“Why?” Chris asked, completely dumbfounded and not connecting with the story. “How’s she saving them pain?”
“She didn’t want them to have to live a life without her,” Coder said.
Chris still looked puzzled.
Finally, Coder cut to the chase. He gave Chris two options to choose from. Either Chris did something to all three of them, or Shanann had done something.
“I didn’t do anything to the girls,” Chris said.
“What did Shanann do to the girls?” Coder demanded.
“Can I speak to my dad?” Chris finally said, defeated.
At this point, the entire interrogation was creeping over five hours.
“Will you promise to tell everything to your dad?” Coder asked, exchanging a look with Tammy.
Chris nodded.
Coder and Tammy left the interrogation room and went out to the lobby, where Ronnie waited. He stood up when he saw them, and they could see that he was wearing a light blue polo shirt with the words “Papa Ronnie” stitched on its breast pocket.
“Chris wants to talk to you alone and tell you what happened,” Tammy said. “Just so you know, everything in that room is being recorded.” Ronnie nodded that he understood and followed Tammy and Coder back into the interrogation room.
“Take as much time as you need,” Tammy said softly, and then closed the door behind her, leaving Ronnie and Chris alone.
Ronnie sat close to Chris and looked at him.
“That polygraph…I failed it…” Chris said in a hushed voice. “They’re not gonna let me go. They know I had an affair. I came clean about that.”
“Anything else you wanna tell them about what’s going on?” Ronnie asked, not fully prepared for the information he was about to hear.
Chris told Ronnie that the morning they had the emotional conversation, he told Shanann he wanted a separation.
“I don’t want to protect her...I don’t want to protect her, but I don’t know what else to say,” Chris said in a whisper.
“What happened?” Ronnie said softly, as if making sure he understood what he believed his son was implying. “Did she hurt them?”
“She hurt them,” Chris said. “And then I freaked out and hurt her.”
• • •
“Talk to me, Chris,” Ronnie said in disbelief. “Tell me what happened.”
“She...she smothered them...they were smothered,” Chris whispered.
“They what?” Ronnie gasped.
“She strangled them,” Chris said, changing his story.
“She smothered them, or chokin’ em?” Ronnie mumbled.
“I didn’t hear anything when I was downstairs, I came back up, and they were gone. I don’t know, like me talking to her about the separation and everything. I don’t know what else to say. Because I freaked out, and I did the same thing to fuckin’ her,” he said, trying to muster more emotion. “Those were my kids.”
Ronnie’s face looked as white as his hair.
“After our conversation, I went downstairs and heard some kind of commotion upstairs, but I didn’t think much about it. When I went back upstairs, I saw Shanann on top of CeCe, choking her. Both were blue.”
“Shanann choked the girls to death?” Ronnie said, still in shock.
“I freaked out and did the same thing to fucking her.” Chris’s voice was a loud whisper.
“Oh my God,” Ronnie whispered, putting his head in his hands briefly and taking a moment. “So, then what’d you do? Haul the bodies off or something?”
“I didn’t know what else to do. I freaked out. It’s just rage. I’m sorry,” Chris said sheepishly.
“I know you’re sorry, son.” Ronnie gently rubbed Chris on the back as he continued to sit with his head buried in his hands.
“I’ll never see the light of day again,” Chris said.
“Why did Shanann have to hurt them babies?” Ronnie said, still in complete shock. He continued to rub Chris’s back and console him. “I love you, no matter what. We’re going to find a good lawyer and see what the hell they can do”
• • •
While Chris was being questioned, a search team had been on foot and using a drone at the Cervi 319 site where they believed Chris had disposed of the bodies. The drone had picked up an area where there appeared to be white fabric, so the team went to go check it out, assuming it was related to the investigation. As they approached the large white piece of fabric, they could see it was the bedsheet from the Watts home that matched the fitted sheet that had been found in the trash in the kitchen.
Not far from the sheet, an area of dirt appeared to have been recently disturbed. While the team waited for further instructions, they received a call from CBI that Chris had confessed and was going to tell them where the bodies were hidden. Photos of the Cervi 319 site—including photos of the disturbed ground, the sheet, and two oil tanks—were sent to Chris.
Tammy and Coder asked him to mark exactly where all three bodies were. Pointing to the photos of the two oil tanks at the Cervi 319 site, Chris marked where he had disposed of Bella’s and Celeste’s bodies, one girl in each tank. The openings of the hatches of the tank were only about 8-inches wide, and he explained he had to use some force to get Bella’s lifeless body through the opening. He heard her body make a splash when it hit the oil and based on the sound of the different splashes his daughters’ bodies made, he felt that one tank must have contained more oil than the other. When Tammy asked Chris to confirm if he was positive his daughters were dead when he put them in the oil tanks, he said he was. He also confirmed that Shanann was buried in a shallow grave beneath the disturbed ground.
Officers easily recovered Shanann’s body first. She was found face down in her grave, wearing only a purple T-shirt, black bra, and blue underwear. Her body had already started the decomposition process. She had a coffin birth, and baby Nico had been expelled from her body.
On Thursday August 16, the extensive and traumatic recovery process for the bodies of CeCe and Bella would begin. This was an incredibly disturbing event for the first responders and those who were involved in the process. First, the oil tanks had to be drained.
CeCe, who had been so vibrant in her short life, was recovered first. Her body was removed, completely covered in crude oil. She was wearing a pink nightgown and a pull-up diaper and was taken out of the tank in a decontamination box with handles. The first responders patted her stomach with oil absorbent pads, which caused some of her skin to slip off. They gently wrapped her tiny body in a white sheet and put her in a body bag. They recovered Bella, who wore a pink nightgown covered in butterflies, last.
On the same day the girls’ bodies were recovered, Chris’s girlfriend Nikki was picked up at her home by CBI Agent’s Kevin Koback and Timothy Martinez and taken to the Thornton Colorado Police Department. She had asked the agents to pick her up and escort her to the station. Her father Dwayne met them there.
Nikki was wearing her thin dark hair in a messy ponytail pulled high on her head. It looked as if she had not washed it in days, and the rest of her appearance seemed in equal disarray. Her sunglasses were pushed on top of her head, and she had bags under her eyelids. She wore a gray zip-up pullover, jeans with ripped holes in them, and sneakers. Agent Koback told her she was not being investigated as a criminal suspect and that she was free to leave at any time on her own accord.
Speaking to the agents, she told Koback that when she had met Chris at the end of May or early June, he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. She said she wasn’t aware he had kids until right around Father’s Day, somewhere around the second week of June.
She thought it was cool that he had kids, she told Koback.
“That sounds sarcastic,” he said.
“No… it was kind of cute. It was like, oh he’s a daaaad…it was around Father’s Day too,” she said.<
br />
She said Chris was always excited to talk about his girls. When Chris mentioned his “significant other,” he explained they were in the process of getting a separation. This was not the same story Chris had told the officers, which was that she knew he was married when they met and when they began dating.
Nikki also told Koback that she didn’t know Shanann’s name when they met, but the records from her phone suggest that she was internet searching the name “Shanann Watts” as early as September 17, 2017, almost a full year before she and Chris started the affair. Shanann’s online profile was easy to find and completely public. Anyone doing a search on her up until the time of her death would have found a treasure trove of information about her personal life, including her third pregnancy.
Nikki told Koback that Chris would usually come to the Anadarko office in the mornings and meet with his team. That’s where she usually saw him. They would pass each other in the hallway of the office and say hi, which soon led to casual small talk. They hit it off right away because they felt they had a lot in common.
The first time they saw each other outside of work for an official date was at a park when Chris got back from a Le-Vel/Thrive San Diego trip with Shanann at the end of June.
Every time Chris spoke about his children, or even Shanann, Nikki said he was never hostile and always civil and kind. There were no red flags that would indicate he was angry with his family or wanted them gone. Chris was always calm, peaceful, and relaxed, she said, and she never once saw him lose his temper.
Although he was an introvert, he told Nikki he enjoyed talking to her because he could get out of his shell when he was with her. He felt like he could really be himself. She thought it was because they had things in common such as fitness, eating healthy, and cars. She said she would classify him as a 4 or 5 out of 10 on an introvert scale but not necessarily the extreme introvert everyone was making him out to be.
On two occasions, Nikki said she was at the Watts family home. Chris told her he was living in the basement, and they were getting ready to sell the house. Koback asked Nikki if she knew Chris’s street number or name. She said she didn’t, but her internet searches showed that she recently searched for “2825 Saratoga Trail,” the address of the Watts family home.
Nikki said Chris was very open and communicative, and in her opinion, he was different from other men because he seemed so open with his feelings. She found that refreshing because she hadn’t had the best of luck dating men in the past. He was kind and thoughtful with her and would often text her pictures of flowers because she loved them. In fact, he had texted her a picture of a sunflower, her favorite flower, from Cervi 319, the morning Shanann and the girls went missing.
She said her second and final time at the Watts house was the weekend of July 14. Nikki recalled this time because she felt incredibly uncomfortable. She remembered seeing a photograph of Shanann and the girls and thinking to herself, Why would Chris want to leave this seemingly amazing life? He has a beautiful wife and children, a gorgeous home, and an awesome job. Why would someone just walk away from that?
Nikki claimed she wanted to make sure Chris really wanted to leave this amazing life behind before he moved further in their relationship. She said she urged him to try to fix things with Shanann. Chris, apparently lying, said they had been trying to fix things for a long time, and it wasn’t working.
Nikki said it almost made her feel bad that she was engaging in a relationship with a man who described his marriage as contractual and not emotional. She wished that the contractual part of the relationship was over before she got involved with him.
She eventually backed away from the relationship, Nikki said, claiming she wanted to know that he really tried to make it work with his wife before he left his family for her. She felt some “cold feet” about her relationship with Chris after visiting his house the weekend of July 14. She said she was holding back with Chris and trying to take things slower. She also said she would sometimes allude to the future with Chris, telling him if she ever met his daughters, she would like to do things like paint pottery with them and help them grow plants.
Before Chris went to North Carolina in early August, he told Nikki that he was going to try to save his marriage with Shanann. Yet once in North Carolina, he was still in constant contact with Nikki. She said he told her that he tried to convince Shanann to work things out with him, but she refused, and that they agreed to proceed with selling the house upon their return to Colorado.
Chris had referred to Shanann as “bossy” and said he couldn’t have an opinion around her. He said he didn’t feel heard, and that Shanann was always scrolling through social media when he tried to talk to her. Chris made it sound as if he and Shanann had drifted apart over six years and were in mutual agreement that splitting everything 50/50 was a good idea. They rarely fought, he said, and were always calm.
Chris confided in Nikki about their financial troubles and bankruptcy, saying they were always “house broke,” and that Shanann had a hard time controlling her spending. He said Shanann wanted it to appear as if they lived a certain lifestyle, even though they couldn’t afford it. Chris never called her a bad mother but said the marriage lasted as long as it did only because of the children.
Nikki knew about the blow-out fight between Shanann and Chris’s family when they were in North Carolina. Nikki vaguely knew the fight had to do with Chris’s mom, Cindy, exposing CeCe to nuts despite her life-threatening allergy. Chris told Nikki when he got to North Carolina, his family didn’t pick up the phone for days. When he finally showed up at their house, he found a note that said, “Son, if you stop by, we’re at the beach.” In Nikki’s words, the Watts family “ignored Chris most of the time he was out there.”
“His own family?” Koback asked, finding it odd that Chris’s family would shun him in such a way.
“Yesss,” Nikki said, as if agreeing with Koback’s reaction. “His mom, his dad and his sister…” Nikki continued.
“What’s the significance?” he asked. “Do you know why?”
“Yeah, he said... and again, I don’t know what’s true with this man anymore and what’s not. But I asked, ‘Why are your folks ignoring you?’ because I was really concerned about it. I talked to him every day when he was out there, and I would ask him, ‘Did you talk to your family? Did you talk to your dad?’ I wanted him to see his people because it’s important. Family is an important thing. And he was like, ‘Well, they’re ignoring me.’”
Nikki was also aware that Cindy Watts (as well as Ronnie and sister, Jamie) did not show up to Shanann’s and Chris’s wedding. Chris told her it was because Cindy really didn’t care for Shanann.
Nikki admitted that in the six to eight weeks she and Chris had been involved in a relationship, they exchanged “I love you’s” several times. Nikki said Chris said it a lot more to her than she did to him. When Chris was in North Carolina, supposedly trying to patch things up with Shanann, he told Nikki he loved her. Nikki claimed her reaction to him was hesitant because she wanted him to try to work things out with Shanann. “Don’t say those words to me, try to make peace with your wife, and then lay in bed with another woman,” Nikki said she told him.
These statements were somewhat confusing because Nikki was acting like she was trying to push Chris away but at the same time willingly engaging with him and communicating with him daily.
“It’s gonna affect me long term,” Nikki said, her voice cracking for the first time. “I’m going to wake up every day knowing this mom and her unborn child, and two little girls are not around anymore, and it breaks my heart. My God…and then I have to think about the consequences of his actions and how they affect everybody else. All her family is impacted. My name is about to be slandered, for probably a while. I don’t know how long it’s going to take to heal, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s going to be hard to go out in public sometimes for a couple of ye
ars, and that really hurts me.” She started to cry. “This is a horrible, horrible thing. How dare you? And people aren’t going to understand that. They are going to say, oh you’re the woman who had this affair with a man who took out his whole family… and I take a step back and it’s like...I didn’t know! Ughhh. He’s so disgusting and I’m so ashamed of him and everything and I just…ohhh those little girls. They’re sooo little. They’re sooo little.” She then began to sob uncontrollably. “It’s so sad and she’s pregnnaaanntt. God, they’re so cute and they’re so little. Why? Why? How? How? How can you bring yourself to do that to someone who is like, that big?”
Nikki collected herself and then tried to recall her interactions with Chris the weekend Shanann went to Arizona until the present. The Saturday before Shanann disappeared, Nikki admitted she was with Chris at the Lazy Dog restaurant and her apartment when Chris lied to everyone, saying he was at the Colorado Rockies game with co-workers. Nikki said although she was pulling back from the relationship because his kids were back home, Chris wanted to see her more.
Nikki said they first went to a different Lazy Dog (there are two in the Denver area), but when they got there, she looked at the menu and realized she didn’t want to eat there. She told Chris she wanted to go to the other one instead. Interestingly, Chris felt he could be more himself around Nikki and called Shanann bossy, yet Nikki seemed to be calling the shots in her relationship with him. Chris would often go to her for advice, and Nikki would advise him on clean eating, counting calories, apartment hunting, and helping young children through divorce. Nikki’s parents were divorced when she was a little girl, so she was familiar with that experience through the child’s perspective.
Sunday night, the evening Shanann was supposed to return from Arizona, Nikki remembered hearing a television in the background when they were talking on the phone. This was odd to her because when she would talk to Chris on the phone at night, he would be downstairs sleeping in the basement, and there was no television down there. That night the thought had crossed her mind that maybe he was waiting for Shanann to come home because he wasn’t in the basement as he usually was.
My Daddy Is a Hero Page 8