Thoughts on Chris Watts

So I’ve been aware of the case since 2018, watched the documentary and have now hung around on there for a while. There’s something uncomfortable in the way I feel about shannan and I’ve been trying to understand what it is. This seems to get debated a lot on both the Chris Watts and Shannon Watts subreddits so I’m going to put it on both to see if the views differ.

So I started off reading about this case doing the usual casual armchair psychology thing and thinking that Chris was a fairly obviously narcisstic/psychopathic monster who had wanted to dump his family, wasn’t too bright and had properly messed it up. I knew about the mlm, I know about the financial stresses and I knew about the affair. I thought that basically from his perspective the potential gain had outweighed the risk or loss and he’d gone for it.

I then watched the documentary and got a different picture. Shannan was super intense and it seemingly played out in all ways. She was passionate about her family, her friends and relationships but was also fairly pathological when it came to her social media presence. I think this was mostly linked with the mlm and how they basically say you have to be out there promoting your ‘lifestyle’ 24/7. It also seemed that there was always a lot of drama and stress in the family, whether it was illnesses, arguments, accidents, money, whatever. Don’t get me wrong, they were clearly at a point where their relationship was breaking down and those times are never stress free but to be a number of things which probably started small had snowballed.

In documentary I saw the video where she was having a go at him about forgetting the phone for the kids pictures and just thinking Jesus Christ, can you imagine what his life must have been like, posing every five minutes, faking the perfect happily family and all that drama and stress around having to capture every perfect moment without any time to ever actually enjoy or experience anything. It all seemed like one massive, uncomfortable performance and there was so much effort for ultimately none of it to seem or perhaps be real.

Then you saw her text messages and it seems she kinda knew what she was and wanted to change. She seemed pretty self aware and was obviously trying to save her relationship with the same passion she put into everything else. It’s really heartbreaking that she literally did not have a clue who she was really living with.

I saw the relationship between Chris and the video of Nicole. Man, if Shannan gave off a few red flags, Nicole was a Chinese military parade. She was fake and unnerving. It doesn’t surprise me at all that she started searching for him and shannan way before, that she morphed into his perfect girl by letting me be himself yet was somehow still completely in control of the narrative.

Then their was watts family. Wow, just wow, no wonder his mother and shannan clashed. I think one definitely had better intentions than the other but you put two overly dramatic, dominant women in the same space and you are asking for this exact scenario, both fighting over and for Chris. Like I say, shannan does not give off the same bad vibes as the mother but I could absolutely see how they would clash.

So there’s Chris, likely having been overly dominated by women all his life. His mother pulling him one way, shannan another and Nicole in different one altogether. Then you think that he was using twice the dose of that thrive stimulant crap, never sleeping and you start to think, did he have some sort of break and just snap. I was almost there, Chris as the henpecked, overly stressed husband snaps having spent an entire lifetime dominated by messed up females finally snaps.

But then you see the videos of him after he’s killed them all. He’s perfectly calm, smiling, giving off totally bizarre vibes, he’s stomping his kids bodies through an 8 inch hole at 7 and making friendly chit chat with his coworkers at 8.30. He’s looking up lyrics for battery, he’s cancelling his kids day care and sending Nicole pictures of flowers.

And I’m back to stage one. I posted the other night saying that we all, including me, are basically voyeurs at best and ghouls at worst. I’ve reflected on that a bit and there’s always a fascination with aberrant psychology and how people who severely lack empathy and guilt interact with the rest of us. How they might trick us and hide. So we pore over the videos and evidence looking for something, a sig that if it we were in that situation we would have noticed because otherwise, monsters could be all around us.

Because of the amount of footage and evidence, it’s brought all sorts of people out the woodwork. Men who’ve been abused and are sick of female on make abuse being ignored; mysogynists who are taking advantage of this perceptions to vent their nasty little ideas; dominant women (or the people who love them) realising the their traits are seen as unpleasant and rushing to the defence and everyone in between. No wonder the debate gets heated sometimes.

I think Chris was quite unusual. His ability to hide his true feelings (or lack of them); his seeming passivity and friendly, smiling, calm demeanour are completely incompatible with the killer we expect to see. There might be glimpses of a socially awkward mess before the tanned face thrive phase but even then, nothing overwhelming.

I think we all feel at risk knowing that people like him exist, sometimes in arms length or closer and we never really have a clue. Shannan was a unique person but her personality probably wasn’t incredibly unusual. There are lots of people like that in the world and very, very few of them get murdered by their husbands.

It’s been a strange few days picking through this one.