Chris, then 33, killed his pregnant wife Shanann, 34, and two girls, Bella, four, and Celeste, three, in August 2018 after having an affair with 30-year-old Nichol Kessinger. Their bodies were found by a drone at an oil and gas site with Shannan's body found in a shallow grave and, horrifyingly, Bella and Celeste’s little bodies were found stuffed inside oil tanks near their mother.
At first, he admitted only killing his wife, saying he ‘went into a rage’ and strangled Shanann after he saw her strangling Celeste. But in November 2018, he was handed three consecutive life sentences without eligibility for parole.
Author Cheryln Cadle struck up a correspondence with Watts after he was jailed and now the letters they exchanged form the basis of her new book, Letters From Christopher, due to be published next week.
Obtained by DailyMailTV, in one of the letters Chris describes how he killed his entire family after having an argument with his wife.
'August 13th, morning of, I went to the girls' room first, before Shanann and I had our argument. I went to Bella's room, then Cece's room and used a pillow from their bed (to kill them). That's why the cause of death was smothering. After I left Cece's room, then I climbed back in bed with Shanann and our argument ensued,' he wrote.
'After Shanann had passed, Bella and Cece woke back up. I'm not sure how they woke back up, but they did. Bella's eyes were bruised and both girls looked like they had been through trauma. That made the act that much worse knowing I went to their rooms first and knowing I still took their lives at the location of the batteries.'
He also describes the murder of his wife in grisly detail, saying what motivated him was thought of being with his mistress.
'Isn't it weird how I look back and what I remember so much is her face getting all black with streaks of mascara?' Watts wrote.
'All the weeks of me thinking about killing her, and now I was faced with it. When she started to get drowsy, I somehow knew how to squeeze the jugular veins until it cut off the blood flow to her brain, and she passed out...
'I knew if I took my hands off of her, she would still keep me from Nikki.'
But instead of being wth his mistress, instead Chris found himself the prime suspect and then his mistress became instrumental in his arrest.
When the affair had started two months earlier, Nichol said Chris wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Nichol said she believed he was separated and in the process of divorcing his wife. It was only when Shanann went missing that she claimed she learnt the truth.
‘When I read the news, I found out he was still married and his wife was 15 weeks pregnant,’ Nichol told the media.
That's when she decided to report him to police and Chris' disgusting act was discovered and he was arrested.
To avoid the death penalty, and with Shanann’s family’s agreement, he pleaded guilty to murdering his daughters as well as his pregnant wife.
At the sentencing hearing, Shanann’s family called Chris a ‘heartless monster’ and said they believed he should spend the rest of his life behind bars.
‘I trusted you to take care of them, not kill them,’ Shanann’s father said to Chris in court.
In November 2018, he was handed three consecutive life sentences without eligibility for parole.
‘This is perhaps the most inhumane and vicious crime that I have handled out of the thousands of cases I have seen,’ the judge said. ‘Nothing less than a maximum sentence would be appropriate.’
