On the evening of December 1, 1979, a man named Joseph Foy looked out and saw a woman being stabbed in an alley behind a dry cleaner at Eight Mile Road and Woodward Avenue, in Ferndale, north of Detroit. Helen Mae Dutcher was thirty-six. She was stabbed twelve times in the neck and back. Foy told the police what he had seen, and nothing came of it.
Twenty-five years later he was watching MSNBC. The Abrams Report ran a segment in which the Michigan attorney general, Mike Cox, explained that a confessed serial killer called Coral Eugene Watts was due out of a Texas prison in 2006 and asked anyone with information to come forward, and it put the number of the attorney general's office on the screen. Foy, who lived in Westland, recognized the man in the footage and called.
He was born Carl Eugene Watts at Killeen, Texas, on November 7, 1953, while his father, Richard, an Army private, was stationed at Fort Hood; his mother, Dorothy Mae Young, was a kindergarten art teacher, and both came from Coalwood, West Virginia. Three days after he was born the family went back to West Virginia. His parents divorced before he was two. In 1962 his mother married a mechanic, Norman Caesar, and moved the family to Inkster, outside Detroit, where she taught art at a high school. He disliked his stepfather. On visits to his grandmother in Coalwood he learned to hunt and skin rabbits with his grandfather, and he took the name Coral from the way his relatives there pronounced Carl.
At eight he and his sister caught meningitis, and he nearly died of it at Herman Kiefer Hospital in Detroit. His family said afterward that he had turned shy and withdrawn. His schoolwork fell off and he was held back a grade, and he began having violent dreams about fighting and killing the evil spirits of women. By twelve, by his own later account, he enjoyed them. Asked years later by detectives why he killed women, he said he wanted to free their spirits because they had evil eyes.
On June 29, 1969, delivering newspapers, he knocked on the apartment door of a twenty-six-year-old woman named Joan Gave, beat her savagely when she opened it, and went on with his route. Police picked him up at home and he was sent to the Lafayette Clinic in Detroit. He told a psychiatrist the dreams did not disturb him: he felt better after one. He had assaulted Gave, he said, because he just felt like beating someone up. Testing put his IQ at seventy-five; a detective who later questioned him thought him very intelligent, with an excellent memory. The psychiatrist wrote that he was struggling for control of strong homicidal impulses and was a threat to society, and discharged him on his sixteenth birthday to outpatient care.
He finished high school in 1973, at nineteen, and went to Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, on a football scholarship, where he also boxed as a Golden Gloves fighter. Within three months he was expelled after being charged with stalking and assaulting women; many at the college also suspected him in the killing of a female student, though there was never enough evidence to charge him. After a spell in Houston and a year as a mechanic at a Detroit wheel plant, he enrolled at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo in 1974.
On October 25, 1974, he knocked at the apartment of Lenore Knizacky, twenty-three, asking for Charles, and choked her unconscious when she unchained the door to find him paper for a note. On October 30 Gloria Steele, twenty, a WMU student, was found dead with a crushed windpipe and thirty-three stab wounds to the chest. An apartment manager, Diane Williams, saw a man looking for Charles in the complex; he dragged her into her own apartment, and she knocked the phone off the hook and screamed for help. Williams and Knizacky both picked him out of a lineup after he was arrested stealing plywood on campus. Questioned about Steele in 1975, he admitted being nearby the day before and denied killing her, while admitting that he had attacked about fifteen other young women. He tried to hang himself with a cord at the Kalamazoo Psychiatric Hospital and was sent to the Center for Forensic Psychiatry. He pleaded no contest to the Knizacky and Williams assaults and got a year in county jail. His psychologists described him as extremely dangerous, remorseless and very likely to offend again.
Released in 1976, he moved back in with his mother in Inkster. In 1979 a childhood friend, Deloris Howard, gave birth to his daughter, Nakisha. He then married Valeria Goodwill, who said that soon after the wedding he began moving the furniture around, cutting up houseplants with knives, melting candles into the table and leaving after sex for hours at a time. The marriage lasted six months.
The killings were rarely sexual, which set him apart from almost every other well-known American case and is part of why they went unlinked for so long. On October 31, 1979, Jeanne Clyne, forty-four, a former Detroit News writer, was walking home from a doctor's appointment in Grosse Pointe Farms in daylight when she was stabbed to death beside her house; the wounds are counted as eleven in some accounts and thirteen in others. She had not been raped or robbed, and the police first suspected her husband. A month later Helen Dutcher died in the Ferndale alley. Newspapers in Ann Arbor named the attacker the Sunday Morning Slasher, because the attacks came around four on Sunday mornings. Shirley Small, seventeen, a high school student, was stabbed twice in the heart outside her Ann Arbor home on April 20, 1980; Glenda Richmond, twenty-six, a diner manager, was stabbed twenty-eight times outside her house on July 13; and Rebecca Huff, thirty, a University of Michigan graduate student, was stabbed about fifty times on September 14. He was never charged with those three and never confessed to them. Police also considered him a suspect in the 1979 killing of Malak Haddad, thirty-four, in Allen Park, and in the abduction of Lilli Marlene Dunn, twenty-eight, from her garage in Southgate on July 31, 1980, and Canadian police believe he crossed into Windsor on October 6, 1980, and cut the face and throat of Sandra Dalpe, twenty, who survived with lasting paralysis.
A task force set up in July 1980 put him under surveillance, and in November a court let officers put a tracking device on his car. On November 15 patrol officers in Ann Arbor watched him follow a woman walking home and stopped him for expired plates. In the car were wood-carving tools, screwdrivers and a dictionary belonging to Rebecca Huff with the words Rebecca is a lover carved into its cover. It was not enough to charge him. In the spring of 1981 he moved to Columbus, Texas, to work for an oil company, and on weekend nights he drove more than seventy miles into Houston.
By his later confession he killed twelve women in and around Houston in the next nine months. Linda Tilley, twenty-two, was drowned in her apartment complex pool in September 1981, and Elizabeth Montgomery, twenty-five, stabbed a week later. Susan Wolf, twenty-one, was stabbed steps from her apartment coming home from buying ice cream. Phyllis Tamm, twenty-seven, was attacked while jogging in January 1982, choked and hanged from a tree branch with an elastic strap, and two days later Margaret Fossi, twenty-five, was found in the trunk of her car at Rice University. Between February and May he killed Elena Semander, twenty; Emily LaQua, fourteen; Anna Ledet, thirty-four; Yolanda Garcia, twenty-one; Carrie Mae Jefferson, thirty-two, a postal worker he choked outside her home, drove in the trunk of her own car to White Oak Bayou and buried there; Suzanne Searles, twenty-five; and Michele Maday, twenty. On January 16, 1982, he cut the throat of Julie Sanchez as she tried to change a flat tire on a freeway and left her for dead; she lived. On January 30 he slashed the throat of Patty Johnson, nineteen, who also survived, and for whose attack another man was serving a life sentence until Watts confessed to it.
On Sunday, May 23, 1982, hours after he drowned Michele Maday in her bathtub, he choked Lori Lister, twenty-one, on the stairs outside her apartment as she came home from work, then went in and choked her roommate, Melinda Aguilar, eighteen, who pretended to be unconscious while he wired her hands behind her back. He carried Lister upstairs and was holding her under in the filled bathtub when Aguilar threw herself out of a second-floor window and got help. Lister lived. He was caught trying to get away.
Prosecutors believed they could not prove a single murder. The Harris County assistant district attorney, Ira Jones, brokered the deal: immunity from prosecution for any killing he confessed to, in exchange for a guilty plea to burglary with intent to commit murder and sixty years. He took it on September 3, 1982, admitted attacking nineteen women and killing thirteen of them, twelve in Texas and Jeanne Clyne in Michigan, and led investigators to three graves. Some accounts put the confessed total at twelve. Michigan refused to join the agreement.
Then the sentence came apart. The Texas Court of Appeals ruled that he had not been told that the bathtub and water he had used on Lori Lister counted as a deadly weapon. That reclassified him as a nonviolent offender, and Texas law then gave nonviolent inmates three days' credit for every day served with good behavior. He was a model prisoner, and his earliest release date fell on May 9, 2006. Texas abolished the credit after a public outcry, but its constitution barred applying the change to him. The immunity agreement barred Texas from charging him with anything he had described. He had confessed his way out.
What the immunity did not cover was Michigan. He was charged with the murder of Helen Dutcher, and the trial judge allowed his Texas confessions in as evidence of a pattern. Several women he had attacked and not killed testified, among them Julie Sanchez, who demonstrated the attack on the prosecutor, Thomas Cameron, in front of the jury. The case rested on Foy. The defense asked how a man could identify a face in a dark alley from eighty-five feet away and remember it for a quarter of a century. Foy said he knew him by his eyes, which he described as evil and empty of feeling. On November 17, 2004, the jury convicted him, and on December 7 he was sentenced to life without parole.
Two days later Michigan began preparing a second prosecution, for Gloria Steele. That trial opened in Kalamazoo on July 25, 2007; closing arguments were heard the next day, and on July 27 the jury convicted him. He was sentenced to life without parole on September 13 and held at the Ionia Correctional Facility. Eight days later, on September 21, 2007, he died of prostate cancer in a hospital in Jackson, Michigan, aged fifty-three.
Two convictions stand, both from the state that was not party to the bargain. He confessed to thirteen killings, later said he had killed forty, and implied more than eighty without ever admitting them outright, because he did not want to be thought of as a mass murderer. Police treat him as a suspect in about ninety unsolved killings, and some believe the true figure is past a hundred. The agreement that got bodies found was the same agreement that made it impossible to charge him with any of them, and without a man at home in front of his television in 2004 he would have walked out of a Texas prison two years later.