The only justification he offered for the senseless killings-and the hypothesis seemingly put forward in the Netflix documentary-is that he felt it was the only way to be with Nichol Kessinger, the colleague he had begun secretly dating only a few weeks before. "It makes the act that much worse knowing I went to their rooms first and knowing I still took their lives at the location," he continued, presumably referring to the facility where he hid the three bodies. The girls, however, then "woke back up," he wrote. The letters also reveal that Chris first attempted to smother his daughters in their beds before returning to his own bedroom, where he argued with Shan'ann and killed her soon thereafter.
The letters were published in the 2019 book Letters From Christopher: The Tragic Confessions of the Watts Family Murders by Cheryln Cadle, who struck up a correspondence with Chris shortly after he was sentenced to life in prison in Nov. He began by claiming that he had killed Shan'ann as revenge after she had smothered to death 4-year-old Bella and 3-year-old Celeste, but eventually admitted that he had killed all three, then hidden their bodies at the oil storage facility where he worked.Īnd while the murders were framed in that fuller confession as a spontaneous act of rage prompted by an argument with Shan'ann over the state of their marriage, Chris has since revealed in letters from prison that he had been planning to kill his family for at least a few hours before doing so. Even after his original confession, though, Chris' story changed. After initially denying any involvement in his family's disappearance, Chris ultimately confessed and pleaded guilty to the murders, resulting in a quintuple life sentence in maximum-security prison without the possibility of parole.