Chris Watts, the Colorado dad who brutally murdered his wife and two little girls in 2017, converted to Christianity in prison after watching pundit Nancy Grace talk about his case.
But a former cellblock mate told the Daily Mail that Watts is still at the mercy of his ultimate weakness.
Dylan Tallman, who was housed in an adjacent cell for seven months in 2020, said his friend simply can’t resist beautiful women, and that he even blames one for his horrifying crime.
‘He will talk to a girl and she becomes his everything really fast,’ Tallman said of Watts.
Watts calls them incessantly and writes them letters, sometimes 15 pages long, with words spanning front and back.
‘A lot of women write him in prison. He talks to them a lot,’ Tallman said.
‘He becomes obsessed with a woman and she becomes all he can think of – and he’ll do whatever they ask him to do.’
The Daily Mail has confirmed that multiple women have put money into the prison commissary for Watts, and that he has a number of female pen pals.
Chris Watts, the Coloradodad who brutally murdered his two little girls (pictured) in 2017
Watts also killed his pregnant wife Shanann (pictured) then masqueraded as a concerned dad and husband on local TV
In letters written to Tallman and reviewed by the Daily Mail, Watts has compared his infatuation with certain religious stories, in attempt to to explain why he murdered his family for another woman.
Watts, now 40, has admitted to strangling his pregnant wife, Shanann Watts, in their Colorado home in August 2018.
According to Watts, who worked for an oil company, he then dumped her body at one of his employer’s job sites.
When he returned to his truck, he suffocated his two daughters – Bella Watts, four, and Celeste Watts, three – as they begged for mercy. He then stashed their bodies in oil drums.
Watts then appeared on the local news, reporting his family missing and begging for any answers.
Authorities soon figured out that Watts was having an affair with his colleague Nichol Kessinger.
Through that revelation, they figured out that Watts, then 34, had killed his family. Watts was arrested and charged with multiple counts of first-degree murder.
After pleading guilty, Watts was sent to Dodge Correctional Institution in Waupun, Wisconsin. There, he was housed in cell 14 of special unit for high profile and dangerous cases.
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Dylan Tallman, who was housed in an adjacent cell from Watts for seven months in 2020, says the killer obsessed over any woman who spoke with him.
Watts killed his family so he could start a new life with Nichol Kessinger (pictured), who he met at work
Tallman told the Daily Mail he was in cell 13, and that the two men shared a wall.
They soon realized that the walls were thin, and that they could easily talk with each other. The prisoners struck up a friendship, sometimes talking for hours each day. Tallman said he and Watts talked about their lives and shared details of the mistakes they made in their pasts.
Tallman told the Daily Mail he witnessed Watts becoming religious.
‘[Nancy Grace] was talking about what he had done, and she was yelling,’ said Dylan Tallman, who was housed in an adjacent cell for seven months in 2020.
‘She addressed him through the TV, saying, ‘Chris Watts, I want to talk to you.’ They showed pictures of his wife and daughters.
‘It affected him. He fell to his knees and confessed his sins. It sounds weird, but that’s when he became a man of faith.
‘I think that was his rock bottom, when he was confronted with all the things he had done and how many lives he had ruined. That was a lot for him. He turned to God after that.’
Watts blames Kessinger as a satanic figure who led him astray and caused him to commit the heinous murders
Tallman told the Daily Mail that while they were neighbors in their cells, ‘all there was to do was talk.’
He said Watts ‘wouldn’t really just immediately talk about what he did, unless it was through discussion of Scripture. So he’d talk about the Bible, and that’s how he would open up about what happened.’
‘We sent each other a lot of letters, too,’ Tallman added. ‘His family knew me, and he called me his ‘spiritual twin.”
In handwritten letters to Tallman viewed by the Daily Mail, Watts often blamed Kessinger for the murders.
Using Biblical figures, Watts painted pictures of a temptress who turned aside a man of God.
‘The words of a harlot have brought me low,’ Watts wrote in a prayer of confession from March 2020. ‘Her flattering speech was like drops of honey that pierced my heart and soul. Little did I know that all her guests were in the chamber of death.’
At his trial, Watts pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty, which has since been abolished in Colorado
In another letter, he compared her to Bathsheba, a married woman who King David saw bathing on a roof. According to the Bible, he impregnated her and had her husband killed.
‘David saw Bathsheba and if he left it at that, then he would’ve been fine,’ Watts wrote. ‘The problem was that he stayed on the roof and entertained the thought of her until sin was born.
‘When a mouse sees cheese in a mousetrap, the mouse only sees temptation, not the ramifications of the decision to go after it. We have both fallen into temptation, but we don’t need to dwell on it, or fall to it ever again.’
The correspondence between the two men showed they planned to write Bible study devotional books together.
When Watts dropped out of the project, Tallman converted some of their material into a series of books entitled The Cell Next Door.
In the resulting series, Tallman detailed how his life intersected with Watts, and how they became close through Bible study and deep conversations.
In his first book, Tallman claimed that Watts called his mistress a Jezebel who led him to destruction.
‘I was having an affair with this girl, and I ended up in love with two women at the same time,’ Watts told Tallman, according to the book. ‘It’s what led up to what happened. She is of evil spirits, like Jezebel.’
Tallman continued, writing ‘He admitted that he was stupid to cheat on his wife, and he asked God’s forgiveness every day for his infidelity.’
Kessinger now lives in another part of Colorado under a different name. She only spoke out once after the murders, telling the Denver Post in 2018 that she knew nothing about Watts’s ‘horrific’ crimes, and that she believed him when he told her he was separated when they started dating.
Kessinger has not responded to the Daily Mail’s requests for comment.
While Watts once said he would try to get his conviction overturned, Tallman told the Daily Mail his friend has now decided to drop any appeals.
‘He says he’s where he belongs,’ Tallman said, referencing letters on the matter from Watts. ‘And that maybe people will come to Christ after hearing about him.’
