New footage shows Shanann Watts returning from her business trip before she is murdered by husband Chris Watts
A new video that has surfaced shows Shanann Watts entering her home in Colorado possibly just moments before she was murdered by her husband, Chris Watts. The 15-week pregnant mother-of-two was seen in the footage from the doorbell camera at her home as she gets out of her friend's car and walks into the home. The video then shows the friend waiting patiently until Shanann gets into her home and is then seen driving away. Unfortunately, the friend and Shanann didn't realize it would've been safer for her to be in the car.
It is unclear if the couple's daughters, Bella and Celeste, were alive at the time when she was entering the home or had already been killed by their father. The home the family lived in has since gone into foreclosure, Daily Mail reported.
Watts was informed of the development with his home in a letter that was sent to him last month by the Weld County Public Trustee. Other documents which were obtained by the publication show that Watts had bought the home in May 2013 for $392,709 but almost six years after this, he still had an outstanding principal balance of $349,938.09 to pay back.
The auction of the home will be announced publicly on March 22 in the Greely Tribune and the auction itself will follow a little less than a month after that. Any interested parties will have to assemble at the Weld County Public Trustee office at 10 am on April 17 if they want to place a bid.
Shanann's family has been spotted removing her possessions from the family home shortly after the murders and then again after the trial was over, with Watts accepting a plea deal from the prosecution in order to avoid the death penalty. Only a few hours after he buried his pregnant wife's body in a shallow grave and put his children's bodies into oil drums, Watts' involvement in their 'disappearance' and murder came to light.
This was possible because of the surveillance footage that the police obtained from his neighbor which showed Watts on the morning of the murders backing his truck into the garage, loading up the vehicle, and then driving away.
Watts had told the authorities, Shanann's friends and family, that she had run away with their daughters that day while he was at work but the footage provided by the neighbor showed that this wasn't the case. The footage, in fact, showed that only Watts left the house the entire day and no one else.
In the video that shows the bodycam perspective of a police officer, Watts can be seen watching the surveillance footage for the first time and placing his hands on his head when he realizes that he's been caught.
The video was used later to draw out a confession before the man was finally charged with murder. After he confessed to authorities, the process started of retrieving the bodies of Shanann, Bella and Celeste, who were all found even though he refused to show the police where they were.
A Hazardous Materials Incident Narrative Report that had been filed by the Colorado State Patrol explains in detail the process of retrieving the bodies of Bella and Celeste from the oil tanks that they were dumped in by their father after he smothered them to death.
After workers manually drained the two oil tanks, they went in with self-contained breathing gear and removed the bodies of the children, whose skin came off as their bodies were passed out of the tanks. Shanann and the unborn baby, Niko, were found in a shallow grave just about 100 yards away from the oil tanks.
Watts is currently serving out his life sentence at the Dodge Correctional Institution in Wapun, Wisconsin. He was moved to the Wisconsin facility on December 3 in an inmate exchange that took place between the Colorado and Wisconsin Departments of Correction under the Interstate Corrections Compact for his own safety.
