A home video plays, presenting a picture of familial perfection.
A husband and wife in the prime of their lives madly devoted to two adorable children.
This is quintessential American suburbia: an immaculately clean house, a manicured garden,
baking cookies as a family, and the girls droopy-eyed listening to bedtime stories.
Pure joy, and what’s more, mom’s got a bun in the oven.
Life is bliss.
Except behind this façade of a real-life American Dream, is a story so vile and distressing
it will enrage a nation; it will break a billion hearts.
We give you the most hated man in America.
The story started in 2010 on Facebook, when a young woman named Shannan, a gal who’d
experienced her fair share of tribulations in life, met her prince charming, Chris.
They flirted, they joked, they had their first date.
Two years later, they were at their wedding reception while teary-eyed family members
stood with a microphone gushing about how perfect the pair was for each other.
The newlyweds talked together about their dreams, their ideal home, and the beautiful
kids that would run around it.
Soon that dream came to fruition when they left their native North Carolina and moved
into a splendid 5-bedroom house in Colorado.
They had their first child, Bella Marie, and about 18 months later their second child arrived,
Celeste Cathryn, or CeCe as she was affectionately known.
The phrase “bundles of joy” would come to mind if you saw them playing in the many
videos that Shannan posted on social media.
Life was all about the kids, and Chris and Shannan seemed to embrace that as much as
any new parents would.
It looked ideal, the whole setup.
“He’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” Shannan said in one video, grinning
from ear to ear.
Her life was complete, except, as social media teaches almost everyone that uses it, declarations
of perfection only too often conceal a more complex and sometimes darker reality.
This house was no sanctuary.
Chris, an operative at a Petroleum company, was aloof, quiet, a kind of shadow man.
Shannan, a hardworking, go-getter, was by her own admission dominant and bossy.
At times this created tension in the house, a tension that would turn into an explosion
of rage from the weaker part of the pairing.
Then there was the debt they were in.
Tens of thousands in unpaid bills, student loans, and credit card debt.
In June 2015, they filed for bankruptcy.
They were sued for outstanding debts.
They argued more.
He became more withdrawn.
Her sometimes tempestuous spirit became more frustrated at her husband’s reluctance to
speak openly about how he felt.
Things were gradually falling apart.
Somewhere far away a dark cloud was forming, belying the perfect family narrative posted
in video form on social media.
Shannan tried to be positive, calling Chris “Her Rock.”
But as you all know, rocks erode and in time become sand.
As the months passed, Chris slid through her fingers every time she tried to grab him.
Little did she know, a beast was growing from within him.
Shannan could never have known this husband of hers, this quiet man, was about to transform
to his shadow self, as Carl Jung might have put it.
“I couldn’t have asked God for a better man,” Shannan said to her video camera one
time.
Fast-forward a few months and Shannan was driving in the car with the two girls in the
back seat.
Chris wasn’t there, but young Bella had a message for him.
She said, “My daddy is a hero, he helps me grow up strong.”
She said this just two months before she, her sister, and her mother went missing.
One day Chris got a call and was told they were gone.
He drove home from work and talked to the local cop.
He told concerned friends of Shannan’s he had no idea where they’d all gone.
He fidgeted as he spoke.
His usual cool and calm composure had gone.
How do people just vanish?
Why would a wife, 15 weeks pregnant, not inform him or anyone else about her and her kids’
whereabouts?
Soon the news media was at the house and much of America was wondering what could have happened
to those beautiful, smiling kids and their devoted mother.
Chris stood on the porch and told the camera how he missed watching his daughters curl
up on the sofa to watch cartoons.
What he failed to mention, among many things, is he was having an affair.
He was participating in his own Instagram-worthy videos with a woman some years younger than
his wife.
Not long before he stood on that porch and waxed about his missing family, he’d told
that woman he was leaving Shannan to be with her.
He was with her most of the time for the five weeks that his wife was with the kids back
in North Carolina.
He was with her when he should have been saying goodnight to his sweet girls.
He was with her just weeks after Shannan sent him the message, “Chris, we are so incredibly
blessed to have you.”
Shannan could tell something was wrong, though.
Chris avoided her at every opportunity.
He stopped having sex with her.
He went for a run or worked out when she tried to talk with him.
“I wish my husband wanted to talk with me,” Shannan wrote in one message.
She told a friend, “5.5 weeks no sex!
He’s never been like this.”
Unbeknownst to her, Chris, like a smitten schoolboy, made a heart-strewn love letter
and card and gave it to his lover.
It read, “A kiss, a touch, a smile, a squeeze.”
Shannan could sense something was wrong.
She told him outright that he’d not been there for her or the kids.
He’d not been answering calls.
He’d barely been a father.
They argued, mostly about his parents, who she wasn’t keen on.
Chris, as always, was distant, never really broaching the issue.
But something inside him was cracking.
The quiet man had a fire growing inside of him.
Shannan sent messages to her friend: “He has changed.
I don't know who he is…He hasn’t touched me all week, kissed me, talked to me except
when I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong.”
Unfortunately, she couldn’t have been more right.
She had no idea who he really was, what he was capable of.
In August 2018, she left for Arizona on a business trip.
Before she went, she wrote him a letter: Part of it went:
“The last five weeks have been the hardest.
I missed everything about you.
I missed seeing you naked on top of me, making love to me.”
She said she wanted to make things right between them, to try to be like they were before.
She was determined to fix the cracks that had formed, not understanding that it was
he who was broken, not them.
Before she got on the plane she texted him: “I’m so happy we have a baby boy.
I will never give up on our marriage.
I just want to hold you.
I love you.”
How he felt when he saw those words we don’t know, but that nascent black cloud that was
forming a while back was now a raging maelstrom of churning anger and resentment and hate
and selfishness that was fully awakened inside of him.
The day he received Shannan’s text message he told her he was going to see a Colorado
Rockies game when in fact he went out with his lover to the Lazy Dog sports bar.
One thing we can say about Chris was that he wasn’t just selfish, vile, and murderous,
but he was unquestionably stupid.
He used his and Shannan’s shared credit card to pay for the $62 bill.
It was obviously for a meal for two.
Shannan guessed this.
She called Chris and confronted him about it.
“Really,” she said after his lame lie, “A beer and salmon dinner for $62.”
She knew he was lying.
It was hard, but she now knew he was with someone all those times he didn’t pick up
the phone.
And this brings us to August 13, 2018, at exactly 1:48 a.m.
A surveillance camera at a neighbor’s house showed Shannan arriving home from her trip.
She could have had no idea that when she stepped through that front door of the family home
she would never walk out of it again.
She would never see her girls in the sunlight again.
She and her daughters vanished.
Chris was hardly skilled at hiding the guilt from his facial expressions and body movements.
To any onlooker, and certainly to the cops, he looked as suspicious as a trench coat on
a hot sunny day.
Sure, the authorities searched high and low for the missing family, but awkward Chris
pretty much telegraphed his guilt even before he started mumbling and stuttering about loss
and love, always with a set of perfectly dry eyes.
Soon he was sitting in a police interview room.
A cop sat close to him and told him he was about to take a polygraph test.
After trying to hold his breath while answering questions about his wife and children in a
clumsy attempt to juke the machine, the cop left the room.
When she returned, she said in a serious voice, “It was completely clear you were not honest
on that test.”
She knew very well he knew where his kids were.
It was now a matter of breaking him.
It wasn’t hard.
At first, he denied any wrongdoing, but when his father entered the room at the behest
of the cops, he broke down.
Alone with his pop, he whispered that he had killed his wife.
He did it, he said, because she killed the kids after he told her he was having an affair
and was going to leave her.
Let’s now go back to Shannan walking through the door when she got home from that trip.
Chris was sleeping.
On the table next to the bed was his phone.
On it was the last message Shannan sent to him.
It read, “I love you.”
What’s strange is for the first time in a while they had sex that night.
We can have no idea what Shannan was thinking, about being intimate with her husband but
also thinking he was almost certainly cheating on her.
Chris on the other hand had already made plans for a future as their bodies became entangled
together for the last time.
In the morning Shannan confronted him about the bill, about the fact she thought he was
having an affair.
They argued.
She told him he’d never see the kids again.
Something snapped inside of him.
He later told the police “I had no control over it.”
He was talking about the fact he had his hands around his wife’s throat and was squeezing
the life out of her.
Shannan’s lifeless body was slumped on the floor when Bella appeared at the bedroom door.
She asked, “What’s wrong with mommy.”
She knew, but she was too young to really understand what was going on.
He later took Bella to the truck, walked back into the house, and woke CeCe up.
He took her down to the truck and put her in the back with her sister.
Their mother was lying at their feet wrapped in a blanket.
45 minutes later they were at the petroleum towers where he worked.
The kids knew something was wrong but could not compute the horror that was enveloping
them.
At the dusty site, Chris smothered CeCe with a blanket in the back seat of the truck.
Bella looked at the body and after seeing her father dispose of her sister in the tower
she asked him, “Is the same thing gonna happen to me as Cece?”
He told her, “Yes.”
He then covered her with the blanket.
Her last words were, “No, daddy.”
He took her to the tower.
He buried his wife in the ground and then called his lover to talk about the future
they were going to have together.
After that, he called a realtor and discussed the selling of the house.
Shannan was reported missing about 1.40 pm that same day after she didn’t answer calls
or texts from a friend and failed to show up to a doctor’s appointment she would never
have missed.
She was going to discuss little Nico Watts, the baby growing inside of her.
You know what happened next.
In court when Chris was found guilty of murder and other charges, the judge told him, “This
is perhaps the most inhumane and vicious crime that I have seen.”
He issued five life sentences without the possibility of parole.
In a later interview from inside prison, Chris wept as he told the complete story.
He ordered Mac&Cheese and a glass of milk shortly before he recounted every lurid detail.
But it would be an injustice to the deceased to give him the last words today, so we’ll
let Bella finish that song she sang for her father:
“He reads my books, he ties my shoes, you're a hero, through and through.
My daddy, daddy, I love you.”
Now you need to watch, “The Burger Chef Murders - Why is it Still a Mystery?”
Or, have a look at, “My Nice Neighbor (Serial Killer - True Crime)”