On the outside, Chris Watts seemed like a loving husband and father. But on August 13, 2018, that all changed. Watts brutally murdered his pregnant wife, Shanann Watts, and their daughters Bella, 4, and Celeste, 3. After his arrest and eventual conviction, details of Watts’ secret life began to emerge, including the identity of his mistress, Nichol Kessinger. Though he once called her a “Jezebel” in letters from jail, it seems the born-again Christian is back to his womanizing ways. This news comes as no surprise to Watts’ mother-figure pen pal, Cherlyn Cadle, who claims Watts’ sexual desires and fetishes drove him to kill.
Cadle knows a lot about Watts’ secret desires.
Cadle, who wrote the best-selling book Murders of Christopher Watts, told the Daily Mail that Watts shared a lot of information with her during their time as pen pals. Cadle, 72, felt like a mother figure to Watts. But when it came to his relationship with Kessinger, Watts opened up much more than Cadle expected.
“He told me dark, sexual things that he did with his mistress,” she told the Daily Mail. “There were a lot of things you wouldn’t tell your mother, but he told me.”
Cadle said Watts and Kessinger apparently had a very strong sexual connection.
Watts got gratification from his lover he couldn’t get from his wife.
Cadle said Watts told her he and Kessinger would have sex multiple times a day, and she was much more adventurous than Shanann. She thinks Watts thrived on the validation he got through sex with Kessinger.
“A lot of it is stuff I just won’t repeat,” Cadle admitted to the news outlet. “But his relationship with her was very sexual, very twisted, very mixed up. And that’s part of why I believe he did what he did.”
Watts told Cadle everything.
According to the author, Watts mixed stories about his affair with tales of the killings. In a bizarre way, he seemed to enjoy talking about it with an older woman.
“I think there’s some sort of fetish there,” Cadle said. “To say things to shock people. And he told me, who he saw as a mother figure, those details about different sex acts he did with a woman.”
Cadle said Watts became totally obsessed with Kessinger and their sexual relationship. In one letter, he wrote that he would never have killed his family if it weren’t for meeting Kessinger.
“All I could feel was now I was free to be with Nikki. Feelings of my love for her was overcoming me. I felt no remorse,” Watts reportedly wrote. “The darkness inside of me had won, it was still in me, though, I thought maybe permanently. I felt evil, swallowed up by this thing inside of me. I felt like I could kill anything and be justified for doing it.”
Cadle finally broke ties with Watts in 2023.
The pair remained pen pals for years, and Cadle even visited Watts in prison. He spoke to her openly about the murders, his affair, and his life. But for her, it became too much to listen to him blame everyone for his actions except himself.
“It was always someone else’s fault: Nikki or Shanann, or someone else. He always had someone to blame for what he did, instead of really taking responsibility for his own actions,” she explained to the Daily Mail. “That really got under my skin.”
Watts will be in jail for the rest of his life for killing his pregnant wife and three girls. We can’t think of a better place for him except maybe in solitary confinement where he has nothing but time to think.
