0:00 On August fourteenth, 2018, a man stood on his front porch in Frederick, Colorado, and begged for his family to come home.0:10 His voice was steady, his face a mask of concern.0:15 Last week, we unraveled the Zodiac's cipher of fear, a killer who hid behind taunting letters.0:23 Chris Watts hid in plain sight.0:26 He looked directly into the news camera.0:29 He spoke about his wife, Shanann.0:32 About his two little girls, Bella and Celeste.0:36 He said if they could hear him, to just come back.0:41 He said the house felt empty without them.0:44 And as he spoke, he knew exactly where they were.0:49 He knew they could never come home.0:52 Because he had put them there.0:54 This isn't a story about a monster who looks like a monster.1:00 It’s a story about a man who looked like a husband, like a father.1:05 A man who posted smiling family photos on Facebook.1:10 A man whose wife wrote loving posts about him, calling him her rock.1:16 This is a story about the pressure it takes to crack a man like that.1:22 And what spills out when he does.1:25 The image they projected was perfect.1:28 Almost aggressively so.1:30 Shanann Watts was a master of social media.1:34 Her page was a highlight reel of a happy, thriving family.1:39 Here’s a video of four-year-old Bella, singing a song about how her dad is her HERO.1:46 Here’s a picture of three-year-old Celeste, all curls and smiles, a little firecracker.1:54 Here’s an ultrasound picture of the baby boy they had on the way.2:00 They were going to name him Nico.2:03 They lived in a five-bedroom house in a quiet suburb.2:07 Chris had a good job with Anadarko Petroleum.2:11 Shanann sold a wellness product and was good at it.2:16 From the outside, it was the American dream, polished to a high shine.2:22 But inside, the foundation was rotting.2:26 The story Chris told police was simple.2:29 Shanann had come home in the early hours of August thirteenth after a business trip.2:36 He said they had an emotional conversation, but that he left for work around five-fifteen in the morning.2:46 He claimed she was going to take the girls to a friend's house later.2:52 But she never showed up.2:54 She missed a doctor's appointment.2:57 Her phone went straight to voicemail.3:00 Her car was still in the garage.3:03 A friend, worried, called the police.3:06 And when the officers walked through the house, they found Shanann’s purse, her keys, her wedding ring on the nightstand.3:17 Who leaves without their phone?3:20 Without their wedding ring?3:22 The first cracks in Chris Watts’s story appeared almost immediately.3:28 His story was too calm.3:30 Too rehearsed.3:31 He gave that televised interview, pleading for their return.3:37 But watch it closely.3:38 There’s no desperation.3:40 There’s no panic.3:42 There is… performance.3:44 He refers to his family in the past tense.3:48 He smiles at the wrong moments.3:50 Shanann’s mother knew.3:52 From the first phone call, she suspected him.3:56 A mother knows.3:57 The police knew, too.3:59 They brought him in.4:01 They asked him about his marriage.4:04 He admitted there were problems.4:07 He admitted he wanted a separation.4:10 And then they asked him about the other woman.4:14 His coworker.4:15 The affair he’d been having.4:18 The fresh start he’d been texting her about.4:22 The life he wanted that did NOT include a wife, two daughters, and a baby on the way.4:29 They put him on a polygraph.4:32 He failed.4:32 Spectacularly.4:34 The interrogation room is a pressure cooker.4:38 It’s designed to be.4:39 And for hours, Chris Watts held his ground.4:43 He was the victim.4:45 The worried husband.4:46 But the agent in the room with him, Tammy Lee from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, she just kept chipping away.4:57 Patiently.4:58 Precisely.4:59 She told him the test showed he was lying.5:02 She told him they knew something had happened in that house.5:07 And then, he broke.5:09 But not all at once.5:11 First came a new story.5:13 A confession, of a sort.5:15 But a monstrous one.5:17 He said, yes, he’d had an affair.5:20 He said he told Shanann he wanted to leave her.5:24 And then, he claimed, in a fit of rage, SHE had strangled their daughters.5:30 He told the investigators that he saw it on the baby monitor.5:36 He said he then flew into his own rage and strangled Shanann.5:41 Think about that for a moment.5:44 The calculation.5:45 To save himself, he tried to turn his murdered wife into a monster.5:51 He tried to paint the mother of his children as a killer.5:56 It was his last, desperate act of deception.6:00 But the evidence didn't fit.6:03 And the investigators kept pushing.6:06 They needed to know where the bodies were.6:09 He finally told them.6:11 An oil site.6:12 Anadarko lease number 28-28.6:15 He said he buried Shanann in a shallow grave.6:19 And the girls… the girls were in the oil tanks.6:23 Later, in a confession made after his conviction, the full, unbearable truth came out.6:30 There was no rage from Shanann.6:33 There was only his.6:35 He strangled her in their bed, just after she got home.6:40 And as he was wrapping her body in a sheet, his daughters walked in.6:46 Bella and Celeste.6:47 They saw him.6:48 They were scared.6:50 He put their mother’s body in the back of his truck.6:54 He put his living daughters in the truck with her.6:59 And he drove forty-five minutes to that oil field.7:03 He buried Shanann first.7:05 Then he took Celeste’s favorite blanket and smothered her with it.7:11 Dropped her body through an eight-inch hatch into a tank of crude oil.7:17 And then he came for Bella.7:20 Her last words were, "Daddy, no!" On November nineteenth, 2018, Chris Watts pleaded guilty to five counts of first-degree murder.7:31 One for Shanann.7:33 One for Bella.7:34 One for Celeste.7:35 Two more because under Colorado law, killing a child under twelve is an automatic two counts.7:43 He also pleaded guilty to unlawful termination of a pregnancy.7:49 He did it to avoid the death penalty.7:52 He was sentenced to five life sentences without the possibility of parole, plus an extra forty-eight years.8:02 He didn't do it because of some sudden, uncontrollable rage.8:07 The prosecution laid out the text messages.8:11 The planning.8:12 This was premeditated.8:14 This was the cost of his new life.8:17 He didn't want to pay for a divorce.8:20 He didn't want to pay child support.8:23 He wanted to erase his family so he could start over.8:28 Clean slate.8:29 He is now an inmate at Dodge Correctional Institution in Wisconsin.8:35 And in a final, sickening twist, the murders made him famous.8:40 He gets letters.8:41 From women.8:42 Admirers.8:43 He spends his days reading the bible.8:47 He claims he’s found God.8:49 He even tried to claim, at one point, that some dark spirit made him do it.8:55 There’s a quote from a podcast that looked into his life after the murders.9:02 It says, "Chris Watts lives in another reality.9:06 In his mind, he’s a good man." And that’s the most terrifying part.9:12 The mask he wore for the cameras wasn't just for us.9:17 It was for him.9:18 He needed to believe he was the good guy, even as he was driving his daughters to their graves.9:26 The perfect family photo is still there, frozen online.9:31 A smiling father, a loving mother, two beautiful little girls.9:37 It’s a ghost.9:38 A carefully constructed lie that cost four people their lives, and revealed that sometimes, the most terrifying monsters are the ones who look just like us.
