Coral Eugene Watts, generally recorded as Carl Eugene Watts, was born in Killeen, Texas on November 7, 1953 and raised in Inkster, Michigan. He suffered meningitis as a child and tested well below average thereafter.
From his teens he was assaulting women. A court-ordered psychiatric assessment in 1974 recorded homicidal impulses and released him anyway.
He said he killed women to release the evil in their eyes, and took nothing sexual from it at all, which sets him apart from almost every other well-known American case.
Michigan police connected him to a series of attacks around Ann Arbor and Detroit in the late 1970s and could not build a case. Under surveillance and knowing it, he moved to Texas in 1981 and went on killing in Houston, mostly on Sunday mornings, mostly young women alone, by stabbing, strangling, drowning and hanging.
There was no sexual assault in any of them, which is part of why the cases were not linked.
He was caught on May 23, 1982 at an apartment complex in Houston, where he attacked Lori Lister and Melinda Aguilar. He was drowning Lister in the bath when Aguilar, whom he had tied up, jumped from a second-floor balcony and got help.
Prosecutors had him for the assault and believed they could not prove a single murder. So they made a deal: immunity from prosecution for any murder he confessed to, in exchange for a guilty plea to burglary with intent to commit murder and a sixty-year sentence. He then confessed to thirteen killings in Texas and led investigators to bodies.
Texas good-time credit as it stood in 1982 meant his release date fell in 2006, and the deal barred Texas from charging him with anything he had described. He had confessed his way to a release date.
What saved the situation was Michigan, which the immunity did not cover. Publicity about his coming release produced a witness to the 1979 killing of Helen Dutcher in Ferndale, and in November 2004 a Michigan jury convicted him of her murder and sentenced him to life without parole. In 2007 he was convicted again for the 1974 murder of Gloria Steele in Kalamazoo.
He died of prostate cancer on September 21, 2007 in a Michigan prison, aged fifty-three. He confessed to thirteen and has been credited by investigators with up to eighty, most of which will never be proved.
Two convictions stand, both from the state that was not party to the bargain. The immunity deal that got thirteen bodies found is also the reason none of those thirteen could ever be charged.