The Watts Family Murders

On 13 August 2018, Chris Watts reported his pregnant wife Shanann Watts and their two young daughters, Bella (4) and Celeste (3), missing from their home in Frederick, Colorado. Watts gave a series of televised appeals for their safe return and appeared cooperative with investigators — appeals that were later shown to be a performance. Within days, inconsistencies in his account, and the discovery that he'd been having an affair with a coworker, led investigators to focus on him directly.

Confronted with polygraph results and surveillance footage, Watts confessed. He admitted strangling Shanann in their bed after she confronted him about the affair, then driving her body and their daughters to a work site operated by his employer, Anadarko Petroleum, where he smothered both girls before disposing of Shanann's body in a shallow grave and the girls' bodies in oil storage tanks. All three were recovered within days of his confession.

Watts pleaded guilty to nine charges on 6 November 2018 in exchange for prosecutors not seeking the death penalty. On 19 November 2018 he was sentenced to five life sentences — three to run consecutively — plus 48 years for unlawful termination of a pregnancy and 36 years for tampering with a deceased body, making his release impossible. The case became the subject of the Netflix documentary American Murder: The Family Next Door (2020), built almost entirely from the family's own text messages, social media, and police body-camera footage.