Chris watts netflix
The Watts case is so utterly terrifying because it shows us a bloke who looks incredibly normal, with a wife and kids who clearly love him. Miscarriages of justice hold a strong draw too – most of us can’t imagine ourselves as a murderer but we could just about imagine ourselves being wrongly convicted, as was the case with Amanda Knox, making that documentary particularly compelling. True crime fans are predominantly female, and some talk about their fascination in relation to avoiding being a victim of crime themselves (the ‘stay sexy, don’t get murdered’ factor, to quote popular podcast My Favourite Murder). It also poses a question: if we are going to watch these things, where do we draw the line? Fans of true crime often talk about reasons, beyond morbid fascination, that they are interested in the genre. It is, to say the least, extremely upsetting. And we also see extensive footage of their two daughters playing with their dad and singing him a song about how he is their hero. We read the text messages they exchanged when she was on her way home from a business trip just hours before he murdered her, and the text exchanges with her friends about Chris. We also see multiple videos of Shanann talking about how much she loves Chris and of the moment Chris found out she was expecting their third child. We see him talking to the press, pleading for the family’s safe return and his strange behavior as identified by a neighbor who has CCTV of Chris leaving in his car in the early hours. In a way it’s an incredible documentary, a look at the days and weeks before Shanann, Celeste and Bella went missing, and what happened immediately after including police footage of Chris just hours after he had dumped his three-year-old and four-year-old daughters’ bodies in oil tanks and buried his 15-weeks-pregnant wife in a shallow grave. There’s no bias and no sides but also there’s no explanation – or at least none that feels bearable or plausible. It means the film is not subject to unreliable opinion or flawed memories, 20-20 hindsight or retrofitting the truth. This means there is no narration, no after-the-fact interviews, no commentary or analysis. The whole thing is pieced together from police and media footage, videos and posts on social media as well as text messages between the main players.
From the internet sleuths of Don’t F**k With Cats, questions about the American legal system in Making A Murdererto the shocking self-incrimination of Robert Durst in The Jinx, true crime docs have to rely on ever more sensational stories, or formats, to stand out.Īmerican Murder: The Family Next Door takes another new approach. Streaming services are packed to the rafters with murder documentaries, while true crime seems to be an ever increasing preoccupation. And we see Chris Watts lying about Shanann and their kids’ disappearance mere hours after he had killed them all. We see the last text messages Shanann sent and the last moments her daughters were alive. In this doc we hear the 911 call from Shanann’s friend Nickole Atkinson the morning of her death and the police footage of the moments they arrived at the house to find a frantic Nickole and later a very cagey Chris Watts. The latest buzzy Netflix documentary tells the story of Chris Watts who murdered his pregnant wife Shanann and their two daughters Celeste and Bella.