We know for a fact that Nut Gate soured relations between the couple, but that couldn’t have been all. We also know for a fact that Watts’ affair meant he was disinterested because he was distracted. If Nut Gate hadn’t happened, Shan’ann would have had a clearer idea that something else was brewing, something that was less her doing.

But besides these hypotheticals, it’s likely the couple argued about money. This aspect is sequestrated from all the correspondence, but because it isn’t there is hardly evidence that it wasn’t a serious issue. Perhaps Watts felt embarrassed and ashamed that he’d allowed himself, and her, to get them into such a desperate financial situation again.

This was also the one aspect he didn’t really discuss with Nichol Kessinger, even though he felt he could be himself and talk to her about anything. Well, not this. Not the first bankruptcy, and not the second.

There may have been a verbal and emotional feedback loop between Kessinger and Watts – and Shan’ann – specifically on the issue on the best way to resolve the financial trouble.

If Watts was blissfully unaware or woefully ignorant of the finances, his affair with Kessinger forced the issue on two fronts:

1) he would need an additional budget to woo her. This would reinforce the knowledge and urgency of just how cash-strapped he really was. And why was he cash-strapped? Whose fault was that? What could he – should he – do about it?

2) As Kessinger became more familiar with Watts’ untenable situation, she may have provided him with sensible advice on how to manage his finances. But if he applied her advice, that would mean “managing” or in some way manipulating or controlling Shan’ann. Regaining financial control meant – necessarily – exerting control over Shan’ann [or attempting to].

 

As most couples know when marriages break down, the wrestle for control over money becomes if not a life and death struggle, ugly, and filled with ploys, dirty tricks and shenanigans. It’s push and go, spite, nitpicking, backscratching, baiting, naming and shaming and taking what you can get away with.  It’s possible that was the content of these back and forth phone calls on Sunday, July 22nd.

We have no idea whether Watts went to the Home Depot on July 22nd, and if he did, what he got there. Did it have anything to do with Shan’ann? Or Kessinger? The discovery case file lists 14 instances of Home Depot in its 1960 pages. On page 945 a USB drive from Home Depot is listed. This may indicate that Watts, or Shan’ann, wanted information on a shared computer in a safe place [probably the former].

In total, Watts and Shan’ann spoke for 65 minutes on July 22nd, a record.

Now, the trouble with reviewing the case file in hindsight, simply glancing backwards through the rearview mirror, is that the weight of our perception is just that – a lightweight glance.

When we go through the timeline systematically, pacing ourselves in real time, we can see how the weight of the finances wasn’t just a factor, it was a daily burden.

And Watts and Shan’ann were unequally yoked. He was the one saddled with the mortgage. The house was in his name this time, and they were almost certainly going to lose the house, regardless of the arrival of a third child.

We don’t know when Watts received word from Chase Manhattan bank regarding their home loan, but we know on June 30th [3 weeks earlier in the timeline] Watts may have forged Shan’ann’s signature on this documents.

It’s likely a forgery simply because Shan’ann was already in North Carolina on June 30th. Regardless, Watts was also listed as a defendant on the summons. The summons was received and filed by Weld Count on the morning of July 12th, and Watts was the one collecting mail while Shan’ann was away. Besides this aspect, if we look at the crime scene, what stood out in a relatively pristine, innocuous looking crime scene overall was this:

It may be that the children trashed Shan’ann’s office, or it could be that Watts went through it looking for bills, familiarizing himself with their true financial situation.

Watts discovery of the paper trail while Shan’ann was away was likely an intermittent process, but with each successive discovery was a more startling revelation of the seriousness and sheer scale of the debt tsunami advancing towards them.

With each discovery, it became necessary to call his co-accused to discuss their debt mess. This would be followed by an inevitable blame game, along with – perhaps – a hastily cobbled strategy to deal with [or postpone] the next large payment.

Their biggest financial millstone was the mortgage, $2 700,going off at the middle of each month – or supposed to. When was the family murdered? Just prior to the middle of the month. July was the second or third month they were behind in paying it. If it was the third, then June was the second, and May the first. This suggests the moment they could no longer pay their mortgage was around the time Shan’ann fell pregnant.

Shan’ann’s trip to North Carolina was possibly a last ditch effort to turn around, to refloat their shipwrecked finances. But by investing all her hope and efforts into the MLM maelstrom, she was giving herself [and her family] a 0.4% chance of success. So there was still a chance, right?

It’s possible, during July, Watts quietly evaluated not so much his own ability to turn around their finances, but whether Shan’ann was capable. By late July it was becoming clear that they weren’t, and worse, that they were losing control. If Shan’ann wanted everyone to think they lived a certain way, that was certainly about to end.

July 20th was the first time Watts logged onto Snapchat, as far as we know. Snapchat started off as a sexting app; it’s primarily used to share photos and videos which disappear shortly after they’ve been seen. Given Nichol Kessinger’s numerous selfies, there’s reason to believe she used the app, and that’s why Watts was on it at 02:00 on a Friday morning.

More: Do YOU date on Snapchat? Singles prefer the social platform over Instagram for flirting – until they hit 35, study finds – Daily Mail

Snapchat Finally Acknowledges the Existence of Sexting With ‘Memories’ – Inc.com

The rise of Snapchat from a sexting app by Stanford frat bros to a $3 billion IPO – Business Insider

By Friday afternoon Watts was ready to start wining and dining his mistress, and started Googling healthy eateries, breweries, gyms, and tickets for Brandimere Speedway.

At 18:12 Watts transferred a tranche of images of Kessinger into his Secret Calculator app. This gives some reinforcement to the notion that at 02:00 she may have been sharing private photos on Snapchat with him.

When Watts refers to being “addicted” to Kessinger, and her having a leash on him, it seems to be in the sexual area, above all.

The lack of data between 02:00 and 17:00, including zero contact with or from Shan’ann, may indicate an argument, or that some critical data was removed on July 20th.

We know that Watts made contact with Cristina Meacham to do a Thrive spiel. It’s interesting that he did it with her and not with Shan’ann. But this spiel had to have been brokered by Shan’ann.

In any event, the next day Shan’ann would show the first obvious signs of networking with Thrivers in North Carolina, this after more than four weeks away from Colorado.

Note Frank Rzucek’s comment above:

I love her cute/evil laugh. Silly little shit lol.

1 year later, conspicuously absent from commenting on these images are Chris Watts and his parents. It’s unlikely any of the Watts family were involved in Shan’ann’s social media at this point, which shows the schism was already brewing on social media several weeks before the murders. It’s also abundantly clear Watts was looking at and even hoarding digital images throughout this period, just not of his wife and daughters.

July 19th, 2018 was a Thursday. Watts called Shan’ann presumably just prior to leaving for work.

We have no idea who Watts communicated with mid-morning that Thursday for seven minutes.

We also have no idea what Watts was doing when he logged onto Facebook. Was he reviewing what Shan’ann had said? It’s unfortunate during the several hours Watts was interrogated, he wasn’t specifically shown the Phone Data Review and asked to explain, and whether he could recall, someone of these interactions. What was discussed in those numerous conversations between him and his wife? Who was this unidentified contact? What was he doing on Facebook [and on the 20th, Snapchat]?

Thursday was also leading to the weekend. Watts had four precious weekends in July when he had the space to conduct the affair. Four weekends. He had to make each one count, because they might be his last with his mistress.

Going through the timeline of July 18th, we see that by the end of the day Watts was looking into vacation rentals in Myrtle Beach. This suggests the calls earlier in the day was Shan’ann telling him she refused to see his family.

This was two weeks before Watts was due to join his family in North Carolina.

We know this change of plan weighed heavily on Watts. Watts told investigators on February 18th he was angry at Shan’ann for separating him from his family. One wonders what he meant exactly, and for when exactly. Did he mean his children, his parents, specifically after Nut Gate, or did Nut Gate remind him of the enmity that had persisted throughout his entire marriage, including the wedding?

One aspect that bothered him most was how Shan’ann’s grudge had now rippled around to include his father as well. This was like Watts losing an important psychological anchor, and by doing that, he no longer wanted to be a father or a husband for or with Shan’ann. Of course, Kessinger also provided plenty of fuel for this psychology. She was also encouraging him tacitly or overtly not to be a husband.

On July 18th Watts seemed to realize for the first time he would be heading back to the wolf, and he’d need to cover his tracks if he wanted to keep the affair going. He wanted to keep his treasure trove of sexy pictures, but how? The massive transfer of semi-naked images on July 18th was the first seditious move, where Watts deliberately put in place a system to deceive and undermine his wife and family.

Think about the Secret Calculator as an analogy for Watts as well. He was using a Secret Calculator, a secret password, using something in plain sight to hide information that could be devastating to his wife, children, and his own future if he wasn’t careful. Shan’ann might take the phone but be none the wiser. This gave him at least the seed of an idea. What if he could do something…but hidden by technology…Vivint sensors, cell phone messages, GPS tracking…but hidden in plain sight, hidden inside an average morning going to work like he always did?

The Secret Calculator is an analogy for Watts himself, and who he started becoming in terms of his criminal capacities as soon as he’d installed it. He is a Secret Calculator too, now.

And this got the ball rolling. He didn’t want to go there, he didn’t want to be there, he wished he could make it disappear so he could get back to the new love of his life. And this is the thought that he sat with quietly, ruminating, while Shan’ann continued to confidently change plans and call the shots.

About a month before his arrest, Watts is out in open prairie at the Cervi Ranch, north of Roggen. Shan’ann had called him a few hours earlier.

When we look at these cases in hindsight, we tend to project the future into them, the end result that we know is coming. But we don’t project the past, or the situation the perpetrator is in, and knows is coming.

When Watts was at Cervi Ranch that day in July, taking photos, did he think this would be a good place to get rid of bodies? Because he didn’t think that thought for the first time on Sunday night/Monday morning [August 12/13]. So when did the thought, the murderous impulse, occur to him for the first time?

And when he bought his new boots, did he think of making further changes to his wardrobe, his home, his circumstances?

 While we’re out in the country north of Roggen, let’s dip into a little Intertextuality. It’s been reported recently that a man in Crete murdered an American woman because he was frustrated with his own life [and sexual frustration was a big part of that frustration]. Incidentally, this case also started off as a “disappearance”.

Suzanne Eaton’s colleagues initially believed she had either fallen while jogging or suffered from heat exhaustion and was resting somewhere. But the Intertextual part is where her killer dumped the poor woman’s body.

From CNN:

Last Monday, her body was discovered by two locals deep inside a cave, according to Crete’s Chief of Police Konstantinos Lagoudakis. The 59-year-old Eaton was found around 60 meters (nearly 200 feet) inside the cave, beneath an air shaft that had been covered by a large wooden pallet. The underground caverns had been turned into a bunker by Nazi soldiers during the Second World War.

Wheel tracks lead officers to the suspect, police said, explaining that they had linked tracks found near the bunker to his car, which, they say, he cleaned in a graveyard after the attack on Eaton.

During preliminary questioning, the 27-year-old suspect denied having been near the bunker for a month, which raised suspicions, Lagoudakis said. Signals from the suspect’s phone also placed him near the crime scene on the day of the attack, the police chief said. Police say the suspect is a married father of two who owns farmland near the crime scene. 

The local police also used aerial support to search for her, but in the end tire tracks, local knowledge and cellphone data proved more useful. Where bodies are hidden in the outdoors, look for locals with local knowledge, and often [but not always] vehicles used to transport the body. Other high-profile reference cases where bodies were disposed of outdoors: West Memphis Three, Madeleine McCann, Casey Anthony and Scott Peterson.