Serial Killer Who Swore To Keep Killing, To Be Released

[bloodrayne]

Deal With The Devil?

Coral Eugene Watts may be the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history. Authorities believe he commited at least 100 murders.

Watts is set to be released in less than two years, after serving 24 years of a 60-year sentence.

Texas authorities agreed to a plea bargain they thought would keep Watts behind bars for the rest of his life. The deal has come back to haunt them, Watts may be the first serial killer ever to be set free.

"Everybody has heard of Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer. But, you mention Coral Eugene Watts, 99% of the public has no clue who that is" says Andy Kahan, hoping to change that.

"I guarantee you, if he is released, women are gonna turn up murdered," says Kahan. "This was a man that by his own admission stated that 'I’m gonna kill again if they ever release me.' You do not rehabilitate a serial killer."

He was 15 when he attacked a woman on his paper route. He’s been in and out of psychiatric hospitals, and in college, he was the No. 1 suspect after a girl was stabbed 33 times. Police had no evidence linking him to the crime. He was also a suspect in a series of slayings in Detroit, once again, not enough to arrest him.

His ability to elude police followed him to Michigan. It was 1980, when 3 young women were brutally murdered by someone the police and newspapers dubbed the “Sunday Morning Slasher.”

Paul Bunten, police chief in Saline, the lead investigator in the case, says he quickly became the prime suspect.

"He knew that I suspected him of 3 murders, even to the point where I demonstrated," says Bunten. "I said, 'Coral, I know exactly how you did it. And I stood up and I put my arm around his neck. 'You did it just like this.'"

Bunten put Watts under 24-hour surveillance. When he skipped town, he was tracked to Houston. Police there were sent a warning.

"We put this large packet of information including fingerprints, photographs, photographs of his car, highlights of our reports," says Bunten. "I called Houston and talked with the detective, I told him, 'I’m mailing this down. This is guy is a predator. You need to watch him.'”

When he reached Houston in 1981, it was the perfect hunting ground. It was the murder capital of the U.S. that year, with more than 700 homicides. Police were underpaid, understaffed and overwhelmed. When he began killing, no one suspected that it might be the work of one man.

He confessed to killing 12 Texas women. The first, Linda Tilley, was drowned. Elizabeth Montgomery was stabbed, two hours later, so was Susan Wolf. Ellen Tamm was hanged, Margaret Fossi was asphyxiated, Elena Semander was strangled and left in a dumpster.

Emily LaQua was 14. Anna Ledet was a medical student. And Yolanda Gracia, Carrie Jefferson and Suzanne Searles were all killed as they returned home.

He killed at random. No patterns, no motives, no witnesses, no evidence.

"If we had the goods on him, we wouldn’t be talking today. That’s how good this guy was," says Kahan.

His luck ran out on May 23, 1982. He saw a woman leaving a nightclub and followed her home. Michelle Maday was killed on her 20th birthday, her body was dumped into a bathtub. Watts moved on to another apartment complex, and his last two victims.

"He came in and grabbed me and started choking me. He told me if I screamed, he would kill me," said 19 year old Melinda Aguilar.

Watts tied up Aguilar, and her roommate, and began filling the bathtub with water. "He was excited, hyper, clappin’ and just making noises like he was happy, that this was gonna be fun," said Aguilar.

As Watts tried to drown her roommate in the bathtub, Aguilar managed to escape, throwing herself off the second floor balcony. Neighbors called police, the roommate was saved, and Watts, a 28-year-old bus mechanic, was arrested as he ran.

On the day Watts was set to go to trial, a deal was struck with the Houston district attorney. In exchange for a guilty plea to “burglary with the intent to commit murder” and a 60-year prison sentence, Watts offered to confess to 12 unsolved homicides if he was given immunity.

To the district attorney, it was a good deal. It got a mass murderer off the streets for a long time and resolved a dozen open cases.

Det. Tom Ladd, who took Watts' confession, says there is no evidence linking him to the crimes he confessed to.

It took Watts more than a week to describe how he had stalked and killed each of his victims, he led them to 3 shallow graves.

He was "Very congenial. He didn’t act like a killer until you started listening to what he’s telling you or following his directions to his crime scenes," says Ladd. "Excellent memory. Very intelligent. He never got the facts of one murder mixed up with another."

"We'd ask him, 'Well, why'd you kill this girl or that girl?' And he goes, 'They have evil in their eyes,'" says Ladd, even though almost all of his victims were picked at night. "We said 'Coral, you couldn’t see her eyes.' And he said 'Yeah. She’s got evil in her eyes.'”

"Sometimes, he’d drive all night long. And then he’d see a female, and whatever it was about that female, which we still don’t know, why he picked one girl, and passed up 20 others."

He killed quickly. None of them were sexually assaulted. Most were killed steps from their front doors. "One girl, he just walked up, she turned, he stabbed her once in the heart, turned around and ran away," says Ladd. "Probably didn't spend 15 seconds there even at the scene, an hour and a half later, he killed again"

Watts said he was willing to confess to 22 murders in Michigan, and a call went out to detectives.

"The next day, we sat down with our prosecuting attorney and we all agreed that you don’t give immunity to somebody who’s committed murder. There’s just no way you can do that," says Bunten.

"Just because we couldn't prove it doesn't mean we don't know who did it," says Bunten.

Why did he do it? "He says, 'I'll take that to my grave with me,'" says Bunten. "He's driven to do this. What drives him, I have no idea."

Bunten said he managed to have one last talk with Watts in a Texas penitentiary: "I said, 'Coral, I haven't got enough fingers and toes to count the number of people you’ve killed, have I? And he looked around the room and said, 'There’s not enough fingers and toes in this room.'”

There were four people in the room. Does Bunten believe he is capable of killing that many people?

"Don't know. I asked him if he confessed to everything down in Texas, and he said, 'No,'" says Bunten. "I said, 'Why didn't you?' He made the statement to me that he doesn't want to go down in history as a mass murderer. I said, 'You know what? That ship sailed.'"

Everyone assumed Watts would die in prison an old man. A series of rulings changed that. As a first-time offender, Watts was granted time off for good behavior – three days off his sentence for every day served. Instead of serving a 60-year sentence, He would automatically be released after just 24 years.

"He'll have served less than two years for every Houston victim he murdered. That’s never happened before in this country’s history," says Kahan.

Because Watts had been given immunity back in 1982, there was nothing Texas could do to keep him in prison. Michigan was another story.

When Michigan police found out that Watts might be released, they created a special task force, headed by Lt. Bill Hanger, to begin digging through every unsolved case that he might be linked to. Hanger says there are "roughly 90 cases we still consider him a suspect on."

They've got a suspect, but now they're trying to find the crime. Usually it works the other way around.

"He said that he would confess to 22 or so Michigan cases if he was granted immunity," says Hanger. "So I know there's at least 22 out there."

Appeals were made to the public for information – it took less than 24 hours for the first lead.

"It's really miraculous, but out of all the hundreds of cases that the task force was looking at, a witness from one of them said 'Hey I know something' and he came forward," says Pendergast. "I got a note on my desk, 'Saw one of Coral Watts’ murders.' My first reaction was 'Sure, you did.'"

The eyewitness, Joseph Foy, was the same person who called police in 1979 to report the stabbing death of 35-year-old Helen Dutcher in an alley of a Detroit suburb. According to the police reports, it was dark. Foy only saw the killers’ face for a brief moment.

"They're looking for any murder, any witness, any anything that they can pin on him," says Ron Kaplovitz, Watts's attorney.

He says his client may be a confessed serial killer, but there is not much physical evidence that he killed Dutcher: "It's hard to believe that a person who could see a person in an alley for a few minutes, a dark alley, 25 years ago, could come into a courtroom, point to that person and say 'That’s the guy I saw in the alley 25 years ago.'"

After two years of investigating, this is the best case the State of Michigan has. Prosecutors may be counting on Watts to convict himself with his own words.

The judge has ruled that the jury can be told about the murders Watts confessed to in Texas, the jury will be allowed to hear from Melinda Aguilar.

Is she worried? "Absolutely. He has admitted to killing again if he was to get out. And I believe him" says Aguilar. "I can still remember when I had to identify him, just the way he looked at me was one of those looks like 'You just wait when I get out.' All I remember is his evil eyes."

The trial in Michigan is the first week in November, but the special task force is still looking for other crimes, in case he is acquitted.

[DraculaInDallas]

* zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz started reading post on Monday, still not donezzzzzzzzz *

[NirvanaNole]

If they can get the things he admitted to in Texas and his statements to police, he'll be convicted in Michigan. His words will come back to bite him in the ass, IMO.

[horror_master]

They should of made him more public then they did. I heard of the other three guys and I live In Canada. If they make it more public about murders like him, or at leasr make it published after the trail has fishined with a verictd of gulity