Read killer dad Chris Watts’ depraved secret letter to slain wife and daughters… as his reclusive parents break eight-year silence and reveal toxic family rift with in-laws

At the historic Bethesda Cemetery, in Aberdeen, North Carolina, a marble bench engraved with the names Shanann, Bella, Celeste and Nico overlooks three graves.

The serene setting makes it hard to ponder the final moments of terror Shanann Watts and her babies endured in August 2018.

I traveled to this beautiful state to hear a mother and father’s perspective on having a child who is a killer.

As the daughter of a murderer (Melissa G Moore is the daughter of Keith Jesperson, ‘The Happy Face Killer’), I only have the child’s perspective on what it feels like to be left behind. As a parent myself, I cannot imagine the pain and guilt Ronnie and Cindy Watts are enduring.

In the early hours of August 13, their son Chris Watts strangled his wife 34-year-old Shanann – who was 15 weeks pregnant at the time – after he had sex with her.

He then drove their girls Bella, four, and Celeste, three, to the oil field where he worked. Once there, he smothered the girls with their blankets before discarding their bodies in oil wells.

After repeatedly lying about what happened to his family, he finally pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five consecutive life sentences without the chance of parole.

The judge who sentenced Chris, now 41, described his crimes as the most brutal and inhumane he had ever seen.

The Watts family have not spoken intimately to anyone about all they have endured in the wake of their son’s arrest and conviction. So there was much to cover in the four days I spent with them.

How could it have come to this? Don’t ask why; don’t go looking for reasons. But for Ronnie and Cindy, silencing that need to know is impossible. They are sinking in a murky water of wants. They want their grandbabies back; they want to go back in time to stop their son from doing the devil’s work; they want to know what God has not yet shown them: Why?

Chris Watts’s silence has frozen his mother and father in suspended animation – a place riddled with more questions than can ever be answered, even if their son cared to. And Chris does not care to.

Says Cindy: ‘Over and over he tells Ronnie and me, “Go live your lives. Go out to dinner and do things, forget about me. I’ll be okay.”‘

Such directives, no matter how well-meaning, are impossible to follow. The shock and disbelief are debilitating.

‘You’re left with no real answers, or mental health answers or something, you know,’ his sister Jamie told me. ‘Because a normal guy that’s never been in trouble before in his life loses his mind one night and annihilates his whole family. No, it doesn’t make sense to me. None of it makes sense.’

Yet here we are.

The public wonders: How can Chris’s parents continue to stand behind such a monster? His parents have their reasons, though this married-for-decades couple, as close as can be, take very different approaches to their new reality.

Cindy is simply certain ‘there’s no way he’d kill his girls.’ A potent blend of biology, maternal instinct, denial and faith makes hating Chris impossible for Cindy.

‘Christopher is a good person, I know him,’ she said. ‘Nobody in his past or even now, who meets him in prison, can find anything bad to say.’

The family tells me they didn’t get the chance to get their answers because there wasn’t a trial – Chris took a plea deal in just two days – which precluded both the family and the general public from seeing the unredacted discovery (the process of obtaining evidence).

This trove includes everything from text messages to crime scene photos of his children’s bodies retrieved from the bottom of the oil storage tanks, a visual that even the seasoned detectives who worked the case have said they’ll never forget.

‘Chris told us, “I don’t want to put my family through that,”‘ Cindy said.

I asked her if she thought going to trial would have helped her family release the daily unease they feel; if seeing their son go through the criminal justice system and letting due process take its course would have provided closure.

‘Yes,’ she answered without hesitation. ‘I would’ve liked to see a defense for my son, and one that would allow him to say out loud, “I killed Shanann but not my girls.”‘

Chris’s initial confession, the one in which he told police he killed Shanann because she told him she had killed the girls, is the narrative that Cindy felt ‘makes the most sense.’

Ronnie insists there were holes and inconsistencies in his son’s second confession to killing his daughters. His focus is not to defend his son’s character, as Cindy does every moment she can; he is instead consumed with learning whether his son acted alone or had an accomplice.

He also wants to get to the bottom of a question that Chris has never answered. And it’s not the question you’d think.

Instead of asking why Chris killed his children, he wants to know why Chris took the plea deal. Why did he avoid a trial, where the prosecution would have had to provide the full discovery? Why didn’t Chris defend his character the way his own mother continues to do to this day?

Chris’s father digs and digs, believing the truth is buried behind black smudge lines. He has scoured thousands of pages of unredacted discovery, obsessing over details of police sweeps of the house, cadaver dog hits, video footage, cell phone pings and records, Nichol Kessinger’s Google searches.

Ronnie firmly believes Kessinger – Chris’s mistress at the time of his murders – played a significant role in his son’s actions.

Ronnie and Cindy did prod their son to speak the unspeakable. Holding up a paper plate during a prison visit, Ronnie allegedly waved it like a flag, begging Chris: ‘Will you please explain to me how you fit their bodies in a hole this size?’

He didn’t get an answer.

‘I’m not saying he shouldn’t be in jail,’ Cindy told me. ‘He killed his wife, but why the girls? There’s no way he could put the girls in that eight-inch hole… It’s not how he is, it’s just not.’

I hadn’t wanted to pressure Ronnie or Cindy to visit the cemetery with me. I knew they had not been able to attend the funeral because of the subsequent estrangement between them and Shanann’s family.

I realized the burial site was also a struggle for turf: who deserves to be there was the question that kept the battle raging.

But on the morning I was to make the hour drive from their hometown to the cemetery, Ronnie and Cindy called to say they’d accompany me.

They brought with them a letter Chris had asked them to read at his victims’ graves.

Birthday

1.10.20

Dear Shanann,

Hey boo! Happy Birthday! Thirty-six years young today. This is the first time of year when I could always say you’re ‘two’ years older than me. You didn’t like that too much, but I liked messing with you.

There’s so much I wish I could say to you and make up for what I did to our family. No one needed to go through this. You and our babies had a long life ahead of them and deserved to see that life.

I promise the man you married isn’t the man who turned his back on his family. That man was an aberration brought on by an evil outside source. You know the husband and dad I am and would testify to that today.

I look outside my window and wonder what we would be doing and then I get this overwhelming feeling you’re looking at me with our babies saying, ‘We love you!’

All of you are a blessing to my life and your memory lives in my soul every waking moment. I close my eyes and imagine the light of God shining across your cheeks and radiant smiles beaming down from Heaven when you look down upon us.

The love you felt down here won’t compare to the love you feel up there – God’s love – and I’ve dedicated the rest of my time on this earth to showing the love He has shown me.

Cheer me on as I walk the path God is putting in front of me. I love you all to the moon and back!

Love,

Chris

The three of us walked toward the edge of the woods where Shanann and the children rest. Ronnie’s phone played the song Broken Halos by country artist Chris Stapleton.

The song is about angels who are on Earth only for a short time, in order to teach us lessons. When bad things happen, the song says, we shouldn’t ask why, because we are not meant to know the answers.

By the song’s chorus, Cindy was in tears. Ronnie put a protective one-armed embrace around his wife’s hunched shoulders. Their decades of love for each other has been their only strength against the constant attacks and judgment of the world. And the ongoing battle with Shanann’s family, the Rzuceks.

For Shanann’s family, there is no unsolved mystery. They know what they know: Chris was unfaithful to their daughter and murdered her and their grandchildren in cold blood. Their son-in-law is a monster.

They engraved Shanann’s maiden name on her tombstone.

As we prepared to leave the cemetery, I noticed a trail cam aimed directly at the headstone, almost camouflaged by the leaves of the tree it sat in. I asked Ronnie and Cindy what the camera in the trees was for.

‘We’ve heard Frankie Jr [Shanann’s brother] had a camera on the gravesite to monitor strangers who videotape the gravesite for YouTube,’ Cindy answered, worried that the private words she had shared with her beloved grandchildren had been recorded.

Suddenly, a gray truck sped up the narrow dusty cemetery road. Cindy said that it was Frankie, and that he’d probably called the police to escort us off the premises. I doubted it. He’d probably just come to confirm it was only the Watts family and not another YouTuber.

Just in case, we left. On our way out, a police car pulled up behind us.

Hours later, as I was on the road, I got a text from Chris’s sister Jamie, a screenshot of Frankie’s Facebook post: ‘There’s a LEGAL sign that states clearly, that this is private property, no video recording of our family’s resting place, violators will be punishable by law due to all the harassment we have received at our family’s gravesite… The police patrol the area all day long because of what we have had to deal with there.’

Two families, destroyed.

Cindy Watts has been reclusive since 2018, rarely working or even leaving the house. Always a mother, she spends much of her energy worrying about Chris and his well-being behind bars. Has he found a purpose? Is he safe? Can he live the rest of his life locked away and have peace at the same time? Does he have enough money for the commissary?

I spoke with Jamie, and she told me that Ronnie is still knee-deep in his pursuit of the ‘truth.’

‘My dad wants to go to Colorado next to try to get the unredacted discovery,’ Jamie said.

‘My poor dad, almost close to 70, still trying to find answers.’

‘There’s something Cindy always goes to,’ Ronnie said, sitting beside his wife at the kitchen table, her cane leaning against her chair. ‘Is there something we did wrong?’

This, of course, is the question that haunts all secondary victims.

‘There’s an us before August 13 and there’s an us after,’ Jamie told me. ‘My parents are not even the same parents anymore. They’re gone. They wake up every day thinking about the girls and Shanann, and they go to bed every day thinking about them.’

Cindy believes it’s their unwavering commitment to their son’s character that keeps her and Ronnie going.

‘Any parent would do the same for their child,’ she said, her voice resolute.

‘They’d be exactly like us. They’d go down every rabbit hole and look at everything before letting anyone else tell them who their child is, or what his heart is really like.’

Excerpted from Killer in the Family copyright © 2026 by Melissa G Moore and Michele Matrisciani. Reprinted with permission from BenBella Books, Inc. All rights reserved.