How Not To Get Away With Murder
Mid-August 2018 was an eternity ago. The world was a year and a half from the Corona cataclysm, I was two and half months from a private meltdown, definitely a “before” time that, if asked, I couldn’t pin historical markers on. But I remember the murder of Shanann Watts and her two daughters, and the Netflix documentary American Murder dredged up those memories.
To the amateur film enthusiast (like me), the art and craft of filmmaking seem less germane to documentaries — after all, the story already wrote itself. Then something like American Murder comes along. There have been movies with innovative use of the ways we live online now, but this one is a whole other level thanks to Shanann Watts, who did a stunning job of logging her own life onscreen. Watching it edited by the filmmakers and by real life, it left me with the same impression I had upon first hearing of the case, only stronger and more disturbing.
Don’t believe Facebook
That impression was, of course: Don’t believe what you see on social media, especially not the Shiny Happy People personae that some of your Friends are sure to be posting in abundance, if you (like me, unfortunately) lack the resolve to quit Facebook. When the news broke, screen shots of Shanann’s upbeat posts, now tragic and macabre, showed a beaming pregnant woman with a hottie husband and two cute little girls in a roomy house in suburban Denver. The American Dream popped up by reflex.
It wasn’t my impression that the story “swept the nation” or “dominated the news”, as some reviewers now claim. Certainly not close to that most bizarre of cold cases in modern times, the JonBenet Ramsey murder (also not far from Denver; is it the air?) or even the Scott Peterson case, more comparable for another philandering pretty boy murdering his pregnant pretty wife because he didn’t see divorce as an option. The Watts murder was solved within days, with the resolution every observer had reached within moments (it’s always the husband), and so her story faded quickly. All those Facebook posts for posterity, which she no longer has, for no one except documentarians.
Race or Class?
Often when opinion pieces on sociopathic behavior focus on the race of victim and perpetrator, which is every time these days, I find it clumsy and unhelpful. Here, it’s instructive what commenters saw in the short window following Chris Watts’ confession before he disappeared from the outside world for good. Some lamented another white guy as a monster in disguise who should’ve been more obvious as such to his friends and neighbors, others decried the relative lack of attention on domestic violence and the white villain who committed it in atrocious extreme. To that I’ll say: He got three life sentences. He’ll rot in prison. That’s hardly going easy on him. What little we know about him is more than enough, since other than being a cruel criminal, there’s nothing remarkable about him. He’s a loser.
So often when we talk about race we should be talking about class instead. What the documentary, ingeniously composed of previous video recordings with no narration or post mortem studio interviews, leaves out is that the Watts’ were over their heads in debt. Their home, in too bland a neighborhood to be a McMansion but spacious and well-appointed — aspirational, remember that American Dream — was a financial stretch that Shanann worked to bridge with multilevel marketing sales jobs, an industry that gets noses snubbed at a lot. Chris was an operator at an oil rig, with tattoos and a pickup truck and obsessed with push-ups. At the same time, while their marriage went horribly wrong, both their parents’ unions were intact, and despite having left the East Coast, both seemed close to their families. That’s no small thing. Far from reinforcing the security of two-parent families or insinuating that single mothers can’t get it right (one of the things I hated about the much-lauded but misogynistic Mindhunter), we see that regular, long-married, presumably churchgoing folks can make a murderer.
Depending on where you stand, is it because the Watts’ could have been anyone you passed in the airport terminal (back when you flew; there are several clips of the girls and their oversized travel bags in bright pink colors) that it’s such a punch in the gut — could this really happen to anyone?
Or, if you belong to another stratum, could there be some relief for this true-crime tale in the knowledge that, well, we’re not like them, just like when a crime involves people of a different race who don’t look like us, and therefore, it is implied, are not like us?
(Parenthesizing this because it’s another topic that deserves more than I can give: The criticism of insufficient coverage of domestic violence in ALL spheres of society is sadly correct. There isn’t enough awareness nor support, whether it’s about celebrities or the underworld or all-American smiley faces like the Watts’ or, of late, the Covid-19 lockdowns.)
Once you pull the lid off the Facebook pot, fermented reality effuses. To her dubitable credit, Shanann Watts was open about many things, such as her autoimmune condition with Lupus, or some introspection on the life she tried so hard to make everyone see she loved. This is where I should state my overall bewilderment with her online habits. Shanann was 13 years younger than me, only half a generation, but her internet use seems more apt for a 13-year old girl. The sheer volume of photos, videos, her orchestrations of events for display, culminating in the announcement to her husband of her latest pregnancy in an “Oops we did it again” T-shirt and his reaction to it (it’s creepy, and it’s all filmed in real time), I am not being dramatic when I say this m.o. is completely foreign to me. I also shouldn’t single out this woman, not just because she’s gone but because I have a hunch that her handling her Facebook isn’t unusual at all for today’s young moms. Fatefully, she met her husband on the platform, too.
And yet, there is no substitute for real-life interaction, even in grainy bodycam footage. Watch when the police first talk to Shanann’s husband, and draw your own conclusions from the tone and posture that’s not edited for likes and shares. Some reviewers call Chris calm, others call him fidgety, and it’s the frankly dimwitted-looking neighbor who’s on target when he says: “He’s not himself. I’ve never seen him like this.” Intuition goes a long way, and clearly the cops listened.
Lovers and Killers
The more exploitative but crucial part of the film are the reproduced text messages between Shannan and Chris and, more candid, between her and a friend, complete with the three iphone dots and autocorrect to “ducking,” where she complains about his waning sexual interest in her. We know what Shannan suspects, namely that he’s getting some elsewhere, still it seems fast. Per timeline, he met the woman he fell for early in June; his wife and kids went to his in-laws for five weeks sometime in July during which time he could fool around and, again befuddling to this middle-aged writer, made and saved some lovey-dovey selfies with the sweet new honey; he joined his family in Myrtle Beach, they came back in August, and the deed was done on the 13th. That’s not a lot of time. Whether and how long Chris planned killing Shanann or if it happened in the heat of the moment of truth we won’t know, but if he planned it, as almost all killers of their partners do, it didn’t take him long to morph from Facebook-model husband and dad to monster. In one of her texts to Chris, not in the film but published after the murder, she says how at the airport she “practically had to beg for a kiss” and asks him if he could have fallen out of love for her in five weeks. He says of course he hasn’t and that he loves her so much, Boo. She says that’s easy to text. She’s right.
When I read that, I shuddered. Love dies, it happens all the time, and most of the time one doesn’t die along with it, not literally, even if the erosion of the rock in your life — another public compliment Shanann paid her husband — makes you fear for your life. Shanann Watts may not have seen it coming that her rock would kill her. But she had felt death creeping up for sure, because he had killed her spirit with her eyes wide shut.
