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The Colorado man who had pleaded publicly for the safe return of his missing pregnant wife and two young daughters was charged Monday with five counts of murder.
Christopher Lee Watts, 33, of Frederick, a suburb north of Denver, was being held without bond in the Weld County Jail pending a bond hearing on Tuesday. He is also charged with a single count of unlawful termination of a pregnancy and three counts of tampering with a deceased human body.
Weld County District Attorney Michael Rourke said Monday that it was “way too early” to discuss whether prosecutors would seek the death penalty.
The murder charges relate to the deaths of Shanann Watts, 34, Bella Watts, 4, and Celeste Watts, 3. Watts was charged with two counts of murder for each of the girls, the second counts specifically citing the death of a child who “had not yet attained twelve years of age and the defendant was in a position of trust.”
The causes of death weren’t made public, but prosecutors alleged that Shanann Watts died “as a result of the unlawful termination of her pregnancy.” Defense attorneys, meanwhile, sought DNA swabs of the children’s necks, informing the court that they had engaged an expert specializing in strangulation.
The body of Shanann Watts, who Rourke said was last seen alive on Aug. 13, was discovered on the property of the oil and natural gas company that Christopher Watts worked for, prosecutors said.
Defense attorneys indicated in court documents that the girls’ bodies were found in an oil well filled with crude oil. The oil company, Anadarko Petroleum Corp. of Texas, fired Christopher Watts the day he was arrested. Rourke said they were killed on Aug. 12 or 13.
The Wattses presented themselves as a happy family on social media, but a bankruptcy filing from 2015 indicated that they were in significant financial distress, with debt eating up most of the couple’s combined income. They said in the bankruptcy filing that they had two savings accounts with less than $10 and a joint account with less than $870.
Watts briefly kept up the facade after his family were reported missing last Monday, telling reporters that he was “torn up inside” and that he wanted “everybody to just come home.” But shortly before he was arrested, police alleged that Watts had confessed to having killed all three of them.
While some friends said there was no indication that Watts might be capable of harming his family, a friend of Shanann Watts’ said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Monday that there were recent red flags and that Shanann Watts wondered whether her husband had been cheating.
“He wasn’t being the loving Chris that he normally was,” the woman, Nickole Atkinson, said her friend had told her. “He wasn’t touching or hugging or doing stuff like that.”
Atkinson said she was likely the last person to have seen Shanann Watts alive after she dropped her off at home from a late business trip at about 2 a.m. on the day she went missing.
Shanann Watts missed a doctor’s appointment later that day, Atkinson said, and when she called Christopher Watts about the family’s whereabouts, he seemed unfazed.
She said Christopher Watts told her that the girls were on a play date but that he didn’t specify with whom.
In the months before her death, Shanann posted regularly on social media about her love for her husband, whom she married in 2012 and called her “rock.”
Atkinson said that it was all a facade and that she should have pressed her friend about what was really happening before it was too late.
“I didn’t want to think that they weren’t coming back,” she added.