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    PEOPLE True Crime Stories
    PEOPLE True Crime Stories
    PEOPLE True Crime Stories
    Ebook276 pages1 hour

    PEOPLE True Crime Stories

    By Meredith Corporation

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    About this ebook

    From notorious offenders to great escapes, True Crime Stories takes you behind the headlines of some of the shocking stories that have riveted the nation with investigative reporting from People magazine's crime team. Discover the latest on the investigation of the Golden State Killer, Wisconsin teenager Jayme Closs, who escaped from the predator who abducted her from her home and murdered her parents, and the latest on Chris Watts, who confessed to murdering his wife and children so he could start a new life with his girlfriend, and more. Plus: The best of Oxygen's popular crime shows Cold Justice and The DNA of Murder with Paul Holes.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMeredith Corporation
    Release dateApr 3, 2020
    ISBN9781547851386
    PEOPLE True Crime Stories

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      Book preview

      PEOPLE True Crime Stories - Meredith Corporation

      family

      Chapter One

      KILLER IN THE FAMILY

      COPS KNOW TO KEEP AN EYE ON THE SPOUSE, THE PARENT AND THE CLOSE FRIEND. THE TIES THAT BIND CAN LEAD TO VICIOUS CRIME

      BEHIND THE SMILE Chris and Shanann Watts (in their 2012 wedding photo) seemed happily married—but the husband secretly wanted his pregnant wife out of the way.

      Deadly Betrayal

      HUSBAND, FATHER, MURDERER

      AFTER HE CLAIMED THAT HIS PREGNANT WIFE AND TWO YOUNG DAUGHTERS HAD DISAPPEARED, CHRIS WATTS CONFESSED TO THEIR BRUTAL KILLINGS—PART OF A TWISTED PLAN TO START HIS LIFE OVER WITH A NEW GIRLFRIEND

      With Shanann and the girls, Celeste and Bella first played dumb about his family’s fate, then claimed he killed Shanann after he caught her strangling Celeste.

      ATTRACTIVE AND OPENLY AFFECTIONATE, Chris and Shanann Watts seemed to have a picture-perfect marriage for the social media age—they had even met on Facebook, when he sent her a random friend request. By the summer of 2018 the couple had welcomed two adorable daughters, Bella, then 4, and 3-year-old Celeste—called Cece—and were expecting a son they planned to name Niko. Warm and gregarious, Shanann generated scores of online posts showcasing her loving husband. I couldn’t imagine a better man for us, she wrote on Instagram in April 2018. As their friend Kris Landon told People, They were the couple that you’d look at and then turn to your husband and be like, ‘Why aren’t we like that?’

      That idealized image was shattered forever in the summer of 2018. On Aug. 13 Shanann, 34, Bella and Cece were reported missing from their Frederick, Colo., home. For 48 hours loved ones pleaded online and on TV for help finding the mom, who was 15 weeks pregnant, and her little girls. Last night I just wanted to hear the knock on the door, Chris Watts told Denver's 9News.com. I just wanted to see those kids barrel-rushing me and just giving me a hug and knock me to the ground.

      The next day Chris Watts was in jail for murdering his family. Police had discovered all three bodies on a property owned by Anadarko Petroleum, the oil-and-gas company where he worked. Grilled by cops, Watts initially confessed that he’d strangled Shanann in a rage after seeing her choke Celeste and finding Bella’s body blue and sprawled on her bed. But the truth uncovered by investigators was even more macabre: Chris was having an affair with a coworker, Nichol Kessinger, and had slaughtered his wife and children in order to start a new life.

      Watts pleaded guilty to the murders of Shanann, Bella, Celeste and his unborn son, and on Nov. 19, 2019, he was sentenced to life behind bars without possibility of parole. We loved you like a son. We trusted you, Shanann’s mother, Sandra Rzucek, told Watts as he sat, head down, at the defense table. Your children loved you to the moon and back.

      It’s hard to comprehend the depravity of Watts’s crime, which sentencing judge Marcelo Kopcow called perhaps the most inhumane and vicious of all the thousands of cases he had seen. Early on Aug. 13 Shanann, who sold health supplements for a living, had just returned from a weekend business trip when Watts killed her in their bedroom. The horror she felt as the man that she loved wrapped his hands around her throat and choked the life out of her must’ve been unimaginable, Weld County district attorney Michael Rourke told the court.

      Watts drove his wife’s body, along with the sleeping girls, to the remote oil-company property, where he buried Shanann in a shallow grave. Then he smothered his daughters in the truck—first Celeste, then Bella. Lacerations suggested the 4-year-old bit her tongue multiple times as she struggled to get away, according to an autopsy report. Indeed, Watts told authorities that whenever he closes his eyes, he hears his older daughter begging him not to kill her—Daddy, no! Watts shoved his daughters’ bodies through 8-in. hatches of separate oil tanks.

      That same morning he called the girls’ school to unenroll them and contacted a Realtor about selling the family’s house. Then he texted with his girlfriend about their future and Googled vacation deals using a Groupon. Shanann may have suspected Chris’s infidelity—she told friends something was amiss. He has changed. I don’t know who he is, she texted one a day earlier. He hasn’t touched me all week. Kessinger, who was not implicated in Watts’s crimes, was placed in witness protection; she has moved out of state under a new name.

      So has her ex-boyfriend. For his own protection, Watts was transferred to the Dodge Correctional Institution in Wisconsin, once home to serial killer Ed Gein, the inspiration for Psycho’s Norman Bates. I pray that you never have a moment’s peace or a good night’s rest in the cage you’ll spend every day of your life in, Shanann’s brother Frankie told Watts at sentencing. Kept in solitary confinement, Watts may have decades to be haunted by little Bella’s last words. He’s left alone with his thoughts for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, a source who knows Watts told People. He’s in his own private hell.

      DOUBLE LIFE Cops found photos of Watts and Nichol Kessinger taken on a secret getaway stored in a fake calculator app on his phone.

      SHIFTING STORY Chris Watts in court in 2018

      NEW LOVE Nichol Kessinger (with Watts) cooperated with police. She barely knew the man she had only recently begun dating, she told The Denver Post.

      GONE HOME The graves of Shanann, Bella and Celeste Watts in Aberdeen, N.C.

      FAMILY ANGUISH Chris’s mother, Cindy Watts (with scarf, at his 2018 sentencing), told her son she hates his crime but I have always loved you, and I still do.

      LIFE IN PRISON Watts (seen in court with Shanann’s mother, Sandra Rzucek) agreed to plead guilty to the murders to avoid a death sentence, prosecutors said.

      SHANANN PUT A CROWN ON YOUR HEAD, BUT THE DAY THAT YOU TOOK THEIR LIFE, GOD REMOVED THAT CROWN

      —SHANANN WATTS’S MOTHER, SANDRA RZUCEK

      1982 Murder Mystery

      A FAMILY DIVIDED

      FOR NEARLY FOUR DECADES THE VICIOUS MURDER OF BARBARA MENDEZ WENT UNSOLVED. BUT WITH HELP FROM THE OXYGEN SERIES COLD JUSTICE, HER HUSBAND WAS FINALLY CONVICTED AND HER DAUGHTERS FOUND CLOSURE

      Robin Mendez in his 2018 arrest photos. Watch Cold Justice, Oxygen, Saturdays, 6 p.m. EST.

      WHEN BARBARA MENDEZ’S BOSS at the former Park City Credit Union in Oneida County, Wisc., went home sick on April 28, 1982, she left the 33-year-old mother of two in charge of locking up the branch for the first time. Sadly it would also be her last: Later that evening Mendez’s boss found her brutally beaten body at the credit union office. Though more than $2,000 in cash had been stolen, more than $17,000 was left sitting in a partially opened safe just feet from where the victim lay, raising the question of whether Barbara was killed during a robbery or if she herself was the intended target.

      With no murder weapon ever discovered and the most obvious suspect in the crime,

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