NEWS ANCHOR: Hours after Chris Watts, a husband and father,
made a plea for his missing wife and daughters safe return--
I want those kids back so bad.
NEWS ANCHOR: --police now consider him a suspect.
POLICE OFFICER: He said when he left, she was in bed sleeping.
It's kind of odd that nothing's on the bed.
NEWS ANCHOR: Authorities say his story just doesn't add up.
What happens when a coroner looks and see
your fingerprints on her neck?
Scared of what?
Scare of what everything was going to look like.
This was a nightmare.
Yeah.
You did not pass the polygraph test,
so now we need to talk about what actually happened.
They say, it's very clear you were deceptive to us, Chris.
Let us find your little girls so that they're
not out there somewhere.
CHRIS WATTS: This is my flesh and blood.
This is what I wanted all my life.
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Tammy Lee and then Agent Coder from the FBI interrogated
Chris a little bit further, and Tammy wouldn't let up on him.
She continued to say that the polygraph--
you failed the polygraph.
You might as well come clean right now.
WOMAN: The night the event took place,
there's a few little spotlights that are outside,
but you can barely see what he was up to.
DILLON THOMAS: Chris is seen backing his truck up
into the family's driveway.
And there, he is seen loading something into the back seat
of the truck.
And then, he drives out to a remote location in Weld County.
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DILLON THOMAS: It painted a very clear map from his house
out to Cervi 3-19 and the oil location
where Chris normally works.
TANIA HAGAN: He was backed up to the wall, pretty much,
the entire time, and he didn't even know it.
Ronnie and Cindy Watts are the parents of Christopher Watts.
Cindy and Ronnie explained to me that they had actually
been in direct communication with law enforcement,
that Ronnie had flown to Colorado
after speaking to Chris.
What is being said is painful.
It's hard to process.
DILLON THOMAS: The disbelief on Ronnie's face says it all.
Here, he's having to listen to his son admit to murdering
his daughter-in-law.
But at the same time, he's having to console him,
because he believes that his son is also the victim here,
because he believes Chris's daughters
were killed by Shan'ann.
This is the story that Chris first gave up,
and investigators used it as a stepping stone
to lead to what actually did happen.
Ronnie left and was under the impression
that the information that he and his son had discussed
was confirmed.
Within minutes of him admitting that he killed
Shan'ann, they already had a printout
diagram of the location where he disposed
of his loved one's bodies.
TANIA HAGAN: And Chris pointed to-- he
actually marked with letters--
you know, B for Bella, and C for Celeste,
and S for Shan'ann-- where exactly
he disposed of their bodies.
DILLON THOMAS: They were already out on the scene,
because they knew the GPS took them there.
A team of investigators moved in with the tough task of having
to retrieve the bodies.
Shan'ann's body was relatively simple to retrieve, because it
was only under some dirt.
Getting Bella and Celeste out of those tanks
was much more of a challenge than anyone expected.
They knew that they were in the tanks,
and the only way to get them out from an opening
is to drain the tanks of the oil,
and then pull the children out from the base.
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There's a lot of investigators whose lives were forever
changed by this incident.
TANIA HAGAN: How do you look at those babies
and put them into an oil tank.
It does not seem like something a human being could do.
DILLON THOMAS: After Chris is arrested
and booked into the Weld County Jail,
the case progresses very quickly.
There was a line out the courtroom door, down the hall,
and around the corner of people wanting
to see him sentenced for the actions he confessed to doing.
JEAN POWERS: This was the case that people
wanted a punishment for.
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