Coral Eugene Watts confessed in 1982 to killing 13 women, 12 of them in Texas and one in Michigan. He was 28, a mechanic for Houston's Metropolitan Transit Authority, and he had just been arrested in the act of trying to drown a young woman in her bathtub. Prosecutors in Houston said they had not a stitch of evidence tying him to any killing. They gave him immunity from prosecution for the deaths he described in return for a guilty plea to burglary with intent to commit murder and a 60-year sentence. The families of the women he named gained answers, and in three cases graves to visit. He never stood trial in Texas for a single death.
The bargain held for more than two decades and then began to slip. A Texas appeals ruling and the state's mandatory release laws cut more than 35 years from the 60, and by the early 2000s his release was scheduled for 2006. Michigan, which had refused to join the agreement, went back to its own unsolved cases. In 2004 an Oakland County jury convicted him of the 1979 murder of Helen Dutcher, and in 2007 he was convicted in Kalamazoo of the 1974 murder of Gloria Steele. He died of cancer weeks later. Those two Michigan verdicts are the only murder convictions in his record.
He was born Carl Eugene Watts on November 7, 1953, at Fort Hood, Texas, to Richard and Dorothy Watts, according to the Dallas Observer's 2003 account of his life, which drew on psychiatric and police records. Three days later the family left for Coalwood, West Virginia. His parents divorced in 1955, and he had a sister, Sharon. He came to use the name Coral, the way he pronounced his given name. Part of his childhood was spent with his grandmother in Coalwood, who later remembered that he had loved hunting rabbits and skinning them.
In 1962 his mother moved to Detroit and married Norman Ceaser, a mechanic, and they had two more children. A bout of meningitis in childhood forced him to repeat the third grade, and his mother blamed the fever for his later problems with memory and learning. As a teenager he was an athlete and a Golden Gloves boxer, but he struggled in school and graduated only at 19, with his mother's tutoring.
On June 25, 1969, while delivering newspapers, he tried to throttle a 26-year-old woman, Joan Gave, in her Detroit apartment building. He was arrested four days later. "I just felt like beating someone up," he said, as the Dallas Observer recorded it. In 1982 United Press International summarized the episode as an attack on a woman when he was 14, after which he was committed to a psychiatric clinic; CBS News's 60 Minutes later put his age at 15 and said the woman was on his paper route.
In September 1969 he entered the Lafayette Clinic in Detroit for evaluation. He told staff there that his mother beat him and struck him with a switch, a claim his stepbrother later denied. The psychiatrist who assessed him, Dr. Gary M. Ainsworth, described him as "an impulsive individual who has a passive-aggressive orientation to life." His final report said plainly: "This individual is considered dangerous." The clinic recommended regular outpatient treatment and released him on his 16th birthday, November 7, 1969. In the five years that followed he went back fewer than 10 times. A note from one of those visits, in 1974, recorded a "strong impulse to beat up women."
In 1973 he went to Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, on a football scholarship. The Dallas Observer, working from his records, attributed his short stay there to a football injury. In June 1974 he enrolled at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, under a program for students who would not otherwise have qualified for admission. He skipped classes and ignored his tutor.
That autumn, women in apartment complexes near the campus began to report a man at the door asking for someone named Charles. On October 25, 1974, Lenore Knizacky, 23, answered such a knock; the stranger asked whether Charles was in, and when she left her door unchained he choked her. On October 29, two residents of the Stadium Drive Apartments, George Wright and Colette Herrick, each saw an agitated young man asking for someone they did not know. Herrick later picked Watts out of a photo array and a lineup.
Gloria Steele was 19, a student at Western Michigan University, and lived in the Stadium Drive Apartments. Around half past noon on October 30, 1974, her boyfriend, Sam Waller, found her dead on the bedroom floor of her apartment. He had seen a Black man leaving a stairwell in the building. She had been stabbed between 30 and 35 times in the chest and abdomen, the autopsy found, and part of the shaft of the weapon, which appeared to be a woodcarving tool, remained in her spine. She was clothed, and there was no sign of sexual assault. Her purse was gone; her keys and books lay near her. No forensic evidence pointed to her killer.
On November 12, 1974, Diane Williams, 23, was choked after a stranger at her door used the same story about Charles. Both she and Lenore Knizacky identified Watts in a lineup after his arrest in December. Police searching his parents' home found ordinary woodworking tools, and in his car they found a Western Michigan University parking ticket dated the day of the murder. Watts told police he had been at the complex the day before, looking for a friend named Charles, and denied any part in the killing. A Kalamazoo detective, Bombich, later testified that Watts had said, "I guess you have me," and asked whether the police had him on "all of them." He never admitted killing Gloria Steele, and for 30 years he was not charged with it.
After his arrest in December 1974, Watts admitted to a court investigator that he had assaulted at least 15 women. He committed himself voluntarily to the Kalamazoo State Hospital, where he made a half-hearted attempt to hang himself with a cord from a laundry bag. A psychiatrist there, Dr. James Katilius, recorded that Watts said he had "beaten a number of women this fall" and "thinks he's killed one or two of them by choking." Katilius diagnosed an antisocial personality and described him as "impulsive and unable to learn from previous experience."
In June 1975 Dr. Elissa Benedek of the Center for Forensic Psychiatry in Ann Arbor found him competent and not mentally ill. "This patient is clearly quite dangerous," she wrote, "and his potential for recidivistic behavior is great." She noted that the part of it that bothered him was getting caught; asked whether he cared about the women, he said no. He pleaded no contest to one assault charge and was sentenced to a year in jail.
In 1978 he met Valeria Goodwill, and they married in August 1979. She later described a man who flailed in his sleep, forbade a Christmas tree and makeup, and tried to flush her wig down the toilet. He would leave right after sex and come back hours later with his clothes torn. She divorced him in May 1980. UPI's 1982 profile said he had married in 1979 and separated two months later.
In October 1979 he was arrested in Southfield, a Detroit suburb, on a prowling charge, which was dismissed.
On October 31, 1979, Jeanne Clyne was walking home along a sidewalk in Grosse Pointe Farms, a Detroit suburb, after a doctor's appointment, when she was stabbed at least 10 times with a tool like a screwdriver. The Associated Press gave her age as 35; the Dallas Observer gave it as 44. Her death went unsolved for nearly three years. It was the one Michigan killing that Watts described to investigators under his 1982 immunity agreement, and so the one Michigan death for which he could never be prosecuted.
Helen Mae Dutcher was 36. On the night of December 1, 1979, she was attacked in an alley in Ferndale, north of Detroit, near the drive-through of a dry cleaner, and stabbed about a dozen times in the neck and back. She died of her wounds.
A neighbor saw it happen. Joseph Foy, then living in a house that looked onto the alley, told the court in 2004 that he watched the attack; news reports described him as watching from his porch, and a 2004 Dallas Observer report said from his bedroom window. The next day he described the attacker to a police sketch artist. "I seen that man kill this woman," he later said on MSNBC, adding that before the man got into his car, "we actually locked eyes." The case went unsolved. In 1982, when Watts's face appeared on television after his arrest in Texas, Foy recognized him and called the police again. He was not charged.
In 1980 three women were stabbed to death in Ann Arbor, each found outside her home in the hours before dawn on a Sunday. Ann Arbor's police chief, William Corbett, pointed to what they had in common: all were stabbed repeatedly in the chest, none was sexually assaulted, and all were found outside their homes or buildings around four in the morning. The killer became known as the Sunday Morning Slasher.
Shirley Small was 17, a student at Pioneer High School. On the night of April 19, 1980, she had been roller skating in Farmington and then went to a Big Boy restaurant in Ypsilanti. She began walking toward Ann Arbor, and her boyfriend found her on Packard Road at 3:45 a.m. and twice offered her a ride, which she refused. She was stabbed to death at about 4:45 a.m. on April 20, a few feet from her home on Page Street.
Glenda Richmond was 26 and the night manager of the Brown Jug Restaurant. She was engaged to be married. On July 13, 1980, a neighbor found her body in the grass about 10 feet from the door of her townhouse on Braeburn Circle, on the city's south side; she had just come home from work. A 2006 Michigan Court of Appeals opinion gives her age as 25 and records 28 stab wounds.
Rebecca Greer Huff was a graduate student at the University of Michigan, studying for a master's degree in business, and had worked as a flight attendant. She was attacked as she walked from her parked car to her apartment at the Waldenwood complex on Pauline Boulevard, early on a Sunday in mid-September 1980, and was found at her apartment doorway with her keys beside her. A witness heard screams and saw a man run to a car. She was stabbed 54 times. Her age is given as 20 by the Dallas Observer and as 30 by the Court of Appeals; the date as September 14 by the court and September 15 by the Ann Arbor District Library's history of the case.
The city put all 31 of its detectives on the cases. Warnings that another woman would die were written in soap on mirrors in the Michigan Union, and the mayor, Louis Belcher, pledged unlimited resources. Watts was never charged with any of the three Ann Arbor killings and never confessed to them.
The task force was led by Paul Bunten of the Ann Arbor police. The break came from Sergeant James Arthurs of the Detroit police, who had dealt with Watts after the 1969 attack and had once helped Kalamazoo police with a search warrant in Detroit in the Steele case. Arthurs, who had worked with Chief Corbett, suggested Watts as a suspect, and Watts's photograph was given to patrol officers.
Across the river in Windsor, Ontario, several women were attacked in 1980. United States Customs records placed Watts's car crossing back into Detroit around the time of two of those attacks, the Dallas Observer reported. Canadian police also looked at him in connection with a later attack in a Windsor laundry room, though his car had not crossed the border that night. None of those cases reached a court.
On November 15, 1980, two officers working the midnight shift in downtown Ann Arbor, Al Doades and Don Terry, were watching a woman they suspected of acting as a lookout for parking meter thieves when they noticed a man in a brown Grand Prix following her. The woman ducked in and out of doorways to avoid him. A registration check showed that the car was Watts's. After a short chase he ran on foot and was caught. He was arrested for driving with a suspended license and expired plates. In the car police found two screwdrivers, woodworking files and a dictionary with the words "Rebecca is a lover" written on its cover. Fingerprints on the dictionary did not match Rebecca Huff. Watts asked for a lawyer and picked one out of the phone book, and he was released for lack of evidence. The Michigan Daily, reporting in 1982, placed his arrest in Ann Arbor on a misdemeanor charge in October 1980.
Police then followed him day and night and secretly fixed a tracking device to his car. He seemed to sense it and cut back his driving. On January 29, 1981, they arrested him at his mother's house and took a blood sample; blood found on his shoes linked him to no crime. In a five-hour interview he refused to answer most questions. When Bunten stood behind him and showed him how he believed the women had been seized, Watts broke down and asked to see his mother. Bunten later told 60 Minutes that Watts became emotional and asked to call her, but no one answered, and he stopped talking. Bunten said afterward that Watts had nearly confessed.
On March 10, 1981, Bunten approached him at a pay phone in a courthouse. Watts dropped the receiver and ran. A few days later he left Michigan without telling his mother. On April 8, 1981, Bunten sent the Houston police homicide division a full case history on Watts, with fingerprints, photographs and reports. UPI reported in 1982 that Watts had moved to Houston in May 1981.
Houston recorded 701 murders in 1981, and its police department was underpaid, short of officers and without settled leadership. Watts moved more than six times in a few months. He worked for an oil-services company, Welltech, in Columbus, Texas, and then for Houston Metro on the 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. shift, maintaining buses. At a Houston church on Easter 1981 he met a 21-year-old woman who became his girlfriend; she told UPI after his arrest that he was intelligent, well dressed and a perfect gentleman, and that she had never been afraid of him. Co-workers called him "a cool dude." A homicide detective, Doug Bostock, confirmed his Metro job and used a tracking device to find his apartment on Idylwood. Through November and December 1981 Bostock saw no sign of attacks.
Watts later confessed to the killings that follow. None of them was ever tried, and the accounts of how each woman died rest on his confessions and on what police found.
Linda Tilley, 22, was a senior at the University of Texas, from Arlington. On September 5, 1981, she was arriving at her new apartment in Austin when she was attacked and drowned in the complex's swimming pool. Her death was at first ruled an accident. Watts said he had followed another young woman from Houston, lost her in Austin, and then seen Linda Tilley. Harris County's district attorney, John Holmes, later described a victim followed some 150 miles from Houston to Austin.
On September 12, 1981, Elizabeth Montgomery, 25, was stabbed once in the chest outside her Houston apartment as she walked her dogs. She made it home and collapsed into her boyfriend's arms. The same night, less than two miles away, Susan Wolf, 21, was stabbed outside her apartment as she carried groceries from her car; she had been followed home from a shopping center.
Phyllis Tamm, 27, was found hanging from a small tree near Rice University on January 4, 1982. Her death was not ruled a homicide until Watts confessed. Margaret Fossi, 25, an architecture student, was reported missing and found dead on January 17, 1982, in the trunk of her car parked at Rice; she had died of asphyxia caused by a blow to the throat. Her husband, Lawrence Fossi, would spend much of the next two decades fighting to keep Watts in prison.
Elena Semander, 20, was found in a trash bin in Houston on February 7, 1982. Watts said he had strangled her with her shirt. Her mother, Harriet Semander, and her sister, Maria, became two of the most persistent voices in the campaign against his release.
Emily LaQua was 14. She had recently moved from Seattle to live with her father in Texas, and on March 20, 1982, she was walking to a new job as a waitress in Brookshire when she was strangled. At first she was thought to have run away. Her body was found five months later in a culvert in Waller County. The Dallas Observer dates her death to March 31.
Anna Ledet was 34, from Dallas, and a medical student at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, due to graduate on the day she died. She had left a career in accounting to study medicine. On March 27, 1982, as she came home from a graduation party, she was stabbed to death in a walkway near some apartments. Later that morning Watts attacked another woman, who escaped because his hands were slippery with blood. The Associated Press gave the name of the Galveston medical student as Edith Ledet.
Yolanda Garcia, 21 or 22 in different accounts, was stabbed twice in the heart on her front lawn as she came home in mid-April 1982, still holding a bag with her work shoes. Carrie Mae Jefferson, 32, worked at the downtown Houston post office. On April 16, 1982, as she returned home from work, she was strangled and stabbed twice on each side of the neck. Watts buried her body along White Oak Bayou. She was the only Black woman known to have been killed in his Houston series, the Dallas Observer reported.
Suzanne Searles, 25, had moved to Houston from Des Moines, Iowa. She was seized as she came home from a party in late April 1982. Watts told investigators that while choking her he could not tell whether she was dead, so he held her head in a flowerpot full of water. He buried her. Hers was the first grave he led police to.
Michele Maday died on her 20th birthday, May 23, 1982. She was choked outside her apartment at about 4 a.m., and her body was found in her bathtub.
Several women survived attacks Watts later admitted. On January 16, 1982, he cut the throat of Julie Sanchez on a freeway as she tried to change a flat tire; she lived. On January 29 a 19-year-old woman was followed to her apartment in Seabrook and stabbed three times with an ice pick; she survived.
On January 30, 1982, Patty Johnson, 19, was attacked from behind as she walked from her car to her home in Galveston. Her throat was slashed, and the attacker ran when a man who heard her screams came to help. She described a Black man about 5 feet 11. From a photo lineup she picked Howard Mosley, who was 6 feet 7 and had two earlier felony convictions. He was arrested on February 16, 1982, and on July 15, 1982, a Galveston County jury convicted him of attempted murder. He was sentenced to life as a habitual offender. A month later Watts confessed to an attack matching Patty Johnson's. "[Watts] gave us a scenario which causes us to be most concerned," said the Galveston County district attorney, James Hury. On August 17, 1982, Mosley was granted a new trial and Hury agreed to drop the charge, and Mosley was released on September 2, 1982. The National Registry of Exonerations records his case as a 1982 exoneration.
Hours after Michele Maday died, Watts attacked two young women at their apartment on Houston's west side. Lori Lister was coming home when he choked her unconscious. Her roommate, Melinda Aguilar, 18, who had moved out of her parents' home against their wishes, was also attacked; she pretended to pass out. He tied both women up and began filling the bathtub. While he was trying to drown Lori Lister, Melinda Aguilar threw herself off the second-floor balcony and ran to a couple sitting on their porch. A neighbor pulled Lori Lister from the water, and she survived. Her age is given as 19 by the Associated Press and 22 by the Dallas Observer.
A Houston patrol officer, Don Schmidt, tackled Watts as he tried to flee. "He looked scared to death to be arrested," Schmidt said. That May, the Houston police had already formed a task force to review some 40 unsolved killings of women.
Examined at Rusk State Hospital in June 1982, Watts was found by Dr. J. A. Hunter to be without psychosis. His defense lawyers, Don Caggins and Zinetta Burney, retained a psychologist, Dr. Jerome Sherman, who diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia. State District Judge Douglas Shaver ruled him competent to stand trial.
The state could prove the attack on the two roommates. It could not prove a single murder. On August 9, 1982, the day his trial was set to begin, the Harris County assistant district attorney Ira Jones spoke to him about his own child. "Coral, you've got a daughter," Jones said. "If your daughter was missing, wouldn't you want to know what happened to her?" Watts said yes. Jones asked whether he could lead him to a body, and Watts said yes again.
The agreement that followed gave him immunity from murder prosecution for the killings he confessed to, in exchange for a guilty plea to burglary with intent to commit murder and a 60-year sentence. Judge Shaver accepted it because there was no evidence to convict Watts of murder and the police needed his help. District Attorney John Holmes said his office had "not a stitch of evidence" in the killings; what it wanted was the bodies and a sentence equal to life. Ira Jones acknowledged that the case was hard because people wanted the man to "burn in hell," but said that returning the bodies meant a great deal to the families. Shaver, a former prosecutor, said he would recommend that Watts never be paroled, though he would be eligible after 20 years. "Sad to say," the judge said, 60 years was the most the evidence allowed.
At a gravesite in a vacant lot, where Suzanne Searles had been buried, Watts demanded a hamburger, fries and a Coke, and said he would show them no more graves without it. Over the next days he led investigators to shallow graves in Houston and near Brookshire.
At his own request, the confessions were taken by Tom Ladd, a Houston homicide detective who had sat with him after his arrest while others tried to make him talk. "Coral and I always got along," Ladd said, "because I wasn't trying to get him to confess." Watts described each killing in detail, so quietly that Ladd often had to tell him to speak up. Ladd and his brother, Jim Ladd, also a homicide detective, drove him to the scenes. "He never got the facts of one murder mixed up with the facts of another murder," Ladd told 60 Minutes. "He never missed." The confessions took more than a week.
Asked why he chose a woman, Watts gave one answer: she had evil eyes. Ladd noted that most of the women had been picked out at night, when their eyes could hardly be seen. Most were killed near their own front doors. Watts said he took an item from each victim and burned it to free her of her "evil spirit," UPI reported. Judge Shaver said Watts would look at a woman on the street and decide she needed to be killed.
The Dallas Observer recorded his total as 13 murders, five attempted murders and one assault. The Associated Press listed 12 confessed killings in Texas and one in Michigan, and later said the immunity covered 12, 11 in Texas and Jeanne Clyne's in Michigan. The difference is Emily LaQua: Waller County, where her body was found, never granted immunity, and the Associated Press called hers the only confessed killing for which he did not receive it. He was never charged with it either.
He offered to confess to 22 killings in Michigan if he was given the same immunity there. Michigan refused. The Washtenaw County prosecutor, William Delhey, said he saw no purpose in granting immunity for the Ann Arbor deaths, and that a Texas sentence of 60 years, which could be parolable after 20 years and shortened further by good time, was not long enough to justify it. If the full 60 years could be guaranteed, Delhey said, he would give a deal favorable consideration. Paul Bunten later explained the refusal more simply: you do not give immunity to someone who has committed murder.
In a squad car on the way to one of the graves, Watts told Tom Ladd: "if I ever get out, I'm going to do it again."
On September 3, 1982, Judge Shaver sentenced Watts and entered a finding that the water in Lori Lister's bathtub had been a deadly weapon. Under Texas law the finding sharply limited the good-time credit he could earn. Shaver also ordered that the transcript be sent to prison officials, for anyone in the future who might be "so foolish" as to let Watts walk the streets before he had served the full 60 years.
Late in 1982 Bunten and a forensic psychologist, Dr. Harley Stock, interviewed Watts in prison. He admitted killing other women in Texas and said he had not confessed to them because "They were making it into a circus." Asked how many there had been, he answered: "There are not enough fingers and toes in this room to count the murders I've committed." He would not explain why. "I will take that with me to the grave," he said. The killings did not bother him anymore, he told them. He later told Bunten he did not want to be remembered as a mass murderer. "That ship sailed," Bunten said.
From the Coffield Unit in 1987, Watts filed a handwritten appeal claiming that his plea had been obtained through threats and promises. His trial lawyer, Zinetta Burney, denied the claims in an affidavit. Judge Shaver appointed a lawyer, Charles Baird, to handle the appeal. In October 1987, in a case called Ex parte Patterson, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals held that a defendant had a constitutional right to notice that a deadly weapon finding might be made. Watts's case was sent back, and in 1989 the court deleted Shaver's finding. Watts became, in law, a nonviolent offender, eligible for good time retroactively.
He came under a Texas mandatory supervision law passed in 1977 and rescinded in 1987, which still applied to prisoners sentenced in that decade. As a first-time offender he earned three days' credit for each day served, which 60 Minutes calculated would release him after about 24 years. He lost four years, nine months and 86 days of credit after a failed escape from the Coffield Unit, in which he tried to squeeze through a small cell window and got stuck, leaving a dummy in his bed. Otherwise he was described as a model prisoner and worked as a machinist in the wood shop at the Ellis Unit.
The deletion of the finding brought him before the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles in February 1990. The Ann Arbor News reported that he could be released as early as March 1 that year. Harriet Semander circulated a flier titled "The Killing Machine" and a petition to the board's chairman, Harry B. Keene, warning that as a confessed serial killer he remained a continued threat to women. Ann Arbor's police chief told the paper Watts was one of the worst mass killers in history. Watts was not released.
By 2002 the date had come into view. The Associated Press and other reports gave it as April 2006; the Dallas Observer gave May 9, 2006, in 2003 and April 8, 2006, in 2004; the Michigan attorney general's office said May 2006. Andy Kahan, director of the Houston mayor's crime victims office, wrote that Watts would become the first serial killer in the country ever to be legally released. "He is a cold-blooded killing machine who randomly preyed on women," Kahan said. "You do not rehabilitate a serial killer." Gerald Treece of the South Texas College of Law called Watts "a guy who just happened to hit the legal system in Texas at a strange time."
The families had backed the 1982 plea bargain because they wanted to know what had happened to their daughters, sisters and wives. Now they organized against its consequences, petitioning and lobbying Governor Rick Perry for two years. Laura Allen, Anna Ledet's mother, had long before written to Watts to tell him she forgave him. "I just want him to stay in prison," she said. At a memorial gathering, Joe Tilley, Linda Tilley's father, said: "Forgiveness cannot be bestowed when forgiveness is not sought." Her mother, Carol Tilley, said the murder had destroyed her faith in God.
Lawrence Fossi had fought Watts's release since 1988. He argued that prison officials should reclassify Watts so that he earned good time at a lower rate. "If this guy's criminal history isn't enough to keep him from getting the highest rate of good time, the rules are meaningless," he said. He blamed the prison system's general counsel for rejecting his arguments.
Texas parole officials said that once released Watts would be held under supervision and monitored by GPS. Ira Jones doubted that anyone could watch him closely enough. His sister, Sharon Watts, said her brother was on medication and lacked "the energy to get out and do something." Harley Stock said his chance of rehabilitation "approaches zero." Bunten, who had become police chief in Saline, Michigan, said: "I don't understand how you can forgive somebody for taking somebody's life."
Michigan had kept its cases open. Donna Pendergast, then a Wayne County assistant prosecutor, formed a task force to review cold cases, and said she believed Watts "could have killed as many as 100 women." A task force under Lieutenant Bill Hanger later found about 90 unsolved cases that still listed him as a suspect. "So I know there's at least 22 out there," Hanger said. The Michigan attorney general's office, by then running the effort, described a 12-member task force led by Pendergast, by then an assistant attorney general, reviewing more than 100 killings in Michigan and Ontario back to 1974, and testing old evidence for DNA. In Kalamazoo, the public safety director, Dan Weston, reopened the Gloria Steele file in 2003.
In January 2004 the attorney general, Mike Cox, appeared on MSNBC's The Abrams Report to ask the public for help. Joseph Foy was channel surfing and came upon the program. He knew Watts's face from 1982 and knew of the deal he had made in Texas. "How come nobody's asking me about this Ferndale murder," he remembered thinking. Within 24 hours of the appeal he called the attorney general's office. It was the third time he had reported what he knew. Assistant Attorney General Thomas Furtaw filed a first-degree murder complaint for the death of Helen Dutcher, and Watts was brought from Texas to Michigan.
The trial was held in Pontiac before Oakland County Circuit Judge Richard Kuhn, and jury selection began on November 8, 2004. There was no physical evidence linking Watts to Helen Dutcher's death, and he had never confessed to it. Judge Kuhn ruled that his 1982 confessions to the Texas killings could be heard, holding that they showed a pattern of behavior. The defense lawyer, Ronald Kaplovitz, had fought to keep them out. "It certainly is very damaging to hear all this evidence," he said before trial.
Foy testified that he was certain Watts was the man he had seen. Kaplovitz asked the jury how anyone could identify a stranger in a dark alley from 85 feet away and remember his face for 25 years. Women who had survived Watts's attacks in Texas, Melinda Aguilar among them, testified too; the jury heard tearful testimony from a Texas woman whose throat he had slashed. The confession itself was presented to the jury.
On November 17, 2004, after about four hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Watts of first-degree murder. He showed little reaction; Kaplovitz described it as "quiet resignation." Helen Dutcher's sister-in-law, Peggy Dutcher, said, "It's what we prayed for." Pendergast said she was glad "finally we were able to pull a viable case together." Elena Semander's mother, Harriet, said she felt that her daughter's spirit was at rest. On December 7, 2004, he was sentenced to life in prison. Michigan law made the sentence mandatory life without parole. Cox said Watts would never again see the light of day as a free man.
Kaplovitz said after the verdict that whether to appeal was Watts's decision. In August 2005, CBS News reported that Watts was appealing. No decision on that appeal was reported.
On the day of the Dutcher verdict, Kalamazoo prosecutors charged Watts with first-degree premeditated murder in the death of Gloria Steele. The case turned on what other evidence could be put before a jury. The Kalamazoo Circuit Court refused the prosecution's request to admit evidence of other acts. The Michigan Court of Appeals first declined to hear the prosecutors' appeal, the Michigan Supreme Court sent the case back to it, and on April 25, 2006, a panel of Judges William Murphy, Helene White and Patrick Meter ruled in an unpublished opinion.
The panel held that the lower court had wrongly demanded direct rather than circumstantial evidence of identity. It ruled that the October 29, 1974, sightings of a young man asking for a stranger at the Stadium Drive Apartments could be heard as part of the story of the crime, and that the choking attacks on Lenore Knizacky and Diane Williams could be heard as evidence of a common scheme. It also ruled that evidence about four other killings could be admitted to show identity and motive: Rebecca Huff and Glenda Richmond in Ann Arbor, and Susan Wolf and Yolanda Garcia in Texas, the last two of which Watts had confessed. The court said the parallels were close enough to reflect a signature, a ruling on what a jury could hear, not a finding that he had committed the Ann Arbor killings. Other Michigan killings, the Texas assaults and the 1980 stalking incident stayed out. The court sent the case back for the district court to reconsider the bindover on the admissible evidence alone and declined to remove the trial judge.
The case was tried in Kalamazoo in 2007. Watts was convicted of the murder of Gloria Steele, nearly 33 years after her death, and was sentenced to life in prison, his second life sentence in Michigan.
Watts had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. From August 28, 2007, he was in Foote Hospital in Jackson, Michigan, almost continuously, in a secure area, while held as an inmate of the Ionia Maximum Correctional Facility, according to the Michigan Department of Corrections spokesman Russ Marlan. He died there in September 2007, a little more than a week after his second life sentence. The Jackson County medical examiner's office treated the death as natural and did not perform an autopsy.
He had never been released from custody since his arrest in Houston on May 23, 1982.
According to the obituary published at his death, Corey Mitchell, the author of a 2006 book on the case, Evil Eyes, called Watts the country's most brutal serial killer and said his research suggested Watts might have killed more than 100 people. Watts himself had told police he killed more than 80, the obituary published at his death reported. The Michigan attorney general's office said in 2004 that he was suspected in 26 murders and had claimed more than 80. None of those numbers was ever tested in court.
For Joseph Foy, the case closed what he had seen as an unanswered question since 1979. For Dan Abrams, whose program had carried the appeal, it was one of the moments that made the job worthwhile, he said on air. For Melinda Aguilar, who testified at the Michigan trial, the fear had been that a legal loophole would free him. "He has admitted to killing again if he was to get out," she told 60 Minutes in 2004. "And I believe he will."
Proven by verdict: the murder of Helen Dutcher (Oakland County jury, November 17, 2004) and the murder of Gloria Steele (Kalamazoo, 2007). Proven by guilty plea: burglary with intent to commit murder in the May 23, 1982, Houston attack. Whether the Dutcher appeal reported in 2005 had been decided, or whether any appeal of the Steele verdict was filed, was not reported.
Confessed, never tried: the deaths of Jeanne Clyne, Linda Tilley, Elizabeth Montgomery, Susan Wolf, Phyllis Tamm, Margaret Fossi, Elena Semander, Emily LaQua, Anna Ledet, Yolanda Garcia, Carrie Mae Jefferson, Suzanne Searles and Michele Maday. These are his admissions, given under an immunity agreement, and no court tested them. Emily LaQua's death was outside the immunity, but no charge was brought.
Suspected, never charged: the Ann Arbor killings of Shirley Small, Glenda Richmond and Rebecca Huff, which Ann Arbor police treated him as the prime suspect in for decades; the other Detroit-area killings of 1979 and 1980 listed by the Dallas Observer; the 1980 attacks in Windsor, Ontario; and the roughly 90 cases that Michigan's 2004 task force said still listed him. His statements that there were more than 80 victims, or too many to count on fingers and toes, were never tied to named cases.
Details that vary between sources: the age of Jeanne Clyne (35 or 44), Rebecca Huff (20 or 30), Glenda Richmond (25 or 26), Yolanda Garcia (21 or 22), Lori Lister (19 or 22); the dates of Susan Wolf's death (September 12 or 13, 1981), Yolanda Garcia's (April 15 or 16, 1982), Suzanne Searles's (April 21 or 25, 1982), Emily LaQua's (March 20 or 31, 1982) and Rebecca Huff's (September 14 or 15, 1980); the first name of the Galveston medical student (Anna or Edith Ledet); the month of his Ann Arbor arrest (October or November 1980); his release date (April 2006, April 8, 2006, or May 9, 2006); the number of confessed killings covered by immunity (12 or 13); and the Texas offense, which the Michigan attorney general's office called aggravated burglary and UPI, AP and CBS called burglary with intent to commit murder.
November 7, 1953: Carl Eugene Watts is born at Fort Hood, Texas; the family leaves for Coalwood, West Virginia, three days later.
1955: his parents divorce.
1962: his mother moves to Detroit and remarries.
June 25, 1969: he attacks Joan Gave, 26, on his newspaper route in Detroit; arrested four days later.
September to November 7, 1969: evaluated at the Lafayette Clinic; released on his 16th birthday.
1973: Lane College, Tennessee, on a football scholarship.
June 1974: enrolls at Western Michigan University.
October 25, 1974: Lenore Knizacky is choked.
October 30, 1974: Gloria Steele, 19, is killed in her apartment in Kalamazoo.
November 12, 1974: Diane Williams is choked.
December 1974: arrested; admits assaulting at least 15 women.
June 1975: found competent; later pleads no contest to an assault charge and serves a year in jail.
August 1979: marries Valeria Goodwill; divorced May 1980.
October 1979: arrested for prowling in Southfield; charge dismissed.
October 31, 1979: Jeanne Clyne is killed in Grosse Pointe Farms.
December 1, 1979: Helen Dutcher, 36, is killed in Ferndale; Joseph Foy witnesses the attack.
April 20, July 13 and mid-September 1980: Shirley Small, Glenda Richmond and Rebecca Huff are killed in Ann Arbor.
November 15, 1980: arrested in Ann Arbor after following a woman downtown; released.
January 29, 1981: questioned for five hours; blood sample taken.
March 10, 1981: runs from Bunten at a courthouse pay phone; leaves Michigan days later.
April 8, 1981: Bunten warns the Houston police.
September 5, 1981: Linda Tilley is drowned in Austin.
September 12, 1981: Elizabeth Montgomery and Susan Wolf are killed in Houston.
January 1982: Phyllis Tamm and Margaret Fossi are killed; Julie Sanchez and another woman survive attacks.
January 30, 1982: Patty Johnson survives an attack in Galveston; Howard Mosley is later wrongly convicted.
February to May 1982: Elena Semander, Emily LaQua, Anna Ledet, Yolanda Garcia, Carrie Mae Jefferson, Suzanne Searles and Michele Maday are killed.
May 23, 1982: attacks Lori Lister and Melinda Aguilar; arrested in Houston.
August 9, 1982: the immunity agreement; he begins leading police to graves.
August 17, 1982: Howard Mosley is granted a new trial; released September 2.
September 3, 1982: sentenced to 60 years with a deadly weapon finding.
October 1987: Ex parte Patterson is decided.
1989: the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals deletes the deadly weapon finding.
February 1990: parole board review; not released.
2002 to 2003: families campaign against a release set for 2006; Michigan reopens its cases.
January 2004: Mike Cox's appeal on MSNBC; Joseph Foy calls.
November 8, 2004: jury selection begins in Pontiac.
November 17, 2004: convicted of the first-degree murder of Helen Dutcher; charged in Kalamazoo the same day with Gloria Steele's murder.
December 7, 2004: sentenced to life.
April 25, 2006: Michigan Court of Appeals rules on evidence in the Steele case.
2007: convicted in Kalamazoo of Gloria Steele's murder; sentenced to life.
September 2007: dies of prostate cancer at Foote Hospital, Jackson, Michigan.