Chris Watts, the “guy next door” child killer who killed his pregnant wife Shanann and strangled his two young girls to death as they pleaded for their lives, has been shown to have a troubling inner life by a psychologist. “True evil doesn’t always shout,” the expert said. In family photos, it occasionally smiles.
When he brutally killed his wife and dragged her body down the stairs in front of their two girls in August 2018, the father of two said he had “no control over” what he did. “What’s wrong with mommy?” Bella, then four years old, said in a sad moment shortly before she was killed by her own father.
Jessen James, a psychologist, former psychiatric nurse and human behavior expert told sources: “Chris Watts is one of those cases that stops you in your tracks – not just because of the horrific actions, but because on the surface, he looked like the guy next door. That’s where the real concern lies.”
Their lives were not flawless, in fact. An affair had been going on with Watts. He described how Shanann challenged him about his adultery to the police. Shanann frantically threatened to never see their children again after he confessed to informing her that he no longer loved her, saying, “You’re never gonna see the kids again.”
According to Jessen, his behavior and his affair together reveal a profound lack of courage and repression. He said: “When you look at someone like Watts through a psychological lens, what’s immediately clear is that there’s a deep disconnection between identity and reality. He wasn’t just living a double life with another woman – he was emotionally dissociating from his current one.”
Watts stated that after he had ruthlessly killed Shanann, he told his kids that she was just ill. He covered Shanann’s body with a sheet, parked his truck in the driveway, and moved his wife’s body to the floorboard behind the backseat.
Won’t anybody think of the family annihilator Chris Watts? It wasn’t his fault that he murdered his pregnant wife and two little girls because his wife nagged and he lost a bunch of weight and wanted to have sex with other women. The way narcissist think.🤦🏻♀️ pic.twitter.com/bOMPTx11cA
— AskAubry 🦋 🐆🦝 (@ask_aubry) August 25, 2024
Jessen added: “It’s not always the monsters we see coming that are the most dangerous – it’s the ones who blend in, who smile at the neighbors, who post family photos like everything’s perfect… while something else entirely is going on beneath the surface. That kind of psychological detachment, where someone can compartmentalise and shut down empathy entirely, points towards antisocial personality traits. Some might call it sociopathy or psychopathy, but labels aside, he displayed classic signs: lack of remorse, emotional manipulation, and a terrifyingly calm demeanor under pressure.”
When Watts sat his daughters Celeste and Bella on the truck’s seat, Bella asked him the heartbreaking question, “Is mommy okay?” Watts described this to investigators. The Colorado father killed his children and disposed of their small bodies in oil tanks after driving to his oil job site and burying his wife in a shallow grave. He alleged from behind bars that Bella cried out the last, excruciating cry, “Daddy, no!” in response to his effort to suffocate her.
In 2018, Chris Watts murdered his pregnant wife Shanann by strangulation, and their two children Bella and Celeste by smothering them.
This is a clip from an interview where he desperately begs for their return, despite being the one responsible for their deaths and disposing of… pic.twitter.com/komj4ybEJ8
— Morbid Knowledge (@Morbidful) May 1, 2024
He claimed that each time he shuts his eyes, he sees this sight. “Fantasy always crashes into reality,” Jessen cautioned. He was apprehended by the police shortly after the bodies of his wife and children were discovered.
Jessen said: “The affair, the new life, the fantasy of freedom, it all pointed to the classic traits of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Grandiose thinking. A sense of entitlement. And above all, an unwillingness to take responsibility for his decisions like a real man would. Instead of dealing with the fallout of leaving his wife- financially, socially, emotionally- he chose what he likely saw as the “cleanest” solution: remove the problem entirely. That’s not just evil. That’s cowardice on a catastrophic level. What makes this case so disturbing is how normal he seemed.”
Watts has talked about the time he killed his pregnant wife since his arrest and incarceration. Watts confessed: “Every time I think about it, I’m just like, did I know I was going to do that before I got on top of her? It just felt like there was already something in my mind that was implanted that I was gonna do it and when I woke up that morning it was gonna happen and I had no control over it.”
