Chris Watts: 8 Years Later... “I Want to Marry Again!”

Añadido: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]But but he doesn't seem to hate all women. He seems to really want a new one. What is the story about the the search for a wife? Is this is there anybody who's actually interested?

[00:00:09]>> Well, I mean, we see this all the time.

[00:00:11]You know, Chris Watts is not a badl looking person. And, you know, there's always going to be somebody who's interested in him. And so, there are women that write to him and he writes back. You know, he's actually very good at at at corresponding.

[00:00:26]>> From a maximum security prison in Wisconsin, a man who took everything from the people who loved him most is now asking for something. Something you would never expect. Look at that photo.

[00:00:37]Look at it carefully. Because that man, that smiling, ordinarylooking man standing in that yard holding his daughter like she was the most precious thing in the world is the same man sitting in a cell tonight writing letters to women. Not letters of remorse. Not letters begging forgiveness from God or from the family he destroyed. No, love letters. Courtship letters. Letters that say, and I want you to really hear this, I am still a good man. Eight years. Eight years since Shannan Bella Celeste and their unborn baby boy Nico were taken from this world by the one person on earth who was supposed to protect them. And in those eight years, Chris Watts has been busy.

[00:01:22]not reflecting, not repenting, shopping for wife. Number two, let's establish something right at the top. Because I know you, you've seen the documentaries, you've watched the interrogation footage. You know about the affair. You know about Nicl Kessinger. You know what happened on August 13th, 2018. We are not going back there today. What we are going to talk about is something that has not been given the attention it deserves. What Chris Watts has been doing for the last eight years. what he has been thinking, what he has been writing and why why some people are actually writing back. Dodge Correctional Institution, Walpun, Wisconsin. Maximum Security. It is not a place you end up by accident. It is the kind of institution built specifically for people the justice system has decided should never again walk freely among the rest of us. Chris Watts was transferred there after his sentencing and has remained there since. Five life sentences, three consecutive, two concurrent, with no possibility of parole. He is never getting out. And yet, he is planning a future. The Daily Mail recently obtained a collection of letters written by Watts from inside that prison. And when veteran journalists and seasoned true crime reporters got their hands on these letters, people who have spent careers covering the darkest corners of human behavior, even they were rattled. Not because of graphic content, not because of new confessions or explosive revelations about the night of the murders, but because of the audacity, the sheer breathtaking audacity of a man who murdered his pregnant wife and his two little girls sitting in a cell agonizing over how to present himself as someone worth loving. Let that sit for a second. Before we get into what he writes to the women he is trying to court, we need to talk about what he wrote first. Because you cannot fully understand Chris Watts, the prisoner, without understanding Chris Watts, the narrator, the man who controls the story of Chris Watts. And in his version of that story, he is not the villain.

[00:03:24]>> Chris Watts has decided he is not to blame for what happened to Shannan and to Bella and to Celeste and his unborn son. Nope. The women in his life are to blame. The Daily Mail just got its hands on some letters written by Watts at the Dodge Correctional Institute. That is a maximum security prison in central Wisconsin where he was sent and he has been there. The letters show a man determined to find anyone but himself responsible for his diabolical behavior.

[00:03:52]He actually addressed his letters to God. Zip code unknown.

[00:03:57]>> He addressed several letters directly to God. Zip code unknown, as one reporter memorably put it. And what does a man who strangled his pregnant wife and smothered his children right to God?

[00:04:08]Does he confess? Does he beg for mercy?

[00:04:10]Does he sit with the full unvarnished horror of what he chose to do? No. He complains about women. Specifically, he begins with Nicl Kessinger, his mistress at the time of the murders. He writes, "And I am quoting directly from the letters obtained by the Daily Mail. I was misled. I was tempted by a harlot. I was weak. And I allowed myself to be fooled by an evil woman. She led me from the path of righteousness. I know that you will deal with her someday. She will be judged. He calls her a harlot. He says she led him from the path of righteousness. Now, let's be precise about what actually happened because the facts matter here. It was Chris Watts who pursued Nicl Kessinger. It was Chris Watts who told her he was separated, practically divorced, and ready to move on. It was Chris Watts who concealed the existence of his wife, his children, and his unborn son from her. And it was Chris Watts when the unbearable weight of that double life pressed into who chose to resolve it in the most permanent, most devastating way imaginable. Nicole Kessinger, for her part, cooperated with police immediately once she feared something had happened.

[00:05:18]Her testimony contributed directly to his arrest. and his explanation to God eight years later is she tempted me. But it doesn't stop there. The letters reveal a pattern far broader than his resentment toward Kessenger. He directs contempt at women generally unnamed women referred to in the language of scripture repurposed as insult. Harlots, Jezebels, seductresses with smooth lips and evil hearts. He writes, "The lips of an immoral woman may be smooth, but no amount of paint on her face can disguise her evil heart." And then, this is the part that made reporters physically recoil when they read it. He turns that same energy towards Shenan. He describes her as doineering, self-absorbed. He frames their marriage not as something he was an equal participant in, but as something that was done to him, an affliction he endured. He implies not directly but unmistakably that she bears some responsibility for what happened to her. That Shannan Watts contributed to her own death. I need to be absolutely clear. Shannan Watts was 15 weeks pregnant when her husband killed her.

[00:06:23]Bella was four years old. Celeste was three. Nico never drew a single breath outside the womb. None of them caused anything. None of them share responsibility for anything. And the fact that Chris Watts all these years later is still building a theological case in which the women he destroyed are complicit in their own destruction. That is not grief. That is not reflection.

[00:06:48]That is not a man who has changed. That tells you exactly who Chris Watts is today. Not who he was, who he is. Here is where the story takes the turn that stops you cold. The same man writing those letters. The letters heavy with contempt. The letters blaming every woman in his orbit for his own choices is simultaneously writing other letters different in tone, different in temperature, warmer, softer, deliberately appealing letters to women who have reached out to him because here is a reality about maximum security prisons that most people don't spend much time thinking about. There is never a shortage of mail. Notorious prisoners, particularly those who received extensive media coverage, particularly those perceived as physically attractive, receive correspondence, significant amounts of it. Some of it from women who are curious, some from women who feel a pull they cannot fully explain. Some from women who have convinced themselves that they see something in him no one else can. This phenomenon has a name in psychology, hibistophilia. an attraction to individuals who have committed violent crimes. It is real. It is documented and it is not new. Ted Bundy, who confessed to the murders of at least 30 women, had women who attended his trial as admirers. Carol Anne Boon, who knew him personally before his arrest, married him during the penalty phase of his Florida murder trial. in the courtroom, leveraging a loophole in Florida law at the time that allowed a verbal declaration in open court to constitute a legal marriage. She later gave birth to his daughter while he was on death row. Richard Ramirez, Estis, the Nightstalker, married a woman named Dorene Lioi in 1996, years after his conviction for 13 murders. She began writing to him in 1985 and sent him 75 letters over an 11-year courtship before they married at San Quentin State Prison. Scott Peterson, convicted of killing his pregnant wife, Lacy, and their unborn son, Connor, received hundreds of letters from women during his years of incarceration. This pattern is consistent, and Chris Watts fits it precisely. But here is what distinguishes him from some of the others. He writes back consistently, thoughtfully, with what seasoned observers of his correspondents describe as genuine skill. Steve Heling, the senior reporter at the Daily Mail who broke the story of these letters and has reviewed substantial volumes of Watts's writing over the years, described him plainly as a very good correspondent. He knows his audience. He knows what register to strike. He knows what words land. And what he writes to women who reach out to him is a performance that bears almost no resemblance to what he writes to God. To these women, Chris Watts presents himself as a spiritual man. A man who has done genuine reflection. A man who was at his core decent until something pulled him off course. A man who has reckoned with his darkness. A man who is somehow despite everything still capable of love. And the centerpiece of this entire presentation that the line that reporters have said makes their stomach drop every time they read it is this. In a letter to one woman, he wrote, "I was a good husband and father. Things happened. Things happen and I am no longer a good husband and father, but I am still a good man. Things happened. I need to stop there because that phrase is doing enormous work and I don't want you to miss it." Things happened is what you say when your flight got delayed, when it started raining on your picnic.

[00:10:22]When the game went into overtime, things happened is not it cannot be a description of making the decision to strangle your pregnant wife in your own bed, of smothering your four-year-old daughter, of smothering your three-year-old daughter, of loading their bodies into your truck in the dark hours of the morning and driving them to an oil field where you work and concealing them. Your wife in a shallow grave, your daughter's inside oil storage tanks. That is not things happening. That is a sequence of deliberate, effortful, sustained choices that required an almost unimaginable level of cold resolve. And things happened is how he frames it. To a woman he is trying to impress, to a woman he may be hoping becomes the next Mrs. Watts. And according to those who have tracked this correspondence closely, some of those women are moved by it.

[00:11:15]Some of them believe him. I want to be careful here because the easiest thing in the world would be to simply dismiss or ridicule the women who write to Chris Watts. To treat it as something that only deeply confused people could do.

[00:11:27]That would be lazy and it would miss the point entirely. Understanding why this happens is essential to understanding what Chris Watts is actually doing and why it works. Hibistophilia, as I mentioned, is real and documented across a spectrum. Researchers who study it have identified several recurring patterns. For some, it is rooted in a rescue fantasy. The belief that they and only they can see through the monster to the wounded human beneath. That their love, their understanding, their patience could reach a part of him that no one else has been able to reach.

[00:12:02]There is something seductive about the idea of being the one person in the world who truly knows someone.

[00:12:07]>> It's often times what we talk about when women seem to be attracted to bad boys.

[00:12:11]It's because they want to be the special person that can turn this life around and then be able to attribute that to their own self-esteem.

[00:12:17]>> For others, the psychology is stranger and more uncomfortable. There is for some people a pull toward a relationship defined by absolute limitation. A man who is never leaving. A man who has no external life to compete with. A man whose attention when he gives it is entirely focused on you because you are the only world he has. There's a grim kind of safety in that predictability.

[00:12:41]For others still, and this is perhaps the most important category when it comes to Chris Watts specifically, the attraction is not really to Chris Watts, the murderer. It is to Chris Watts, the correspondent. The version that exists only in his letters, the spiritual, thoughtful, misunderstood man who still insists against all evidence that he is good. And this is where Chris Watt's skill becomes genuinely dangerous. He has had years, quiet, uninterrupted, purposeful years to refine this version of himself, to calibrate exactly what words to use, to understand through feedback from the women who write back what works, what resonates, what makes someone feel seen. He writes about God.

[00:13:23]He writes about redemption. He writes about being misunderstood. He writes in the vocabulary of a man doing the hard interior work of reckoning without ever actually doing any of it. Steve Heling noted that the women who are drawn to his letters tend to arrive at the same conclusion. Maybe he has changed. Maybe there is something more to him than the headline suggested. And that is the most chilling dimension of this entire story.

[00:13:48]Not that a dangerous man is writing letters from prison, but that he is good enough at it that it is working. The same pen that calls women harlots and jezebels in letters addressed to God writes tender considered correspondence to women he has never met. Telling them they understand him in ways no one else does. Same hand, same cell, same man.

[00:14:10]There is something else worth understanding here. See something that goes beyond the individual women who respond to Watt specifically. We live in a culture that has always had a complicated relationship with the idea of the redeemable monster. Movies, television, novels. Our storytelling is saturated with the narrative of the person who did something terrible and found their way back to humanity. We are culturally primed to believe in second chances, to root for transformation, to want the story to end with something that looks like redemption. Chris Watts understands this consciously or not. His letters are written in the grammar of that narrative. He is the fallen man.

[00:14:50]Boen, the man who was weak and was led into darkness, but who is beneath it all still capable of goodness, still worthy of love. It is a story we have seen told sympathetically a thousand times. The problem is that in most of those stories, the central character has actually done the work of reckoning, has actually sat with the damage, has looked the people they harmed in the eye, or at least in the mirror, and let the full weight of it register. Chris Watts has not done that. The letters make it absolutely clear he has not done that.

[00:15:22]He is performing the aesthetic of transformation without undergoing any of the substance of it. He has learned the costume. He has not changed the man inside it. And women who write to him, I I intelligent, thoughtful women in many cases, not naive women, not women who lack discernment, are responding to the performance because the performance is skilled. Because it borrows from a narrative template they recognize and find moving. That is what makes it dangerous. Not stupidity, not weakness on their part, but the fact that Chris Watts is deploying with precision a story that human beings are deeply conditioned to want to believe. We need to talk about the Christianity because it is not incidental to these letters.

[00:16:06]It is the skeleton around which everything else is built. Every letter, every self-presentation, every appeal Chris Watts makes to the outside world is saturated in the language of faith, scripture, righteousness, God's judgment, the path, redemption. And I want to be precise here because this matters. This is not a commentary on faith itself. Christianity has genuinely transformed people who have committed serious harm. Real repentance exists. Real spiritual change is possible and documented. What reporters who have spent years reading Watts's letters describe is something categorically different. It is faith as a language system, faith as protective cover, faith deployed not to illuminate what he did, but to create a framework in which what he did is always somebody else's fault, always something that acted upon him from outside, always something that God will eventually adjudicate, which conveniently removes the burden from Chris Watts himself.

[00:17:08]Look at the architecture of it. He was tempted, passive voice. He didn't choose. Something was dangled in front of him. He was weak. A human failing, almost sympathetic, not a decision, a vulnerability that was exploited. He was led astray by someone else, a woman, a harlot. The blame exits the room before it ever lands on him. He fell as if gravity pulled him down, as if the murders were something that just sort of occurred in his proximity. In every theological construction he offers, Chris Watts is the object of the sentence, never the subject. Things happen to him. Women do things to him.

[00:17:44]God will deal with those women. Chris Watts, meanwhile, is a man after God's own heart, his words, who simply found himself in an unfortunate situation.

[00:17:54]What real accountability sounds like is entirely different. It sounds like, I did this, I planned this, I carried it out, no one forced me, no one made me. I alone am responsible for the death of my wife, my daughters, and my unborn son. I will own that fully without condition, without footnote for the rest of my life. That statement does not exist in Chris Watts's letters. Not in any form, not approximated, not implied, not hinted at. The absence of it is as telling as anything he has written.

[00:18:25]Consider this. If you removed every passage of scripture from his letters, if you stripped away every reference to God and righteousness and temptation, well, what remains? Grievances, blame, a portrait of a man who believes himself to be the victim of the women around him and of circumstances beyond his control.

[00:18:43]The Christianity is not the message. The Christianity is the wrapping paper around a message that has nothing spiritual in it at all. Real faith in the context of real crime looks like victim- centered thinking. It looks like sitting with the damage you caused rather than cataloging the damage others caused you. It looks like writing a letter to Shannan's parents, not to God, whose zip code is unknown and who cannot press charges, but to the people who wake up every morning to the specific named absence of the people you took from them. It looks like asking what you owe, not counting what you are owed.

[00:19:18]None of that appears in any letter Chris Watts has written. And yet the women who receive his pages of scripture and his appeals to the Lord receive a man who sounds transformed, who sounds like he has done the interior work, who sounds like faith has changed him. That is the costume. And he wears it without visible discomfort. While Chris Watts has been writing love letters and composing his spiritual autobiography from a cell in Wisconsin, a different story has been unfolding in the world outside. A quieter story, a harder one. Shannan's parents, Frank and Sandra Rzuchek, and her brother Frankie, have had to carry something for eight years that no family should ever have to carry. They lost Shannan. They lost Bella. They lost Celeste. They lost Nico, a grandson and nephew who never had the chance to exist in the world beyond the 15 weeks he spent growing inside his mother. And they have had to do all of that grieving while living in a world where the man responsible for it all is in a prison cell somewhere carefully composing letters presenting himself as good telling women that things happened asking in the language of courtship for a second chapter. Sandra Rzuchek has spoken publicly in the years since briefly and painfully. She has said she does not understand how anyone could do what Chris Watts did. She has spoken of trying to hold on to the love rather than the rage, of choosing when she can to focus on who Shannan was rather than on what was done to her. That is a depth of grace that most of us will never be called to find. And it stands in complete contrast to the man in that Wisconsin cell surrounded by his Bible and his letters and his carefully maintained image of himself as still fundamentally a good person who has apparently decided that enough time has passed that he is ready. Bella was four years old. Celeste was three. Nico never got a birthday. And the man responsible for that is writing love letters. Here is the question that stops a lot of people cold when they first encounter this story. Can he actually do this? Can a man serving five consecutive life sentences in a maximum security prison legally get married? The answer, and brace yourself, is yes, potentially. In the United States, prisoners retain certain constitutional rights even after conviction. The Supreme Court addressed this directly in Turner versus Safle in 1987, ruling that inmates retain a constitutional right to marry. That right can be restricted by prison administrators under certain circumstances, but it cannot be eliminated entirely. It is, in the eyes of the law, a fundamental right that survives incarceration. Wisconsin's Department of Corrections has specific procedures and regulations governing inmate marriages. The process is extensive. It requires approval from the warden. Background checks are conducted on the prospective spouse. There are documentation requirements, interviews, scrutiny at multiple levels. It is not simple. It is not fast. But it is not impossible. And that is a fact that sits heavily because it means that Shannan's family already carrying an unimaginable weight must also live with the knowledge that somewhere inside the legal framework of this country, there is a pathway, a real legitimate legally protected pathway through which Chris Watts could one day sign a marriage certificate. Could legally bind someone to him. could be called a husband again by a man who made himself a widowerower.

[00:22:45]There are those who argue thoughtfully and seriously that preserving the right to marry for even the most serious offenders is part of what it means to maintain a justice system grounded in human dignity. That stripping civil rights selectively, even from people who have committed terrible acts, is a precedent worth being cautious about.

[00:23:04]There are many others, perhaps most people who follow this case, who find the idea morally intolerable, that a man who murdered his pregnant wife should not be extended the institutional recognition of a new marriage. That there are some things that must be forfeited. That this is one of them. And then there is a third position that doesn't get talked about as much, but that I think deserves a moment. is it even if he never legally marries, even if no warden approves any application, even if no prospective spouse passes the institutional scrutiny required, the letters still exist. The courtship still happens. The emotional relationship, such as it is, still unfolds through correspondence. And for a man serving five consecutive life sentences, that correspondence may be the closest thing to a life he has access to. which raises the question that nobody in the legal framework is really equipped to answer.

[00:23:55]Is the punishment working? Not in the retributive sense. He is never leaving that building. That part is settled, but in the deeper sense, in the sense of a man genuinely reckoning with the magnitude of what he chose to do.

[00:24:08]Because a man who is genuinely reckoning does not describe murdering his family as things happened. A man who has truly sat with the weight of what he did does not spend his prison years cultivating romantic correspondence and blaming women for his crimes. The law has done what the law can do. What the law cannot do and what Chris Watts apparently has no interest in doing for himself is make him face it fully without the costume, without the scripture, without the story in which he is still the hero. This video is not going to settle that argument, but it is going to ask you to sit with it because it is not a comfortable question and it deserves more than a reflexive answer. Before we move to the final reckoning, I want to step back and place this in a wider frame because as disturbing as the Watts letters are, and they are disturbing, the phenomenon of high-profile convicted killers attracting romantic interest and even marriage from prison is neither new nor isolated. Ted Bundy married Carol Anne Boon during the penalty phase of his Florida trial in 1980, exploiting a procedural loophole that allowed a declaration in open court to constitute a legal marriage. She already knew him.

[00:25:23]She believed in his innocence. She had a child by him while he was on death row awaiting execution. Richard Ramirez, convicted of 13 murders and facing the death penalty in California, married Dorene Leoy in 1996. A a woman who had written him 75 letters and fallen in love with the version of himself he presented through correspondence. Scott Peterson, whose case shares haunting parallels with the Watts case. A man who killed his pregnant wife and unborn child, who went on television to plead for their safe return, who was having an affair, received enormous volumes of mail from women during his incarceration. Letters, photographs, money. The pattern is not a coincidence.

[00:26:05]It reflects something real about the way notorious men present themselves when they have nothing but time and paper.

[00:26:11]These men are not improvising. They have no distractions, no bad days that bleed into their writing, no stress, no fatigue, no competing obligations. Every word they commit to the page is chosen, revised, calibrated. The prison cell paradoxically creates ideal conditions for a certain kind of performance. Every letter is a best version. Every correspondence is a curated moment. The person on the receiving end never sees the daily reality. They only see what he has decided they should see. And there is something else these cases share that rarely gets examined closely. In virtually every instance, Bundy, Ramirez, Peterson, Watts, the men involved were considered by people who knew them before their crimes to be charming, normal, even likable. These were not men who broadcast danger. These were men who had already demonstrated over years of ordinary life that they could present one face to the world while concealing an entirely different interior reality. That skill did not disappear when they were convicted. If anything, it was refined because the stakes inside prison when it comes to correspondence are high in a specific way. These men have almost nothing. No freedom, no autonomy, no future in any conventional sense. What they do have sometimes the only thing they have is the image of themselves that they project to the outside world. Their correspondence is not just courtship. It is identity. It is their only remaining way of being someone. And that investment, that that desperate, sustained investment in being seen as something other than what the verdict says they are, makes the letters more convincing, not less. Because the need behind them is real, even when everything else is performance. Chris Watts, who was described by neighbors and colleagues before August 2018 as a quiet, friendly, unremarkable man, has taken that same ability, the ability to seem ordinary and decent and safe and applied it methodically to the only audience he has left. He is not an anomaly. He is an example of something that happens consistently and that we have not reckoned with adequately as a society. The question is not just why do women write to him. The deeper question is what does it tell us that the conditions of incarceration create such ideal circumstances for this kind of manipulation? Why does this bother us so much? Not just on a surface level, not just the obvious moral revulsion of a child killer composing love letters.

[00:28:39]That reaction is immediate and understandable and correct. But there is something deeper underneath the revulsion, something more specific. And I think it is worth naming. When someone commits a crime like this, when they take lives the way Chris Watts took lives, there is a psychological contract that the rest of society enters into, an expectation, a need. We need there to be a cost that goes beyond the legal sentence, not just years. Years are abstract. Years are bureaucratic. We need them to feel the loss of what they destroyed. We need Chris Watts to know in his body, in his daily reality, in the permanent texture of his life, what it means to be without Shannan, to be without Bella climbing onto his shoulders, to be without Celeste's laugh, to be without the son he never got to meet. We need the punishment to match the crime, to not just in duration, but in depth, in emotional reality. And when we learn that Chris Watts is writing love letters, that he is finding correspondence, that he is constructing a version of himself that some people find appealing, that he is actively seeking a new wife, and that some women are responding to that, it ruptures that contract. It suggests that he has found a way around the suffering we believe the crime demands. That he has insulated himself through letters and scripture and carefully managed self-presentation from the full weight of what he did. That eight years in he gets to want things again. Shannan does not get to want things. Belle and Celeste do not get to want things. Nico never had the chance. That asymmetry, fundamental, permanent, irreducible, is why the love letters feel like a second offense, not a legal one, a moral one, committed slowly in ink from a cell. So 8 years on, who is this man? Not who was he? Not the story of August 2018 that has been told. Who is he right now today in that cell in Walpun, Wisconsin? Based on everything the letters reveal, based on the years of reporting by journalists who have tracked his correspondence closely, here is what the evidence shows. He is a man who has never genuinely confronted what he did. Every letter, every theological framing, every passive construction, they all point to the same fundamental truth. He has constructed an internal narrative in which he remains at his core the protagonist. A good man buffeted by circumstances and bad women. A man who fell, a man who was tempted, a man who despite everything is still worth loving. He is a man who has used religion as a mechanism to avoid accountability rather than as a path toward it. Faith in his hands is not reckoning. It is rebranding. The vocabulary of Christianity of sin and temptation and weakness and God's mercy creates a framework in which he can discuss his crimes continuously without ever actually owning them without ever looking at them directly without ever saying I did this fully deliberately with my own hands and I am the only one responsible. He is a man who holds women in contempt and needs their attention simultaneously. The cognitive dissonance of writing about harlots and Jezebels in one letter and tender courtship in another is not an accident. It is not inconsistency. It is the full picture of who he is. Both are true at once. He resents women and he needs them. He blames them and he courts them. That contradiction is not something he is working through. It is who he is. And he is a man who is genuinely skilled at this. skilled at the letters, skilled at the register, skilled at knowing what to say and what to withhold. He has had years of practice with a specific audience. Women who reach out to famous prisoners and he has calibrated his presentation accordingly. That is not transformation. That is a man who was dangerous before he ever went to prison, becoming more practiced at the particular kind of danger he poses. I want to leave you with something simple.

[00:32:44]Somewhere tonight, Frank and Sandra Rzuchek are living with a weight that does not lift. They lost a daughter.

[00:32:51]They lost two granddaughters. They lost a grandson who never got to have a birthday. That grief has no ending. It does not resolve. It does not get a new chapter. And somewhere in Walpun, Wisconsin, in a cell in a prison built for people the justice system has decided should never walk free again, Chris Watts is composing something.

[00:33:12]Maybe a letter to God in which women led him astray and God will deal with them someday. Maybe a letter to a woman in which he is still good and things happened and he is worthy of a second chance. In both letters, he is the center of the story. In neither letter do Shannan or Bella or Celeste or Nico exist as anything more than context for the story of Chris Watts. And that is the truest thing the letters reveal. Not that he wants to remarry, but that eight years of solitude and reflection have produced apparently no real change, no genuine reckoning, no moment in which he sat down with the full weight of what he chose to do and let it land on him completely without deflection. There is a sentence that would represent that moment. It would go something like this.

[00:33:57]I chose this every part of it. No one led me. No one tempted me beyond what I consented to follow. I made each decision deliberately. I am the only person responsible for the deaths of Shannan, Bella, Celeste, and Nico. I will carry that all of it without reservation, without asterisk, for the rest of my life. That sentence does not exist in any letter, not in any form.

[00:34:20]And I want you to notice what fills the space where that sentence should be.

[00:34:24]Scripture, grievances, blame, romance. A letter to God about a harlot who led him astray. A letter to a woman about the good man he still believes himself to be. a quiet sustained refusal to say the one thing that would indicate genuine change which is simply I did this me alone fully. 8 years is a long time.

[00:34:45]Long enough for real change to happen in a human being. Long enough for real reckoning. Long enough for the kind of painful humbling interior work that might might I produce something that resembles genuine accountability. The letters show none of that work. They show a man who has spent eight years becoming more comfortable in the story he tells about himself, more fluent in its language, more skilled at its delivery. And that is not a reformed man. That is a man who got better at being exactly who he already was. And until it does, until Chris Watts finds the honesty or the courage or the conscience to write those words and mean them, every love letter, every spiritual reflection, every claim to still being a good man is just another way of escaping the one thing he owes, the truth about what he chose, about what he took, about who he actually is, committed slowly, incursive from a cell in Wisconsin.

[00:35:43]Shannan Watts, Bella Watts, Celeste Watts, and Nico, who never got to have a last name in this world. We remember them. If this video made you think, if if it made you feel something, that is exactly what it was supposed to do. True crime is not just about what happened in the past. It is about what keeps happening. And the story of Chris Watts did not end on August 13th, 2018. It is still unfolding in letters, in cells, in the grief of a family that doesn't get to stop. I want to hear from you in the comments, not just a reaction. I want a real answer to a real question. Does the legal right of a prisoner like Chris Watts to remarry sit right with you?

[00:36:26]Should that right exist for someone convicted of murdering his pregnant wife and children? Or does committing a crime of this magnitude mean forfeiting certain things permanently? There is no easy answer. But it is a conversation worth having seriously. If you are new to this channel, we do not sensationalize. We do not speculate beyond the facts. We take these cases seriously because the people in them were real and what happened to them was real and they deserve that level of care. If that is the kind of content you want more of, subscribe. And if this one moved you, share it because this story deserves more people thinking carefully about it. I will see you in the next one.