Carl Eugene Watts

Finally, there was his reaction to sex. After intercourse, Watts would disappear.


"He would get up and leave the house," Goodwill told police. "He would just get in the car and go. He'd be gone hours and hours."

Police believe they know where he went. Between October 1979 and November 1980, at least 14 women were attacked and eight of those were killed in a similar manner in the Detroit area, in Windsor, Ontario (just across the border), and in Ann Arbor. The attacker either strangled or stabbed his victims. He never raped or robbed, and those who lived usually described him as a muscular black man, often wearing a blue, hooded sweat shirt.

One of the first women killed in Detroit was Jeanne Clyne, stabbed on Halloween in the suburb of Grosse Point Farms.

Watts was out driving, he said, when he saw her walking on the sidewalk. He parked, got out and crossed the street toward her, passing a group of children in trick-or-treat costumes. He approached her from the front, pulled a screwdriver from beneath his blue sweat shirt and stabbed her several times in the chest.

"She kept saying something like, `OK, OK' and she fell back on the grass," Watts later told police. "I just walked back to my car and drove away."

Clyne's killing showed less fumbling than Watt's Kalamazoo assaults. He was improving.

His marriage was deteriorating, however. His range from childish indifference to dark anger had become too much for Goodwill. She finally became afraid of Watts , left him and filed for divorce in January 1980. Watts was unperturbed. He moved back to his mother's home in Inkster, and the series of attacks continued.

They happened in the early morning hours of Sundays in Ann Arbor and began on April 20, 1980, with Shirley Small, 17. Small had argued with a boyfriend at an Ann Arbor skating rink late Saturday night and had walked home. She was found near her front door the next morning, stabbed twice in the heart, expertly.

A little more than two months later another young woman, Glenda Richmond, 26, was stabbed outside her home. On Sept. 14, a third woman, Rebecca Huff, 20, a student, was killed under almost identical circumstances.

It was too much for Paul Bunten and Dale Heath, two felony investigators in Ann Arbor, a quiet, picturesque college town on the Huron River, less than 20 miles but fully a world away from Detroit. Old, well-kept homes nestle under the trees that border Ann Arbor's rolling streets. Students from the University of Michigan jaywalk with aplomb. People wave at one another across the city square.

A murdered woman causes alarm in Ann Arbor. Three can cause panic, and this one already had been dubbed "the Sunday morning slasher." Police were without clues until the night of Nov. 15, 1980, when two patrolmen saw Watts and a young woman engaged in a deadly game of maneuvers along Main Street.

As police watched, Watts would drive slowly past the woman, then park just ahead of her. The woman would turn the first corner she came to in an attempt to avoid him, and Watts would follow. The activity continued for nine blocks until the woman ducked into a doorway and Watts lost her.

"He almost went nuts," says Bunten. "The police who were watching him said he got frantic, started craning his head around in the car, trying to see where she'd gone. He even got out and ran around trying to see her."

Watts then spotted the police who had been watching him, and he attempted to drive away. He was stopped and arrested for driving with a suspended license and having expired license plates. In his car, police found a box containing small, rectangular wood files. In the back seat was something that reminded Bunten of the Rebecca Huff killing, something Coral Watts would have little use for.

It was a large, collegiate dictionary. There were no identifying marks in the book, but scratched on its cover, etched there as though by the force of a pen bleeding through from a separate surface was the sentence, "Rebecca is a lover."

Bunten began dogging Watts . The detective finally had a suspect in his baffling murders and he didn't intend to lose him. A cursory check turned up the Kalamazoo assaults and Gloria Steele murder. Watts ' former attorney and psychiatrist told Bunten that, short of implicating Watts , they could tell the detective he need look no further for a suspect in those cases.

Bunten was ecstatic. He now had a target to focus his investigation on. He called a meeting of area police agencies and obtained a court order to place a tracking device on Watts ' car and a search warrant for his mother's house.

The search warrant produced little. Police found another set of woodworking files in the basement, this one used by Watts ' mother in her art classes, but those were free of blood traces. They found what appeared to be blood on a tennis shoe, but it proved to be untraceable.

And they made Watts wary. The tracking device was placed on his car on Nov. 29, 1980, and police began an around-the-clock watch on him, but he did nothing.

"He got paranoid," Bunten says. "He knew we were watching him, and the longer we watched him, the less he'd move around. He got to where he almost wouldn't leave his neighborhood."

For the next two months, there were no more killings of the sort police had seen in Ann Arbor. On Jan. 29, 1981, the tracking device was removed, and Bunten decided to bring Watts in for questioning.

"The whole thing took eight hours," Bunten says. "I used every means I know to get somebody to confess...He's so streetwise, nothing would work.

"He was nice. He was polite. If you can forget about what he does, he seems like a soft-spoken, timid but personable, pleasant person.

"I think I got close once. We knew the women had been attacked from behind. The killer had wrapped his left arm around their throat, then reached over their right shoulder and stabbed them. The blouses were pulled up at the front, and marks on the throat of one, just under the chin, came from a man's wristwatch on a left arm.

"Finally, toward the end of the session, I told Watts , `I not only know you did these, I know "how" you did them.' I got up and walked behind him and said, `You grabbed them like this. Then you pulled their heads back like this, and you reached over with your right arm and stabbed them like this!'

"And he started crying. Just broke down and started crying. It was the first real emotion we'd seen from him. I thought he might break for a minute, but he didn't. He wanted to talk to his mother and we let him - that was probably a mistake - and, after that, he wouldn't say a word. It was all over."

Watts ' life in Inkster was over as well. His anonymity was lost, and the constant police surveillance was frustrating. He began asking co-workers at the trucking company about work prospects in other states, and he settled on Texas and then-boomtown Houston.

Sometime in March 1981, Watts left Michigan. His first stop was in Coalwood, where he visited his grandmother. From there he drove on to Columbus, where two acquaintances from Detroit were working and he soon found work as a diesel mechanic.

Columbus was a hiatus for Watts . Paul Bunten and the worrisome Ann Arbor police were a thousand miles away. For the first time he was living alone. For the first time he had made a major move without consulting his mother.

"He didn't even tell her where he was going," says Lula Mae Young. "He'd never done that before. He'd always lived at home with his mother or stayed with me except when he was in college.

"She didn't know what to think. He'd just gone off and left his whole family."

He wasn't rid of Paul Bunten, however. The policeman had kept up daily checks on Watts and learned he had gone to the Houston area in April. Bunten immediately sent Houston police an 18-page packet on Watts , including pictures, fingerprints, vital information and details of the killings in which he was a suspect.

The packet arrived April 8, 1981, but Houston police couldn't find Watts . Tom Wine, then police chief in Columbus, knew Watts because of the crowd Watts associated with, but he knew nothing of the murders Watts was suspected of.

"As far as we know, he didn't kill anyone while he was in Columbus," says Wine. "We had no unsolved murders during that period. The strange thing is that, later, he always insisted there was one he killed here and buried, but we didn't have any missing persons either, and he couldn't find the grave."

Houston police, operating on the assumption that Watts was working and living in Houston, found no trace of him. A detective was assigned to check on him and found that he was working in Columbus, but nothing else was done. It was a time of political unrest in the Houston Police Department. A new police chief was to be hired, but Lee P. Brown had not yet been chosen. There were complaints of understaffed divisions, no funds for overtime, no time for investigations.

There were no continuous watches such as those in Michigan. After Watts moved to Houston late in the summer of 1981, a tracking device was placed on a van he owned, but it was later learned he was using a car he drove from Michigan. At one point - in November, 1981, after Watts had started work for the Metropolitan Transit Authority as a mechanic - a patrolman who lived in his neighborhood in southeast Houston was asked to watch Watts ' house during his time off. A few detectives spent their own time attempting to follow him, but learned little or nothing.

And Watts was busy: Elizabeth Montgomery, 25; Susan Wolf, 21; Phyllis Tamm, 27; Margaret Fossi, 25; Elena Semander, 20; Emily Laqua, 14; Anna Ledet, 34; Yolanda Gracia, 22; Carrie Jefferson, 32; Suzanne Searles, 25; and Michelle Maday, 20, all died at his hands.

Whether Watts killed during the three months he was living in Columbus may never be known. The exact number of women he killed in Texas almost certainly never will be. His first known Texas killing was that of Linda Tilley, a young woman he drowned in a swimming pool in Austin Sept. 5, 1981. During the next nine months he attacked at least 18 women and killed a dozen of those. He stabbed, strangled, hanged and drowned them.

And, finally, he was caught. It took bad luck and overreaching on Watts ' part. He'd already killed in the early morning hours of May 23, 1982, already followed Michelle Maday to her apartment, dragged her inside and drowned her in a bathtub of hot water, but he wasn't satisfied.

Lori Lister was supposed to be next. He'd spotted her turning into her apartment parking lot just before dawn, seen her back her car in and glance toward a nearby fire station before she started for her door. She walked quickly, but Watts was faster. He caught her just before she started up her stairs.

He choked her then, not enough to kill her, just enough to leave her senseless. He dragged her up the stairs, took her keys and opened the door.

And there was her roommate. Melinda Aguilar, standing in a bathrobe staring wide-eyed at Watts , who was only able to stare back. He recovered momentarily, forced Aguilar into her bedroom and bound her with coat hangers. Then he filled the tub and and lowered Lister under the water.

The rest happened quickly. A neighbor, having seen Watts standing over Lister by the stairs, had called police. Aguilar, her wrists still bound behind her, had made her way to a balcony and jumped to the lawn below, just as police arrived. Watts , realizing one of his victims had escaped, attempted to run.

He was arrested in a courtyard just below Lori Lister's apartment.

When lawyer Zinetta Burney arrived at the county jail a few days later, she expected to find a client whose rights had been violated. She didn't expect to be frightened.

"I thought I'd find a young, black man who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and got arrested," says Burney. "When I got there, when I started talking to him and he started telling the things he'd done, I thought he was lying or crazy."

After listening to Watts for a few hours, Burney's attitude changed from incredulity to shock. Within the next few days she had gone to the police with an offer: Watts would clear a large number of unsolved homicides and plead guilty to a lesser crime in return for immunity from prosecution for murder.