Chris Watts’s Pen Pal Unveils His Most Intimate Secrets

Last month, when reports emerged about convicted child murderer Chris Watts engaging in flirtations from his prison cell, there was at least one person who wasn’t taken aback.

That person was Cherlyn Cadle, who had witnessed this behavior firsthand.

Cadle, a 72-year-old grandmother, formed a prolonged connection with Watts following his 2018 conviction for the brutal murders of his pregnant wife and two young daughters—a crime that shocked and appalled the nation.

Driven by the same curiosity as millions of others, the crime writer sought to unravel how a man who appeared to be a loving father could commit such horrific acts and then deceive the public on national television.

Their interactions led to hundreds of phone conversations, thousands of exchanged words, and several books that drew from the letters Watts wrote to her.

But now, in the wake of the Mail’s reporting, Cadle is lifting the lid on what happened off the page – during their private phone calls.

She said the relationship began as ‘motherly.’ But it turned dark when he started to talk about his lover, Nichol Kessinger.

‘He told me dark, sexual things that he did with his mistress,’ Cadle said.’

‘There were a lot of things you wouldn’t tell your mother, but he told me.’

Cherlyn Cadle is a true crime author who spent years corresponding with Chris Watts while he was behind bars

Watts is currently serving five life sentences plus 48 years in prison without the possibility of parole for the murders of his wife and daughters Celeste, three (left), and Bella, four (right)

Watts was having an affair with Kessinger at the time he killed his wife Shanann and their daughters, Bella, four, and Celeste, three.

Watts bragged to Cadle that he and Kessinger had sex three to four times a day, describing his libido as insatiable.

They would have phone sex for hours. She sent nude photos and performed sex acts Shanann wouldn’t, fueling his obsession.

‘A lot of it is stuff I just won’t repeat,’ said Cadle. ‘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.’

Cadle says she was not remotely shocked by reports that Watts has continued chasing women behind bars. 

Sex, romance and the thrill of being desired drive him, she believes.

‘I think that’s just who he is,’ she says. ‘He needs that validation.’ 

At the time they were pen pals, she thought he confided in her because she was one of the few non-family members who listened to him after his incarceration. The relationship was almost familial. 

Like millions of others, she wanted to understand how a seemingly devoted and handsome young husband could annihilate his family 

At the time of the killings, he was having an affair with his coworker Nichol Kessinger (pictured being photographed by Watts

Now she’s not so sure. She thinks he may have gotten a sexual thrill out of telling her his sexual encounters with Kessinger and detailing how he killed his family.

‘I think there’s some sort of fetish there,’ she 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.’

In Cadle’s view, his lust for Kessinger and women more broadly explains everything.

‘If I had not met Nikki, I would never have killed my family,’ he told Cadle in one letter.

‘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.

‘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.’

‘He was obsessed by NK,’ Cadle says. ‘He talked about her all the time.’ 

Cadle first wrote to Watts in February 2019 – six months after the August 13, 2018 murders in Frederick, Colorado.

‘I thought he was totally guilty and I decided to write him,’ the grandmother of 12 told the Daily Mail. ‘I didn’t ever expect him to write back.’

He did and they exchanged more than 100 phone calls and reams of letters. 

She later visited him at Dodge Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison in Waupun, Wisconsin.

Watts strangled his 34-year-old pregnant wife in their bed, killing their unborn son, Nico. He then drove Bella and Celeste to a remote oil site where he worked and dumped them in tanks

Watts acted like a concerned husband and father when local news stations began covering his family’s disappearance 

She was struck by his boyish demeanor – gentle, polite, soft-spoken.

Soon, he was telling her everything.

‘He said I was easy to talk to,’ Cadle now says. ‘In many ways he seemed to think of me as a mother figure.

‘I tried not to judge him – at least not to his face, and I listened to whatever it was that he had to say. So he felt he could confide in me.’

But the conversations spiraled.

‘He confessed, not once, but repeatedly,’ she says.

‘He revisited details. He contradicted himself. He rationalized, minimized, and occasionally revealed more than he intended to. And through it all, I listened.’

What he never did, she says, was grieve for his victims.

‘Christopher Watts grieved himself,’ she said.

‘That may sound harsh, but it is accurate. He grieved the loss of admiration. The loss of being perceived as a good husband, a good father, a good man.’

Before that summer, Watts was widely seen as a doting family man. That illusion shattered on August 13, 2018, after Shanann confronted him about the affair.

He strangled his 34-year-old pregnant wife in their bed, killing their unborn son, Nico.

Cadle believes Watts is driven by sex and the desire of others which allowed him to justify the killings

He then drove Bella and Celeste to a remote oil site where he worked.

Shanann was buried in a shallow grave. The girls were smothered and forced through eight-inch hatches into oil tanks.

‘I couldn’t believe how easily it was to just let her drop through the hole and let her go. I heard the splash as she hit the oil,’ he told Cadle of Celeste.

He later described killing Bella, who had watched her sister die.

He spoke of his surprise that ‘little quiet Bella had a will to live.’

‘Out of all three, Bella is the only one that put up a fight. I will hear her soft little voice for the rest of my life, saying, “Daddy, NO!!!”

‘She knew what I was doing to her. She may not have understood death, but she knew I was killing her.’

Cadle says the confessions haunted her.

‘I thought I was getting into his head, but he was getting into mine. I had to really process through a lot of very dark things that he would tell me,’ she told the Daily Mail.

‘He did it on purpose. He loves to talk about himself, he is very smart. He’s a narcissist, and he liked telling these disturbing things.’

She began having nightmares and intrusive thoughts.

‘There were moments where I questioned whether any person should sit that close to such darkness for so long,’ she said.

‘Those things really stayed with me, and they still stay with me. I had to control myself while talking to him. I wanted to let him have it, so many times. But I held my tongue.’

Cadle began having nightmares and had to cut Watts off in 2023

She cut ties around 2023, unable to tolerate what she saw as his relentless narcissism.

‘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.

‘That really got under my skin.’

In one particularly self-pitying letter from April 2019, Watts seems to suggest autism may have played a role.

He wrote: ‘I’ve never had a psychological exam… the Asperger’s (a form of low level autism) symptoms do make a lot of sense and I can match up a bunch of instances in my life that correspond with it. 

‘It would’ve been much easier to diagnose me with it when I was 11 years old instead of 33 years old.’  

Cadle said Watts’ mother, Cindy, also objected to their relationship.

‘She got really ugly about it,’ she says. ‘And then we stopped talking as much.’

Now, she no longer corresponds with him.

But the lesson lingers.

‘Someone like Christopher will always take things further than he’s supposed to. I had to confront the darkness of his crime. And then I had to draw some boundaries, and move on.’