’s deal with Thrive again, briefly, and the “auto bonus” spiel. We’ll so via Shan’ann and other MLMers.
What Shan’ann and other MLMers say about the luxury car bonus
Shan’ann, her mother, Chris Watts and the Watts family go way back when it comes to cars. Shan’ann used to work at Dirty South after all.
So posing next to cars was almost second nature to her, and if you’re a mechanic, what’s wrong with you or your wife, or you and your wife, using a snazzy car to sell shit?
In the above video, Shan’ann and her fellow promoters are at the rooftop pool of a San Diego hotel, when Shan’ann announces Nickole Atkinson has hit her “12K”, and earned her auto bonus. Atkinson appears to shed a tear on camera, that’s how moved she is by her achievement, and the honor of being recognized by her MLM peers.
In the video, dated June 26, Shan’ann adds that Nickole had started working full-time as a Thrive promoter for the past month [presumably June], “working the business”, and that she [Nickole] had quit her job of 14 years to do that. Basically, after working for Thrive full-time for a month, selling vitamin patches and shakes, the company apparently wanted to give Atkinson a car to reward her for her hard work.
The Discovery Documents, however, disagree with Shan’ann’s claim that Nickole had quit her job in May or June 2018.
Here it is:
On August 21, when detective Baumhover contacted Atkinson, she was getting ready to do a night shift as a nursing assistance at Mesa Vista Nursing Home in Boulder, a short drive west of Frederick and Erie.
In the video, Atkinson mentions using her auto bonus to get a Tesla, but it’s clear in the crime scene footage that she’s still driving a white Mazda Dodge GT more than six weeks after the rooftop video was recorded.
We know that Chris Watts had received an auto bonus as well, yet in spite of Shan’ann’s grandstanding on social media in May that she was shopping for a new Lexus for him, on his behalf, he never acted on his auto bonus either.
But Shan’ann was using Chris Watts’ Facebook as an additional “profile”, if you will, to market, promote and sell Thrive products. So his auto bonus, was actually hers.
But that exposes the above spiel as more than a little misleading. If Shan’ann was speaking on Watts’ behalf, telling everyone he was shopping for a new luxury car, when it was actually her auto bonus, her business, and her aspirations [or promotional aspirations], then she was representing an acquisitive ability that wasn’t merely a gross exaggeration, we’re able to see in the discovery dump that it wasn’t true.
Put simply, Shan’ann was advocating spending beyond their means as a way of promoting a product, and using the idea of living beyond one’s means [as a sort of dream-come-true fantasy] as a sales hook. In other words, her sales pitch was essentially to lure others into spending beyond their means as well. Quit your job – like I have – get free stuff, live the glamorous life, and…have no money at the end of it.
In one of the few instances where the Discovery Documents do deal with the Watts finances in some detail, notice the manner in which Watts cagily frames the situation around the Lexus.
It’s “their” car, not Shan’ann’s car, and it’s not a lease, it’s paid for by the company.
This is Watts doing a Thrive spiel to the cops, only, a police interrogation is where pitching fairy tales no longer works.
In reality, the Lexus wasn’t paid for by anyone, it belonged to the leasing company.
Now, it’s probably important to head off the counters to these counters, one of them being that the Watts vehicle was part of a hire-purchase arrangement, and that eventually they would become the owners of the vehicle.
One way to address that, besides through the semantics in the Discovery Documents [the word “lease” isn’t used multiple times accidentally], is to look at former employees and to see what they say about their experience with MLMs. So there’s not a lot of information out there from disgruntled employees, but there is some, like this, posted on Reddit in 2017.Of course, former employees are contractually and legally obligated not to disclose sensitive information, and if they do, they can be – and often are – sued.
But Thrivers don’t pose around fancy cars, and post themselves doing that on Facebook, do they?
According to lazymanandmoney.com, Le-Vel/Thrive aren’t unique in using the luxury car lure as bait. It’s pretty much standard practice when it comes to MLM companies:
The dirty little secret promoters won’t tell you, is that far from the auto bonus being a reward for hard work, the promoters are required to get a lease when they reach a particular milestone. This obligation then infects that person’s social network, as everyone goes gaga about X’s brand new car and the wonderful company X works for. It’s marketing gold, and it mainlines into the greed/envy/ego aspect of a person.
At 5:37 in the clip above, HBO’s John Oliver refers to the “dangling of vast lifestyle improvements”, especially flashy cars, and luxury travel, as being “at the heart of the MLM pitch.”
A cursory glance at Shan’ann’s Facebook profile provides confirmation of this. She uses almost every Live pitch to punt the lifestyle perks – flexi hours, better health, wealth, holidays and overall luxury. [Meanwhile, her credit cards are maxed out, she’s about to lose her house,and tragically in Shan’ann’s case, her life].
An argument can be made that Shan’ann started losing her life before she died. That she was so caught up in something, it swallowed her up, and encouraged the swallowing up and wholesale consumption of others, so that while this was happening, she was blinded to not one, by many obvious realities.
The Lexus is one reality that was employed in the Watts family fairy tale to convey an alternative reality.
The white Lexus in the Watts’ garage was a beautiful lie, and each day, that beautiful lie propelled Shan’ann and her two beautiful children through their days. Unbeknownst to them, the beautiful lie was slowly but surely conveying them – and their murderer – to an ultimate destination: permanent ruin.
Ironically, since Shan’ann’s nightmarish murder and burial on a leased oil site, rather than taking a knock, Thrive seems to have reaped a whirlwind of “positive” publicity.
Millions of curious Americans have visited Shan’ann’s still public page since August 13th, and in the process of getting to know her by watching her videos, millions have been pitched.
A sizable fraction of those visitors have undoubtedly converted into the Thrive fairy tale. Think about it. Thanks to Shan’ann’s grotesque death and dumping of her body “like trash” at CERVI 319, Thrive have likely seen a windfall of sales over the last four months leading up to Christmas.
Postscript:
The Discovery Documents also provide fascinating insight into how Watts changed his parking habits at the time of the murders, not only in terms of the truck [which was normally parked to the left of the front door, and Watts typically exited the house through the front door], but the Lexus as well.
And then there’s this. The Discovery Documents are unambiguous about Watts not only backing up his truck onto the driveway on the morning of the disappearance, but that witnesses had observed the Lexus’s rear hatch was open at the same time.
This could mean that one or more bodies were stowed in the boot of the Lexus prior to being transferred to the truck. It’s also possible then, that one or more of the bodies wasn’t carried outside in plain sight, but transferred instead in the semi-enclosed garage area, in the blind area of Trisnatich’s camera [in other words, from the Lexus hatch to the very rear of the truck].
True Crime Rocket Science is supposed to be – and meant to be – exactly that.
TRUE CRIME
ROCKET SCIENCE
Intelligent discussion about true crime. Are your conversations and comments here intelligent?
This site is also meant to build the brand of a line of books. Incidentally, have you read any?
How to have conversations on this site
The idea is that people come here and make discoveries about crime, criminals, society and themselves. It’s meant to be a growing experience, a learning experience, and an affirmative experience. It’s meant to be interesting and meaningful, but meaningful above all.
How do we make sure it stays meaningful, and how do we avoid getting messy with one another?
Get personal about you
We can have meaningful conversations when we personalize what has happened in true crime, especially where we see errors of judgement or character flaws, and apply those to ourselves and our lives. Getting personal means being sincere – about ourselves. Am I materialistic? Is my community too preoccupied with appearances? Am I on social media too much? Is my work turning me into more of machine than a human being?
These are the conversations we want to have that enhance our coming together here.
Share technical or factual evidence
We can also extend the knowledge of cases by sharing information that we come across, or by providing facts, photos, forensic data, logic analysis etc. There have been some stunning contributions to date by a handful of readers, and what they all have in common is modesty and curiosity.
Test insights
This blog is also an excellent forum to test theories and insights, but it’s important to be humble when doing so. Is your theory off-the-top-of-your-hat, or have you thought about it, and do you have reinforcing information. Whichever it is, be honest about it.
Deepen the Hypothesis/Prove it Wrong
The narratives contain various hypotheses, one example being that Shan’ann’s murder took place downstairs. In order to deepen these theories, one has to have a superlative knowledge of all the evidence. If any information has been overlooked that supports a particular hypothesis, please be sure to let me know.
It’s not the goal of Rocket Science to be dogmatic about its own positions, especially if they can be improved upon, fine-tuned, or worse, if they are demonstrably wrong. All factual corrections are much appreciated.
It’s okay to be wrong
Nobody’s perfect. Mistakes happen. It’s okay to be wrong about something, but it’s not okay to always be in someone’s face about it. Move on. Remember the brief is:
TRUE CRIME
ROCKET SCIENCE
What Rocket Science is not about
It’s not about you. It’s not about me, either. It’s not Rocket Science when comments devolve into attacks, and it becomes us/me versus you/them. This isn’t high school, or a popularity context. We’re interested in true crime first, everything else is secondary.
As soon as the attempt to score ego points begins to dominate a particular discourse, everyone becomes distracted from the conversation, and concentration is squandered – thanks to your immaturity.
ALL CAPS, expletives, excessive use of question marks and quotation marks, name calling etc are all symptoms of this. If you’re doing that, you won’t last long here. If you’re doing that, I’ll see that and you’ll be on my radar. If you think you can misbehave and come back under a different email address, and a different avatar, ask the dozens who have already tried to do that and remain permanently banned from this site.
Insulting me will get you an express ticket off this site. I built this site. You’re welcome to take it all in, but if it’s not your cup of tea, please don’t stick around. If you don’t like it here and you do stick around, it will probably show. Just as in the real world, I decide who I want in my living room, and if I don’t like what you have say, or the manner in which you’re saying it, and if it’s the same negative stuff on repeat, just know it’s my prerogative to decide whether you stay or go, not yours. Like it or lump it, being here is privilege.
One way to avoid nasty repartee here, or on any forum, is by making sure you share your thoughts about the case and the characters involved. Not your thoughts about what someone else said. Your thoughts about the case and the characters. That’s all. That’s why we’re all here. So let’s discuss the case! If someone disagrees, be curious rather than threatened, and test your differences by referring to sources. What do the sources say? Do the sources agree on everything? Be interested in fact checking to advance what we know, not ego attacks, to advance your sense of self at the expense of knowing more.
On a personal note, I find moderating this site extremely tedious, frustrating and time consuming. I hope that will improve with time. Honestly, I would much rather be researching and writing, but I do see the value in having and growing a community, and exchanging new thoughts and ideas. It will obviously take time to gather a group of like-minded and smart people who want to engage with one another in a mature, and stimulating manner.
I would like the assistance of regular commenters to this site who have been here a while to assist in moderating the newcomers and guiding them where necessary. If the slurs and the nasty knee-jerk responses and the sarcastic shooting from the hip conversations continue, I will disable comments permanently. This is easy to do, I am tempted to do it and it will make life a lot easier for me. So it’s your call.
I also want to mention another ugly aberration that occurs from time to time at this site. Someone arrives, doesn’t like something they’ve read, don’t like something that’s said, and they then go straight to the books and leave troll reviews.
I could name a few of the folks that have come here and done that, but what’s more important is that you know who you are, and I know exactly who you are too, and obviously once that line is crossed, it’s over. In spite of your addiction to this case, and this site, you are never coming back.
That kind of behavior actually makes an excellent case to not bother to put up this site to begin with, and a strong case can be made that the time spent here offering up research and analysis for free, I could be investing in writing books that readers happily and willingly pay for [despite the troll reviews].
It’s incredible to me that on a site that’s about honesty, and talking about crime and deceit, and specifically a narrative called TWO FACE, people can behave in this manner. And they apparently feel completely justified in doing so.
These same people, on this site, have wondered why Chris Watts lied and thought he could get away with it.
Every so often, someone mentions that I don’t tolerate dissent. It’s true, like Ripley in Aliens, I have a low threshold for bullshit, as I hope the above illustrates and emphasizes. When you’ve been around the block and survived a few monsters in real life, having a low tolerance for other people’s bullshit is necessary.
But it’s not true that I reject a difference of opinion out of hand, as long as that opinion has a lot going for it. Does it? If it doesn’t, it’s not me being an asshole, it’s me saying you haven’t really thought your theory through, try harder.
A theory that is based on facts and information is one thing, an opinion that comes to you willy nilly, and that’s held up to be equal to my efforts, thought and the deep rationales that go into my narratives usually simply aren’t on the same level. Sorry if that’s tough to hear. If you think they are worthwhile and meaningful, prove it. If they are worth their salt, go on, prove it. Make your case, but put as much effort into making your case as I have. I’ve written a book. Put some thoughtful effort into your paragraph.
I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again; if you come here and you think the “opinions” expressed here are cheap, unfounded, biased and fictional, you should do yourself a favor and let yourself out. Either you get that a lot of work and mental focus has gone into figuring out these crimes and criminals, and is worth something, or you don’t. If you don’t, if you’re here to strut around and be dismissive, if you find you’re just not convinced there’s any merit to any position, please don’t waste your time and my time – find a resource that suits your standards.
If you’ve read this far, thank you for being so conscientious. You’re one of the good guys.
On a more positive and constructive note, I’d like to encourage those who live in Frederick, Colorado or the general area to send through photos of the environment if at all possible. The list of photos wanted include:
The for-sale/foreclosure sign at #2825 Saratoga Trail
#6508 Saratoga Trail
#6507 Black Mesa
The new fracking battery under construction now opposite Saratoga Trail
By doing this analysis of Coonrod’s bodycam video again, what are we looking for and why does it matter? We’re looking for Shan’ann’s phone. We suspect it wasn’t inside the house when Chris Watts first arrived arrived home on the 13th. But we could be wrong. It could have been inside the house.
In the analysis posted five days ago [Officer Coonrod’s Bodycam appears to show Watts tucking something under his arm…] we explored the possibility that Watts snuck something, possibly a phone, under his arm when he opened the passenger door of his truck. Watts had two phones, so it could be that the one under his arm was one of them.
In time we’ll do a more thorough analysis, looking for instances where Watts has his phone, and we’ll see what that looks like.
One of the commenters on this site, MattyB, has suggested Watts retrieved Shan’ann’s phone not in his truck, but in the passenger area of Shan’ann’s Lexus.
Let’s take a look.
https://youtu.be/Jamym-lOZUQ
It’s worth looking at the the whole manoeuvre in real time a few times to get a sense of how he’s moving relative to the camera behind him. MattyB has a point. Watts does appear to scootch down towards the floor mat of the Lexus passenger seat, and retrieve something there, something inside the Lexus.
It may be a case of visual bias – we may be seeing what we want to see, rather than what’s really there, but it does seem like Watts is retrieving a flat, pinkish object with his right hand. The same can’t be said for the object from the truck, tucked under his arm [it may be a phone, but it’s definitely not pink].
As soon as Watts gets what he came for, he turns away from the camera. He skedaddles through the garage’s rear interior door just as Nickole starts to advance on his position at the passenger door. Nickole then inadvertently blocks Officer Coonrod’s video view of the suspect.
What does this mean?
Again, this could be reading way too much into fuzzy video images, and we saw how some folks got carried away seeing a phantom Ronnie Watts or Nichol Kessinger accomplice in Trisnatich’s surveillance video. We don’t want to do that here.
So let’s just say tentatively, there could be two possibilities here.
1. Watts left Shan’ann’s phone in her car
Taking her phone with him presented an enormous risk. If he was seen with it, or caught with it, he would be in deep trouble, and if he turned it on, then a cross-reference for his phone and hers would implicate him directly.
It just wouldn’t be a good idea to take her phone with him, unless he could be in two places at once. If he had an accomplice, he or she could impersonate Shan’ann and leave a bogus message. But that didn’t happen.
It makes sense that Watts would leave the phone in her car, because that’s what Scott Peterson did as well. When Laci’s phone was found, it was plugged into her 1996 Land Rover SUV’s cigarette lighter, but had virtually no charge on it. Shana”n’s phone, when found, was also off.
The phone is a vital piece of evidence, because it locates both the victim, and in the case of a cover-up, provides insight into where the murderer doesn’t want an inquiring mind to go. If Watts did move the phone first to the car before he left, then from the car when he got back, why put it on the couch and not next to her bed, or suitcase?
The answer is, Watts probably preferred it if the phone wasn’t found, because it could incriminate him. But he couldn’t have the phone be completely irretrievable, as that would raise serious suspicions that Shan’ann wasn’t simply missing, but had come to harm. That scenario wouldn’t be good for him. But that’s precisely what Nickole Atkinson thought when the phone appeared but Shan’ann didn’t.
Putting the phone in the car delays discovery. Putting it on the couch under cushions also delays discovery, but confuses the location of the crime scene.
Unfortunately the phone wasn’t seized immediately as evidence and dusted for prints. Chances are Watts wiped traces of himself from the phone both times when he placed it in the car, and under the cushions.
2. Watts is a cagey bastard
Let’s assume that Shan’ann’s phone was in the Lexus when Watts pulled up. Let’s also assume that foremost in Watts’ mind was a sense of, “Oh shit, I’ve got to get hold of that damn phone…”
I’m not sure why he’d think that, perhaps because the mismatch of the bed sheets on the floor and the phone in her car, would implicate him more directly. But looking at Watts arrival the first thing he does – making for the garage and the Lexus – it does seem Watts was intent on staging the phone, and we know Watts knew that her phone had some utility in exonerating him in terms of his call to her phone and the staged message [Scott Peterson did the same thing on the way from his fishing trip].
If Watts’ first thought when he got out of the truck was to retrieve her phone, then if did that, he achieved it virtually without being seen even though he was on camera. That’s stealth. If true, I think it also reinforces the notion of a stealth attack when Shan’ann arrived at 01:48. This is a guy who is acutely aware of his surroundings, and the digital eyes and ears of his world.
But as savvy as he was to all these signals, what he was attempting to do was insane. What he was trying to pull off reminds one, quite frankly, of the scene in Entrapment when the cat burglar [played by Catherine Zeta Jones] tries to outwit a spider web of cotton strands with bells on them [symbolizing a security systems of laser beams]. You’ve got to know what you’re doing. Watts thought he did until one bell after the other started going off, only he was the only one who couldn’t seem to hear them.
“Notice is hereby given that I will at public auction on Wednesday April 17, 2019, sell [your property at 2825 Saratoga Trail] to the highest and best bidder for cash.”
When someone else loses their home it’s no biggie, because it’s theirs. When it’s you losing your home, it’s a completely different story. If there was a lot of trauma behind having and losing homes in the past, then the trauma is so much greater.
There is no doubt that the mountain riding like an obese woolly mammoth on Watts’ shoulders at the time of the murders was the burden of the house. We know Shan’ann was in love with her home, and didn’t want to sell it. But the home didn’t belong to her.
Since Shan’ann was bossy, called the shots, and often told Watts what to do or how things were going to be, we can see how she would have opposed Watts on selling the house. Shan’ann was also very invested in the home, in terms of putting the names of her children on the walls, decorating rooms to color-coded specifications, and also using the house as a showpiece to brag on social media about how much she, and her husband and the family were Thriving ever after. It was easy to sell that spiel in a big, spacious, immaculate mansion, with a shiny new car in the garage, than in a grubby apartment with a battered 2006 Mustang.
Kessinger said Watts dragged his feet about selling the house, but it’s likely Shan’ann was the reason for this feet dragging. That seemed to end though when the Watts family were summoned by the Wyndham Hill Homeowner’s Association. Watts was also keenly aware of an oil battery that was about to spring up across the road from their big, new home, and cause its equity to hemorrhage.
For someone as OCD and fussy as Shan’ann, her laissez faire attitude to a fracking battery with all its health implications [she and the children had asthma] popping up nearby, says a lot about her level of attachment to the big home, and her determination to maintain the optics at least, of a lavish, successful lifestyle.
As soon as Shan’ann and the children were dead and disposed of, Watts went into high gear to get his house on the market, and to find a new one. He didn’t waste any time, did he? He was urgent, took charge, and got the ball rolling. This seems clear evidence that if he was dragging his feet, it was because of Shan’ann.
Perhaps this was the source of the furious screaming matches the neighbor overheard, and the reason why Watts was the one going crazy in them. He wanted to sell the house! Listen to 1:14 in the clip below:
https://youtu.be/hiHXZJM2f4Q?t=74
So a major reason for disagreement and dissension would have been the house. Watts would felt he HAD to sell it, but Shan’ann didn’t want to. Perhaps she convinced him that she’d have a good month selling Thrive and that would lift them out of their debt so they could breathe for a while. Maybe he believed her. Maybe he was betting that could work. Maybe he went along with it. Perhaps that’s what the trip to North Carolina was all about – a last ditch effort to drum up new business.
But did it?
The words “house” and “home” pop up 525 and 472 times in the 1960 pages of discovery, respectively, or at an average rate of once every two pages. The 4 177-square-foot home that is 2825 Saratoga Trail is by far the largest and most expensive of the Watts family assets. The owner is none other than Chris Watts himself. The house was purchased for $392 709 in May 2013, the same year their first child, Bella, was born.
The outstanding principal on Watts’ home as per the recent foreclosure filing served on the new inmate at Dodge Prison in Waupun, Wisconsin, is $349 938.09.
This means over five-and-a-half years, Watts had only paid $42 770,91 on his mortgage. That’s significantly less than $10 000 a year, and significantly less than $1000 per month.
In the 67 months that have passed since the house was purchased, an average of $638,37 has been paid off each month. That amount was supposed to be almost five times that, at $2700-$2800. Watts has acknowledged that insurance payments on the house alone comprised $500 of the total mortgage. Using that calculation, arguably the Watts family were still averaging less than a third of the mortgage payments that were due each month.
Many who remain mystified by the Watts family murders don’t think much of the finances, or the living-beyond-their-means spiel. District Attorney Michael Rourke also mentioned the Watts’ finances dismissively in court.
“I think it became pretty obvious that he found a new love interest and for whatever reason in his mind, divorce wasn’t an option.I can’t speak as to why anyone would take the steps that he didbut during the course of our investigation, other than the normal stressers of financial stress that I think most of us have, the occasional marital stress, we couldn’t find anything else that was a significant enough motive to annihilate your family, in the manner that he did.”
This is poor form from the prosecutor. Couldn’t find? Don’t have a motive? Look harder!
Ironically, the very area the District Attorney is minimizing as “normal stressors” was the area that wasn’t. One reason is that unlike the District Attorney who is used to living in middle class America, and probably grew up in middle class America, both Chris Watts and Shana’nn were not from middle class America. They’d risen from another social class and by the summer of 2018 were desperately trying to hang on to an upper-middle class fairy tale picture.
It’s true that many couples go through financial hardship without literally killing each other, but it’s also fair to say financial issues tend to weigh heaviest on a marriage or relationship. And here’s the rub. The worse the finances are, the worse the fighting that happens inside families.
Chronic financial disaster is going to weigh a lot more heavily than run-of-the-mill bad debt.
In the Watts family, what made this second disaster so fraught was that it was a nightmare they’d previously eluded, only to be caught up in the crocodile-infested quagmire a second time. But the second time there were three children to fjord through the swamp, two of them often sickly. There was also Shan’ann’s $100 000 surgery in August 2017, that the Watts’ family were till trying service many months later.
Probably the biggest obstacle both Watts and his wife faced if they wanted to get out of the debt black hole they were stuck in, was themselves. Both Watts and Shan’ann came from relevatively poor backgrounds, so a lot of personal pride and status was invested in the house on Saratoga Trail. It was a symbol of their great rags to riches success story. It was something they had built together into a home, and an impressive one, the biggest on the block.
The problem with such symbols, especially when they’re not real, the symbol can make you, but it can also drag you down and destroy you. Most fairy tales when they encounter the real world, and real world limits, end in tears.
A case can therefore be made, that if the house was taken out of the equations of this crime [keep the unwanted pregnancy, keep the mistress, keep the so-so finances] – but take away the real monster, take away the unaffordable castle, then everyone is free. Poor, not living so large, but alive and free.
Watts clearly wanted the best of both worlds. To keep his lifestyle and start a new life. He got his second wish.
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
Visit the TCRS Archive of 100 Books dealing with all the world’s most high-profile true crime cases.
Join the TCRS Community on Patreon for as little as $1 per month. Multiple daily posts, interesting discussions, amazing audiobooks narrated by the author, ongoing series and powerful, informative weekly podcasts.
Subscribe to the Growing TCRS YouTube Channel
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.”
Recent Comments