Chris Watts' mistress has shared the haunting final text message he sent her after murdering his wife and kids.
On August 13, 2018, Watts, 35, committed one of the most horrifying crimes in modern American history.
Watts strangled his 15-weeks-pregnant wife, Shanann, before killing their daughters, 4-year-old Bella and 3-year-old Celeste. He then dumped their bodies at an oil site where he worked, but publicly posed as a grieving husband.
“Shanann, Bella, Celeste, if you’re out there, just come back,” he said in a televised plea the next day. “If somebody has her, just bring her back. I need to see everybody.”
It wasn’t just the public that Watts was deceiving. In a newly surfaced police interview, Nichol Kessinger - his mistress at the time - recalled the final exchange she had with him before learning the truth.
“I kept asking him, ‘What did you do, Chris? What did you do?’ I asked, ‘Where’s your family?’” she said, per E! News.
“So I texted Chris one last time, and I told him, ‘If you did anything bad, you’re going to ruin your life and you’re going to ruin my life. I promise you that.’ And he responded, ‘I didn’t hurt my family, Nicky,’” she revealed.
According to Nichol, that was the last text she got from him. "I never said another word to him after that," she added.
The chilling interview, verified by People, shows Kessinger grappling with the horrifying revelation that the man she had dated was a family annihilator.
“There were several discussions that we had about his current relationship and where it had gone,” she said. “It was never anything aggressive. It was still very kind. He was just like, ‘This is not working.’”
Even with hindsight, she admitted, “His behavior wasn’t anything out of the ordinary or anything that would scare me... Even to this day, even after everything that I’ve found out, I still look back at that, and I don’t see any red lights about the way he spoke about his family.”
Watts ultimately pleaded guilty to nine charges, including murder and the unlawful termination of a pregnancy, on November 6, 2018. He is currently serving five life sentences without parole in Wisconsin.
The 2020 Netflix documentary American Murder: The Family Next Door shocked millions, but several disturbing details were left out.
Among them was that Kessinger had searched for wedding dresses and “marrying your mistress” on Google just nine days before the brutal murders. She later filed to change her name, per Business Insider.
Watts’ alleged affairs didn’t end with Nichol. A woman named Amanda McMahon said she had a violent one-night stand with him in March 2018, describing the encounter as “really fast and aggressive.”
A male escort, Trent Bolte, also claimed a 10-month affair with Watts, although investigators questioned the claim and Watts denied it, saying, “I’ve never been with a guy.”
Even after his arrest, Watts had a steady prison visitor. Between March and December 2019, Anna Nowak visited him 31 times, according to visitation records.
The documentary also failed to mention that Shanann hadn’t given up on her marriage to Watts. Per the Daily Mail, she looked for travel deals on Groupon and had arranged childcare for Bella and Celeste.
Legal analyst Joey Jackson summarized the case's disturbing contrast between appearance and reality: “You look at a family so in love... and to think about how you can portray that in such a vile way is just totally remarkable.”