Every Town - MICHIGAN'S Most Prolific Serial KILLER - The Sunday Morning Slasher

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

Today we have an interesting one that I know is going to stick with you for a long time. So let’s head over to Michigan and dig into the case of Carl Eugene Watts. A.K.A The Sunday Morning Slasher. 👀 Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://youtu.be/Z_QwSt0Nlpc 👁 Check out our movie AN ANGRY BOY: https://www.anangryboy.com 💀 MERCH: https://scary-mysteries-merch.dashery.com 💀 Scary Mysteries SECRET VAULT: https://www.patreon.com/c/scarymysteries/collections    🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT⁠ 👁 Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg⁠ 👁 TikTok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald⁠ 👁 Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial⁠ 👁 X: ⁠https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1⁠  🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at ⁠[e-mail]⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Every town has a dark side. The man we're about to talk about might just be the most prolific serial killer the United States has ever known. It's not Ted Bundy or John Gacy or Jeffrey D. Dahmer. Those names are burned into American culture. But this one, this one surpasses them in almost every single way. Carl Eugene Watts isn't a household name. There are no movies about him, no documentaries people argue over online. What makes this tale so disturbing isn't just how many victims there were, but how close the system was to letting him walk away Scott Free. Now, hey guys, it's Andrew. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Everytown.

today, we got an interesting one that I know is going to stick with you for a long time. So, let's head to Michigan now and dig into the case of Carl Eugene Watts, aka the Sunday morning slasher. Carl Watts was born back on November 7, 1953 in Colleen, Texas. His father was a strict man, a private in the army. His mother, Dorothy, was the opposite of that. She taught kindergarten art. The kind of job that meant construction paper, finger paint, and kids bringing home projects that barely survived the walk from the bus stop.

When Carl was barely two years old, his parents split up, and that's when Dorothy packed what she could and moved north to Inkster, Michigan, a working-class suburb just outside Detroit. And she took Carl with her, and there she remarried a mechanic named Norman Caesar, and together they had two daughters. From the outside, it all looked fine enough. This modern family had a steady household. Parents who worked, kids who went to school, really nothing that would make you stop and think something terrible was taking shape inside that house. But when Carl was eight years old, something did occur that his family would later point to again and again. The moment they believed, everything changed. He got meningitis. If you're not familiar with it, meningitis is a brutal infection that attacks the brain and spinal cord.

In the early 1960s, around the time Carl got it, it was often fatal, and his case was severe. His fever climbed so high, doctors worried about permanent brain damage. He endured repeated spinal taps, painful invasive procedures, and was kept isolated for weeks because of how sick he was. One of his younger sisters caught the same illness and bounced back quickly, but Carl, he didn't. When he finally came home, his family noticed it right away. He simply wasn't the same kid. The outgoing talkative boy they remembered was totally gone.

And his place was someone quieter and withdrawn. A child who seemed distant, like part of him never fully came back from the hospital. His grades collapsed as he struggled to focus. Eventually he had to repeat a grade. And then the nightmares started. except to Carl, they weren't nightmares. Watts told doctors he had these reoccurring dreams, ones where he was fighting off what he called evil women.

In his mind, they weren't people, they were forces, wicked spirits that he had to battle. The dreams were extremely violent and graphic, but when he woke up and here's the weird part for a young kid, he didn't feel afraid. He didn't feel shaken or disturbed. He said he felt good, calmer, better than before he went to sleep. They never stopped happening,

and by the time he was 12 years old, the dreams didn't stay in his sleep anymore. He started thinking about them when he was awake, fantasizing, replaying them over and over in his head. That's about the time he began following girls around his neighborhood, observing them and keeping track of where they went. And that's what he did for the next three years, the whole time fantasizing about what he was.

would do to them if he got them alone. On June 29th, 1969, Carl was 15 years old and working a paper route. That morning he knocked on the door of a 26-year-old woman named Joan Gave. When she opened it, he attacked her without warning. He beat her and kicked her, and then, just as suddenly, he stopped. Carl just turned around and walked away like nothing had happened. It was like he gave into his impulses for a moment, but then had the sense enough to realize what he was doing was wrong. Joan called the police immediately, and officers went to the Watts House, picked him up, and sent him off to the Lafayette Clinic, psychiatric hospital in Detroit. And there, doctors evaluated him. What they found was a 15-year-old boy with an IQ of 75, just above the threshold for what

was then classified as intellectual disability. They noted a delusional thought. They noted a delusional thought, process, though they stopped short of diagnosing full psychosis. When they asked him why he attacked Joan, Watts didn't offer much. He just shrugged and said he just felt like beating somebody up. One psychiatrist put it plainly in his notes. Watts, he said, was a paranoid young man struggling to control strong homicidal impulses and a serious threat to society. It's a pretty clear warning, and yet on his 16th birthday, they released him, sent him home with instructions to attend outpatient therapy, and he barely went. Somehow, Watts managed to graduate from high school in 1973, and he was 19 by then. His grades were

awful, and everyone knew he was using drugs, but he was good at sports, good enough to land a football scholarship to Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee. He lasted exactly three months there. The school kicked him out after multiple women reported that he was stalking and attacking them. And there's more. That same year, a female student at Lane College was murdered, stabbed to death. A lot of people on campus believed Watts was responsible, but there wasn't enough evidence to charge him with anything.

After that, Watts bounced around. He spent some time in Houston, then came back to Michigan and enrolled at Western Michigan University. in Kalamazoo in the fall of 1974. It's like he was fighting, trying to live normal, but of course he was anything but. When you know it, once he got to WMU, almost immediately, the attack started again. On October 25, 1974, a woman named Lenore Nazaki heard a knock on her apartment door. She opened it, with a chain still on and there a man stood asking for someone by the name of Charles.

She told him no one by that name lived there, but the man was persistent. In trying to end the interaction and not be offensive, she offered to grab some paper so he could leave this Charles character a note. The moment she unhooked the chain, he lunged at her, choking her until she passed out. She survived, though, because once again, Carl walked away. And five days later, the next victim wouldn't be so lucky, because at the very same apartment complex that Lenore lived at. 20-year-old Gloria Steel was found dead in her apartment, and she'd been stabbed 33 times in the chest. After that on November 12th, another woman,

Diane Williams answered her door to a man asking for Charles. Same setup. He attacked her too, but she fought back hard enough that he ran. As he drove off, she caught a look at his car, a tan Pontiac Grand Prix. Both Nazak, and Williams later picked Watts out of a lineup. The police arrested him and charged him with assault and battery, and during questioning, he admitted to attacking around 15 other women that said nothing about Gloria Steele's murder. His lawyer, Adam, committed to Kalamazoo State Hospital, where psychiatrists diagnosed him with antisocial personality disorder, and warned once again that he was extremely dangerous and likely to hurt people again.

Watts was deemed competent to stand trial, and he pleaded no contest to the assault charges, served a year in county jail, and was released in 76. The murder charge never came, there just wasn't enough evidence to make it stick. When he got out, Watts moved back in with his mom and stepdad and inkster. In 1979, he got a woman pregnant, an old childhood friend. They had a daughter together, but as you can imagine, the relationship didn't last. Not long after that, he married a woman named Valeria Goodwill, and from the beginning the marriage was a mess. Later Goodwill described Watts's behavior as strange and unsettling.

He constantly rearranged the furniture, almost compulsively. He'd take knives and hack apart their houseplants. Melted candles directly onto the table, and he'd scatter trash across the floor and just leave it there to rot. That marriage lasted six months before she'd had enough. What she didn't know was that by then, Watts was already killing regularly. On October 31st, 1979, a 44-year-old woman named Gene Klein was walking home from a doctor's appointment. It was the middle of the day in Gross Point Farms, a quiet, affluent suburb, and someone attacked her on the sidewalk and stabbed her 11 times with what appeared to be a screwdriver.

driver. She died right there in the street and police had no leads. In early 1980, once moved to Ann Arbor, about 40 miles west of Detroit, and that's when the violence really escalated. On April 20th, 17-year-old Shirley Small was stabbed twice in the heart outside her home. On July 13th, 26-year-old Glenda Richmond was stabbed 28 times outside her apartment. Then, on September 14th, 30-year-old Rebecca Huff, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, was found outside her place with around 50 stab wounds. All three attacks happened in the early morning hours. All three women were just steps from their front doors, none were robbed and none were assayed,

just sudden, overwhelming violence, and then nothing. By this point, the pattern was impossible to ignore. the Ann Arbor newspaper started calling him the Sunday morning slasher. It became glaringly obvious at that point because of the wound pattern. And again, time of morning, Sunday morning, a couple of months apart, that we had a serial killer on our hand. Police then formed a task force, and that was led by Detective Paul Bunton. But they were almost empty-handed. No witnesses, no physical evidence.

and more importantly, no clear motive. The victims range from teenagers to women in their 40s, different races, different backgrounds. The only real constants were that they were women, and they were attacked at the same time of day. Then Bunton got a call from a sergeant who'd worked one of the Kalamazoo cases back in 74. The similarities were hard to dismiss,

and Bunton started digging in to Carl Watts. At the time, Watts was working for his stepfather's trucking company. He'd married, he'd been divorced. On paper, he looked like a regular guy just getting by, but Bunton wasn't convinced. In October of 1980, police in Canada reached out to investigators in Michigan because they'd been dealing with a string of attacks in Windsor, Ontario, just across the border from Detroit. Women there were being slashed and stabbed. Most survived, but barely.

And Bunton noticed that Watts' car had crossed into Windsor multiple times, and almost every time it did, an attack followed. One survivor, a woman named Mary Angus, picked Watts out of a photo lineup, though she said she couldn't be completely certain. Then on November 15th of 1980, two patrol officers in Ann Arbor spotted a Brown Pontiac Grand Prix, moving slowly behind a female student walking home. She noticed it too and ducked into a doorway. The officer has pulled the car over, the driver's license was expired, and the plates were out of date, and it was Carl Watts. When they searched the car, they found screwdrivers and wood filing tools, and then they found something else. A book with Rebecca Huff's name carved into the cover. She was a 30-year-old grad student stabbed more than 50 times just a month prior.

All this, though, wasn't enough to change. charge him with murder, but it certainly made him the primary suspect. Police placed Watts under round-the-clock surveillance from there, and they even planted a tracking device in his car, and for months they followed him everywhere. What they saw was unsettling. Watts would drive hundreds of miles in a single night, circling neighborhoods, crawling through streets, searching, hunting. He knew that he was a suspect in my eyes, if nothing else, and he He was suspecting that he was being followed. He was suspecting a lot of things.

It also became clear that he knew he was being watched because the murders in Michigan stopped completely. In the spring of 81, Watts quit his job and moved to Columbus, Texas, about 70 miles outside Houston, looking to shake his tails and start somewhere fresh. Detective Button immediately contacted Houston police and sent everything he had. Watts' criminal history, photographs, details about his car,

and a full breakdown of the Michigan murders. And he warned them plainly. Watts was a predator, and he needed to be watched. And Houston police did, well, basically nothing. But look, understanding what Houston was like in 1981 is important. It had the highest murder rate in the entire country of the time. And police were completely overwhelmed, underfunded, understaffed, and drowning in cases.

When Button's warning showed up, it probably went into some filing cabinet and just sat there. Mott's found work as a mechanic for an oil company, and on weekends, he drove into Houston and started killing again. A lot. Okay, so, we're going to go through these because it shows you just how insane this killing spree actually was, so here we go. On September 5, 1981, 22-year-old Linda Tilly was found drowned in the swimming pool at her apart apartment complex in Austin. Authorities ruled it an accident. A week later, 25-year-old Elizabeth Montgomery was stabbed while walking her dog near her Houston apartment. She managed to make it back inside, but she bled to death shortly after. And two hours later, 21-year-old Susan

Wolf was stabbed in the arm and chest while carrying groceries to her apartment, and both women died just steps from their front doors. In January of 82, 27-year-old Phyllis Tam was found hanging from a tree near Rice University. Watts would later confess that he strangled her and then staged the scene to see what cops would do. At the time, they never suspected she had been murdered at all. That same month, 25-year-old Margaret Fosse was found dead in the trunk of her car on the Rice campus. She'd been struck in the throat with such force that her windpipe was crushed. Also in January, Watts attacked a woman named Julius Sanchez as she was changing a flat tire along the highway. He slashed her throat and left her there, and somehow she survived.

February 7, 1982. 20-year-old Elena Samander was found strangled, her body dumped in a trash bin near a bar she'd visited earlier that night. In March, 14-year-old Emily LaQuas disappeared while walking to her new job at a restaurant. Her body wasn't found for five months, hidden inside a culvert. On March 31st, 20-year-old Mary Castillo was found strangled in a ditch. April 15th, 21-year-old Yolanda Gracia was found stabbed to death in her front yard, still holding a bag with her work shoes inside. The next day, 32-year-old Carrie Jefferson was strangled and stabbed after finishing her shit.

at the downtown post office. Watt's buried her along a bayou. On April 21st, 25-year-old Suzanne Sourles was grabbed outside her apartment. Watt strangled her, but wasn't sure she was dead. To make certain, he forced her head into a flower pot filled with water, and then he buried her.

On May 23, around 4 in the morning, 20-year-old Michelle Medea was choked to death outside her apartment. and watched her inside and left her body in the bathtub. Later that same day, he broke into another apartment in the same complex. 21-year-old Lori Lister had just gotten home from work when he grabbed her outside and choked her unconscious. He attacked me like just before I reached the staircase

because he didn't know if I was upstairs or downstairs. And he came behind me, but then he pulled me underneath into this patio area here where we were kind of hidden behind the fence there. He pulled her inside and then ran into her 18-year-old roommate, Melinda Aguilar. He attacked her, too. And Aguilar went completely limp and played dead. Watch used wire hanger to tie her hands behind her back. And then, one of the details investigators would never forget,

he clapped his hands and jumped up and down, visibly excited about what he thought he was about to do. He left Aguilar there, went back to Lister, dragging her into the bathroom and turning on the water. While Watts focused on the tub, Aguilar managed to free her hands. She ran to the balcony, jumped from the second floor, screaming for help. A neighbor heard her, rushed inside and pulled Lister from the bathtub just in time. Police arrived moments later and caught Watts as he tried to flee. So they arrest him and charge him with attempted murder and burglars.

with intent to commit murder. They realize who they're dealing with, as prolific serial killer, but as one problem prosecutors face, Watts was incredibly careful. He almost never left physical evidence, and there were no fingerprints at the scenes and no witnesses to the actual killings,

no DNA linking him to the Houston murders. And prosecutors looked at what they had and didn't think they could win a murder trial, and they were worried he'd walk. Of course, they don't tell Watts that. They tell him they have him locked in on multiple murders and offer to cut him a deal. If Watts confessed to the unsolved murders and show police where the bodies were, they'd give him immunity for those murder charges.

He'd plead guilty to burglary with intent to commit murder instead, and he'd get a 60-year sentence. At the time, everyone thought that was good enough. Watts was 29 years old. A 60-year sentence meant he'd die. behind bars, most likely. So, what does he do? Well, Watts took the deal. Over the course of about a week, Watts confessed to 13 murders in disturbing detail,

12 in Texas and one in Michigan. He led detectives to three different graves and described exactly how he killed each woman, what he did with their bodies, the tools he used, and he showed no remorse. When investigators asked him why, Watts said the women had evil in their own. eyes, just like the evil he saw in his dreams when he was a kid. And he claimed that by killing them, he was freeing their spirits. And the whole time, he kept hinting that there were more, a lot more. Later he claimed he'd killed 40 women, then 80. Eventually, he stopped counting altogether. Investigators believed the real number could easily be over a hundred. I mean,

this guy attacked multiple women on the same day several different times. On September 3rd of 1982, true to their word, Watts was sentenced to 60 years in prison. But this isn't where the story ends. In 1989, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reviewed Watts's case and found a technicality. When he accepted the plea deal, no one had told him that the bathtub and water he used to try to drown Lori Lister, qualified as a deadly weapon under Texas law. Because of that mess-up, his conviction was reclassified from violent to non-violent. And in Texas, non-violent offenders could earn three days off their sentence for every day served, as long as they behaved. Watts behaved. In fact, he became a model prisoner and accumulated

good time credits at a staggering rate. The 60-year sentence was quietly carved down piece-by-piece. By 2006, Watts was eligible for release at the age of 52. After confessing to 13 murders and hinting at dozens more, he was on track to serve just 24 years. He was going to walk free. Back in Michigan, prosecutors went into overdrive. Watts had immunity for the murders he confessed to in Texas, but that protection didn't extend north. If Michigan could tie him to even one killing, they could stop his release. cold. A task force reopened, more than 200 unsolved cases across Michigan and Canada,

coming through decades of files, reports, and half-forgotten leads, anything that might hold up in court. Then in early 2004, a man named Joseph Foy saw a news story about Watts's possible release. I'm watching TV, and it's the nightly news, and this thing catches my eye of this black man being led into a courtroom, and I just yelled at him. wife. That's the guy that killed that woman. And Foy lived in Ferndale. And on the night of December 1st, 1979, he looked out his window and saw something he never forget.

While I was on my back porch, I seen the man raise his hand and bring it down in a slashing motion. And for a split second, the attacker looked up and their eyes met. When Foy called police immediately, he worked with a sketch artist and gave investigators everything he could remember, but the case went cold. But now, nearly 25 years later, his memory, combined with what investigators knew now, was enough. Watts was charged with the first-degree murder of 36-year-old Helen Dutcher, the woman stabbed to death in that Furndale alley. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. And two days later, prosecutors announced they were charging him with another murder, the 1974

24 killing of glorious steel, a western Michigan university student stabbed 33 times. In July of 2007, Watts was found guilty again. A second life sentence, no parole, and justice, finally. But it didn't last long. Just months later in September of 07, Carl Eugene Watts died of prostate cancer in a hospital in Jackson, Michigan. He was 53 years old. He never fully confessed to everything he did. That's what makes this case so messed up. Because based on what investigators know, the patterns, the timelines,

the confessions that kept changing, Carl Watts may have been one of the most prolific serial killers in American history. A man who killed for decades, a man who nearly walked free, and a man, most people, have never even heard of.

So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Everytown. I appreciate you tuning in. If you want more insane true crime stories, well, we got a ton, so subscribe and take a look around. Our YouTube channel, Scary Mysteries, is all our videos. If you're listening to this podcast, you can find our other one called Scary Mysteries. And for our exclusive vaults collection, with some super dark stories, go check us out at patreon.com slash scary mysteries. Hope you all learned something from Carl's story today. Remember to come back next week for another episode.

every town filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories, because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.