But Like, What If He Didn't Orchestrate It?

Most people who might stumble across this story know the basics of the Chris Watts case: in 2018, he murdered his pregnant wife and two existing daughters, and received five life sentences for it. He’s now at Dodge Correctional in Wisconsin, where initially he had photos of those he murdered on the walls, but I believe the courts made him take those down. I’ve also seen stuff about him being in homosexual relationships in prison while also receiving panties and other fan mail from women. Society is very odd.

The centerpiece of the Watts case was Nichol Kessinger, who was his mistress at the time. She apparently got witness protection and lives elsewhere — the true crime boards claim Washington state — under a new name. There are a lot of inconsistencies in Kessinger’s stories and public interrogations, including claiming she didn’t know Watts’ wife was pregnant, even though she regularly checked his wife’s Facebook and it’s literally all she posted about.

Sometime during COVID, Netflix did a special on the Watts case. I think it was called American Family: Murders Next Door. In fact, yes, here’s the entire trailer:

That got more people discussing the case, which might be the best-known family annihilator case of the last 20 years, sadly.

As more came out about this case, Kessinger seemed to fade to the background and we went to a series of other places, including “Watts was a psycho” (easy) or “His wife was nuts, posting everything on social media and controlling his life” (hard, because that makes a victim into a perpetrator, and we’re not supposed to do that).

It seems like what happened in this case is that Watts was fat and nerdy and doing IT work and he met a girl, gave her the kids she wanted desperately, then he got in shape and started getting attention elsewhere. He probably had a predisposition to being a little crazy — there’s stories about his dad, Ronnie, being a coke addict — and everything built up and snapped. It’s sadly a tale as old as time in true crime circles: man wants one thing, woman wants one thing, the things eventually don’t compute, and in the name of control, someone snaps and kills the other person.

Kessinger’s role faded, as noted. And she disappeared from public view. But in the last year or two, there have been more theories about how much she was involved. This article gets at some of it.

Most of the theories about Kessinger are downstream of this particular TikTok.

Basically, what’s happening here is that the morning of the murders, Watts backs his truck up to the garage and is seen loading and unloading things. If his timeline is correct and he killed his wife first, then killed his kids closer to the oil tanker site where they were all found, then he had to at least be dragging his wife’s body into the truck at this point. This security footage is from his neighbor, who famously told the cops “He ain’t acting right.”

It’s nearly impossible to see clearly in this footage, but the TikTok’er is claiming you can see a figure with breasts and a purse here — which could be Kessinger. I’ve only seen this in 1–2 places, but there are reports Kessinger’s phone pinged that morning near the Watts home, when her actual home was 25 minutes away.

And look, jailhouse confessions are notoriously unreliable, but Watts apparently told people that Kessinger did it.

This case is cooked — Watts is in the pen for life, and Kessinger is doing whatever under some name like “Amanda Guilder” outside of Spokane. Who knows? But it definitely seems possible that Kessinger skated on this one, and Watts took the whole thing on himself.

Your take?