Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags: The Chris Watts Murders

Episode Date: November 9, 2021

Chris Watts’ wife and daughters were missing for three days before their bodies were found on the dad's former jobsite at Anadarko. Shanann Watts was buried in a shallow grave. The girls were stuffed through hatches into oil tanks. During the days before the bodies were discovered, Watts played the grieving dad, giving interviews, begging for information on his missing family. What no one knows is Chris Watts is having an affair, and no longer wants to be part of a family unit. Murder was his way out. Ultimately, he tells police where he deposited their bodies. Today on Body Bags, former death scene investigator and forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan walks us through what investigators would have found at Anadarko. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. One of the greatest gifts any man can be given is a beautiful wife, two adoring daughters, and a child yet unborn. For years now, the case of Chris Watts has puzzled many of us, wondering what his motivation was

to literally go in and destroy this beautiful gift he had been given. My name is Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Joining me right now is my good friend, Jackie Howard, producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie, what can you tell us about this case? As you said, Joe, Chris Watts and his wife, Shanann, had two daughters, four-year-old Bella and three-year-old Celeste, and Shanann was expecting a baby boy. Shanann had been out of town and came home, and that's where things go sideways. Shanann misses a doctor's appointment, and when a friend goes over to check on them, Shanann's car is still in the driveway with the car seats in it.

And Chris Watts tells her that Shanann had taken the kids on a play date. At that point, the friend knew there was exactly a problem because the car seats were still in the car in the driveway. Police are called. We know now, Joe, that Chris Watts strangled his wife in their bed after sex, which leads us to wonder how was he able, yes, she was pregnant, but how was he able to so easily overpower his wife? We know that she traveled, so she was tired. She had just gotten home. She is pregnant. And we also find out later on that over the weeks before her murder, he had been dosing her with oxycodone. Any of these things alone would have taken her strength away. What happens

when you've got all of these things going on together? Jackie, I think the thing that comes to mind for me in regards to Shanann in this case is a term that you hear many times, bone weary. Can you imagine? She is in the advanced months of pregnancy. She's been carrying her unborn son, Nico, for all this time, and she's still on the road going to sales meetings and this sort of thing. And that evening, she had, in fact, returned from a sales meeting. Her friend had dropped her off. Can you imagine how weary she was?

And then to come home into this environment with a husband who she was troubled with, they didn't have a solid marriage anymore. There were dark storm clouds on the front. And then just think about this for a second, because we really couldn't get real good toxicology off of Shanann's body. But if in fact he had been dosing her with OxyContin along the way, perhaps maybe to induce a premature birth at some point in time, but tonight plan was different.

He was going to dose her with this, and then she was going to drift off into a very, very deep sleep. And, you know, from the reports that we have heard, they may have had intercourse just prior to this. And this goes to this idea that he's kind of drawing her in the entire time, trying to make her feel safe and secure. Maybe one last time, maybe she thinks that everything's going to be okay, but she's not going to have the will or the physical ability to fight back. So when he wrapped his hands around her throat, and there is evidence that she was choked on the right side, there was some hemorrhage of her neck. She couldn't fight back. As a matter of fact, it took so little pressure in order to squeeze the life out of this pregnant mama

that we didn't even see any evidence of petechial hemorrhages in her eyes, which normally come about with an asphyxial death, this increased pressure. So that gives you an indication, perhaps, of how little pressure it took to subdue her and eventually end her life. Joe, we actually do not know specifically whether or not Chris Watts dosed his wife with oxycodone that day. It has been suspected. He told someone, a pen pal that he'd been writing to, that he had been trying to poison her. But with the tissues that remained when Shanann's body was found, could they prove that? Her body was in such a state of decomposition that it's actually an unprovable point.

When you recover decomposed tissue, it's a real uphill battle to retrieve sufficient sample in order to conduct toxicology examination. Just think about it. The more compromised the body is by natural decay that's occurring out in the elements, and she was, in fact, in the elements buried in a very shallow grave, those elements that we would normally examine after death are compromised to the point where you can't really appreciate if, in fact, there was a lethal level of any kind of substance in her system. Now, you might be able to find out, and these are two terms we use in forensics and forensic toxicology, you might perhaps can qualify a substance in the body and say, yes, we have an opiate in the system. But because the tissue is

so compromised, you're not necessarily going to be able to quantify that. And that means apply a specific number to that agent in the body. Well, why is that important? It's important because there are what are called therapeutic doses. That is, if you go to the doctor and they give you medicine for a hurt back or maybe a busted knee, there's a certain amount that's acceptable to be taken into the body that is not going to put you into a lethal range, but you can't achieve that with decomposed tissue. More than likely, there is no blood left where you can draw it up and examine it in its normal state post-mortem. That is a non-decomposed status. And then the tissue that's left behind, you can't really examine it for it, at least to put a fine point on it with those

numbers. Is it a lethal level? Is it a non-therapeutic level? Those things that would give us an indication that maybe this was an intentional overdose. When you're looking at a body that has been buried in a shallow grave versus six or eight feet deep, when we think about how people are normally buried, although yes, they're normally in a coffin, but a body that's been buried in a shallow grave versus someone that was much deeper. What is the difference that you are going to be able to see forensically? Is there going to be a difference between a shallow grave and a deep grave? You know, the fact that Shanann was buried in a

shallow grave brings all kinds of problems along with it, as opposed to somebody digging down traditionally, what you think about, you know, six feet deep, we've heard that term before, when you get down into that kind of substrata, what they call substrata, you're just barely on the surface here. It doesn't afford a lot of protection for the body. So any kind of insect life that's out there, the body may as well be on top of the ground because for a fly that's coming by, it's nothing for the fly to sense this body buried under a very thin layer of soil. So you're going to still have, for instance, larval development that turns into maggot, for instance.

You're going to have burrowing animals that might not be quite as prone to get down to six feet with, you know, just a very shallow area. They can dig down very easily. And then, you know, out in this area, you've got things like coyotes, and they've got this tremendous sense of smell. So it's not really going to inhibit their ability to sense this body. And with that comes the fact that the body will be further compromised. It's just kind of logic. You know, that earth, the deeper in the earth that you go, the body becomes more and more protected from what's going out on the surface and what's happening. And then you still have the environmental factors. If the body is in a shallow grave, the body's not going to be very well protected from heat either. Maybe not to

the degree that you would appreciate if the body was laying out on bare earth, but still heat is going to impact the body and it's going to speed up the process of decomposition. As you said earlier, Joe, there is coffin birth. Talk to me about what that is, how that happens, and the state of Shanann's body when she is discovered. Here's what the scene would have looked like. And, you know, I had an opportunity to hear some of the comments were made by many of the investigators that were out there. And they're still to this day, Jackie, just troubled down to their soul over what they saw. And we're just talking about Shanann's grave.

Shanann, according to them, was essentially buried in a very, very shallow grave. There was not great effort that was taken in this. And we can learn a lot about an individual based upon this preparation, if you will. They have described her body as essentially being dumped in there like a pile of garbage. We do know that she was wrapped in a sheet and lying on one side of her body. It's not, you know, when we think about burial in a modern context, we think about people being honored, don't we? We think about people, say, perhaps't we? We think about people, say, perhaps being laid on their back, maybe their hands crossed, not thrown away like rubbish. And according to the investigators, that's what they saw. It was hurried. It was frenzied.

It was disordered. And as they began to kind of peel away these levels of dirt, as they kind of began to peel away these layers of dirt that had been quickly placed over her body, and they began to pull back the sheet that she was wrapped in, one of the things they saw was the body of little Nico that she had been pregnant with. And this gives you an indication as to how decomposed her body was. When humans are in their normal state, there's a certain amount of muscle tension that's in the body. And just think about that relative to a pregnancy.

There's a certain amount of elasticity and tension that is occurring, say, for instance, in the womb, in the uterus, that retains a child in place. But as decomposition begins to set in, that tension is released because muscles, they no longer have the same continuity. And as they release, as the body of the mother begins to decompose, this tension that indwells the body naturally releases. The muscles are no longer as resilient as they once were. And suddenly we have what is called a coffin birth. So the baby is literally born in a postmortem state. That means that the mother's decomposing body has the child's body issued forth from her. It's no longer contained in.

And when the investigators pulled back that sheet, they found little Nico laying there. And they described his body as being in a state of decomposition as well, you know, no longer protected by his mother's body. Now that little fetus, that little now born child in death is exposed to the same elemental factors, the same decompositional factors as his mother's body. And there he lay in that dirt next to his mama's body. Knowing that Shanann had been dead probably about 12 hours at this point, Nico would not have been born alive, correct? That's not possible for that baby to have been born alive.

This was something that occurred post-mortem. And keep in mind, this really kind of draws a point home here. And this is why this is just one of the points along this that makes this so gut-wrenching, is the fact that when Chris Watts wrapped his hands around Shanann Watts' throat, and he caused that hemorrhage in the muscles around her neck as he squeezed the life out of her. He was, in effect, squeezing the life out of this unborn child. And it's a sad, sad ending to this life. Jackie, we've talked a little bit about Shanann and little Nico.

What do we know about Celeste and Bella? Chris Watts took his children with him in the vehicle on the way to bury Shanann Watts. But what happened once they got to the oil field is certainly disturbing. We know the girls were asking what was wrong with their mother, and then he smothered his girls one at a time. What is the difference, Joe, between smothering a child and strangling an adult, or is there any difference? That's a good question, Jackie. In forensics, we actually refer to both of these kinds of deaths, whether it's strangulation or suffocation, as an asphyxial death. And what that means is it's a deprivation of oxygen. As we say in the South, things got cut off. You know, you're cutting off the air supply.

And so that's what's actually happening here. So you're depriving these little bodies, both Celeste and Bella, of their source of oxygen. And they're believing, at least the ME is believing, that this in fact was a smothering. And it's floated around for years and years. Smothering is one of the most difficult things to detect. And you'd be absolutely right because, you know, you think about, well, how would you go about smothering these children? Well, in the case of, say, for instance, we've got Celeste, who's tiny, you know, she's only three years old. You could very simply, if you're a

grown man, particularly the size of their daddy, remember he worked out all the time. He took a lot of pride in displaying what a fantastic physique he has. They would be no match for this man. With Celeste, there was very little evidence of trauma on her little body. So it would be very simple for him to take, say, for instance, the palm of his hand or even a pillow and place it over her mouth. I think that probably in these circumstances out there, remember, the investigators believe these two children were actually alive in his vehicle as he is transporting the body of his deceased wife out to her burial spot. He could have easily placed his hand over Celeste's face, over her nose and her mouth, and deprived her of oxygen. And she would have essentially just kind of gone to sleep. And this is what's referred to as an anoxic death, which means that you're literally depriving the brain of oxygen.

The brain requires oxygen in order to do all of its functions, including keeping our heart beating. Now, Bella is a completely different story. And I'll tell you why. There's something that's very, very significant here from a forensic standpoint that gives us an indication of what may have happened to her and what he actually did to her. She had no evidence of petechiae. And that is those little vessels that are bursting in her eyes due to pressure. However, there is something significant, and it has to do with her mouth.

Investigators report, and the ME reports, that she had some trauma to her tongue. You know, how else would she get trauma to her tongue unless she's probably resisting. And not only in her tongue, but there's a little piece of tissue that attaches our upper lip and our lower lip to the gums respectively. And that's referred to as frenulum. And it's a classic thing that you look for in suffocation or smothering. Her upper frenulum was actually lacerated or torn. And if people at home will just kind of take the tip of your tongue, put it outside your gum and in between your lip, and you can actually feel that little piece of connective tissue.

If there is pressure directly applied to the mouth with a hand, for instance, and you're fighting, you're resisting, you're trying to save your own life. You're struggling to get a breath that can actually tear. And I find it very interesting that out of the essentially four lives that he ended, little Bella fought the most. She was only four years old. Just let that sink in. We, you know, we were all four years old at one point in time. Maybe we have children or grandchildren that are four. You can think about the size of a child, a little girl like this, but she fought. And you know what? The one thing that they found on Chris Watts at night when they interviewed him, the one bit of evidence when they talked to him the next day, he had a small mark on his neck. And I've often wondered if that was not Bella in just a last gasp, a desperate gasp to try to reach up and fend her daddy off, her father, her father, the man that was there to protect

her and love on her and watch after her as she grew up. She's trying to fight him off, perhaps, and she scratched him on his neck. And they have evidence of this. They took pictures of that. They've never actually linked the two, but I've often thought about that because she did fight back. She fought back to the point where this tissue in her mouth was essentially lacerated, and there were little areas of hemorrhage, which means it happened in life. Joe, you just confused me by saying that there was no petechial hemorrhage in her eyes. How is that possible? And you're going to have to explain that to me because you've repeatedly said that when people are smothered, that's one of the first things that forensic experts look for.

So how was it possible if she was smothered that there's not any? I'll tell you why, Jackie. I'm a simple guy and I kind of like word pictures. And so the way I always try to explain petechial hemorrhaging is if you think about a water hose that's attached to your house and you've got a nozzle on one end and it's closed and you turn up the water pressure on this faucet outside your house and the hose might begin to expand, but yet you turn it off and suddenly the water that's trapped in there, you can release it if you squeeze the nozzle. There has to be sufficient amount of time that goes by where this internal pressure is placed on these tiny little vessels. These vessels are actually located in what's referred to as our capillary beds, which are these tiny, tiny little vessels.

You've got what are called arterioles and you've got what are called venules. And what happens is that most of the time with particular hemorrhaging, if you put enough pressure on them, they're going to literally burst. And in the little areas of tissue that surround these vessels, that blood seeps out. It seeps out into what's called interstitial tissue. And it presents, you can't make it go away. It's not like a crime scene that you go back and you try to clean it up. That doesn't happen. With these little pinprick hemorrhages, it's going to be there forever and ever. Amen. The trick here, though, is that in all three of these cases where Chris Watts put his hands on these two children, these two little precious baby girls and his precious wife that's laying there asleep,

is that he didn't render enough pressure for a long enough time, for a long enough time, for these vessels to burst in their eyes so that they could appreciate. You're not always going to get these little focal areas of hemorrhage like that. It just is not necessarily going to happen. So what you're telling me, Joe, is that the difference in the two is that it took less pressure and less time to kill a child as opposed to an adult? Yeah. And you're absolutely right, Jackie. It did take less pressure and less time because they're weaker. And so it only takes a smaller amount of time to compromise their airway, their ability to uptake oxygen so that their brain can still function, as opposed to someone that might be more robust, like a full grown man, an adult, if you will. And, you know, Shanann is not too far removed from this category because we reflect back and think about what we think may have been her status. We know that she was tired.

We know that she was advanced in her months relative to pregnancy. And also there's that specter that she may have had some type of drug on board that would cause her to be in a weakened state, cause her to be, I don't know, just probably barely semi-conscious. So yeah, it's not going to take you begin to think about these two little girls whose lives were snuffed out by their daddy. But one of the really puzzling and most horrific parts to this whole story is what he did with the bodies afterwards. You're absolutely right, Joe. Let's start at the beginning. We know that once the little girls were dead, that he first stuffed their little bodies through an eight-inch hatch into an oil tank. Let's just start there. How do the bodies of two little girls, four and three years old, fit through an eight-inch hole?

Think about it. That's about the size of a dinner plate. It's horrific. You know, and it was the Anadarko oil fields out there, and it's a desolate area. I mean, it is. You talk about being removed. It was removed from the rest of civilization and just kind of sits out there. It kind of rises up out of this prairie out there.

Why there? Well, he knew that it would be isolated. This guy was familiar with this area. He had a full awareness of what went out there. And these tanks are essentially storage tanks for raw petroleum. He takes these two children out there and he's got a problem. What am I going to do with them? Well, he had already dug a very shallow grave for his wife, not too far away from the base of these tanks, and quickly deposited her body in that area.

Now, what do you do with these two children where there's two tanks? Now, these things are made very specifically. They're kind of high. They're probably approximating maybe 20 feet in height or so. And on top, they have these little hatches, and they've got a very interesting name. They're called thief hatches. And he popped a latch on the thief hatch on each one of these tanks. And with Bella in particular, she's four years old.

So her body is certainly larger and more robust than her three-year-old sister, Celeste. How do you get her into this hole? Well, the only way I can really describe it is the fact that she was actually jammed down into that hole. And how do I know that? You know, the investigators reported that one of the first things that they noticed when they got out there to that site and they had been given the information that this is where these two little angels were. They looked at the thief hatch where Bella's body had been deposited and right along the rim there, some of her hair was caught in that. And it wasn't just like a strand. I don't think it was like a clump of hair. Now, how's that accomplished? Well, her body is obviously, just think about how big

eight inches is. That's the diameter on this thing. How, in fact, do you drive the body of a four-year-old through this tiny opening? Well, it was hard. And the evidence of that is the fact that her hair was left behind in the edge, which means that it was torn away. It was ripped away as he's jamming her down through this hole. And another thing that's demonstrated is when they finally do examine Bella's body, she's got scrapes where the edge, the metal edge of that thief hatch caught hold and it left these marks on her body would there have been broken bones joe we think about what he would have had to have done to get bella through that thief hatch isn't that an appropriate appropriate term considering this guy stole the life of these of these two little

precious girls he would have had to have taken bella probably would not have needed to break bone, but he would have at her shoulders kind of folded her in toward the center in order to facilitate getting her down. She probably would have went in head first. The metal edges of this thing caught hold of the tissue, the skin, and it raked it away. And it left these scratches on her body as she fell through this thing. Finally, I'm sure that it took a tremendous amount of force on his part to get her down there. And looking at the drop from this thief hatch that you're talking about, Joe, as he stepped the bodies down, you said that most likely he would not have had to have broken bones to get the children inside those hatches. But what about the drop? We don't necessarily know how far they fell if they went right into the contents of the oil tank.

So would there have been broken bones from the drop itself? I think that the fact that they're falling, though it is a kind of a height, you know, we're looking at maybe 15 to 18 feet in height that they're falling from the opening of the sea hatch, they're splashing down into a fluid environment. So that's actually going to break the fall to a certain degree, provided that they don't strike the bottom of this tank, you know, the bare bottom, you know, I think that there's enough of a layer of fluid there that kind of cradle the bodies when they hit. So you're not going to see any kind of fracturing or impact injuries necessarily related to this. And one other thing you have to

keep in mind, there's not going to be any hemorrhage related to the fall either, you know, because this is a post-mortem event. He had killed these girls before he put them in there. So I don't know that we would ever really know. And, you know, not to mention the bodies were greatly compromised. Their status was greatly compromised when it came to the medical examiner, the coroner being able to examine these bodies once they got them back to the morgue. That leads us to the next point in our discussion, Joe, is what happened to the bodies of those two little girls once they were inside those oil tanks. How caustic is oil and what is it going to do to human tissue

that is left in there for any period of time? The horrific part to this is that, first off, when you go into this environment, this is raw petroleum. And there's a lot of stuff that comes off of raw petroleum that we create in this world that we use. It's not just gasoline. It's not just lubricant. It's all kinds of stuff that it's used for. But something that's naturally occurring is what's referred to as aromatic hydrocarbons. And in this environment, two

substances stick out. One's called toluene and another is called benzene. And if you've ever heard of benzene, you know that it can be used to polish things with. It is very lethal. Taluene as well, and it causes things to break down very quickly. It eats into tissue, not to the same degree as certain acids do, but it causes the tissue to become greatly compromised. It softens things. It begins to promote this kind of coming apart. And then you marry that up with natural decompositional process.

And these bodies are going to wind up in what's referred to as kind of a macerated state, which means that the decomposition has gotten to the point, this chemical effect has gotten to the point where the structural integrity of the body. It's really hard. The structural integrity of the body is so compromised that assessing the body at the autopsy is going to be quite the chore. So are you telling me then, Joe, that their bones would have been pliable? I don't know that the bones would have necessarily been pliable in this case. I know that the soft tissue surrounding them, though, just imagine, if you will, the worst sunburn that you've ever seen in your life where tissue is beginning to peel away. It's almost like a chemical burn that's taking place.

And you would have seen layers and layers of tissue that would have been coming off just by touching it. Now, it's not going to necessarily appear that way initially, but when you begin to move these bodies around, the bodies are very fragile. So tissue will begin to fall off of the bone, if you will, in certain cases, depending upon the length of exposure they have to these horrible chemicals that they're found in. You know, they had to drain both of these tanks when this occurred. They had to call the EPA out because this is such a dangerous situation. So not only did this guy murder his children and his wife. But where he placed Bella and Celeste is such a volatile environment that

all of the workers, all of the investigators, the people that work out there that have control over these tanks, because they had to be drained, all these people were exposed to these chemicals. And just think about that just for a second. This is the ultimate in a selfish act. You know, and nobody really talks about this. These investigators that are out there and the workers that are out there are traumatized to the fact that they're having to extricate these little girls out of these tanks after they know they've been sitting out there all night long after the tanks have been drained. They've got to go out there and do that.

But they've got to put on hazmat suits in order to facilitate this. It was a monumental undertaking. And I can tell you these investigators and workers, they're going to be scarred by this for the rest of their life. Joe, I've heard you talk about this case before. And one of the things that always rings out for me is the phrase, the term degloved. I've heard you reference that word in regards to these girls. Explain that to me. We've got two layers of skin. We commonly think about, we think about the epidermis, which means top. It's the top layer. It's like when you get a blister on your hand, that's the top layer of the skin that's rising up, it's filled with fluid. Then you've got the dermis,

which is that underlying surface beneath the epidermis. It's a bit more robust. It's thicker. With deep clothing, it can happen in a couple of ways. You find it a lot in water environments where you have a body that's found out in a lake or a river, maybe the ocean, and that skin begins to come away, that dermis begins to come away from the underlying connective tissue, you can actually peel an entire hand. You can actually peel the surface of tissue off of a human hand. And that's where we get this term degloving. It's like you're peeling a glove off of a hand. And this can happen over the entire body when you're talking about exposing them to things like benzene and toluene and this sort of thing. The whole body can become degloved so that the tissue, that outer layer of tissue becomes peeled away.

And you can actually appreciate this. It's almost like the skin is just being kind of rolled off, if you will. And I've seen this in environments when you bring bodies into the morgue that have been exposed to chemicals like this. You have to be very, very careful because it's all very fragile. It'll come off in an instant. You can actually take your gloved hand, you have a rubber glove on in the morgue, and touch it to the surface of these bodies. And sometimes when you pull your hand away, part of that tissue comes off on your gloved hands.

And it really magnifies this in that sense that when they got these bodies back to the morgue, this is something that we're having to deal with. There's a horrible smell that comes along with this. You would probably have to wear some type of not just regular mask, but probably a respirator if you're going to do this examination. And the evidence that you're talking about here is so fine, Jackie. I mean, we're talking about, you know, we talked about petechiae. Are the eyes even preserved well enough, the tissue around the eyes, so that you can see if there are any particular hemorrhages?

Are you able to appreciate the neck to the degree you need to, to see if there was any kind of hemorrhage relative to manual strangulation? And, of course, in Bella's case, they were able to see this trauma to the tongue and that little piece of tissue, the frenulum in her lip. They were able to appreciate that. But a lot of this other evidence is gone. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan,

and this is Body Vax. You're listening to an I heart podcast.