Controversial Lifetime movie about NC native who murdered his family airs Saturday
Lifetime’s latest ripped-from-the-headlines true crime movie hits very close to home for many in North Carolina.
“Chris Watts: Confessions of a Killer” premieres Saturday night, telling the story of how Watts murdered his pregnant wife, Shanann, and their two daughters, 4-year-old Bella and 3-year-old Celeste, in Colorado in 2018, and how he came to confess to the monstrous crimes.
Chris and Shanann met in 2010 while they were both living in North Carolina. Chris is a North Carolina native and grew up near Fayetteville, and Shannon, born in New Jersey, grew up in Aberdeen and went to high school in Southern Pines. The two married in Charlotte in 2012 and then moved to Frederick, Colorado, just outside of Denver.
Shanann and the girls had visited with her parents in North Carolina in the weeks before she was reported missing by a friend. A good portion of the movie actually takes place in North Carolina (one small hiccup is that the filmmakers describe a family/work trip to Myrtle Beach as taking place in North Carolina, not South Carolina).
Shanann’s family denounces the movie
Last week, Shanann’s family publicly denounced the film through their attorney, Steven Lambert. According to WLOS-13 TV station in Colorado, Lambert is representing the family in a wrongful death lawsuit.
At the Jan. 15 news conference, Lambert said that the family learned about the movie after it was already in production, and that Lifetime never contacted them for their input. ABC Denver 7 TV station reported that Lambert said the family fears the movie will reignite conspiracy theories and lead to more online bullying.
“Armchair detectives going out there trying to find scraps of evidence, saying, ‘Chris really wasn’t the killer, it was X’ or, ‘his original confession was the true confession and Shanann did have a hand in this’ or ‘there is some sort of conspiracy going to it,’ that kind of stuff bothers them a lot,” Lambert said.
Lambert told the TV magazine show “Inside Edition” that the movie is “a false narrative that does not accurately depict who Shannon was in life, who Bella was in life, who Cece was in life.”
According to Lambert, Shanann’s family says what they’ve seen of the movie is disturbing.
“This is their tragedy, their story and it’s being taken away from them so when people go out and make things without their input and do not get the facts straight from the horse’s mouth, it does pain them, it does hurt them,” he said.
The tragedy has been featured in many true crime documentary-type programs, including shows on Investigation Discovery and Reelz.
The Lifetime movie
A review copy of the movie was provided to The News & Observer by Lifetime.
Sean Kleier plays Chris and Ashley Williams plays Shanann. Brooke Smith plays Colorado Bureau of Investigation agent Tammy Lee, who was a critical player in obtaining Chris’ confession.
Many scenes in the movie play out exactly like the real-life scenes documented in news interviews, police body-cam footage and interrogation footage released by officials. They even have Chris in the UNC Tar Heels T-shirt he was wearing in the now-infamous local TV news interview on his front porch, in which he begs for the return of “missing” Shanann and the girls.
In the movie, he also wears the shirt (and shorts and flip-flops) throughout his police station interview with detectives, his polygraph test and his eventual confession, but that appears to be a compression of time (in real life, his arrest came the day after those TV interviews).
The movie portrays Shanann as working very hard for her multi-level marketing job selling Thrive vitamin products. She is shown posting multiple videos to social media giving her followers insight into her own life and giving pep talks about how to live your best life. She is portrayed as a loving mother and as a wife trying hard to make her marriage work.
Chris is portrayed as being less into the marriage and family. When Shanann goes on a six-week trip to visit her parents in North Carolina, Chris immediately begins an affair with a young woman at work, whom he tells that he is separated. He is portrayed as falling hard for the young woman (and her for him, though she is skeptical of his marital situation and quickly alerts police to their relationship when Shanann disappears).
It’s not long at all after Shanann returns from North Carolina (and then from another quick business trip) that Chris murders her and the girls. How all of that went down is uncertain, since we only have Chris’ account of events, and it’s clear that he initially lied to police about how all of that happened (he initially claimed that Shanann killed the girls and that he killed her in a fit of rage).
Chris did eventually confess to investigators that he killed all three of them, and that is shown in the movie.
After his confession, Chris was offered a plea deal, with the support of Shanann’s family, so there was no trial. He was sentenced to five life sentences (murders of children under the age of 12 carry an additional count) and an additional 48 years for the murder of Shanann’s unborn baby, plus 36 years for three charges of tampering with a deceased body.
How to watch Lifetime’s ‘Chris Watts: Confessions of a Killer’
The movie “Chris Watts: Confessions of a Killer” airs at 8 p.m. Saturday (Jan. 25) on Lifetime. The movie repeats at 11 p.m. and will likely repeat many times on Lifetime.
Immediately following the movie, “Beyond the Headlines: The Watts Family Tragedy,” featuring an interview with CBI agent Tammy Lee, airs at 10 p.m. This special will repeat at 1 a.m., after the encore of the movie at 11.
This story was originally published January 24, 2020 at 12:55 PM.
