Sell With Susan: A Multi-Level Murder Story

In the early hours of August 13, 2018, in Frederick, Colorado, Christopher Watts murdered his pregnant wife, Shanann, by strangulation, and their daughters, Bella and Celeste, by suffocation. He buried Shanann in a shallow grave near an oil‑storage site and placed the girls' bodies inside crude‑oil tanks, each with an opening only 8 inches wide. Watts initially denied involvement in the family's disappearance, but on August 15 he was arrested after admitting during an interview with detectives that he had been responsible for Shanann's death. He later acknowledged that he had also murdered his daughters. On November 6, 2018, Watts pleaded guilty to multiple counts of first‑degree murder under a plea agreement in which the death penalty—later abolished in Colorado in 2020—was removed from consideration. He was sentenced to five life terms without the possibility of parole, three of them to be served consecutively.