Family killer Chris Watts's insatiable sexual appetite: His humiliating fetishes... all-consuming obsession behind bars... and the secret he'll 'take to his grave'

By STEVE HELLING, SENIOR NEWS REPORTER and LUKE ANDREWS, U.S. SENIOR HEALTH CORRESPONDENT Published: 22:33, 17 August 2026 | Updated: 22:33, 17 August 2026 As brutal as they were, the Watts family murders appeared to have a simple explanation.  Chris Watts felt trapped by his marriage and family and wanted out. He had fallen for a younger colleague, Nichol Kessinger, and prosecutors argued that he killed his pregnant wife and two daughters so he could start a new life with her. Watts confessed and was sentenced to life in bars in November 2018 – case closed.  But a months-long investigation by the Daily Mail into Watts' behavior behind bars suggests there may have been something darker driving him. We've uncovered new evidence of Watts's insatiable lust for women before and after the murders, exposing the violent fantasies he reportedly carried out with a secret mistress and revealing the sexual letters he's sent from behind bars.  We also tracked down his new girlfriend, 39-year-old realtor Lizzie Henderson, in a world exclusive that shocked the nation. As part of our investigation, we spoke with people who knew the killer dad behind bars who said his obsession with sex and female attention – not simply the fantasy of a new romance – were two critical and overlooked aspects of the case. Interviews with people who knew Watts, former lovers and women he has pursued from prison reveal a pattern of increasingly extreme sexual behavior and an apparently insatiable need to be desired by women.  Chris Watts was a married dad who was carrying on affairs and trolling dating sites His new girlfriend Lizzie Henderson, 39, spotted in Wisconsin wearing a wedding ring Cherlyn Cadle is a true crime author who became Watts's most prolific prison penpal, visiting him in prison in Wisconsin. Cadle revealed to the Daily Mail that in 2024, Henderson reached out to her through social media to ask her about Watts. When she warned Henderson to stay away, she 'cursed her out' and has not reached out since.  For Cadle, Watts's obsessions were already clear long before his latest relationship with Henderson came to light.  The first clue came from an easily missed detail from Watts's own confessions: that he had sex with Shanann the night before killing her. ‘The last time I was with Shanann it felt totally strange. I didn’t know who I was,’ Watts told investigators in 2018, and admitted that he thought Shanann initiated sex that night as a ‘test.’ To Cadle, the encounter was not about intimacy. The sex was an act of manipulation and control, Cadle said. The married couple hadn’t had sex in weeks – texts Shanann sent to friends showed the lack of intimacy, which was one of reasons she grew suspicious he was having an affair in the first place. The second clue came from Watts’s life in prison after the murders. From behind bars, Watts has shared graphic details of his past sex life with some of his closest confidantes, boasting about threesomes, porn, anal sex and even using fruits and vegetables as sex toys. One of those confidantes was Dylan Tallman, a fellow inmate who held regular Bible studies with Watts. ‘He always said that women were his weakness,’ Tallman told the Daily Mail. ‘He wanted attention from as many women as he could get. And all he could think about was having sex with them.’ Watts also detailed his lurid sexual fantasies to Cadle in very detailed letters. Cadle, a Midwest grandmother, said the family killer appeared to enjoy recounting the details about his sex life with his mistresses, including Nichol Kessinger. ‘He told me things that were really embarrassing, about threesomes and other things he did. But there were even things he said he wouldn't tell me that he did sexually. ‘Secrets he's taking to the grave with him.’ Author Cheryln Cadle has maintained a long correspondence with Watts, and he has shared deep sexual secrets with her Watts blames former mistress Nichol Kessinger for enticing him to kill his family  Watts has written hundreds of letters from behind bars, some spiritual and others sexual  For Cadle, those conversations reinforced her belief that sex was not simply part of Watts's life.  She theorized it became an obsession that fueled his fantasy of abandoning his family and starting over. Despite his polite, almost shy demeanor in television interviews and police interrogations, Cadle said she saw a very different side of him in private. 'He likes to talk about it [sex],' Cadle told the Daily Mail in the new podcast The Trial USA: Chris Watts Unmasked. ‘I think he really liked talking about it with me.’ Watts’s lewd correspondence from prison fits a pattern of ‘sexual boundary crossing’ he exhibited before the murders, according to psychologist John Delatorre, who added that this type of deviant behavior often escalates. Watts ‘spent a long time committing sexual boundary crossing behaviors,’ Delatorre told the Daily Mail, referring to the two affairs he carried out in the months before annihilating his family. ‘But once you’ve put yourself into doing an act that would harm someone else, whether it be sexual harm or violent harm, it becomes a lot easier because you’ve already broken down the social fabric barriers.’ A woman who claims to have had an affair with Watts before he met Nichol Kessinger recently gave the Daily Mail a new and harrowing description of the boundaries he had crossed with her.  Last month, Amanda McMahon told the podcast that Watts had an angry rage that showed itself during sex. 'He had just this animalistic fury come over him,' she said, claiming that during one encounter, Watts aggressively choked her. Amanda McMahon says she had a brief encounter with Watts after meeting him on Tinder Letters written by Chris Watts from prison, filled with bible verses 'He went from normal to crazy, like brutal, almost. I was scared to really say anything.' The Daily Mail has spoken with several women who have corresponded with Watts, sending pages of handwritten letters that often veer into deeply sexual topics. One 36-year-old admirer named Deborah has shown ribald letters to the Daily Mail in which Watts asked her for risqué pictures and expressed his desperate desire to get physical with her. 'I wish we could have conjugal visits,' he wrote in one letter, according to Deborah. 'I need to be with you.' He then asked her for photos: 'Show me what I'm missing.' Watts began their correspondence in 2022, and the conversations were often as spiritual as they were sexual. 'I will never fully understand what Christ went through when he was crucified,' he wrote in his second letter to Deborah, 'but my trials have given me a glimpse of it.' But by 2025, when their conversation ended, he was a lot more direct about his desires.  'Men and women connect by being intimate, and I want to be intimate with you. I want to feel your body. I want to be next to you, inside you. But that is impossible now. 'I believe that in a different time, I would have been able to be with you. But God has other plans for my life,' he said in his ominous final letter to her. But Watts did not stop sending letters to other women. Cadle claimed she knows of 'at least a dozen' women who have received romantic and sexual letters from Watts since he was arrested in 2018. Watts pictured with wife Shanann on vacation, who he was later convicted of murdering  Chris Watts in custody - experts have claimed he is taking sexual fetishes 'to his grave' 'He needs that validation from women, to prove, I don't know, that he's still got it,' Cadle said. 'He likes to think of himself as being attractive, and to think that all these women want him.' Delatorre argued that Watts's behavior reflected a deeper need for control rather than just reassurance. ‘He doesn’t want to be validated so much as he wants to be worshiped,’ Delatorre told the Daily Mail. ‘The reality is that this isn’t about getting validation, it’s about getting attention, this is about pushing someone to a point where he can manipulate them to do whatever he wants them to do.’ Watts may also be entertaining the attention of women from behind bars to inflate his own sexual ego.  ‘The idea of engaging in a sex act is of course something he would want to do, but it’s more about the feeling that he would get from all of these women that want to be with him, that he can do or say whatever he wants and these women will still flock to him,' Delatorre said.  Watts, a former oil worker, admitted that he strangled his wife Shanann in their large Colorado home after having sex the night before. After he killed her, he loaded her body into his truck and took his two little girls, Bella, four, and Celeste, three, along on a ride to a job site. At the site, he dumped Shanann's lifeless body in a shallow grave. Then, as his daughters begged for mercy, he methodically suffocated them. He stashed their bodies in large oil tanks on the property. After returning home and cleaning himself up, Watts reported his family missing. He appeared on local news, begging for any answers. But authorities didn't buy his story. They soon figured out that Watts was not the family man he claimed to be – and discovered that he was having an ongoing affair with his colleague, Nichol Kessinger. Kessinger told cops that Watts told her he had separated from his wife and was planning on divorcing her. Several people close to Watts have spoken out about his sexual appetite in the new podcast: Trual USA: Chris Watts Unmasked Watts pleaded guilty to five counts of first-degree murder and is serving life without the possibility of parole at Dodge Correctional Institution in Wisconsin. But in several jailhouse letters, Watts has avoided responsibility, instead blaming Kessinger for the deaths of his family members. He calls her a 'harlot' and a 'Jezebel,' saying that she enticed him to go on his murderous spree. In one letter to Tallman, dated March 2020, Watts wrote a prayer of confession: 'The words of a harlot have brought me low.' Delatorre was not surprised by Watts's responsibility-dodging. ‘These individuals, they may feel it, but they don’t like it, and so they’re going to replace it with something else and the easiest thing to do is to replace the guilt and shame with anger and hatred,’ Delatorre said. ‘If he can blame someone else, then he is a victim of this whole thing.’ Meanwhile, Watts continues to write to women – and have them visit him behind bars. 'I don't think that will change,' said Cadle, who has written several books about Watts. 'I think the sex stuff is just who he is.' Read parts one and two of our extraordinary Chris Watts series and listen to our Chris Watts podcast, plus analysis from the Daily Mail's premier crime reporters, by searching for The Trial USA wherever you get your podcasts. All four episodes are available to Crime Desk subscribers today. Non-subscribers can listen to episode one now, with new episodes each week. Start a subscription with a free 7-day trial at thecrimedesk.com.