Family is woven from routine trust, shared breakfast conversations, and echoes of laughter bouncing off living room walls. It is the ground we lean on, the human fabric that promises safety without condition. When that trust collapses from within, the wounds are not dramatic; they are deep, and nearly impossible to heal.

One such betrayal was captured in stark detail in the Chris Watts Documentary for the world to witness. This is the story behind it.

American Murder: The Family Next Door (2020) is a Netflix documentary that meticulously reconstructs the 2018 murders of Shanann Watts and her daughters, Bella and Celeste, at the hands of Shanann’s husband, Chris Watts. On August 13, 2018, Shanann Watts, 15 weeks pregnant with a son she and her husband planned to name Nico, returned home after a business trip.

Later that day, Shanann was scheduled for a routine prenatal appointment; when she failed to show up and could not be reached, her friend and colleague Nickole Utoft Atkinson called the Frederick Police Department.

Chris Watts, an operator for an oil and natural gas company named Anadarko Petroleum in Colorado, initially appeared cooperative, participating in public appeals broadcast on local news. But investigators quickly noticed inconsistencies in his story and became suspicious of his behavior.

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American Murder compels viewers to witness the truth unfold through the very messages and moments the family shared with the world.

American Murder: The Family Next Door is available exclusively on Netflix, where it has remained one of the platform’s most-discussed true-crime documentaries. It premiered on September 30, 2020. The film distinguishes itself by refusing dramatization or reenactment. Instead, it presents the tragedy as a timeline of real interactions, online posts, police body-cam footage, and investigative audio, encouraging viewers to piece together the truth as it happened.

During the interrogations that followed, Chris Watts confessed. In a series of recorded interviews with law enforcement in August 2018, he admitted to strangling Shanann inside their home. 

In November 2018, Watts pleaded guilty to multiple counts, including first-degree murder, tampering with a deceased human body, and unlawful termination of a pregnancy. He received five consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole, ending any judicial ambiguity about his fate.

After the murders, Shanann’s parents, Frank and Sandra Rzucek, became vocal about keeping their daughter and grandchildren’s memories alive. In interviews following Watts’s sentencing, they emphasized that these were real people with names and stories, not just true-crime material. 

“That’s the big word, Why?” said the father of Shanann Watts, Frank Rzucek, in an interview with ABC. “He must have snapped, because there’s nothing else I could figure out what happened to him.”

An unsettling standout among Netflix murder documentaries, the Chris Watts case still haunts, revealed exactly as it unfolded in American Murder: The Family Next Door.

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