Carl Eugene Watts (November 7, 1953 – September 21, 2007), dubbed the Sunday Morning Slasher, was an American serial killer who murdered numerous women and girls between 1974 and 1982. Watts is suspected of being the most prolific serial killer in United States history. He died of prostate cancer while serving two sentences of life imprisonment without parole in a Michigan prison for the murders of Helen Dutcher and Gloria Steele.
Watts officially confessed to the murders of thirteen women but later claimed he had killed forty women and also implied that there were more than eighty victims in total. He would not confess outright to having committed these murders, however, because he did not want to be seen as a "mass murderer." Police consider Watts a suspect in ninety unsolved murders, and he is now suspected to have killed more than one hundred.
Early life and criminal history Carl Eugene Watts was born on November 7, 1953, to Richard Eugene Watts and Dorothy Mae Young, both natives of Coalwood, West Virginia. Watts' father was a private first class in the United States Army, and his mother was a kindergarten art teacher. In 1942, before Watts was born, his father was transferred to Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, the location of the Army's tank destroyer training center. Three days after Watts' birth in Killeen, the family returned to West Virginia. The couple's second child, a daughter named Sharon, was born a year later.
Watts' parents divorced when he was less than two years old, and his mother raised him as a single parent. In 1962, Watts' mother married a mechanic named Norman Caesar, with whom she had two daughters. The family moved to Inkster, Michigan, where she found employment as a high school art teacher. Watts disliked his new stepfather, however, which made it difficult for him to adapt to his new familial environment. Watts later claimed that he often worried about losing his mother's attention.
Watts, his sister and his mother frequently visited his maternal grandmother in Coalwood. In the rural region near his grandmother's home, Watts learned to hunt and skin rabbits with his grandfather, an activity he enjoyed. Watts later adopted the nickname "Coral," which was the southern pronunciation of his name, as a result of his passion for the Coalwood and the relatives who lived there. Watts reportedly had academic difficulties in Michigan but yet managed to earn decent grades.
When he was eight years old, Watts and his sister contracted meningitis, which nearly killed him. He was brought to the Herman Kiefer Hospital in Detroit for treatment and was kept apart from other patients and underwent spinal taps. Journalists claim that Watts' body temperature was so high that physicians worried it might have caused brain damage. Family members noticed a change in his personality following his illness, describing him as bashful, quiet and introverted. Watts' performance at school worsened, resulting in him being held back one grade. Watts also started having violent dreams about battling off and killing the wicked spirits of women, which interrupted his sleep cycle. When detectives later asked why he killed women, Watts responded that he wanted to "free their spirits" because they had "evil eyes."
By age 12, Watts began to relish his dreams of torturing and killing girls and young women. He began stalking girls as a teenager, and it is thought that he killed his first victim before the age of 15. On June 29, 1969, while delivering newspapers on his route, Watts knocked on the apartment door of 26-year-old Joan Gave. Watts savagely assaulted Gave when she answered the door, then continued on his route as if nothing had happened. Gave immediately contacted the authorities, who apprehended Watts at his home. He was ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment at the Lafayette Clinic in Detroit.
During a psychiatric evaluation, when asked if his dreams disturbed him, Watts replied, "No, I feel better after I have one," and claimed that they were not nightmares because "he enjoyed them." He further elaborated that his motivation for assaulting Gave was because he "just felt like beating someone up." According to a psychiatric assessment, Watts was revealed to have a mild intellectual disability with an intelligence quotient of 75, and to have a delusional thought process and no evidence of psychosis. However, a police officer interrogating Watts after his arrest later stated that he appeared to be "very, very intelligent" with an "excellent memory." Watts' psychiatrist later reported that he was an "impulsive individual who has a passive-aggressive orientation to life" and who is "struggling for control of strong homicidal impulses." He thought Watts posed a threat to society and hoped that the adolescent would benefit from outpatient therapy. Watts was discharged from the Lafayette Clinic on his 16th birthday and visited the facility nine more times for outpatient care throughout the ensuing years. During his time in various mental institutions, he was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder.
Watts graduated from high school in 1973 at the age of 19 and was given a football scholarship to Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, despite his subpar grades and sporadic drug use after his release. Watts said that exercising allowed him to let out his suppressed rage. He was able to achieve stardom as a football player and even greater success in boxing, becoming a Golden Gloves fighter. After just three months, he was expelled from Lane College after being charged with stalking and assaulting women and receiving minor leg injuries. The fact that many people at Lane College thought Watts was a suspect in the violent killing of a female student—even though there was insufficient evidence to hold him accountable for the crime—was another factor in his dismissal. Watts briefly resided in Houston, Texas, following his expulsion, and then spent a year working as a mechanic for a Detroit wheel manufacturer. In 1974, when Watts enrolled in Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, a string of heinous assaults and attacks on women started to occur.
Murders Watts' first confirmed murders took place in 1974, by kidnapping his victims from their homes, torturing them and then murdering them. He attacked in several different jurisdictions and even different states. Most of his victims were thin, attractive white women, and he used methods such as strangulation, stabbing, bludgeoning and drowning. His victims ranged between the ages of 14 and 44. Watts murdered dozens of women between 1974 and 1982, and despite the scale of his killings, he was not discovered for almost eight years. Even with the advent of DNA testing, it was still nearly impossible to connect them because he rarely performed sexual acts on his victims; his crimes were not thought to be sexually motivated.
On September 6, 1972, the body of Zenaida Tomes, aged 20, was discovered in a field in Taylor, Michigan, adjacent to North Line Road and Lange Close. She had suffered forty-five stab wounds. Over the years, rumors have circulated that Tomes' death may have been caused by Watts, who was present in the area at the time. However, Tomes was taken from Detroit and murdered somewhere else, which is contradictory with Watts' known modus operandi. Watts may also have been involved in the disappearance of 16-year-old Nadine Jean O'Dell, who disappeared on August 16, 1974. O'Dell was last seen walking down John Daly Street in Inkster, on her way to babysit at her boyfriend's house. Her body has never been found, and no one witnessed her presumed abduction.
At 10:45 a.m. on October 25, 1974, Watts knocked on the apartment door of 23-year-old Lenore Knizacky. He called for "Charles," which was the name of one of his siblings, when she unlocked the door while the door was still chained. When she responded in the negative, she asked if he would like to leave a note, and she undid the chain lock and went to get paper. Watts then attacked Knizacky and choked her into unconsciousness. Police were later alerted by Knizacky, but were unable to find her attacker.
Gloria Steele, a 20-year-old student at Western Michigan University (WMU), was tortured and killed by Watts on October 30, 1974, having suffered a crushed windpipe and thirty-three stab wounds to the chest. There were no witnesses other than Diane Williams, an apartment manager, who saw a black man "searching for Charles" strolling throughout the complex. When Watts saw Williams, he grabbed her, pushed her door open and dragged her inside her own apartment. Williams' phone started to ring as the two were fighting, so she knocked it off the hook and yelled for help. She spotted the attacker getting into a tan Pontiac Grand Prix after he fled. Police assembled a line-up, and Williams and Knizacky recognised Watts, who had just been apprehended stealing plywood from the WMU campus. For both the Knizacky and Williams cases, Watts was taken into custody and charged with assault and battery.
After being diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, and attempting suicide with a length of cord at the Kalamazoo Psychiatric Hospital, Watts was moved to the Center for Forensic Psychiatry in Michigan. When he was questioned about the Steele killing in 1975, he acknowledged that he had been nearby the day before the murder, but insisted that he had not killed Steele despite having admitted to attacking around fifteen other young women. When Detroit police executed a search warrant for Watts' residence, they discovered wooden carving tools but no evidence connecting him to Steele. Watts entered a "no contest" plea at his trial for the assault and battery of Knizacky and Williams and was sentenced to a year in county jail. Watts' psychologists classified him as being extremely hazardous, lacking in remorse for his crimes, impetuous, careless and emotionally distant, with a high likelihood of recidivism.
Watts returned to Inkster after being released from prison in 1976 and moved in with his mother and stepfather. In 1979 he impregnated Deloris Howard, a childhood friend, resulting in the birth of Nakisha Watts. Watts and Howard soon split, and he wed Valeria Goodwill not long after. Goodwill claimed that shortly after their wedding, Watts started behaving oddly. Watts kept moving the furniture around, using knives to chop up houseplants, broke candles and melted them into the table and dumped trash all over the floors without picking it up. He would also get up and depart after they had sex or had an "intimate encounter," and would disappear for several hours at a time. Their union only lasted six months.
Five women were attacked and killed in the Detroit region over the course of a year by a perpetrator who was dubbed by Ann Arbor newspapers as the "Sunday Morning Slasher," since all of the attacks took place on Sunday mornings at around 4 a.m. On October 31, 1979, Jeanne Clyne, a 44-year-old reporter for Detroit News, walked home after a doctor's appointment and was attacked. She was approached in broad daylight next to her Grosse Point Farms home and stabbed eleven times, resulting in her death. Insufficient evidence was discovered by police to identify a suspect. Detectives initially suspected Clyne's husband, but once Watts admitted to her murder, they ruled him out.