Chris Watts blames ‘control freak’ wife on his affair in sickening letters about killing her and kids

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

Chris Watts blamed his “control freak” wife as the reason he had an affair in sickening letters he wrote about murdering her and their two young daughters.

Watts, 39, is serving five life sentences plus 48 years in prison for the murder of his pregnant wife Shanann and their two little girls, Bella, four, and Celeste, three, in 2018 in Frederick, Colorado.

He reportedly whined to prison mate Dylan Tallman, in the letters seen by theNew York Post, how Shanann was “really busy with her job and everything it required” which left him to be the primary caregiver to their daughters.

Tallman has written a series of books about his time with Watts in Dodge Correctional Institution in Waupun, Wisconsin.

Watts met co-worker Nichol Kessinger in 2017 and the pair began an affair in the months before he executed his family. He wrote to Tallman that Kessinger was “just everything my wife wasn’t like with me. She was just nice, and not a control freak. We could make decisions together.”

He said: “I was not thinking. We worked together, we had chemistry, and I fell into temptation. She was the forbidden fruit.”

In a previous letter, the newspaper reported Watts went on to blame Kessinger for the affair, confiding in Tallman she “became the death of me” and was a “jezebel”.

Watts killed his wife in August 2018 during a fight when he told her he’d been having an affair and wanted a divorce. After strangling Shanann in the family home - who was pregnant with their son - he drove Bella and Celeste 45 minutes away to the oil field where he worked and smothered them to death while their mother’s body was in the back of the vehicle.

The oil worker initially tried to pin the girls’ murders on Shanann before finally confessing to killing his entire family.

During sentencing, prosecutors revealed Bella fought back before Watts killed her. The prosecutors also argued that he did not kill Bella in rage, but “deliberately and viciously.”

He pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty, which has since been abolished in Colorado.

The murders were the subject of a hit Netflix documentary that aired in 2020. American Murder: The Family Next Door was the streaming giant’s most-viewed title when it was first released.

Praising the documentary at the time, Shanann’s brother, Frankie Rzucek, said: “It shows what her life was like before [Chris] came along, and how happy she was with her beautiful family until he cheated and turned into a different person and became that monster.”