Nathan Schiller

Whatever you feel right now—joy, sorrow, pain, elation, cynicism, optimism—your spirits can be obliterated with a viewing of American Murder: The Family Next Door. This Netflix documentary tells the story of the Watts family murders, a crime so disturbing it gave the case investigators PTSD and prompted the presiding judge, who’d handle thousands of cases, to call it “perhaps the most inhumane and vicious.”

Within the purview of director Jenny Popplewell, the crime and its context are chronicled with a brutal yet respectful intimacy, transcending the true crime genre and revealing the future of non-fiction audio-visual storytelling. But her film’s innovative brilliance starkly contrasts with the events it depicts. Those exist on some other plane of humanity.

A brief summary of the Watts family murders

I watched American Murder knowing nothing about the Watts family murders, which makes me a latecomer. A couple years ago, they were a tabloid sensation, plastered on magazines, beamed onto screens, dissected on social media. It is not hard to understand why.

One day, in 2010, a man named Chris friends a woman named Shanann on Facebook. They’re both in their mid-twenties. Shanann has recently left an abusive marriage and been diagnosed with lupus. At first, she rejects Chris’s advances. But he pursues her, and they marry. Then they move across the country, from their towns in North Carolina to Frederick, Colorado, a half-hour north of Denver. They buy a nice house in a subdivision, but the mortgage contributes to their financial troubles. In a few years, they declare bankruptcy. But Chris has a good job as an operator at a petroleum company, and Shanann starts hustling for a multi-level marketing company. They keep the house and happily raise their little two girls in it.

In the early summer of 2018, Shanann tells Chris she’s pregnant. He reacts with a vague, detached acceptance. Shanann, sensing something’s amiss, takes their kids to North Carolina for a weekslong visit with her parents. Chris stays in Colorado and begins a torrid affair with a younger woman from work. He wants to start a new life with her and decides that, to make that happen, he will kill his wife and kids.

In the early morning of August 13, when they’re all back home in Colorado, Chris tells Shanann he’s been cheating on her. They argue. He strangles her, then wraps her body in their bedsheet and drives it to his industrial job site. His girls, ages three and four, are in the car. He’d tried and failed to suffocate them at home, so he does it now. Then he shoves their bodies through a hatch atop an oil rig. Nearby, he digs a shallow grave for Shanann.

Later that morning, Shanann’s friend reports her missing. Chris feigns surprise and concern, for local and national media. But within days, under intense police questioning, and after dismally failing a polygraph, he confesses.

American Murder is the evolution of New Journalism

In a recent post, I argued that mental interiority is written fiction’s greatest storytelling advantage. But in the 1960s, journalism appropriated it, and birthed a new literary form of written nonfiction (labeled, ingeniously, New Journalism). The best results go where novels go: they come unusually close to their living subjects. An example is Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Gay Talese’s 1981 book about the sexual revolution. Like any committed reporter, Talese immersed himself in his subjects’ world firsthand. But he didn’t really get into their heads until he persuaded them to share their diaries.

This skillful technique is not obsolete, just far less valuable. To access a subject’s unvarnished thoughts, a journalist today can just look online. So much user-generated content is either publicly available or a couple savvy clicks away. American Murder begins with a disclaimer that “All materials in this film were captured by police, media or uploaded to the internet. Personal footage and messages were also provided by Shanann’s family and friends.” What ensues is entirely Facebook videos, surveillance and body cam footage, and text messages—enough audio-visual cues to preclude narration, interviews, and editorializing.

The effect is holographically potent. Like millions of people, Shanann had an audience of close friends and family on Facebook, where she posted cheery, mundane updates showcasing her seemingly every daily moment. They all play and bake and do dishes. She confesses her life challenges, discloses her diagnosis, and constantly attributes her happiness to her loving family, including her husband, even if she may get irritated when he ruins a staged Christmas surprise for the kids. This outer layer of her life—curated but authentic, calculated yet caring—is cozy.

The inner layer is crushingly tragic. As Shannan’s marriage rapidly disintegrates, she feels nothing unexpected. She is confused, sad, angry, depleted, but also energetic, tactful, hopeful. We know this because we read the texts she sends to her close girlfriends. When she says she’s sobbing after her husband rejects her in bed, we feel her pure, unbearable pain. (Only in Blue Is the Warmest Color have I seen such relationship pain fictionally realized on screen.) We also get sucked into the tension of knowing that Shanann does not yet know that she will soon die by the hands, literally, of a husband whom she does not know hates her. Without this knowledge, she is unable to stop herself from wanting him, and from believing that he wants her, and her friends are unable to do anything other than coach her up, root for her, console her when she’s wrecked. And we’re right there with them.

Where written fiction—and now all nonfiction—has always given readers reported thought, video has always offered editing. The ability to manipulate recorded images spatially and temporally, to take any events, whether “real” or “acted,” and arrange them to dramatic effect, so that the viewer sees and feels something that was not present in the original—this has always made movies special. But it does so at the expense of mental intimacy. Cameras capture exteriors: bodies, clothes, faces, structures. We relate to them primally—we never learn to look or hear the way we learn to read—but only through the prism of sight and sound do they offer a facsimile of mentally interiority. Even when a film successfully incorporates voiceover—Days of Heaven and Taxi Driver come to mind—rarely does the narrator tell us what a character is thinking. This is a rule of audio-visual storytelling, and American Murder has broken it for good.

The banality of evil in “the family next door”

American Murder has a zigzagging structure, and the (helpful) time cues are the closest the documentary comes to narration. But the timeline itself is relatively incidental compared with the forceful argument the film makes against our national tragedy of domestic violence against women. When all the images end, we read a series of statements: “In America three women are killed by their current or ex partner every day. Parents who murder their children and partner are most often men. This crime is virtually always premeditated.” This fact set caps a murder story told from the perspective of the female victims and a son in utero, a story that, as Aja Romano notes in Vox, refuses to glamorize the killer, instead framing him as some sort of narcissist “neither compelling nor intriguing in the slightest.”

It’s a refreshing point of view, especially when tabloid and social media chatter blame Shanann for being bossy and controlling (even though she spent her days caring for everyone and working hard) while awing Chris for his muscles and declarations of love for his kids (even though he plotted their murder so he could escape with his mistress). And it’s also what merges the modifier American in the movie’s title with the subtitle: The Family Next Door. The Watts were uniquely American in how they migrated west, accumulated debt to finance their cookie-cutter suburban house, and posted it all to social media in rosy hues. They were uniquely American in their clothing (the day of the murders, and for much of the movie footage, Chris is wearing a skin-tight thigh-length animal-print North Carolina Tar Heels performance T-shirt), their vacations (the hotel lobbies, the white beaches and clear water), and their manner of speech: he personifies the “head-down-just-working-hard” flat-affect good-guy bro, while she talks in “always-moving-everything’s-sunny-but-I’m-on-edge” up-and-downisms). And they were so uniquely and unremarkably American—truly the “American family next door”—when they turned out to actually embody the fears of every American who instinctively rattles off clichés about “the family next door”: one family member actually was a monster, and no one ever suspected him.

American Murder excels in its ability to allow the known explanations for the murders—financial anxieties and adulterous escapism in a marriage with major communication issues—to be presented while disengaging from their deeper motivations. It can be true that Chris Watts is a dim and diseased person who should not be culturally mythologized for his crimes, and also true that if not for his crimes, his wife and their three children would be alive, and this story would not exist. American Murder explicitly, correctly locates Chris in the class of the three violent and vengeful American males who premeditatedly kill their female partners every day. What it does not mention is that there are only 15 to 20 cases of family annihilation per year, and that many of them culminate with the murderer taking their own life—but that this one ended with the murderer going to work, spending the night at a friend’s house, and shopping online for jewelry to buy for his mistress on their next getaway, thrilled and relieved to no longer have to deal with his wife and kids, and bumblingly unprepared to discuss his family’s disappearance.

Why did the Watts family murders happen?

What Chris Watts did, specifically, is, indeed, exceptionally rare. We know how he did it. But why did he do it? If one wants, one can read the near-2,000-page public case discovery, or scour the web for scraps of information. I have done some of this and found only dull dead ends. Chris seems to be some sort of sociopath who, lacking empathy, plotted and executed the strangulation of his family when they became the source of his problems and the obstacle to his freedom, however irrational and illogical he might have deemed this plot were he observing it from afar. He seems not stupid but witless and anti-charismatic; by his own admission he has always expressed himself better in writing and thought than in speech. He craves respect and love, yet he either outgrows or never internalizes the feelings of love and respect expressed by his wife and kids and reasonably good life circumstances. Partnered with his outwardly strong wife, he is exposed as extremely weak-willed. He grows to hate her, but denies her the courtesy of knowing that. He blames his mistress for driving him to plot his family’s murder and claims that his wife’s threat to keep him from seeing their kids due to his infidelity was the final trigger. He seems to understand what he did was wrong and, in some real, hazy way, feels badly about it, but he lacks the ability to feel, in any meaningful way, an iota of the bottomless agony he has caused his victims and their loved ones.

This pop psychological profile is, more or less, I would say, the passive explanation of American Murder. But it still does not seem adequate. How many damaged men must find themselves in Chris’s marital situation, thoughts of murder and freedom filling their minds, only to never seriously plot it, or to freeze up or retreat when the opportunity to kill finally arrives? Among the biggest heartbreaks of American Murder is that in every single scene set before the murders, it feels possible to tell Shanann to flee, to tell Chris to relax to, tell the kids that everything will be OK. It feels possible because what ends up happening feels literally impossible.

The Executioner’s Song is the written predecessor to American Murder

All great art lays the groundwork for more great art, and American Murder could be the launching pad for a story that goes inside the murderer’s head nominally to understand his motivation but more so to mine his depravity for commentary on—as novelists like to put it—the human condition. Such a story would resemble the one Norman Mailer wrote about Gary Gilmore in The Executioner’s Song. That book hinges on what happened on two consecutive nights in July of 1976, in Utah, when Gilmore, who was 35 (Watts was 33), robbed and shot two innocent, unrelated men, while they were working at a gas station and a motel, respectively. Gilmore was quickly apprehended, charged, and sentenced to death. He invited his punishment, and was executed by firing squad in January 1977, less than six months after his crimes.

The Executioner’s Song spends 800 pages chronicling these six months, after 200 pages weaving together narratives of Gilmore’s earlier life. We learn about his natural intelligence and artistic gifts, and of course about his history of violence, no doubt fueled by his psychopathic personality traits. He was born in less-than-ideal circumstances, but he was always uniquely troubled, in and out of correctional facilities, never able to capitalize on opportunities to live in free society. Yet it was only after he moves to Utah, fresh out of prison, and falls in love with a younger woman that he is driven to irrational, rageful murder.

(Gilmore’s girlfriend was named Nicole. Coincidentally, Chris Watts’s mistress has the same name, though she spells it “Nichol.” And in another coincidence that seems less creepy or cryptic than simply American, the person who both last saw Shanann alive and reported her missing has that name too, with a third spelling variant: “Nickole”. To top it off, Chris and Shanann had named their unborn son Nico.)

Gary’s story is the story, but foregrounding it, and threaded throughout it, is a probing of the worst of American essentialism: westward migration, male rage, loneliness and isolation, the working underclass, random violence, mass imprisonment, capital punishment, tabloid news, and even the purchasing of lucrative rights to a person’s life story. This last element is crucial: The Executioner’s Song exists only because a producer named Lawrence Schiller swooped in from the east coast, interviewed Gary and the relevant players, and recruited Mailer to write it up. From Schiller’s exhausting trove of raw material, Mailer sculpted what he called his “true-life novel.”

American Murder has closed this case

So maybe someone will do this with the Watts family murders. Maybe they’ll interview everyone who ever knew Chris and Shanann and figure out what was in the minds and hearts and dreams of these people as they made their way in America. Maybe we will one day see the Watts family murders in newer, deeper, more expansive narratives about the politically turbulent, climate-frenzied, Big Tech-dominated post-recession, pre-pandemic late 2010s United States of America, in which the Watts family floated until it sunk.

Or maybe there is nothing new. Maybe this story is nothing but another weak, deceitful American man who decided he could not live without proving, if only for an instant, that he was, as he imagined, more powerful than the women he hated. Maybe—or, rather, hopefully—American Murder has closed this case.