What to Know
Nearly eight years after Chris Watts was convicted of the murder of his wife, Shannan, and their two daughters, one of the women he was secretly having an affair with is sharing details of their relationship she’s never spoken about before.
Amanda McMahon says she met Chris on Tinder a year before the killings, and she’s dropping some serious bombshells about his behavior behind closed doors.
Amanda’s relationship with Chris lasted longer than she first let on.
All of this new intel is coming from Amanda’s interview with the Daily Mail this week, where she revealed that she had been seeing Chris for longer than she first told police — she thought if she was honest about the timeline, it would have hurt her in the custody battle she was having with her ex at the time.
Now, she’s saying that they were actually together from the spring of 2017 to March 2018, and when they first started seeing each other, he claimed that he and Shannan were separated.
“Looking back on it, I could tell any kind of sweetness he had was very fake,” she said. “I won’t say forced, because he was able to turn on the charm for anything he needed … but something about him felt off.”
She claimed he was aggressive with her from the very beginning.
Amanda McMahon has opened up on killer dad Chris Watts whom she had met on dating app Tinder.
— Daily Mail (@DailyMail) July 28, 2026
🔗 https://t.co/BLIbbkXblo pic.twitter.com/gIM8gotLGN
The first time they were intimate together, Amanda said that she saw an “animalistic fury come over” Chris that made her fearful that he might hurt her.
“He just went into like a zone. He just didn’t look the same in his eyes,” Amanda told the Daily Mail. “In the snap of a finger, he went from normal to crazy – like brutal, almost.”
During their on and off relationship, Amanda said that Chris would sometimes contact her asking for prescription opioids, though she said she never directly witnessed him using any drugs.
“I had my own prescription that he would essentially beg for things out of,” Amanda said. “It seemed he wanted to get away from something or numb himself … and honestly, I was trying to forget things too, so I understood where he was coming from.”
Chris told Amanda that Shannan was a “psycho.”
While Chris led Amanda to believe that he and Shannan were separated, she said that he also spent a lot of time speaking pretty poorly about her (no shock there). Not only did she say he called her a “f—ing psycho,” but also a “gold digger.”
She added, “He would say the most awful things … talking her down and making her seem like a horrible, unstable person… say[ing] he wished she’d work and complain that he had to support her.”
In the end, Amanda concluded, “he’s just sick,” which sums up the entire case involving Chris pretty well.
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