The Watts Family Murders: The Weeks Before and the Evidence After

On August 14, 2018, the day after Shanann Watts and her daughters were reported missing, her mother called police in Frederick, Colorado. According to a police report later released by prosecutors, Sandra Rzucek said her son-in-law was acting "weird" and out of the ordinary, and that she suspected foul play.

The next night he was under arrest. Christopher Lee Watts later pleaded guilty to murdering Shanann, 34, who was 15 weeks pregnant with a son the family planned to name Nico, and their daughters Bella, 4, and Celeste, 3. This post sets out the timeline from the court record and from the nearly 2,000 pages the Weld County District Attorney's Office released after sentencing, including what those pages show about the weeks before.

The Weeks Before

Shanann worked from home selling a nutritional product called Thrive for the multi-level marketing company Le-Vel. Chris was an operator for Anadarko Petroleum. The couple bought their five-bedroom house at 2825 Saratoga Trail in Frederick in 2013 and filed for bankruptcy in 2015.

At the end of June 2018, Shanann took the girls to North Carolina for an extended family visit. Chris joined them for the last week. By then he was seeing Nichol Kessinger, who worked for an Anadarko contractor. Kessinger later told The Denver Post that he said he was separated and nearly finished with a divorce, that they saw each other four to five times a week from early July, and that he called from North Carolina to say the divorce was final. He had never filed for divorce.

The released records show what Shanann was living with. In texts to friends she described her husband as cold and distant, said he had rebuffed her affection and would not hold her hand during an ultrasound, and worried about having a third child with a man who seemed uninterested. On August 5 she texted him: "You don't fall out of love in 5 weeks." A few days later she told a friend that Chris had said he was "scared to death about this third baby." When the friend raised the possibility of another woman, Shanann said she had asked him and he had denied it.

He was also lying about where he was. On Saturday, August 11, while Shanann was on a work trip to Arizona, he left the girls with a babysitter and told people, police among them, that he had gone to a Colorado Rockies game and then to dinner with friends. Kessinger told police she was the one who had dinner with him that night.

Read together, after the fact, those records show a marriage under strain and a husband hiding an affair from his wife and lying to the woman he was seeing. At the time they were visible in pieces to different people, and only some of them to Shanann. They do not explain what he did, and his own explanations have changed more than once.

August 13

Shanann got home from Arizona at about 1:48 a.m. on Monday, August 13. Her friend and colleague Nickole Utoft Atkinson dropped her off. Later that morning Shanann missed an obstetrics appointment and stopped answering texts. Atkinson went to the house at about 12:10 p.m., got no answer, contacted Chris at work and called Frederick police. An officer arrived for a welfare check at about 1:40 p.m., and Watts left work to let police into the house.

Inside were Shanann's purse, wallet, keys and medication. Her phone was later found between the couch cushions. Her car, with the girls' car seats in it, was in the garage, and her wedding ring was on a bedside table.

Watts told police that he and Shanann had an emotional but civil conversation about separating that morning. That afternoon he texted Kessinger that his family was "gone" and that Shanann had taken the girls to a play date. A neighbor's security camera had recorded Watts loading his work truck before dawn. When the neighbor played the footage for police with Watts in the room, he said he had been loading tools for work. The next day he stood outside the house and told a Denver television station, "I just want them back."

The Confession and the Recovery

The FBI and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation joined the case on August 14. On the morning of August 15, Kessinger called the Weld County Sheriff's Office to tell investigators about the affair, and met with FBI agents that day. Watts took a polygraph examination and failed it. After talking with his father, Ronnie, he told investigators that he had strangled Shanann in a rage after seeing her on a baby monitor strangling Celeste, with Bella "sprawled" and blue on her bed. District Attorney Michael Rourke later called that account "a flat-out lie," and Watts's guilty plea admitted all three murders.

He was arrested that night. He told investigators where he had taken his family: an Anadarko oil site in rural Weld County. Before his confession, a police drone had already spotted a bedsheet in a field near the tanks that matched sheets found in the trash at the house. Shanann was found the next day in a shallow grave. Bella and Celeste were found inside oil tanks nearby. Anadarko fired him the day he was arrested.

The Charges, the Plea and the Sentence

On August 20, Rourke charged Watts with nine felonies: five counts of first-degree murder, including two for the deaths of children under 12, one count of unlawful termination of a pregnancy, and three counts of tampering with a deceased human body.

On November 6, 2018, Watts pleaded guilty to all nine counts. Rourke had traveled to North Carolina to discuss a possible deal with Shanann's parents and brother after the defense approached him, and he said the family's wishes were the most compelling factor in not seeking the death penalty. He quoted Shanann's mother: "He made the choice to take their lives. I didn't want to be in the position to make the choice to take his."

On November 19, 2018, District Judge Marcelo Kopcow sentenced Watts to five life terms without the possibility of parole, three of them to run consecutively, plus 48 years for the unlawful termination of a pregnancy and 36 years for tampering with the bodies. In December 2018 he was moved out of Colorado for safety reasons to Dodge Correctional Institution in Waupun, Wisconsin, where he remains.

His Later Accounts

On February 18, 2019, a CBI agent, an FBI agent and a Frederick detective interviewed Watts at the Wisconsin prison. In that account he said he strangled Shanann at home, then drove the girls, still alive, to the oil site and killed them there. He said the affair had contributed. In 2021 a pen pal, Cheryln Cadle, told Inside Edition that he had written to her that he planned the killings for weeks. Those letters are his own claims, relayed by a third party, and have not been tested in court.

After

In November 2019 a Weld County judge ordered Watts to pay Shanann's parents, Frank and Sandy Rzucek, $6 million in a wrongful death suit he did not contest. The family filed it to keep him from profiting from the killings, not expecting to collect.

The family has also faced years of online harassment from people pushing theories about the case. In 2025 Shanann's brother, Frankie Rzucek, won a harassment and defamation case in the United Kingdom against a YouTuber, and the court ordered the channel shut down. "I never saw so much evil in this world," Frank Rzucek said in a 2026 Fox Nation special. "Towards us, towards other victims."

Shanann, Bella, Celeste and Nico are the people this case is about. What happened to them is settled by a guilty plea. Why it happened rests mostly on accounts from the man who lied to everyone around him, and those accounts have changed.

Sources

1. Chris Watts case: What we learned from unsealed affidavit - CNN, Aug. 20, 2018
2. Christopher Watts girlfriend Nichol Kessinger speaks - The Denver Post, Nov. 15, 2018
3. Christopher Watts pleads guilty to killing his pregnant wife, two daughters - The Denver Post, Nov. 6, 2018
4. Christopher Watts murder case file released - The Denver Post, Nov. 21, 2018
5. Christopher Watts family murders: highlights of police documents - The Mercury News, Nov. 26, 2018
6. DA releases 2,000+ pages in Chris Watts murder case, revealing texts with wife - CBS Colorado, Nov. 21, 2018
7. Christopher Watts sentenced to life in prison - NBC News, Nov. 19, 2018
8. Wisconsin DOC confirms where Chris Watts is being held - KKTV, Dec. 2018
9. Watts family murders - Wikipedia
10. In prison interview, Chris Watts tells FBI, police about murders - Denver7, 2019
11. Chris Watts owes parents of slain pregnant wife $6 million, judge rules - NBC News, Nov. 2019
12. Shanann Watts' father says family faced years of 'evil' online hate - Fox News, March 23, 2026

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