Chris Watts reveals Shanann's face went 'all black with mascara' and her eyes filled with blood as he choked her
Warning: Disturbing content
It's been a little over a year since Chris Watts killed his pregnant wife Shanann, and his two daughters Bella, 4, and Celeste, 3, in their Colorado home in a crime that shocked the nation.
Now, in a series of revealing letters which are set to be published as a part of author Cherlyn Cadle's explosive new book, 'Letters from Christopher: The Tragic Confessions of the Watts Family Murders,' Watts has detailed the horrific August 13, 2018, murders. Cadle struck up a correspondence with Watts after he was jailed and the letters along with one-on-one conversations form the basis of the book that will be published on October 7.
In excerpts obtained by the Daily Mail, Watts contradicted his previous claims that he killed Shanann, who was 15 weeks pregnant with their son Nico, in a spontaneous outburst of rage so he could be with mistress Nichole Kessinger, and confessed he had been plotting their murders for quite some time.
He also confessed that he slipped his wife the potent painkiller Oxycodone in the hope of inducing a miscarriage so it would be easier to leave her for Kessinger, and confirmed that it was he who killed Bella and Celeste, and not Shanann, as he had claimed in police interviews after his arrest.
"August 12th when I finished putting the girls to bed, I walked away and said, 'That's the last time I'm going to be tucking my babies in,'" he wrote in one letter. "I knew what was going to happen the day before and I did nothing to stop it!"
The next day, before killing Shanann, he said he went to Bella's room, and then Celeste's room, and used a pillow to "kill" them. But when he got back to his bedroom and the fatal argument with his wife ensued, the girls had woken back up.
"After Shanann had passed, Bella and Cece woke back up. I'm not sure how they woke back up, but they did. Bella's eyes were bruised and both girls looked like they had been through trauma," he wrote.
The 34-year-old also recalled the grisly details of how he killed his wife, including how she looked moments before her death when he told her he wanted a separation and that he no longer loved her. "Isn't it weird how I look back and what I remember so much is her face getting all black with streaks of mascara?" he reminisced.
"All the weeks of me thinking about killing her, and now I was faced with it," he continued. "When she started to get drowsy, I somehow knew how to squeeze the jugular veins until it cut off the blood flow to her brain, and she passed out..."
"I knew if I took my hands off of her, she would still keep me from Nikki. They asked me why she couldn't fight back, it's because she couldn't fight back. Her eyes filled with blood; as she looked at me and she died. I knew she was gone when she relieved herself."
Watts pleaded guilty to multiple counts of first-degree murder as part of a plea deal and was sentenced to five life sentences without the possibility of parole, three to be served consecutively and two to be served concurrently.