As has been tradition for 10 Weeks of Spooktober: 2 Spook 2 Tober, we’re just kind of posting these whenever I feel like it throughout the month of October, despite my honest efforts to stick to Saturdays. My bad friends.

And this is also new territory for Spooktober, because this time I’m covering a new Netflix true crime documentary: American Murder: The Family Next Door. Does this fit with a horror movie series? That’s complicated to answer. Some people find true crime really scary. Which makes sense. Unlike horror fiction, true crime… really happened.

I know what you’re saying. “Duh, Emily. We know that. Thanks for the insight.” But I do have a point. In my head, I know that true crime should probably be scarier because they’re events that really happened. And it’s often really messed up stuff. Meanwhile horror story stuff like ghosts may or may not be real (they are real).

And yet I have never been scared by true crime stuff. American Murder: The Family Next Door is no exception. This isn’t scary. To me. I really don’t know why. Maybe somebody in the comments can explain that to me. But I still wanted to watch this documentary and wanted to talk about it. Why? Well.

Before Netflix released this documentary last week, a lot of people had already heard about this case. In 2018, Christopher Lee Watts murdered his pregnant wife Shan’ann Cathryn Watts and their two children Bella and Celeste.

There are a lot of reasons we know so much about this case already. First of all, Shan’ann was a Facebook oversharer. There are so many Facebook videos that you can still watch that show Shan’ann and her life with her husband and her family. As with most people’s social media lives, there’s a lot that isn’t shown here. Shan’ann’s Facebook family seems perfect. Happy wife. Supportive husband. Sweet little girls. Cute dog. There’s something fascinating about seeing Shan’ann as she wanted to be seen while also knowing what will later happen to her.

There’s also just a lot of footage of the crime, in general. Like an almost shocking amount. Again, a lot of it is available on YouTube already. You can find videos of the police investigating the Watts home. You can watch Chris Watts fail his lie detector test and later confess the murders to his father and then the police. Heck, they actually have footage of Chris disposing of the body. It’s intense and it’s something we don’t have with older true crime cases.

But this is the main reason this case is so popular. And I can’t stress this enough. Shan’ann and her two children were white. And the family overall was very attractive and middle class. The documentary title pretty much spells that out for us. American Murder: The Family Next Door. This family is considered all-American because they’re white, pretty, and not poor. They’re the family next door because they’re white and have money but not TOO much money. And they’re pretty but not like TOO pretty. Basically, they’re the American standard for a “normal” family, which is not normal at all, but that’s a story for another day. But this is a huge part of why this story is so shocking.

However, with all of that said, even if we set aside the footage, the Facebook oversharing, and the wholesomeness of this all-American family, this is still a horrifying story. Chris Watts was having an affair. Instead of filing for divorce like your average douche who finds a new shiny toy to play with, he murdered his entire family. He strangled his pregnant wife and then drove his two little girls 45 minutes away before also killing them. In other words, this wasn’t done in the heat of passion. Chris Watts took his time. This is as cold-blooded and heartless as murder can be, and it feels so needless. It’s hard to understand why he felt like this was the answer.

On top of that, Chris Watts’ behavior during the investigation is even more chillingly cold. He seems completely emotionless for a good majority of it. Then he tries to blame Shan’ann for the murders of their two daughters. Once the detectives tell Chris that they know he did it, only then does he start to cry. And he has the audacity in that moment to say he’s crying for the death of his daughters. He asks himself why he didn’t save them. Save them? My dude, you killed them.

It’s all very intense, and it’s all very sad. As I have said, I’d seen a lot of this footage before and I knew the story. Watching this documentary, however, did pull all of the information together in a way that made it feel shocking all over again. One of the things that stood out to me the most about this documentary was Shan’ann’s family. I don’t think I’d seen much from them before this, and my heart goes out to them. The loss they’ve had to endure is incredibly unfair.

But on top of that, during the trial, people criticized Shan’ann for being overbearing, being a bitch, sharing too much of her personal life, and so on. It’s unfair to speculate on who Shan’ann was in her marriage because we weren’t there. But even if we could, even if we knew for a fact that she was all those things, that still gives no one the right to murder her and her unborn child. I felt horrible for her family, knowing they had to hear those things said about a recently passed family member whom they were mourning.

When researching for this post, I also read that the documentary has sparked a lot of renewed interest in Chris Watts. In his prison cell where he’s serving three life sentences, Chris gets lots of letters, mostly from women. Some of these are hate letters, but he’s also getting romantic proposals and requests for friendship. And I’m just like… ladies, what is wrong with you?

And so concludes this departure from fiction to look at real life monsters. Because make no mistake, Chris Watts is a monster who deserves to rot in prison for what he’s done. Sans love letters, preferably.

Are you afraid of true crime? Is there something wrong with me? Let me know.