“We were talking about general things, about how her two girls were doing and how life was out in Colorado. She didn’t give me an indication that there was anything wrong. She seemed pretty happy.” – Joe Beach, former neighbor in Aberdeen, North Carolina
If Shanann gave her neighbor the impression that everything was fine, and that she and the kids were pretty happy, and they all ended up dead, was the neighbor right, or was the impression he got, wrong?
We know in the Scott Peterson case, Laci also gave an impression of sunny fortitude to many who encountered her. Many but not all. A few close friends did notice the odd gripe or complaint.
In the Watts case, clearly there are friends who were closer to her who knew some of Shanann’s private concerns – but kept them private. If we are to find insights, they’re not going to be in obvious places, they’re going to be subtle. Let’s probe three areas, and look at some of the latest information that’s been exposed by the mainstream media.
a) Finances
Scott and Laci opened up a burger joint, the business failed and they limped back to Modesto to start from scratch again. Recovering from bankruptcy is arduous. It’s especially hard when you’re not recovering, and your family’s demands are growing. Scott Peterson’s family was growing at the time he murdered his pregnant wife.
After the murder, Scott sold his wife’s car and bought himself a new vehicle, and wanted to sell their home all within two months of her disappearance while she was still missing. He couldn’t put the sale of the house through, and when it was sold, he was denied the money. We know they were pawning jewelry Laci had inherited, including on eBay. Scott appeared to pawn a very expensive watch and diamond ring around the time Laci disappeared. What we see here is an effort to convert a human being into cash, flesh into gold.
In the Watts case, we see a similar pattern. In July 2015, just three years before the murder, the couple sought Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. Their liabilities were close to half a million dollars [$448,820].
The key insight we get from this is that it would take years to recover from a debt of this magnitude. After three years it was obvious that they weren’t recovering. And with a third child on the way, Chris Watts had probably done the math. They could never recover. Part of the reason for that was Chris Watts. According to People:
Chris, 33 reported earning a monthly salary of around $5,400 from Anadarko Petroleum…When the couple filed for bankruptcy, Shanann worked at Children’s Hospital Colorado, earning a monthly salary of $2,977. But for reasons not made clear in the filing, the couple’s reported combined income was tumbling — from $147,256 in fiscal year 2013, down to $90,789 in fiscal 2014, and then to $40,491 at the time of their 2015 filing.
The reason is actually obvious, and it’s the same reason that plagued Laci Peterson. As soon as Shanann fell pregnant, she could no longer earn as consistently as she had been, and three consecutive pregnancies can hemorrhage an already cratering bank account to a critical level in no time. Chris Watts was unable to raise his game, and if anything, lowered it, just as Scott Peterson was failing as a salesman, and yet continuing to be a spendthrift.
Medical and credit card debt had combined with mortgage payments on their $400,000 home in Frederick, Colo., to undermine their financial stability, the record shows. Christopher Watts had gotten a job six months earlier as an operator for Anadarko, and paystubs indicate his annual salary was about $61,500. Shanann Watts was working in a call center at a children’s hospital at the time, earning about $18 an hour — more for evenings, weekends or extra shifts she sometimes worked. The couple had a combined income of $90,000 in 2014. But they also had tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt, along with some student loans and medical bills — for a total of $70,000 in unsecured claims on top of a sizable mortgage.
They said in the filing that their nearly $3,000 mortgage and $600 in monthly car payments formed the bulk of their $4,900 in monthly expenses.
Do the math: Chris Watts was earning $5,400 a month when their expenses were $4,900. Soon, Shanann would take another break from work, and then there’d be a fifth mouth to feed and maintain. There just wasn’t going to be enough credit for that, let alone money.
So what we see here is an effort to convert a human being into cash, flesh into gold.
b) Faking the Fairy Tale
We’ve already seen how busy Shanann was on social media. Not all of it was a show just for the sake of showing off. Shanann was promoting herself and selling her products through Instagram, for example, and so part of that was putting up perfect pictures.
In the image below, it’s not just a happy snap of the couple in a car pasted to Facebook, it’s Chris sporting a patch under his blue shirt sleeve. Even in their leisure family time, they’re selling. And though both are showing their teeth, look closer at the eyes in the picture – neither of them are smiling.
By selling this happy family vibe, what Shanaan was doing was selling herself. But I also think it was part of Shanann’s personality to be showy, to put a positive face on things [just as Laci did], and this is part of what got the family into the difficulties they got into – at least financially. Sometimes you’ve got to admit the fairy tale flag you’re waving isn’t true, and that’s humbling. It’s also difficult if your job requires you to sell sell sell.
Since there’s less information about the murderer, that’s really where we need to look to move the narrative along. How was he faking it? What was his fairy tale – for himself? For Scott Peterson it was golf. Scott saw himself as a pro golfer who missed the train and missed the glory that would have – that should have followed.
According to Patch.com, Chris Watts had similar delusions of grandeur. But like all delusions, they start off with a little bit of reality supporting them:
“[Watts] was one of the best students I ever had. Oh, my God. This is a shock,’ retired teacher Joe Duty told the Fayetteville Observer. Watts graduated from Pine Forest High School in 2003 and…won a $1,000 scholarship to technical institutes in his home state.
So Watts was a promising starter, and so there was a lot of hope and expectation that he was carrying with him, for himself. In the Peterson case there’s the lie that Peterson won a golf scholarship.
But here’s the crucial insight:
“The guy had a photographic memory,” Duty remembered. “I said, ‘Chris, if I ever had a student who was going to be tremendously successful, it’s you.'”According to Duty’s recollection, Watts in high school aspired to be a NASCAR crew chief technician. But instead, Watts worked, until Wednesday, at Anadarko Oil and Gas, earning around $60,000, according to bankruptcy records filed in 2015.
Reading between the lines, even his teacher through Watts was a kind of Golden Boy destined for greatness. But fifteen years after leaving high school, there was no gold, no greatness, and very little of that spirit of hope left. The aspiration to be a NASCAR chief technician shows us in colorful descriptive imagery how Chris Watts idealised himself. Big, glamorous, where the action and the crowds were.
Reality turned out to be very different from that very tale – and even humiliating. There were no crowds, no excitement, no glamour, just the daily grind toiling with grease and oil, and scrubbing to get the muck off his skin each day. Scott Peterson sold fertilizer solvents for a living. It was a long fall from the dizzy heights of the golfing great he always dreamed of becoming.
It’s difficult to say what the implications are of the house in Belmont, west of Charlotte, except to say that it belonged to Shanann. She’d bought it in 2009. The couple were married three years after that – in 2012. According to the Denver Post, the new owner, Byron Falls said the Watts’s were in a hurry to sell and left all the furniture behind.
What does that mean? It might mean they were trying to outrun their debts. If so, this mendacity would have set a precedent for breaking the law, for lying, and getting away with it. For having a debt and not paying it if you felt you couldn’t.
c) Time of Death
Shanaan was last seen on Monday, August 13, by a friend who dropped her off at her home at about 1:45 a.m. According to heavy.com:
Her husband had told reporters he left for work at 5:15 a.m., and then did not hear from her again. Friends also grew worried after she didn’t respond calls and messages and didn’t show up for a doctor’s appointment and a planned outing. Shanann Watts was reported missing that afternoon by her friend, not by her husband.
But the affidavit sketches a different picture.
The affidavit suggests Chris Watts murdered Shanann moments after she stepped inside the door. Between 02:00 and 05:27, when he [like Scott Peterson] backed his truck into the driveway “to load up some tools”, Watts likely killed Shanaan, cleaned up the crime scene and himself, loaded the bodies into the truck, and then left home at the usual time “for work”.
We know the bed linen was stripped, which suggests this had been washed or disposed of during the cover-up. Chris Watts probably took a shower too, before going to work.
Watts likely had to kill Shanann shortly after her arrival, because the children were already dead. But it’s also possible Shanaan was killed first, silently as she slept [at around 03:00] and then the children. This still gave Watts two hours to get done what he needed to do, and drive to where he needed to get, all under cover of darkness.
Sunrise on August 13th was just after 06:00 in Frederick, Colorado.
By bundling them into the truck and transporting them before dawn to a remote work site, he expected not to be seen, and all things being equal, he wouldn’t have been.
By going to work as per usual [just like Scott Peterson did, when he went fishing], Watts could claim plausible deniability in their disappearance. He’d simply gone to work – how should he know where they were? Maybe she’d gone to a friend? Maybe she’d run away with him?
The most vital insight, the gamechanger, is this, from the affidavit:
Neighbor, Nathaniel Trinastich’s home video surveillance system recorded Nicole’s vehicle leaving [the residence] at 01:48. At 05:27 Chris’ truck is observed backing into the driveway and leaving a short time later.*
This suggests the moment the bodies were transferred from the home to the truck, for disposal elsewhere. When Chris Watts left, he had to leave the home looking like there was no struggle. What he forgot though was if Shanaan had run away, she’d have taken her personal effects. Laci Peterson’s phone was also found in her car, an unlikelihood given Scott’s claim that she’d gone with the dog for a walk.
The media still don’t know why Chris Watts committed murder.
Who does?
Do we have to wait for prosecutors to tell us Chris Watts’ motive, or can we figure it out on our own? If we can’t, what does that say about our ability to intuit the thoughts, desires and machinations of those around us? If we can’t figure out hypothetical catastrophes in other folk’s families, do we have any chance of piecing the puzzles [hidden and less hidden] of the motives of those that are part of the fabric of our lives?
What true crime offers is a series of precedents and templates. The criminal psychology is never a new journey, although some tangents along the way may be a little unusual or even novel.
The best place to start in order to fathom a motive for Watts is Scott Peterson. There are many similarities: pregnant wife, business trips, Mr Perfect persona, picture-perfect marriage and family, fairy-tale home, sunny smiles all round versus fertilizer/oil, selling, foreclosure, financial ruin, her earning more than him and the collapse of the Picture Perfect Charade. There’s a lot of vanity in both marriages. There’s also a lot of shallowness. Under the vanity there’s no real wealth, just empty words.
Of course, to intuit a motive in the Watts case requires that we went to the trouble to figure out Scott Peterson’s motive. Did we? Was Scott’s motive that he wanted to have an affair? I hope that’s not your answer, because millions of married folk cheat on each other quite happily, without resorting to murder. The affair was a factor, and I believe it was a factor with Watts. Both good looking, charming and facile men. In both cases, women who knew or should have known their husbands were cheating, but kept up the pretense that everything was just fine, including through the new pregnancy.
Was money a factor? Of course it was. But millions of couples struggle through financial difficulty without resorting to murder, though perhaps less than the group committing adultery. Add together financial difficulty and adultery, and we’re starting to get somewhere, but we’re still not quite there.
The vital element of course is the pregnancy. In the Scott Peterson case, Scott endured the pregnancy for eight long months, until just before Christmas. He figured Christmas was a good time to do things when people would be away or not watching so closely.
In the Watts case, fifteen weeks proved to be his cut-off date. What does the pregnancy reveal about the motive? Simply that her husband’s threshold for commitment had been exceeded by a substantial margin.
It’s not just financial commitment, and financial overreach that’s at issue here. Like Scott, Watts is having a kind of existential crisis. He doesn’t want to be married.
He doesn’t want to be a dad. He doesn’t want to be burdened or pressured by life-sapping and gut-draining expectations. He was living a life he didn’t want to be living, and it was killing him. He was living a lie, and in his fucked psychology, the only way to fix that was by killing them. That way he could get his life back. By taking their lives, he got his.
It’s transactional, but then Capitalist society is rigged that way. Give and take, cash on delivery, no work no pay. So we’re wired to function in a transnational system, but every now and then someone thinks they can outsmart it. How to get something for nothing. How to get what you really want without paying the price.
So in a sense, it is the simply dimension of a man who wants his freedom. He wants to escape the bind he’s in. But we have to look at the scale of the things that are tearing at him. Moneylessness. Pregnancy and the raft of commitments and expectations that are part of that. And probably someone else pulling him away from the marriage, some sort of fairy-tale romance that offered him a better, alternative happily ever after.
When we add all of these together, we need to come up with a simple hypothesis. Why, in a single word, did Watts commit triple [actually quadruple] murder of his own family.
Greed.
He wanted more. But he wasn’t prepared to pay the price to get what he wanted, so he chose subterfuge, so that he could dodge paying for what he wanted, the same way he’d been dodging reality for year.
He wanted to have his cake and eat it. Just like Scott Peterson did. I suspect further investigation will show Watts was a spoiled kid, and used to entitlements. He didn’t like the drudgery of his job. He wanted to convert his family to oil and gold, cash in his chips and start a new life with someone else.
JUST IN from People Magazine – When Nickole Atkinson, Shanann’s friend, didn’t hear from her, she called Chris Watts to find out what was going on. That’s when he made this surprising disclosure to Nickole about his 6-year marriage:
“I didn’t find out that they were going to separate or anything like that until I called Chris that morning. When I called him and asked him where she was, that’s when he told me and I basically told him that that wasn’t my [concern] at that particular moment, because it wasn’t and that their business was their business, that they would either work it out or they wouldn’t.”
Why would Watts be chomping at the bit to tell someone their marriage was in trouble immediately after his wife was dead and the kids gone? Why would it not be okay for his own wife to know [or say] their marriage was in trouble?
There could be other factors too, depending on issues of Watts’ identity. Without knowing his background, his make-up, his backstory, it’s difficult to be more accurate.
Now let’s see what the prosecutors have to say today…
“As a journalist we have to give up the right to have a public opinion about things…it’s not my job to judge…”
This was Zora Stephenson’s take on her exclusive interview with Chris Watts, the Colorado man who confessed to murdering his pregnant wife and two young daughters earlier this month.
Obviously Watts was addressing a phalanx of reporters simultaneously when he gave that infamous interview, not Stephenson directly, but regardless, getting Watts to talk when he did, and how he did, and for as long as he did, was a major scoop. Probably the recording will be fielded in a criminal trial as evidence.
Because the interview went viral, many wanted to know what the reporter’s thoughts were, standing there, getting a direct, firsthand impression of Watts. The public were disappointed to hear Stephenson wouldn’t give them her personal opinion because she couldn’t.
It wasn’t that she didn’t have an opinion. As soon as you sign up as a journalist, your opinion becomes a public opinion, and represents whichever media employs you. In a journalist’s contract, everything you say and write is owned – through copyright – by your employer. As such, they can also be sued if you express an opinion, especially one that’s subjectively accurate or even true, but not legally defensible.
For this reason it’s drilled into journos heads that they may not have an opinion. That the highest journalistic ethic is to remain neutral, kinda like Lady Justice herself.
Many in the public admire this, and think it’s admirable. It’s not. Being able to think for oneself, and think independently, is a sign of intelligence. Being able to speculate, especially in important matters that rock society like crime, is a sign of a healthy, self-aware community. Being restricted from expressing an opinion when you have firsthand knowledge is a kind of common commercial censure.
Many in the public take the lead from journalists, thinking it’s immoral and unChristian “to judge”. Only God and a court Judge can do that.
Okay, well, when you get married, who decides whether your partner is right for you, and trustworthy, and vice versa? Do you want to go to court and have a Judge decide? Well, many marriages do end there, in divorce court with a Judge telling each side how to split the marriage pile. In the real world, we do have to think for ourselves, we do have to reason, we do have to have an opinion about the quality of virtually everything, from the vegetables we buy to the air that we breathe. Those who give up this right become sheep, and sheep are led like lambs to the slaughter.
If true crime teaches us anything, it’s not to be a sheep. It’s to think.
So how do journalists and media companies get around the pitfalls of not being able to comment on true crime, even when they’re right there, covering it? Well, that’s why they’re always interviewing experts.
Just as experts are brought into court rooms to provide their “objective” assessments of a set of facts [even though these are often competing opinions with some supporting evidence], the media are allowed to “objectively” comment on interviews such as the one Watts gave, through experts. I often find these “expert” commentaries quite comical. It’s not as though these experts dedicate themselves to one case when the media asks for comment; they’re by their very nature true crime butterflies, jumping from flower to flower, and trying to get to as many as they can. In this sense the experts are like the journalists, jumping around from case to case, story to story, but not really sticking around to absorb one case for any length of time to really extract the marrow out of it.
That does happen when an expert becomes part of a defense team, someone like Dr. Henri Lee the forensic scientist, or a DNA specialist like Barry Scheck. But experts that are not part of a defense team that appear on air amount to little more than a circus act, expressing an opinion while holding up a CV and calling it truth.
After the Watts interview the media were desperate to do something with it, but because of legal perils and pitfalls, they had to have experts weigh in. And so they wheeled in their circus acts – the expert body language consultant, the ex-FBI profiler [who looks like someone’s granny], the professional lie detector etc.
It gets absurd when these experts are leaders in the field of pseudosciences – stuff like handwriting analysis, body language, lie detection, and the rest of it. Although there are groups who make a study of these areas, it’s hardly scientific. Although there are professional bodies that accredit one another, they’re hardly authoritative outside of these groups and clubs.
That’s not to say there isn’t merit in examining handwriting, or human behaviour, or that there aren’t patterns, or that plenty can’t be revealed, it’s just that one “expert” can easily be debunked by another “expert” interpreting exactly the same information in a different way.
A good example of Expert Wars in a court room is the handwriting analysis done in the Ramsey Ransom Note. 78 samples were taken, but only Patsy Ramsey’s handwriting was singled out as a possible match. Team Ramsey’s experts scored Patsy as a 4.5/5 for being the author of the note where 1 is certain and 5 is uncertain. Whever Patsy was interviewed she’d recite these numbers over and over again, like gospel. The prosecution handwriting experts – about half a dozen of them – either called her handwriting a 100% match for the Ransom Note, or extremely certain.
Which set of experts were right?
During the Wolf case, when the handwriting narrative was discussed as evidence, Lin Wood, the Ramsey’s defense lawyer managed to have all the prosecution’s handwriting analysts thrown out of court. He was able to demonstrate they didn’t belong to a particular professional body, and thus weren’t experts according to a particular standard.
With them gone, he could then field his own experts, and so it was no surprise when Judge Carnes accepted his version, that Patsy Ramsey wasn’t the author of the Ramsey Ransom Note.
Many of the experts courted by the media to prognosticate on court cases tend to be guns for hire either by prosecution teams, or by defense teams. It’s usually one side or the other. So a coroner or a polygrapher or a handwriting specialist or an ex-FBI profiler may make themselves available – at a fee – to testify in court, usually in support of a prosecution narrative, or to bolster a defense case.
They’re only too happy to talk to the media, it’s good for business, and so when they do, it’s all under the guise of “being objective”. But is it?
You’re only going to get a truly objective view of a true crime case from someone with no horse in the race. That’s not going to be an expert, and typically, it’s not going to be a journalist. There are a few journalists out there that have gone freelance, and cut themselves loose of their contracts [like me], who are allowed to do independent research and speculate, as long as they do so without defaming, or making absolute statements of guilt.
Media personalities who express their opinion well can become very wealthy and powerful, especially when they take their curated followings with them. Think about Oprah, Dr. Phil and Nancy Grace.
Nancy Grace is a special case. She’s empowered to comment and speculate because she’s an expert journalist in her own right; she’s a journalist with a law degree, and some experience in the Atlanta, Georgia courtroom as a prosecutor for the DA’s office. She’s smart enough to know how to speculate, or express an opinion in public that may be controversial or even inflammatory, but also legally sound. Many lawyers who field high-profile cases quit lawyering and become media pundits, like Marcia Clark. Legal commentary is a more fun gig, and if they’re compelling and charming in their coverage for the big networks, it pays well too.
Journalists who write books about criminals are also still beholden to their employers to toe the line, and be very careful about what they say or speculate on. A team of media lawyers will go through their narrative and make sure it reads like reporting, so that it’s just a recounting of dry facts and isn’t too subjective.
Lawyers sometimes write books too, but lawyers aren’t the best journalists, and constructing legal narratives doesn’t always translate to compelling prose on the page. That said, some do spectacularly well, especially when they hire ghost writers. Juan Martinez’ book on Jodi Arias for example is a major bestselling blockbuster, with well over 1000 reviews. It’s compelling stuff because of the prosecutor’s intimate knowledge of the case, and his many firsthand impressions and experiences with that particular murderess. This gives the reader a real sense of voyeurism, of being right there.
The bottomline when it comes to true crime is that you’re unlikely to get the authentic narrative from the media, just as you’re unlikely to get the actual story in court. What you will from the court and the media echo that follows, is opposing versions jostling for a legal stamp of approval. One version is the PR Apologia favouring an accused [where the family share their feelings of sympathy etc], the other version involves the sanitized neutral reporting on the objective facts [this person died at that time on Avenue X].
What the public really wants to know is why. They want motive. The media often tease their audience that they’re going to go there and expose these deepest of deep insights, they’re going to reveal all, that the accused is going to say why…and when you watch the documentaries, it’s actually about the accused denying they committed a crime. The media don’t talk about motive because they can’t. Even if they did, the accused wouldn’t want to be associated with a production than condemns them. So invariably, any media reporting that involves a criminal tends to be sympathetic to his case, otherwise he wouldn’t participate.
The media like to pretend to be biased, but they never are, and usually they’re biased towards the very criminals the public are outraged about. They have to be, because how the law works, if you say someone is innocent in public and they’re guilty, or possibly guilty, that’s okay, but if you say they’re guilty and you can’t prove it, then you’re guilty. In this way the media narrative always favours the defense narrative.
The public want to know what really happened, the thought processes that were involved, the whole dynamic. They want to see what is hidden. They want to speculate on the possibilities. Who is going to tell that story, because this is the hallowed ground of true crime?
It’s only the one with no horse in the race that’s going to deliver on that story.
After covering a series of high-profile true crime cases, I’m ashamed to admit how long it’s taken to pick up on the tongue flick as a behavioural giveaway of some significance.
It was probably thanks to the LIVEFEED video in the Henri van Breda axe murder trial, that I actually began to really notice it. Because it happens so quickly, you tend to miss it in real time, or even in television coverage.
Since the LIVEFEED was immediately available on YouTube, I was able to go back and review what I thought I’d seen and heard in court, and that’s when a whole new world opened. Henri often lifted his hand just as his tongue poked out, or just as his lip would snarl. It was virtually impossible to catch this unless one slowed down the YouTube video and rewatched it again and again.
Then I noticed the same thing in the Rohde case. Then you start seeing just how often it comes up in true crime. When you realize it’s out there, it starts coming out of the woodwork. What you want to watch out for, besides the tongue flick itself, is the context within which it happens. What is being said, what idea is being brokered when the person flicks their tongue?
Below, John flicks his tongue as he’s congratulating himself about “the point at which justice comes into our system.” He’s referring to the Grand Jury system, and implying the Grand Jury voted not to indict the Ramseys, when in fact they had voted to indict. Watch the clip here.
In the screengrab below Patsy is explaining that the $100 000 is for the arrest and conviction of the killer of their daughter. If the killer was under age 10, then Colorado law wouldn’t even recognize the crime, so there could be no arrest or conviction, and so there was no way that reward could be paid out.
Patsy’s tongue flick happens as she says: “We feel there are at least two people on the face of this earth that know…” Uh-oh. Watch the clip here.
Burke’s tongue flick happens when Dr Phil is taking him through the morning when they discover JonBenet is missing. He describes Patsy coming into his room, and then a cop coming in and shining a flashlight [Burke pretends to be asleep]. When Dr Phil says: “It’s still dark when this happens…” Burke pokes out his tongue. Watch the moment here.
In the Madeleine McCann case, Gerry’s tongue flick happens immediately after he says: “Everything we’ve done is to increase the chances of her being returned.” Then he looks down, and the flick happens. Is that true? Is everything done to increase the chances of Madeleine being found and returned to them? Watch the clip here.
What prompted Scott Peterson’s tongue flick [below]? He says: “A lot of the questions are ‘how do you stay focused and keep working…?'” Does Scott mean the questions are about him continuing with his life almost as if nothing has happened? If so, part of the answer to that may be his affair with Amber Frey.
In the same interview he says “it [the affair, which by then was public knowledge because Amber had told the media] had nothing to with it…” and then “I had nothing to do with it.” Didn’t it?
Read the analysis on Chris Watts here. He does more than one tongue flick in his seven minute interview.
In the Rohde case, which is still sub judicae, Jason Rohde [accused of murdering his wife and staging it to look a suicide] not only flicks his tongue often, but shrugs constantly.
Henri van Breda was an excellent case to learn to catch the tongue flicks. Because of his laid-back demeanour on the stand, and his well-groomed and educated manner of answering questions, you tended to miss the tongue flicks entirely. Only when making a close study of the livefeed, watching snippets repeatedly, did you begin to notice the many times Henri would touch his face. Behind his hand you saw the tongue reflexively slipping out, and the lip curling, as if to hide a nervous smile or twitch of the upper lip.
Below is a rare screengrab where his face is not obscured by his hand, although his head is turned away from the camera slightly. On this occasion, the convicted triple axe murderer was asked to demonstrate – using a balsa wood prop of the axe – how the axe murderer bludgeoned his father while he [supposedly] watched from elsewhere in the room. According to Henri, the attacker laughed while raining axe blows on his father in particular. It may be that his hand isn’t blocking his face on this occasion because it’s holding the axe.
Watch the relevant clip here.
What’s the actual significance of the tongue flick? It could be several things. It could be the psychological idea of tucking into a good meal, in the sense that what’s being asked is something of immense value, but the suspect is determined not to give this information up. As a result, there’s a sense of relishing this delightful leverage, of knowing something someone else doesn’t.
It may also be to hide another microexpression, like a smile, or a nervous curling of the upper lip, and in this sense the tongue flick might be reflexive.
Often we associate a flicking tongue with a snake. Snakes flick their tongue, but that is done to smell. Human beings aren’t trying to smell when they flick their tongues, except that those questioning them are trying to intuit something. So in a sense, there is this psychological effort to perceive something, to smell something. The tongue flick intuits that on a primal level. The suspect is asked a series of questions which the suspect probably could offer a lot more information. This information is on the “tip of their tongue”, but there would be dire consequences if this information is simply volunteered.
Also, the suspect tends to know before he is asked what is being asked [or suspected] of him. So when the question is fielded, often on camera, there is a sense of savouring it, almost as one would a nice meal.
The tongue flick’s real value, as I’ve mentioned before, isn’t that it happens, but when it happens. Catch the tongue flick and then go back and see what prompts it, and a world of psychological possibilities is revealed, including the crown jewel in unsolved true crime cases: motive.
After posting the blog on lie spotting, MandyHVZ on REDDIT commented on a mark on Chris Watts’ neck. Check it out.
In some of the interviews Chris Watt gave, he’s faced away from the camera, like this one from CBS, where he says: “I don’t feel this is even real right now. It’s Earth-shattering. like a nightmare where I just can’t wake up from.”
The word “earth-shattering” is a colorful term. Watts volunteers this, but it’s a semantic Freudian slip because he’s buried his wife, and that required the shattering or breaking of Earth. These residues are in this mind as he’s being asked to share his thoughts and feelings. Some are slipping through.
The reality is there were several cameras, and thus several camera angles. The Denver7 Channel had the all-important side-view. It’s from Denver7 that the screengrabs below were taken.
Although the autopsy results for Shanann are still pending, we know Watts strangled both his daughters. It’s likely Watts did the same to their mother in a so-called “silent death”. During a death by strangulation/suffocation, two things happen:
Right at the end of the interview, Watts purses his lips and raises his left hand to his chin, blocking the view of the scar. Just reflexive touching, or was he conscious of the scar right through the interview and right at the end, could no longer resist the urge to block it from view?
Sidenote: This reddish blemish reminds me of the same faded fresh scar on Amanda Knox’s throat, visible to all outside the scene of the crime but seen by none.
Also a lot of similar patterns in Knox’s situation and responses and Watts [see below]. Original Daily Mail article here.
Throughout the Oscar Pistorius case, Cape Town’s Kelly Phelps, a senior lecturer on criminal law at the University of Cape Town’s department of public law [and thus a legal expert] often provided expert counsel to the clueless mainstream media. Below are just a handful of Phelps’ contributions to the media narrative.
‘Appealing Oscar Pistorius’ conviction a waste of taxpayer money’ November 2015 – Despite Phelps contention that it was a frivolous waste of time, the State won the appeal on Oscar’s murder sentence.
Why parole for Oscar Pistorius is perfectly legitimate – written by Kelly Phelps on June 23rd, 2015, when Oscar was about to be released from prison after serving just 10 months in jail.
Experts differ on Oscar Verdict – on September 11 2014, when Judge Masipa found Oscar guilty of culpable homicide [a verdict ultimately overturned by the Supreme Court of Appeal to murder] Kelly Phelps told the media:
“I support her finding and her reasoning… Culpable homicide was always a likely outcome in this case,” she said.
There’s a lot more where this comes from. I remember Phelps very well during my coverage of the Pistorius case between 2014 and 2017. I remember not agreeing with virtually every criminal law assessment she made. Ulrich Roux, on the other hand, I remember made fairly astute calls and sensible commentary during the first third of the trial narrative, but his handle on the case got a little more wobbly from there onwards, I thought.
In order to comment on a court case with true insight requires more than a passing knowledge of a trial, and a lot better source of information than coverage by the mainstream media. To pick the nuances you really have to be there, or failing that, study everything that’s out there. Most of these experts simply don’t have the time for that, so it’s no wonder their assessments are glances and glimpses, and of dubious worth otherwise, especially when there are long court narratives. The Van Breda case has been pending for the past three years and counting. That’s a lot of intrigue to have to catch up on at short notice.
When Phelps cast her pearls to the media during the Pistorius case, which was a five year trial narrative from beginning to final conclusion, I wondered whether it was just bad luck, or whether one of us was consistently critically misinformed about the case.
You can say what you want, in spite of Phelps’ prognostications from the get-go, let the records show, the most authoritative courts in the country have consistently found otherwise, contrary to her expert academic counsel to the media regarding Pistorius.
Now, with Henri van Breda, she appears to be doing to same thing.
Over the weekend, Cape Town’s Weekend Argus quoted the criminal law lecturer [whom they describe as a legal analyst on the Oscar Pistorius trial for CNN] saying:
“I’m convinced after reading the defence’s papers that they stand a decent chance of getting a Supreme Court hearing…it’s not unthinkable the Supreme Court could be swayed into acquitting him. [The state’s] argument is strong, but the defence’s is equally so. This case is not as open and shut as the public have been led to believe.”
This whopper from Phelps makes me wonder how much time she has spent following this case, between her duties as a university lecturer. If I had to score the state’s case against the defence case I’d say it was a 9-1 whitewash. Botha only gave the appearance of fielding a defence, in my view.
In the Pistorius trial, we saw similar legal sleight of hand. Oscar really had no defence, but Barry Roux managed to convince a few, at least for a while, that he did, or at least that there was some doubt to consider. I’d score the Pistorius defence’s case slightly better, at 8-2.
The only point for the defence in the Van Breda trial was that Henri presented a version in court, which was better [barely] than presenting no version. I agree with what Desai said during the application for leave to appeal hearing, rarely do you come across a case as open and shut as this one. It goes without saying that Henri was a very unconvincing witness on the stand, among a host of other problems which I’m not going to go into here.
[Phelps] said to understand the complexity of the trial, it was important to grasp the distinction between circumstantial and direct evidence. “Direct evidence supports the truth of a claim directly. For example, if a witness saw an accused shoot and kill the deceased, this testimony is direct evidence of the guilt of the accused. After reading the defence’s appeal application it’s clear that another reasonable inference may be able to be drawn. And if the Supreme Court is persuaded then Henri van Breda will walk free.”
It sounds like the same sort of drivel about Oscar, doesn’t it? There are very few high-profile criminal cases where someone actually sees someone else commit a crime. Direct evidence cases basically negate the need to even have a trial. Something that’s self-evident typically doesn’t need to be tested in court, just look at the CCTV footage. Case closed.
A good example, said Phelps, is the way the defence challenged the State’s persuasive argument that De Zalze’s security was not penetrated. “Van Breda’s lawyers refer to unrefuted testimony that real alarms went off on the night in question, which were never explained by the State. Furthermore, they point out that the majority of the fence was not covered by cameras and there were in fact 191 prior incidents of crime reported to the police. This clearly shows that the security is not impenetrable.”
If you sat through the court testimony, and you were properly appraised of the DeZalze estate – it’s size, it’s extent, the mapping, the location of #12 Goske Street in the fabric of the estate, the various security layers etc – then you’d know the perimeter security isn’t a good legal argument in this case. You’d also know the alarms that went off sound like a promising defence but they’re not; they’re just false alarms picked up the perimeter sensors that are typical at estates of similar size.
Phelps said while the State’s case was compelling enough to secure a conviction, it nevertheless provided no motive as it is not a legal requirement in South African law. “However, motive is an important persuasive tool as it adds plausibility to the State’s case. So why did Van Breda just decide out of the blue one morning to axe his family to death? It beggars belief it’s deeply implausible. “The State provides a compelling narrative but no context to drive it. They did not put forward a shred of evidence to explain why Henri would have murdered almost his entire family. Ultimately, the lack of motive might sway the Supreme Court.”
On paper, this also sounds like a brilliant legal argument, and certainly the court and the media all scratched their heads post conviction. It was as if for the first time people wondered – shit, if he did it, why would he? And then a few people pontificated about a boy being wounded by his dad, as if that’s never happened in every other family in the world that’s ever raised teenage boys or male siblings.
Once again, Phelps is making the same mistake she made with Oscar Pistorius. There the state, the court and the media all failed to address motive as well, and yet ultimately, Oscar was found guilty of murder and sentenced to the appropriate sentence.
In South African criminal law, all you have to prove is intention, also known as Dolus. In the Van Breda case the state went even further, proving premeditated murder.
The Van Breda case has far more intentionality than the Pistorius case, because Van Breda puts himself at the scene in his own version, and because he’s there when four people are slaughtered at arm’s length from where he’s standing like a statue. He’s right there as his brother and father are being hacked multiple times – he’s standing right there in the same room. Murdering someone with an axe takes time. Each blow takes a moment to lift and smash, and then there’s another blow, and the victim may move and perpetrator must change position to land the blow where it will inflict the most damage. Killing one person with an axe takes time, even after you’ve landed your blows. Imagine how long killing four people, one after another, takes? Imagine how tiring it is.
And by his own admission, Henri does nothing while the one family member is attacked, then the other, then the other and does nothing for several hours afterwards when he has the house to himself, to help any of his family members even though he has minimal injuries, and he’s well aware that they are seriously injured and still alive.
The fact that Marli survived in spite of her injuries, and despite her brother’s callous lack of compassion, indicates there was something that could have been done, there were lives that could have been saved.
Yet Henri can also offer no explanation for why he didn’t come to the aid of any of his four slain family members, and yet he came to his own aid. According to his version, he fought off the attacker with ease, but only when the phantom confronted him. In this sense there is a clear intention to fight for his own survival, but then not to assist his family whose suffering persists for hours on end, and for many more minutes during his ridiculous phone call in which he expresses a deplorable lack of urgency given the circumstances.
Van Breda’s 20-something emergency phone call is another huge piece of evidence which we didn’t have in the Oscar Pistorius case.
In my view – and I don’t think this is legal rocket science by any means – Judge Desai will not grant an appeal, neither will the Supreme Court of Appeal and neither will the Constitutional Court.
Is Chris Watts a convincing liar? Really?
Have a look at the seven minute interview Chris Watts gave while his pregnant wife and two daughters were still missing. Make a mental note of any inappropriate behaviour, micro-expressions, mannerisms, phrases or words that raise red flags. Ready? Go!
It hasn’t taken long for the media and the public to draw comparisons between Chris Watts and Scott Peterson. These two assholes even look similar. People magazine’s so-called experts have called Chris Watts “very convincing” in front of the cameras. Here’s the full quote:
Investigative experts tell PEOPLE, Watts’ behavior comes as no surprise. “He has an incredibly large ego,” says Dale Yeager, a criminal analyst and forensic profiler who is unconnected with the case. “He was very convincing in front of the camera, which means he really comes off as sociopathic. That doesn’t mean he is mentally ill, just that he has a personality defect.”
Drawing a parallel between Watts’ case and that of Scott Peterson, who notoriously murdered his pregnant wife and then repeatedly gave interviews, Yeager says, “He’s Scott Peterson, just less charismatic.”
Australia’s News.com.au also fielded one of their true crime specialists to give their “expert” take on Watts.
To the untrained eye, Watts may have given the impression of a quietly anxious husband and father seemingly clueless about the whereabouts of Shanann, 34, Bella, 4, and Celeste, 3. But to renowned body language specialist Judi James, the subtle quirks in his physical behaviour told a different story to the one coming out of his mouth.
Ms James has identified nine techniques that Mr Watts may have used to conceal his guilt as he was filmed on the front porch of the family’s home in Frederick, Colorado on Tuesday.
She says Mr Watts may have gone to extraordinary lengths to appear calm and unruffled in the belief that was how innocent people behaved.
What a crock of shit. You don’t need to be a forensic profiler or a body language specialist [whatever that is] to intuit decepion. You just need to pay attention, be alert, and some familiarity with other true crime cases and their patterns doesn’t hurt.
Now, without any further ado, what are Chris Watts’ tells?
He’s too controlled under the circumstances, and when emotions do leak through, they’re the wrong ones. Also, he keeps smiling or looking like he’s about to smile.
That’s an analysis of less than half the interview, but I think it’s enough. Why is it important to study a shithead like Watts and figure out his MO, and his patterns? Because the failure to figure out when someone is lying to you, especially someone close to you, could get you killed. You could be a child, or a spouse in a family, you could be pregnant or engaged, or trying to make it work, and you might be living day to day with someone who means to kill you, or if not kill, do harm to you. Perhaps financially. Perhaps in a host of ways.
It’s important that we as social creatures are awake and alert to the many little gestures that give away a spectrum of our inner feelings, from mostly harmless disassociation, to toxic and callous sadism, to seditious and insidious and potentially destructive narcissism.
It’s important that we’re wise to these expressions masking incredibly destructive impulses in those close to us, and those around us. If it doesn’t apply to us in our relationships or friendships, it may come in useful with someone out there and our ability to look into their relationships, where those in them maybe can’t see the wood for the trees.
True crime has always been about figuring out ourselves and each other through the struggles and motivations, the life and death stuff going on with other people. Failure to figure this out places us at risk, if not in danger in the real world. In a world where tabloids and their “experts” advise us on how convincing the likes of Watts is in an interview, we need to be sharper than that. And with a little practice and attention to detail, we can be.
The good news is, when you know what you’re looking for, and when you’ve seen it once, it’s easy to pick up the pattern. The trick is to look and listen carefully, to pay attention not only to the words but to the context of the words, and to have the confidence to think for yourself, to make up your own mind, rather than accept someone else’s version of events as gospel.
In a marriage, especially a doomed marriage, this simple ability to discern the difference between a genuine person and deception, could save lives. In the real world, the ability to discern the difference between reality and fiction can mean the difference between success and failure. A society that can read itself right is self-correcting. The same applies to us as individuals.
When we develop the capacity to intuit lies, we’re forewarned. Because we have a handle on reality, we’re less easily to mislead or manipulate. We can act, we can change reality before it happens, rather than as we see so often in true crime, piecing it all together when it’s too late, after the fact.
Notice how different Watts presents himself in court. The glasses are meant to convey sensitivity and minimize the perception of masculine aggression, and malice.
Visit this link to watch Chris Watts’ reaction to his wife’s pregnancy test. Given that they’d bought an expensive house in 2013, and Watts’ had filed for bankruptcy in 2015, the news couldn’t have been received well in his heart of hearts.
According to the Daily Mail:
The couple declared bankruptcy in 2015, and despite Shanann’s frequent Facebook posts boasting of the Lexus and frequent paid trips she was awarded for selling health supplements, the couple [in 2018] was facing a $1,500 civil suit from their homeowners’ association. They purchased their five-bed, four-bath home for $400,000 in 2013, and their mortgage payment was about $3,000 a month, according to bankruptcy records.
Ironically Watts situation and Scott Peterson’s are almost a carbon copy – new house, new child on the way, and a job that’s not quite paying the bills. Divorce more messy than murder? Only if you’re a sociopath.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bl7cFW2gL_x/?taken-by=shanannwatts
When I first heard Advocate Botha’s arguments in his bid to win leave to appeal I was very underwhelmed. I didn’t get a sense that Botha was volunteering anything new on behalf of his notorious client. There were no game-changers. There was nothing that stopped one in one’s tracks and went, wow, I never thought of that, this could change everything.
After further analysis Botha’s arguments do have a little merit. He starts off challenging the state and the court a quo on the “premeditation” findings. In the first three minutes of the hearing Botha emphasised precisely this aspect.
Let’s review the transcript.
BOTHA: Even if the court confirms the guilty finding, on counts 1 to 3, there’s a reasonable prospect the court of appeal may find that the state failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the applicant planned the murders, or that the murders were premeditated. Of course in that premise [clears throat], in that event, the charges – if a court of appeal agrees with us on that aspect – the mandatory life sentences fall away. And the court will then consider [correcting himself] will then be free to consider afresh, a sentence without the uh-uh…provisions of section 51 B…the Criminal Law Amendment Act being applicable.
In theory this is a reasonable argument. It worked in the Oscar Pistorius case. Premeditation is often very difficult to prove, especially in circumstantial evidence cases.
In the Oscar Pistorius case, had Oscar shot Reeva with his prosthetic limbs on, the court would have had a strong case for premeditated murder. Why? How? Because in Oscar’s own version he was asleep with his legs off. If he had the presence of mind to put on his prosthetic limbs and arm himself [an activity that took time, perhaps half a minute] and rather than flee the scene, approach the danger and shoot, well that creates a mosaic of premeditated action doesn’t it? When Oscar was putting his limbs on, had he formed an intention in his mind?
As it turned out, Oscar wasn’t on this prosthetic limbs when he fired the shots, which was a huge early miscalculation and embarrassment to the state and the state’s case.
Personally I believe Oscar was guilty of premeditated murder, because he heard Reeva screaming [I believe], because he approached the screaming cubicle, because he fired four shots into it, and because each shot’s trajectory differed markedly from the other, which means he was tracking his target who was unsighted, using sound. Using her screams to see her.
3 of the 4 shots were on target, despite the fact that Reeva was moving behind the door, and the last shot was a head shot. The sound she made when she received this wound, was falling on the wooden magazine rack. This sound would have told the shooter exactly where Reeva was.
I covered a lot of this in my book Justice Eventualis, cross-referencing expert testimony with ballistics angles and measurements. I even reconstructed a to-scale scene in my garage with a real door.
Ultimately though, despite a fairly good palette of evidence, the state failed to prove premeditated murder, and ultimately failed to prove that Oscar murdered Reeva.
In the end Oscar was only found guilty [Dolus Eventualis] of indirect intent, in the sense that he murdered an unarmed intruder, not Reeva. Indirect intent, such as throwing a hand grenade into a crowd may be an indirect way of killing specific people, but it’s intent nevertheless. You might not know who you’re killing, but you clearly intend to kill nonetheless. I cover this intention in detail in Slaughter, my book on mass murderers.
It’s difficult to see more premeditation and a clearer motive in mass murderers, and yet the media and even the FBI often are unable to say why these mass murders happen. They can’t say why the Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock killed a record number of Americans. Ditto Newtown’s Adam Lanza, Virginia Tech’s Seung Hui Cho or the JThe Dark Knight cinema shooting in Aurora by James Holmes.
Because of the state’s failure to prove premeditation and direct intent, technically and legally, Oscar is only guilty of murdering someone, not of murdering Reeva. Wherever Reeva is right now, I’m sure she’s not happy with that. If you were murdered, would you be?
In any event, not all cases are born equal, and the Van Breda case – in terms of intent – is a lot simpler than the Pistorius case. Obviously where there are four victims, three of whom are bludgeoned to death, and the fourth also bludgeoned but miraculously survived, you have clear premeditation. Just in the act of successively murdering one, then another, then another, and then attempting to murder a fourth, you have an assailant who has a very clear intention. In an axe murder death isn’t instantaneous. It requires several blows to the head and neck, and in this case, all four received blows to the head and neck. Henri is the only family member who didn’t.
One sees this intent reinforced by the fact that Henri also didn’t come to the aid of any of his family members after they were attacked.
Even though he knew his brother and sister were alive, struggling to stay alive for at least two hours, he didn’t come to the aid of either of his siblings, or even comfort them. In fact, there’s some reason to believe Henri laughed while he massacred his family. In his own version he described the axe murderer laughing while hacking his father to death. This isn’t premeditation, but it suggests if he wanted his family dead, after killing two family members, he was prepared to still let nature take its course.
In my books on Van Breda I’ve gone into some detail why the second axe murder – of his father – is clearly premeditated. Galloway skillfully avoids getting her hands dirty in these arguments by simply stating that if the family members were all upstairs, and the axe was downstairs, it required Henri [who claimed he was also upstairs], to go downstairs in the middle of the night when everyone was asleep, collect the axe and then head upstairs and carry out the slaughter he had in mind.
I agree that this implies premeditation, just as the fact that the crime occurred when it did, at about 03:00, about three hours after a neighbour heard the sounds of raised male voices arguing.
I also feel this ought to be sufficient, except we see a mirror image of this scenario in the Oscar case. It’s not a 100% reflection, but it is similar. In Oscar’s story he got out of bed, went to the balcony door to close the curtains, heard a sound, went to retrieve his gun from under the bed [right where Reeva was supposed to be sleeping, but blanketed in impenetrable darkness].
Oscar claimed he either spoke to Reeva in a low tone, or whispered to her. In this schema he spoke to her too softly for her to hear, that’s why she didn’t answer, but in the reality of the story, Reeva wasn’t there to begin with, she was already in the toilet, and had locked the door.
The point is, like Van Breda, Oscar also had to retrieve his weapon from somewhere else, and then approach his target. Instead of a stairway, he went along a hallway, was presented with an empty bathroom, and someone inside a locked room. Oscar’s story that he’d communicated with Reeva throughout waves the flag that he’d warned her he was armed, and this was in a sense a warning shot. In Oscar’ version, Reeva’s failure to acknowledge herself cost her her life. Oscar was justified in being afraid and trigger happy, and Reeva died because she failed to raise her voice and identify herself. That’s his explanation.
I don’t wish to conflate the two cases more than that, other than to point out Henri’s girlfriend invoked Oscar’s testimony and how Oscar was blamed when he showed emotion, and blamed when he didn’t. Danielle said in her exclusive interview with 60 Minutes that Henri was trying very hard not to fall into the same trap. But what she seems to have missed is that Oscar was found guilty of murder. It’s not as if he was innocent and his emotions were wrongly found to be inappropriate by the media. He was guilty and thus his inappropriate emotions made sense. The same applies to Henri, doesn’t it?
At face value then, Botha’s argument that the premeditation narrative is a little shaky holds some water. But for anyone familiar with this case, and applying the logic that premeditation is implicit in multiple serial killings, then Botha’s arguments are very shaky indeed. The Van Breda axe murders are almost at the scale to meet the classification for mass murder. If Marli had died, Henri would officially be regarded as a mass murderer. Even worse, a mass murderer exclusively of his own family members.
In terms of Judge Desai, he was combative and interrupting throughout Botha’s arguments. He was also scornful straight off the bat when Botha said this was merely a “circumstantial evidence” case.
The Judge is correct that most criminal cases are circumstantial evidence cases. In criminal cases, direct evidence tends to be lacking, often because the perpetrators conduct their crimes in secret, and tend to remove the direct evidence implicating them.
Examples of direct evidence are eye witnesses. A fingerprint isn’t direct evidence. In a circumstantial evidence case, a court must draw inferences based on the mosaic of information provided.
My favorite moment during the 28-minute hearing was when Galloway accused Botha of nit-picking the circumstantial evidence, causing him to miss the wood for the trees. That’s exactly what he’s done.
If I had to bet, I’d say the Judge won’t grant an appeal, because this would be little more than giving further opportunity for further fruitless nit-picking. If that happens, Botha can apply to the Supreme Court of Appeal [SCA] directly, just as Gerrie Nel did when Judge Masipa denied him leave to appeal her “shockingly light” sentence.
If the SCA refuse to grant an appeal, and they tend to be very strict in the cases they do grant leave to, Botha can apply to the Constitutional Court. Oscar did this when the SCA ruled against him. The Constitutional Court rarely rule on criminal matters, and it’s virtually inconceivable that they’d want to hear this case.
We have seen that Judge Desai has been somewhat sympathetic towards Henri. That said, he has been exceedingly patient hearing Botha’s case, even when it’s been hours and hours of much ado about nothing. Prior to sentencing, Desai repeatedly offered Botha the chance to provide evidence in mitigation of sentence. Botha and his client spurned this offer, a decision both may rue for the foreseeable future.
If Desai refuses leave, it’s also possible that in future another application may be lodged, fielding a new set of evidence. The Drugs Narrative, in my opinion, may yet be out there, but I wouldn’t count on those chickens before they hatch.
#SHAKEDOWN 