What Chris Watts' Mother Told Reporters About Shanann After the Confession

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is History's Hidden Killers. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:08)
Cindy Watts sat in front of a camera after her son confessed to strangling his pregnant wife and smothering his two daughters. And the words she chose were, he's not a sociopath.
Her son had stuffed Bella and Celeste through 8 inch openings at the top of crude oil tanks. He had buried Shanann and their unborn son Nico in a shallow grave at his worksite and gone about his day. He confessed he pled guilty. He's serving multiple life sentences without the possibility of parole. And his mother's first instinct, even after she knew all of it, was not to grieve what he had done. It was to explain who he was, not explain the act, explain the person. Something I'm going to guess she had a lot of reps in in life and in no way, shape or form am I saying she was complicit or had anything to do with this crime at all. I'm saying the patterns in which families develop into, as strange as they may seem from the outside, to the people in them, explaining the strangeness, explaining the atrocities that some within that circle engage in, that's another Tuesday. Obviously this is quite extreme, but the reps are there. The knee-jerk reaction when you hear your son did something horrible is probably like, Oh my gosh, he could never do that. It's more like, Oh, what did he do now?
Like he's bad. He's not a sociopath.
Sorry. He is. You've just been telling yourself a fairy tale for a very long time. This is a series about something that happens in almost every high-profile criminal case almost never gets examined on its own terms. The family that stands behind the accused, not the defense attorneys, not the legal strategy, the families, the parents, the siblings, the children, the in-laws, who look at the same evidence the rest of the world sees and arrive somewhere completely different. And in each case, the question is the same.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:34)
Why?

**Tony Brueski** (2:35)
We're going to be going through six cases in the next handful of videos over the next few days.
And I'd love to get your thoughts on each one in the comments section on Substack and YouTube. The links are in the description. Be sure to press subscribe wherever you're listening or watching right now so you don't miss any of it. In the Watts case, understanding why starts long before the murder. Cindy Watts did not like Shannon. That's not speculation. She boycotted her son's wedding because she didn't approve. She blamed Shannon for pulling Chris away from her family, for being too controlling, too bossy, too much. When Chris and Shannon moved from North Carolina to Colorado, Cindy allegedly sought confirmation that her son was being taken from her. That resentment was already baked in what the bodies were found.
And it shaped everything Cindy said after the confession because the narrative she'd built about Shannon for years didn't require updating. It just required expanding, basically. Now, this is all opinion. This is all conjecture. Again, in no way am I saying that Cindy is guilty of a crime. She's guilty of being a human being, a human being that couldn't conceive of this.
It's fairly normal in relationships. Sometimes it's not healthy, but it is fairly normal, fairly common where you have a mother-in-law that's not such a fan of the new wife. There's friction, there's this, there's that. All of that is explainable. All that can be understandable. And who knows what the dynamics actually were? I don't. And I'm not here to say that Shannon was a bad person or Cindy was a bad person, but I'm here to examine the support that one still gives the perpetrator of such extreme harm and the ability to not cognitively, clearly see what's going on around you, the forest before the trees. Here's what Cindy said to a reporter after the confession that triggered a response so furious it made national news. She went on camera and pointed the finger at Shannon. She described her murdered daughter-in-law as the reason Chris had changed, as the controlling force that had created the conditions for the family's disintegration. Ronnie, her husband, told the press there was unanswered questions about the case. They initially suggested Chris may have been pressured into his plea deal. A representative later walked that back, said they'd been misinformed, and confirmed they accepted that Chris had committed the murders and chosen to plead guilty. But the instinct had already shown itself. Their son couldn't be solely responsible. Something else had to explain this. Someone else.
The Rzuc family, Shannon's parents, responded publicly. Their statement was direct. The Watts family's comments would never alter the truth about Shannon, and will never alter the truth about the crimes committed by their son. They called the remarks vicious, grotesque, and utterly false. A murdered pregnant woman was being blamed for the conditions that led to her own murder by her killer's mother. And you go, gee, I wonder why Chris turned out the way he did. He could never be wrong. He could never, like...