Coral Eugene Watts: Sunday Morning Slasher

Case No. 07

A 1982 Houston plea deal won immunity for a dozen murders and one 60-year sentence. Twenty-four years later, Texas law said he had to be let out. Michigan got there first.

The Victims

Watts was convicted of two murders. Gloria Steele, 19, was a Western Michigan University student and the mother of a young child. She was killed in her Kalamazoo apartment on Oct. 30, 1974 (People v. Watts; Detroit Free Press). Helen Dutcher, 36, was killed in an alley in Ferndale, Michigan, on Dec. 1, 1979 (News-Herald; AP).

In 1982 he confessed to killing 13 women. He was never tried for any of these deaths, so these are his confessions, not court findings (Dallas Observer; Detroit Free Press):

• Jeanne Clyne, a former Detroit News food writer, in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan, on Halloween 1979.
• Linda Tilley, a University of Texas student from Arlington, in Austin in September 1981. Her death was believed accidental until he confessed.
• Elizabeth Montgomery, 25, who was walking her dog, and Susan Wolf, 21, in Houston in September 1981, hours apart.
• Phyllis Tamm, an advertising art director, and Margaret Fossi, a Rice University architecture student, in Houston in January 1982.
• Elena Semander, a University of Houston student, in Houston in February 1982.
• Edith Anna Ledet, a medical student, in Galveston in March 1982.
• Emily LaQua, 14, near Brookshire in Waller County in March 1982.
• Carrie Mae Jefferson, a postal clerk, and Yolanda Garcia, a jewelry store bookkeeper, in Houston in April 1982 (Houston Chronicle). Contemporaneous accounts spell her name Gracia; the Michigan opinions use Garcia.
• Suzanne Searles, who had moved to Houston from Des Moines, in April 1982.
• Michele Maday, in Houston in May 1982, earlier on the morning of his arrest.

Lori Lister and Melinda Aguilar survived the attack that led to his arrest. “I was told and promised that he would serve his full 60 years,” Lister said in 2002 (AP). Officials and Watts himself put his total much higher. Those claims are attributed where they appear below.

The Case

Detroit and Kalamazoo

Carl Eugene Watts was born on Nov. 7, 1953, in the Killeen area of Texas, which some accounts give as Fort Hood, and later went by Coral, the way his name sounded in his mother’s family’s Southern drawl (Dallas Observer; Detroit Free Press). He grew up mostly in Inkster, Michigan, near Detroit. A childhood case of meningitis forced him to repeat third grade, and he struggled in school after that. He was a high school football player and graduated at 19 (Dallas Observer).

In June 1969, at 15, he attacked a woman while delivering newspapers in her Detroit apartment building. On his lawyer’s advice he checked into the Lafayette Clinic in Detroit, where a psychiatrist, Dr. Gary M. Ainsworth, wrote: “This individual is considered dangerous.” He was released on his 16th birthday with a recommendation for outpatient treatment (Dallas Observer).

In 1974 he enrolled at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. That fall two young women there reported that a man had knocked on their doors asking for “Charles,” then choked them. Both picked Watts out of lineups (People v. Watts; Dallas Observer). He served a year in jail on one of the assaults (Dallas Observer; AP).

Gloria Steele

Gloria Steele was found dead in her apartment at the Stadium Drive Apartments on Oct. 30, 1974. Her boyfriend, Sam Waller, found her body when he came home around 12:30 p.m., and police were dispatched at about 1:40 p.m. Watts had been asking for “Charles” at the complex the day before. Questioned by the campus police chief, Robert Brown, he admitted being at the complex the day before, but not on the day of the killing, and denied any part in it (People v. Watts). He was not charged; investigators could not connect him to the crime (Dallas Observer; People v. Watts).

Ann Arbor

In 1979 and 1980 a series of women were killed in the Detroit area and in Ann Arbor, including Jeanne Clyne in Grosse Pointe Farms, Helen Dutcher in Ferndale, and, in Ann Arbor, Shirley Small, 17, Glenda Richmond and Rebecca Greer Huff (Dallas Observer; People v. Watts; News-Herald). Watts was never tried for the Ann Arbor deaths and never directly confessed to them (People v. Watts; Detroit Free Press).

Ann Arbor detective Paul Bunten came to suspect him. On Nov. 15, 1980, officers stopped Watts after he was seen following a woman, arrested him on license and registration charges and searched his car, finding two screwdrivers, wood-filing tools and a dictionary belonging to Rebecca Huff with “Rebecca is a lover” carved into the cover. Ann Arbor police put a tracking device on his car. Blood tests on his shoes, taken after a later arrest in January 1981, failed to link him to any crime. In mid-March 1981 he left Michigan for Houston (Dallas Observer; People v. Watts).

Houston

Watts arrived in Houston in mid-March 1981 and worked as a mechanic, by that fall at a Metropolitan Transit Authority bus barn. Bunten sent Houston homicide detectives his case history, and Houston police began following Watts (Detroit Free Press; Dallas Observer). Over the next 14 months, by his later account, he killed nine women in Houston and three more in Austin, Galveston and Waller County (Detroit Free Press). Some of the deaths were not recognized as murders at the time. Tilley’s was believed accidental, and a medical examiner had suggested Tamm’s was a suicide (Detroit Free Press). Holmes later said the deal changed one woman’s manner of death from suicide to homicide (Houston Chronicle).

The Arrest

Early on Sunday, May 23, 1982, Watts grabbed Lori Lister outside her apartment in southwest Houston, and forced her inside (Houston Chronicle). He bound her roommate, Melinda Aguilar, with wire hangers and tried to drown Lister in the bathtub. Aguilar locked herself in a bedroom, got onto the second-floor balcony and went over the railing. A neighbor who had heard muffled screams called police, and accounts differ on whether Aguilar called too. Patrol officers L. W. Domain and Donnie Schmidt arrested Watts at the scene (Detroit Free Press; Dallas Observer). Michele Maday had been killed earlier that same morning (Detroit Free Press).

The Deal

Watts was set for trial on three felony counts from the Lister and Aguilar attack when, in August 1982, his lawyers, Zinetta Burney and Don Caggins, and Assistant District Attorney Ira Jones reached a deal (Dallas Observer). District Attorney John “Johnny” Holmes explained the State’s position: “We didn’t have a stitch of evidence to go on in the killings” (Detroit Free Press).

At the plea hearing on Aug. 10, 1982, Jones put the terms on the record. Watts would plead guilty to burglary of a habitation, entered with intent to commit murder, and the State would recommend 60 years. In exchange, he would lead Houston detectives “to all of the graves of individuals that he knows of” and help clear unsolved murders in Houston, Austin, Galveston, Ann Arbor, Kalamazoo, Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. If he did, “there will be no prosecution,” as Burney put it. Other places would get his cooperation only if they first agreed in writing not to prosecute him (People v. Watts, quoting the plea transcript; AP).

By late August, the Detroit Free Press reported, Houston, Austin, Galveston, Brookshire and Grosse Pointe Farms had given guarantees that his statements would not be used against him, and Ann Arbor, Kalamazoo, Detroit and Windsor had not. “All we have to gain is giving away our chance of ever convicting a killer,” said Kalamazoo County Prosecutor James Gregart (Detroit Free Press). Waller County, which includes Brookshire, is the one jurisdiction that never granted immunity (Houston Chronicle). Why that happened is unsettled. The AP later reported that Emily LaQua’s killing was the only case for which Watts did not receive immunity, while the Free Press counted Brookshire among the places that had given guarantees, and the list of cities read into the plea record does not mention it. In all, the AP reported, he received immunity for 12 killings, 11 in Texas and one in Michigan (AP).

He kept his side of the deal. He led detectives to graves, and Emily LaQua’s body was recovered from a culvert five months after her death (Detroit Free Press; Houston Chronicle). Unlike Henry Lee Lucas, whose confessions this series covered first, Watts led police to bodies they had not found. Houston homicide detective Tom Ladd, who questioned him, would open a session with a prompt such as “Do you remember a woman walking her dogs?” and let Watts supply the rest (Dallas Observer). His confession to a similar Galveston attack came to light on Aug. 13, 1982, and four days later a Galveston County judge granted a new trial to Howard Mosley, who had been convicted that July of attempted murder in that attack and sentenced to life as a habitual offender. The charge was dismissed and Mosley was released on Sept. 2, 1982 (National Registry of Exonerations; Detroit Free Press).

Judge Doug Shaver told Watts that 60 years was the most he could get on the evidence available. “Sad to say,” the judge added (AP). He also made a finding that Watts had used a deadly weapon, the water in Lister’s bathtub (AP; Dallas Observer). At sentencing on Sept. 3, 1982, Shaver ordered the transcript sent to prison officials in case anyone “is ever so foolish, in this court’s opinion, to allow you to walk upon the streets again until you have completed the entire 60 years in the Texas Department of Corrections” (Dallas Observer).

Prison and the Release Date

A few months after reaching the Coffield Unit, Watts tried to escape, and the attempt cost him about four years and nine months of good time. In September 1987 he filed a handwritten challenge to his sentence, and Shaver appointed a lawyer, Charles Baird, to represent him (Dallas Observer). In 1989 the Court of Criminal Appeals deleted the deadly weapon finding from the judgment. We could not locate a written opinion. The court appears to have ruled by unpublished order, and the reasons reported since then differ. The Associated Press reported in 2004 that the court ruled Watts “had not been properly notified of the finding” (AP). A 2002 AP report said Shaver “failed to specify the water as a deadly weapon in the court record” (AP). A 1990 Ann Arbor News report gave a different reason, that the court had held a water-filled bathtub could not be classified as a deadly weapon (Ann Arbor News). The Dallas Observer reported that Watts was reclassified as nonviolent and granted retroactive good time (Dallas Observer).

News accounts credited that ruling with putting him on track for early release. The law of the time tells a narrower story. For a crime committed before Sept. 1, 1987, a deadly weapon finding delayed parole eligibility, but it did not stop good conduct time from counting toward mandatory release. Ex parte Patterson, 740 S.W.2d 766, 774 & n.4 (Tex. Crim. App. 1987) (op. of Clinton, J., announcing the judgment), overruled in part on the notice question by Ex parte Beck, 769 S.W.2d 525, 528 (Tex. Crim. App. 1989). What set his release date was mandatory supervision: an inmate had to be released when his calendar time plus accrued good conduct time equaled the maximum term to which he was sentenced. That entitlement was in force when he committed his crime, and the Legislature carried the same language forward in former art. 42.18, § 8(c) (House Bill 1433, § 1). The program was approved in 1977 and rescinded in 1996, and prisoners who qualified in between stayed eligible. By most reports his good time put his date in spring 2006, about 24 years into a 60-year sentence, with reported dates ranging from April 8 to May 9 (AP; Dallas Observer). “He’ll have served less than two years for every Houston homicide victim that he murdered,” said Andy Kahan, Houston’s crime victims’ advocate (CBS News).

Harriet Semander, Elena Semander’s mother, learned of the release date in the early 1990s and petitioned the parole board to keep him in prison (Houston Chronicle). Andy Kahan dates the public campaign to 2002, when he, Semander and the victims’ group Justice for All built a twentieth-anniversary memorial service into a national media push (KPRC). In 1995 the Legislature gave parole panels the power to block mandatory release when an inmate’s good time did not reflect his rehabilitation and release would endanger the public. The change applied only to offenses committed on or after Sept. 1, 1996, so it never reached Watts (House Bill 1433, §§ 2, 3(a)-(b), 4). A 1997 House Research Organization analysis summarized the argument of those pushing for change, who named Watts and one other inmate: “Under current law, the state can do nothing to keep these people in prison.” That analysis put his release in 2007; later reports put it in spring 2006 (HRO).

Michigan Steps In

In 2002 the Houston Chronicle reported that the release date was approaching (Houston Chronicle). Michigan formed a 12-person task force to look for a case not covered by immunity (Dallas Observer; CBS News). In mid-January 2004, Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox went on MSNBC’s The Abrams Report to ask for witnesses (Dallas Observer). A man named Joseph Foy saw the program and called. In 1979 he had seen a man attacking Helen Dutcher in a Ferndale alley and the next day described him to a police sketch artist, and he contacted police again about three years later (Dallas Observer; Houston Chronicle; AP).

Cox announced the charge on March 4, 2004, and Assistant Attorney General Thomas Furtaw filed the first-degree murder complaint. On April 14, at a hearing in Huntsville, Watts waived extradition (Houston Chronicle; Houston Chronicle). Trial began in Oakland County Circuit Court on Nov. 8, 2004, before Judge Richard Kuhn, with Assistant Attorney General Donna Pendergast prosecuting (AP; Houston Chronicle). Judge Kuhn let the jury hear about the murders and attempted murders Watts had confessed to in Texas (AP; AP).

Defense lawyer Ronald Kaplovitz attacked the identification, challenging whether Foy could identify anyone from 85 feet away in a dark alley and questioning his memory after 25 years (AP). On Nov. 17, 2004, the jury convicted Watts. Pendergast said she spoke to the jury after the verdict and that they, like the State, thought Foy was a very strong witness (Houston Chronicle). On Dec. 7 he was sentenced to life without parole. “It’s one murder in my life I did not do,” Watts told the court (Houston Chronicle).

The Steele Trial

Kalamazoo police had reopened the Steele case in 2003, and prosecutors there charged Watts the day of the Dutcher verdict (Houston Chronicle; AP). In a 2005 letter to the Detroit News, Watts denied both Michigan killings (AP). The case turned on how much of his past the jury could hear. The trial judge denied the prosecution’s motion to admit it, finding the evidence “inflammatory” and “highly prejudicial, and thus inadmissible under the law,” and the Court of Appeals denied leave to appeal. The Michigan Supreme Court then remanded the case to the Court of Appeals for consideration as on leave granted, 474 Mich. 948 (2005), and on that remand the court let some of the evidence in, as described below (People v. Watts). On July 27, 2007, a Kalamazoo County jury convicted Watts of first-degree murder, and on Sept. 13, 2007, he received the mandatory sentence of life without parole (Houston Chronicle; AP).

Eight days later, on Sept. 21, 2007, Watts died of prostate cancer in the prison ward of a hospital near Jackson, Michigan, while serving his sentences out of the Ionia maximum-security prison. He was 53 (AP). “It closes the door for our case and many others,” Harriet Semander said (Houston Chronicle).

How the Case Was Built

• Texas, 1982. His own confessions, recorded under the immunity agreement, and the graves and culvert he pointed out. The only conviction was for the Lister and Aguilar attack, which had eyewitnesses and an arrest at the scene (Detroit Free Press; People v. Watts).
• Helen Dutcher, 2004. One eyewitness, Joseph Foy, and evidence that Watts had attacked 17 other women, admitted to show motive, premeditation and a common scheme. In rejecting his challenge to the DNA testimony, the Court of Appeals noted that cross-examination “established that the prosecution had absolutely no physical evidence linking defendant to the murder of Helen Dutcher” (People v. Watts).
• Gloria Steele, 2007. Before trial, the Court of Appeals ruled that prosecutors could offer his presence at her apartment complex the day before, using the “Charles” ruse; two 1974 Kalamazoo assaults with the same ruse; and four other murders, all stabbings, which it found carried his signature, Garcia to a lesser degree and mainly to show motive (People v. Watts). We found no account of exactly what the 2007 jury heard.

The Signature Question

The Steele appeal is the clearest court analysis of signature evidence in this series so far. Kalamazoo prosecutors asked to put 15 murders, eight assaults and one stalking in front of the jury. The trial judge denied the motion, finding the evidence inflammatory and highly prejudicial. On appeal, the Court of Appeals applied essentially the test Texas uses: the shared features “must be so unusual and distinctive as to be like a signature” (People v. Watts, quoting People v. Golochowicz, 413 Mich. 298, 310 (1982), which in turn cites McCormick on Evidence).

The line was drawn by method. The court held that the parallels between the Steele murder and the stabbing murders of Rebecca Huff and Glenda Richmond in Ann Arbor and Susan Wolf in Texas, “and to a lesser degree” Yolanda Garcia, were “so close as to reflect defendant’s signature on each of them.” Garcia came in mainly to show motive. As for the rest, including killings by strangulation, choking, drowning or hanging with no stabbing, the court wrote that “even though we may disagree with the trial court regarding exclusion of some of these other crimes,” it could not conclude the judge had abused his discretion. The result, in the court’s words, “effectively bars presentation of eleven murders, six assaults, and one stalking,” which it called “a majority of the crimes that the prosecution sought to admit,” adding that these were “crimes which defendant indeed committed.” What it did admit, the court said, was “proper and powerful evidence of identity and motive,” not evidence of “scant or cumulative probative force, dragged in by the heels” (People v. Watts).

The bathtub attack that sent Watts to prison in Texas is the kind of act the court excluded. A pattern is not a signature just because the same man was behind both crimes. It has to look the same.

The Dutcher trial took a different route. There the judge admitted evidence of 17 other attacks for motive, premeditation and a common scheme, and the Court of Appeals held the evidence “was properly admitted for proper purposes other than identity.” It agreed that the scheme the trial court found “was not necessarily ‘distinctive or unusual,'” borrowing that phrase from People v. Sabin, but added at once that “it does possess some unique elements, such as, the use of a particular car to stalk victims, rapid attacks, killing by various means available, and lack of the usual motives for such random attacks.” The stricter identity test did not control, it held, because the evidence came in for another purpose. On premeditation, the court said Foy’s testimony “by itself could not establish that element” because “it was susceptible of being explained as a sudden affray between lovers or strangers” (People v. Watts). Texas also allows other-crimes evidence for purposes such as motive and intent. Tex. R. Evid. 404(b)(2); Montgomery v. State, 810 S.W.2d 372, 387-88 (Tex. Crim. App. 1991) (op. on reh’g). That is why the purpose the State names matters. It sets which test the evidence has to pass.

Both Michigan opinions recite the requirement of “substantial evidence” that Watts committed each other act (People v. Watts; People v. Watts). Texas sets the bar higher. Before a jury at the guilt stage hears about another offense, the trial judge must find that a jury could reasonably find beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed it. Harrell v. State, 884 S.W.2d 154, 160-61 (Tex. Crim. App. 1994). For the Texas murders Watts confessed to, his confessions would supply that proof. The Ann Arbor deaths are different. He never directly confessed to them and was never tried for them. In the Steele appeal, the Court of Appeals pointed, in a footnote, to his remark to Bunten, after his Texas arrest, that there was no need to keep looking for the Ann Arbor killer, which it called “tantamount to an expression of guilt” (People v. Watts). In a Texas courtroom, whether that remark could carry the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt threshold would be the first fight.

What the Defense Could Have Tested

• The scope of the immunity. The Houston agreement promised not to prosecute. It did not promise not to use what he said. Michigan’s Court of Appeals read it as giving him “transactional immunity from prosecution in the jurisdiction of Houston or Harris County,” not use immunity, and his Texas confessions came in at the Dutcher trial (People v. Watts). Anyone cooperating in exchange for leniency should know exactly what each promise covers. See What Is a Federal Proffer Session? and Why You Must Not Give a Statement.
• Who signed. Outside Houston and Harris County, the deal reached only places that agreed in writing (People v. Watts). Kalamazoo, Ann Arbor, Detroit and Windsor refused, and Waller County never granted immunity at all (Detroit Free Press; Houston Chronicle). Michigan’s Court of Appeals held that informal immunity agreements “do not generally bind prosecuting authorities who are not a party to the agreement” (People v. Watts). A separate use-immunity letter from the Wayne County prosecutor, promising that “the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office will agree not to use any statement” about the Clyne killing, bound neither the attorney general nor the Oakland County prosecutor.
• How the confessions were taken. Leading prompts can feed details to a suspect. Watts’s confessions were corroborated by graves, but any confession taken this way should be tested for where each detail came from, the lesson of the Henry Lee Lucas entry.
• The eyewitness. Foy identified a man he had seen at night, from a distance, 25 years earlier, after Watts’s arrest had been in the news in 1982 and his case on national television in 2004. Texas courts may admit expert testimony on the factors that affect eyewitness memory, and excluding it can be an abuse of discretion where identification is central and the identification procedure was unusual, though such an expert “will not necessarily assist the trier of fact in every case.” Tillman v. State, 354 S.W.3d 425, 442 (Tex. Crim. App. 2011).
• The judgment itself. A deadly weapon finding changes when an inmate can be released. Check whether the State gave notice that it would seek one, and whether the finding was actually made and entered in the judgment.

How It Works in Texas

Immunity needs the judge. Texas has never had a general statute regulating the granting of immunity from prosecution. A grant of immunity from prosecution is a promise to dismiss, and under Art. 32.02 of the Code of Criminal Procedure a dismissal needs the court’s permission. Without court approval, “there is no grant of immunity on which a defendant can rely,” and the rule binds the State as well as the defendant. Graham v. State, 994 S.W.2d 651, 653-55 (Tex. Crim. App. 1999). The judge must know the dismissal rests on an immunity agreement but need not know its terms. Smith v. State, 70 S.W.3d 848, 855 (Tex. Crim. App. 2002). The court in Graham held that an agreement never approved by a court binds no one, so one county’s unapproved promise did not stop another county from prosecuting (994 S.W.2d at 656). What the court left open was whether a court-approved agreement in one judicial district binds the judicial officers in another (id. at 657). A prosecutor can, however, bind himself to use immunity without court approval, because what evidence to offer at trial is his to decide (id. at 656). There is no statute of limitations for murder (Art. 12.01(1)(A)), which is why a missing signature can matter decades later.

Deadly weapon findings need notice. A defendant is entitled to notice in some form that the State will seek a deadly weapon finding. Ex parte Beck, 769 S.W.2d 525, 526-27 (Tex. Crim. App. 1989) (citing Ex parte Patterson, 740 S.W.2d 766, 775-76 (Tex. Crim. App. 1987) (op. of Clinton, J., announcing the judgment, joined by no other member of the court), overruled in part, 769 S.W.2d at 528); Blount v. State, 257 S.W.3d 712, 713-14 (Tex. Crim. App. 2008). Notice is required when the indictment neither alleges death or serious bodily injury caused by a weapon nor uses the words “deadly weapon,” but there will be evidence at trial that the defendant used or exhibited a weapon. Beck, 769 S.W.2d at 527. A burglary indictment alleging only an intent to commit murder would not give that notice. In 1982 a finding delayed parole eligibility until the inmate had served one-third of the maximum sentence or 20 years, whichever was less, without good time, and in no event less than two years. Polk v. State, 693 S.W.2d 391, 392-93 (Tex. Crim. App. 1985) (quoting former art. 42.12, § 15(b)). Today the court must enter the finding in the judgment (Art. 42A.054(c)); the inmate is not eligible for parole until he has served half the sentence or 30 years, whichever is less (Gov’t Code § 508.145(d)(1)(B), (d)(2)); and he cannot be released to mandatory supervision at all (§ 508.149(a)(1)).

Mandatory release depends on the offense date. Release law changes apply by the date of the crime, not the date of sentencing (HRO; House Bill 1433, § 3(a)-(b)). For a crime committed today, a parole panel must still release an inmate to mandatory supervision, except as Section 508.149 provides, when calendar time plus good time equals the sentence (§ 508.147(a)), but it can refuse if good time does not reflect rehabilitation and release would endanger the public (§ 508.149(b)). And some offenses are excluded entirely, including first-degree burglary (§ 508.149(a)(13)). Entering a home with intent to commit murder is first-degree burglary under Penal Code § 30.02(d). Watts’s 1982 crime, committed today, would not qualify for mandatory release, and if the judgment carried a deadly weapon finding he would be barred independently under § 508.149(a)(1).

Other crimes at trial and sentencing. At the guilt stage, other offenses come in only for a purpose other than character, and, on a Rule 403 objection, only if their probative value is not substantially outweighed by a danger of unfair prejudice. Montgomery v. State, 810 S.W.2d 372, 387-90 (Tex. Crim. App. 1991) (op. on reh’g). At punishment, either side may offer evidence on any matter the court deems relevant to sentencing, including any extraneous crime or bad act shown beyond a reasonable doubt to have been committed by the defendant or for which he could be held criminally responsible, whether or not it was ever charged (Art. 37.07, § 3(a)(1)). On a timely defense request the State must give notice of its intent to offer that evidence, and for an uncharged act the notice must include the date, the county and the alleged victim’s name (Art. 37.07, § 3(g)). For how a capital case is tried in Texas, see Capital Murder in Texas.

Where Things Stand Now

No Texas court ever tried Watts for a murder. The Texas killings he confessed to remain closed by confession, not by verdict; see The Case That Will Never Be Tried. Waller County, the one Texas jurisdiction outside the immunity agreement, never charged him in Emily LaQua’s death, and evidence in her case was reported lost (Houston Chronicle).

The Michigan Court of Appeals affirmed the Dutcher conviction in August 2006 (People v. Watts). We found no appellate decision on the Steele conviction, which came weeks before his death. Watts was never tried for the Ann Arbor deaths (Detroit Free Press).

Harriet Semander died in 2025 at 91. Kahan called Watts “probably the nation’s most prolific serial killer no one has ever heard about” (FOX 26). How many women he killed is unknown. In 1982 Judge Shaver told the Detroit Free Press that the lawyers had told him Watts admitted killing 22 people (Detroit Free Press). Michigan’s attorney general later said Watts had claimed more than 80 (Michigan Attorney General). No court has found either number.

The case has been covered by 60 Minutes (CBS News), in Glenna Whitley’s Dallas Observer cover story “Evil Eyes” (Dallas Observer), in Corey Mitchell’s book of the same name (Los Angeles Times), and in the first episode of Oxygen’s Unknown Serial Killers of America in 2025 (Oxygen). For another case built on deaths that were first given another cause, see the Billy Chemirmir entry in this series.

Sources

This post describes Coral Eugene Watts’s convictions using court records and published reporting. Killings he confessed to under immunity were never tried and are described as confessions; killings he was suspected of but never charged with are not described as proven. Victim counts are attributed to the officials who gave them. This post is offered for general information about Texas law, is not legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship.