And yet his family remained insistent that he couldn’t have possibly done it.
“There’s not one person you can talk to that will say anything about this kid,” mom Cindy Watts, who like his father Ronnie believed his original version that he only killed his wife after she murdered their kids, told ABC 11.
“It’s hard for me to believe that he would hurt them girls no matter what,” Ronnie agreed. “The story he told me that night, I believed it: The way he looked at me, the way he was crying, I believed it.”
Following his plea, she said, she worried what would happen to her son who spends 23 hours a day in his cell under “Close Watch Protocol,” a technical name for suicide watch. While he had access to a communal newspaper during his once-a-day outing to the common room, in his cell he had just two personal effects: a bible and a photo of his slain wife and children.
“He was normal,” Cindy insisted, “he didn’t have a temper, he was just easy-going like his dad. He’s not a monster.”
That’s a term she seems to reserve for her former daughter-in-law. Claiming that Chris changed after meeting his future bride in high school, Cindy said she could be abusive, manipulative and worked to isolate him from his family. Her interactions with Shannan often fraught, she said, “It was a very hard relationship.”