The neighborhood of Wyndham Hill in Frederick, Colorado, looked like the image on a real-estate brochure — new construction, wide streets, yards that families had only just begun to fill in. Chris and Shanann Watts had moved there with their daughters, Bella and Celeste, and were expecting a third child. From the outside, the life they had built appeared comfortable, even aspirational. On the morning of August 13, 2018, that life was exposed as something else entirely.

The Watts Family

Christopher Watts, born in 1985, was a soft-spoken operator at Anadarko Petroleum. Shanann Rzucek, born in 1984, was vivacious and entrepreneurial, building a following on social media through her work selling nutritional supplements for Thrive, a multi-level marketing company. She documented her family’s life extensively online — birthdays, vacations, the girls’ milestones. Bella, four years old, and Celeste, three, were the daughters who appeared in those posts. Shanann was fifteen weeks pregnant with a boy the couple had planned to name Nico when she was killed.

August 13, 2018

Shanann had returned from a business trip to Arizona in the early hours of August 13. She arrived home around 2 a.m. By morning, she had not responded to messages, and a friend who had come to take her to a doctor’s appointment found her car in the driveway and no one answering the door. Police were called. They performed a welfare check; Chris Watts arrived home during the welfare check, having left for work earlier that morning. The house appeared normal. Shanann and the girls were reported missing. Watts spoke to a local television news crew outside his house, appealing for his family’s return. Within hours, investigators were focused on him as a suspect.

The Investigation and Confession

Cell phone and surveillance data quickly began to undermine Watts’s account. Investigators discovered he had been in a months-long affair with a coworker named Nichol Kessinger, who had been told by Watts that he was in the process of an amicable divorce. Two days after the family was reported missing, on August 15, Watts confessed during a police interview. He led investigators to an Anadarko Petroleum work site in Weld County where he had buried Shanann in a shallow grave and submerged the two girls’ bodies in separate crude-oil storage tanks — tanks with openings only eight inches wide. The bodies of Bella and Celeste were recovered from those tanks. Shanann’s remains, including the unborn Nico, were recovered from a grave nearby.

The Guilty Plea and Sentence

On November 6, 2018, Chris Watts pleaded guilty to nine counts, including three counts of first-degree murder, under a deal that removed the death penalty from consideration. He was sentenced to five life terms — three of them consecutive — without the possibility of parole, plus additional time for unlawful termination of a pregnancy and other charges. He was transferred to Dodge Correctional Institution in Wisconsin, out of state for his own protection.

The Prison Years

The case did not fade after the sentencing. In 2020, Netflix released American Murder: The Family Next Door, a documentary assembled almost entirely from Shanann’s own social media footage, police body-camera footage, and surveillance video. It became one of the most-watched true-crime documentaries in the platform’s history, reintroducing the case to millions of viewers and drawing intense criticism of Watts — particularly given that so much of Shanann’s own documentation of their life was used to tell the story of her murder. From prison, Watts has sent letters to pen pals over the years. In those letters, he has shifted accounts of his motive — at times suggesting the affair was central, at other times blaming Shanann for the state of their marriage. In a letter reportedly written in 2025, he claimed to be “a new man,” a phrase that drew widespread condemnation from advocates for the victims’ families. Colorado abolished the death penalty in 2020, two years after his sentencing.

Why This Case Still Matters

The Watts family murders became a cultural reference point for the true-crime era of social media. Shanann’s extensive online presence — her warmth, her humor, her love for her daughters — made her unusually visible as a victim, and the contrast between the curated life online and the reality behind closed doors prompted a widespread reckoning with the limits of what we know about other people’s lives. The case also raised serious questions about intimate partner violence: Watts showed none of the outward markers that people associate with an abuser, which is, researchers note, precisely the point. The children’s deaths drew particular anguish. And the manner in which their bodies were disposed of — the crude-oil tanks, the logistics required — spoke to a calculated coldness that the community found almost impossible to reconcile with the quiet man who had lived among them.

Shanann Watts documented her family so thoroughly that her voice and her daughters’ laughter are preserved in hundreds of hours of footage — more documentation than most murder victims leave behind. Chris Watts will almost certainly die in prison. Nichol Kessinger has not been seen publicly since the investigation. The neighborhood of Wyndham Hill has moved on in the way that neighborhoods must. But somewhere in that archive of videos — birthday parties, ordinary dinners, Bella and Celeste playing in the yard — is the question that cannot be answered by any court document or prison letter: what was going through Chris Watts’s mind in those ordinary moments, and how did no one see what was coming?

This piece discusses the murders of children. If you or someone you know is struggling with grief or trauma, reaching out to a trusted person or local support line can help.