Post by GenericBlackmail on May 30, 2024 11:05:58 GMT -5
On August 13th, 2018, in the town of Frederick, Colorado, Shannan Watts and her two children, 4 year old Bella and 3 year old Celeste, were reported missing by Shannan's best friend, a woman called Nickole Atkinson. Shannan was 15 weeks pregnant, and she'd missed a doctor's appointment scheduled for that morning. Atkinson had called the police and asked them to do a welfare check at the Watts house, but they were unable to locate her or the two children. Chris Watts, Shannan's husband and the girls' father, had returned home from work that afternoon to find police at his doorstep.
The next day, Chris made pleas that were broadcast on national television, where he begged for his family to come back.
However, the police had not fully bought his story, and on the night of August 15th, Chris was placed under arrest after he confessed to killing Shannan, burying her in a shallow grave and placing the girls' bodies in oil tanks near his workplace.
He originally claimed that he saw Shannan killing the girls and subsequently killed her in a fit of rage, but in 2019 he changed his story and admitted to having pre-meditatively murdered all three of them. He pleaded guilty to several counts of first-degree murder, several counts of tampering with a deceased human body, and unlawful termination of a pregnancy. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Soon, word got out that Chris had been having an affair in the weeks leading up to Shannan's death, with a work colleague of his called Nichole Kessinger. In July 2018, Shannan and the kids went to North Carolina to visit family for several weeks, leaving Chris alone to pursue his relationship with Kessinger(it had been around this time that Shannan felt that Chris was beginning to grow physically distant from her and the kids, according to her friends and family). Kessinger had actually gone to the police of her own accord shortly after Shannan and the kids went missing, and she's currently living under a new name in witness protection, although Chris says she still writes to him while he's in prison. Whether that's true or not is anyone's guess.
