by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched an unusually compelling Lifetime movie
in their “Ripped from the Headlines” series (the phrase was actually coined by
the marketing department at Warner Bros. in the 1930’s to tell would-be
moviegoers that their stories were based on things that had actually happened,
and recently happened at that) called Chris
Watts: Confessions of a Killer. Chris Watts
(Sean Kleier) was a seemingly ordinary married middle-class man in Frederick,
Colorado — he had a job at an oil refinery just outside of town and his wife
Shan’ann (Ashley Williams) was a saleswoman for “Strive,” an Herbalife-style
multi-level-marketed weight loss product whose principal distinction was that
it was applied as a skin patch instead of being taken as a pill. Then, on
August 13 2018, his wife suddenly “disappeared” along with their two daughters,
four-year-old Bella (Dahlia Oldham) and three-year-old Celeste, nicknamed
“Ceecee” (Ellie McPhee). Lifetime followed this up with an hour-long “Behind
the Headlines” documentary on the real case which showed just how much the
screenwriter, Barbara Marshall, took from the actual dialogue as it survives on
tapes of the police interrogations, including a polygraph test, the police put
Chris through and ultimately learned — and got him to confess — that he had
strangled his wife in their bed and afterwards killed both daughters by
smothering them in a blanket and hiding their bodies in oil drums on his work
site.
Having watched previous dramas about how police will fixate on one
particular suspect and “interrogate” them, essentially browbeating them into
confessions to crimes they didn’t actually commit, it was interesting to watch
the same technique being used on someone who was definitely guilty — though a)
when a person is murdered under these circumstances the police almost always suspect the spouse or significant other, and b) as
my husband Charles pointed out, no one else in the dramatis personae had a motive to kill the Watts family (unless, he
rather macabrely joked, it was an Herbalife distributor trying to eliminate the
competition). I can’t really fault the filmmakers, writer Marshall and director
Michael Nankin, for not giving us much of an inside into What Made Chris Run —
just why he committed such a
heinous crime (he was actually convicted on his own guilty plea of four murders, including that of his unborn son Nico —
though I must say as a pro-choice person I’m nervous about the whole idea of
declaring a fetus a “person” and charging the killer of a pregnant woman with
an additional murder for killing it) — but then I’m not sure anyone really knows that, and that includes Chris Watts
himself. The two things that seem to have sent him off the rails were the
upcoming birth of his son — which he’d originally been happy about (there’s a
video — apparently a real one, since Shan’ann was a big Facebook person and
much of the last year or so of her life survived in documentation on home videos
she’d posted to Facebook — of her wearing a T-shirt quoting the opening line of
Britney Spears’ song, “Oops — I did it AGAIN!”) but later got scared of
assuming the additional responsibility of caring for a third kid; and a
co-worker named Nichol “Nikki” Kessinger (Chloe Van Landschoot) with whom he
had an affair.
It’s not all that clear whether Nikki was Chris’s only
extra-relational interest — or whether he was only interested in women, since
on August 29, 2018, after Chris was in police custody but before he’d
confessed, a then-unidentified man came forward and told CNN reporter Ashleigh
Banfield that he’d had a Gay affair with Watts for nearly a year (https://www.queerty.com/man-claiming-secret-lover-accused-wife-killer-chris-watts-attracted-male-20180829?utm_source=Queerty+Subscribers&utm_campaign=87f8364a06-20180829_Queerty_Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_221c27272a-87f8364a06-430235561).
The man wasn’t originally named but he was later in a May 2019 follow-up to Inside
Edition as 29-year-old Wyoming resident
Trent Bolte (https://www.queerty.com/second-man-claiming-sex-family-killer-chris-watts-talking-police-20190308?utm_source=Queerty+Subscribers&utm_campaign=26a1e7aea3-20190308_Queerty_Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_221c27272a-26a1e7aea3-430235561),
and the possibility that Watts was having affairs with several people — and not
all of them were women — puts a quite different “spin” on the case than the one
we get here, which shows Nikki as his only affair partner and motivates their
get-together by his loneliness when Shan’ann visits her family in North
Carolina and leaves him alone for several weeks.
As it is, the story is told so
much from Chris Watts’ point of view we almost feel for the guy — we get the
impression that he had legitimate grievances and he just hideously, monstrously
overreacted. The film gives rather short shrift to the two friends of
Shan’ann’s who alerted the police and pushed them to suspect Chris Watts in the
first place — Nickol Utoft Atkinson, who reported her missing in the first
place, and another whose name I can’t recall but who was interviewed on the Behind
the Headlines show; writer Marshall changed
their names to “Cassandra” and “Amber” and left pretty much unexplained why a
blond teenage boy was following the police around as “Cassandra” pointed out
locations on the Watts property and steered the police to security video
footage taken by her husband in his capacity as a Neighborhood Watch commander.
(The kid was really Nicholas Atkinson, Nickol’s son.) The big question raised
by the Chris Watts case — and it’s actually articulated in Marshall’s script —
is how well we really know our
neighbors and how our media-conditioned idea of evil is quite different from
the reality of people who commit murders. Chris Watts wasn’t a monster
per se, though he did monstrous things; he
seemed until the morning of August 13, 2018 to be an ordinary suburban worker,
husband and father, hardly a perfect man but not the screaming, obviously
insane portrait of evil we’ve been conditioned by the media to expect given
what he did. The idea that a totally “normal” person could go so completely off
the rails and do such a horrible thing not only to the wife he was cheating on
but to their children, who were as “innocent” as anyone can be in this world,
is the scariest part of the story.
The other fascinating thing about this show
is how much of the dialogue Barbara Marshall took from the actual case files,
including police videotapes; even the final scene was dramatized based on
Watts’s own confession from a jailhouse interview in Waupun, Wisconsin in
December 2018. The film also raises some odd jurisdictional issues: the two
law-enforcement officers who interrogate him are from the Colorado Bureau of
Investigation and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, respectively — and one
wonders how the FBI got jurisdiction and what part of Watts’s actions
constituted a federal crime: he
disposed of the bodies in Colorado and did not take them across a state line, which would have given
the feds jurisdiction. The film also doesn’t explain why, when his crimes
occurred exclusively in Colorado, Watts was imprisoned in Wisconsin; the
Wikipedia page on the case claims it was due to “security concerns” (as if
there wasn’t a secure enough prison in Colorado to hold him?), but as the U.S.
expands the use of private, for-profit companies to run prisons it’s actually
become common for private prisons in one state to market their services to
governments in another state and offer to house their convicts — despite the
hardship that wreaks on the convict’s relatives who have to travel a far
greater distance to visit them. The Chris Watts story raises a lot of questions about how we treat our lawbreakers and
also what can make previously law-abiding individuals “snap” and commit heinous
acts — Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase about Adolf Eichmann, “the banality of
evil,” has become a cliché but it certainly applies here — and it makes a
mockery of the idea that we can somehow “profile” people and thus determine in
advance whether they are likely to commit crimes. No one would have “profiled” Chris Watts as a potential
murderer — until he became a killer for real.
