The penpal of notorious killer Chris Watts has offered what she believes to be the reason he murdered his wife and two children.
On August 13, 2018, Watts murdered his pregnant wife, Shannan (34) by strangulation. He went on to murder the couple’s two daughters, Bella (4) and Celeste (3) by suffocation, before disposing of their bodies in crude oil tanks.
The crimes of Watts received international recognition due to their appalling nature. Despite initially speculating that his wife might have ran away with the girls, he was ultimately charged with three counts of first-degree murder, and accepted a plea deal to avoid the possibility of facing the death penalty.
Crime author Cherlyn Cadle has had contact with Watts for a number of years, communicating with him via letter and on the phone. Her aim was to discover more about the killer’s psyche, the better to perhaps understand how he could commit such shocking deeds.
Cadle, 72, has now revealed Watts’ dark “fantasies” and how they could have fueled his desire to eliminate his entire family.
Prior to the murders, Watts had engaged in an affair with Nichol Kessinger. In some of his prison letters to Cadle, he claimed he and his mistress were having sex three or four times a day.
As per an interview with the Daily Mail, Cadle, a grandmother, described the relationship between Watts and Kessinger as ‘very sexual, very twisted, very mixed up’ , suggesting this was ‘part of why I believe he did what he did.”
Furthermore, Cadle stated her belief that Watts got a thrill from telling her about his sex life, as well as his crimes.
“I think there’s some sort of fetish there,” she explained. “To say things to shock people. And he told me, who he saw as a mother figure, those details about different sex acts he did with a woman.”
In 2020, Cadle published a book titled The Murders of Chris Watts, including in its pages letters wherein Watts had detailed his desire to murder his wife, and the initial, failed attempt at killing his daughters.
A former cellmate of Watts’, Dylan Tallman, told how Watts had embraced religion after being called out on television by American journalist Nancy Grace.
“She addressed him through the TV, saying, ‘Chris Watts, I want to talk to you.’ They showed pictures of his wife and daughters,” Tallman said.
“It affected him. He fell to his knees and confessed his sins. It sounds weird, but that’s when he became a man of faith.
“I think that was his rock bottom, when he was confronted with all the things he had done and how many lives he had ruined. That was a lot for him. He turned to God after that.”
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