It’s 1:48 a.m. and a pregnant Shanann Watts is arriving home from a business trip to Phoenix.
Front-door video at her Frederick, Colorado, home captures the moment a friend drops Watts from the airport on August 13, 2018. She can be seen carrying her suitcase up the driveway and to the door.
Immediate suspicions
By mid-afternoon of August 13, friends and family of Shanann were starting to become concerned. She wasn’t answering her phone—and her daughters hadn’t shown up for preschool.Authorities said the three were dead by this time. It’s not clear whether the girls were alive when their mother arrived home.
A massive investigation and search, involving the local police department, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and the FBI, ensued.
Within days, Shanann was found buried in a shallow grave on a ranch, just under an hour away from the couple’s home. Roughly 100 feet away were the bodies of her little girls, Celeste, 3, and Bella, 4. They had been dumped in separate 20-foot tall oil tanks.
Evidence also paints a picture of a family mired in debt, living well above its means.
Watts was sentenced to life in prison in November. Weld County District Attorney Michael Rourke says his office continues to receive daily phone calls, emails and letters containing everything from conspiracy theories to suggestions on follow-up investigations.
New Love Interest Could Be a Motive
Weld County prosecutor Michael Rourke said Chris Watts’ motive for the brutal killings appears to be a desire to move on with another woman he met at work.“He had a desire for a fresh start, to begin a new relationship with a new love,” Rourke said. Watts’ mistress said shortly before the trial that he misled her into thinking that he had already separated, and divorced from his wife.
Rourke described how Watts furtively communicated with, met, and planned meetings with his mistress while his wife was focused on him and their family.
“While Shanann texted the defendant over and over again in the days and weeks leading up to her death, attempting to save her marriage, the defendant secreted pictures of his girlfriend into his phone, and searched, and texted her at all hours of the night,” Rourke said.
“While Shanann sent the defendant self-help and counseling books, he was searching the internet for secluded vacation spots to take his new love, and researching jewelry.”
Rourke expressed confusion as to why Watts killed his family instead of just getting a divorce.
“You don’t annihilate your family and throw them away like garbage,” he told the court. “Why did they have to lose their lives in order for him to get what he wanted?”
The morning after Watts killed the family, he texted his mistress about future plans, Rourke said.
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