Hi everyone, this is Deb from Dying to be Found.
Before we get started, I just wanted to say that episodes contain disturbing discussions
on harmful acts and crimes against animals and or humankind.
Recordings are not intended for young or sensitive audiences due to the content nature of this podcast.
Listener discretion is strongly advised.
Hi everyone, I'm Deb.
And I'm Shelby.
And welcome to episode number 48 of Dying to be Found.
We are trying something new this morning.
We are recording with coffee.
So let's hope that we have a little pep in our voice today.
Shelby and I always love it when our listeners ask us to tell a story and we have Alicia
to thank for our storyline.
Thanks for reaching out, Alicia.
We appreciate you.
If you DM me your address on Instagram, I'll mail you a sticker.
Shelby, you're the lucky one today on who I get to tell this tale to.
But just like Alicia, just keep those storyline requests coming and click on our show notes
to find our Linktree account where you can fill out a storyline request and see all our
social media platforms all in one place.
Keep watching our social media because I'm putting my money where my mouth is and adding
a couple teasers about season two.
I'm so excited to hear.
Well, Shelby, here's your question for the day.
Have you ever had anyone just show up at your door at an odd hour, say maybe late at night
or early in the morning and they really had no reason to be there?
I don't think so.
Okay.
Well, that's a good thing because we know you're locking your doors.
Yes.
I know Beth is thinking about this question.
If she's listening, she likes to open her door at 3 a.m. for women who like to bring
bagels around at that hour.
I did hear that in the podcast a few weeks ago.
Well, I can't remember what episodes we were recording and I almost fell out of my chair
when she told me that.
I know.
It's so crazy.
Today, we're going to talk about Carl Eugene Watts, who's believed to have killed upwards
of a hundred women and get this Shelby, because they had evil eyes.
Wow.
Well, Carl Eugene Watts was born in Killeen, Texas on November 7th, 1953 to Dorothy Mae
and Richard Watts, a kindergarten teacher and an army officer.
When Carl was just two years old, Richard took off, leaving Dorothy Mae to raise Carl
and his baby sister Sharon all on her own as a single mother.
Dorothy Mae soon moved the three of them to Michigan, where she continued to work as an
art teacher.
Dorothy Mae did the best she could raising her two children and even spent a lot of time
with her own mother, which is awesome because family is number one in my book.
Of course.
Carl bonded quickly with his grandmother and soon took on the name that she gave him.
It's a nickname and she would call him Coral because of his Texas accent.
And I'm sure that if you can imagine that, Shelby, how he would say Carl and it comes
out Coral.
Have you ever seen The Walking Dead?
I have never watched that show.
Is there so many named Coral on there?
No, his name is Carl.
He was like one of the best characters and there was a meme going around where instead
of Carl, it was Coral.
Oh, gotcha.
When Carl was just eight years old, he suffered a bout of meningitis, which if anybody does
not know what that is, it's a viral infection that attacks the brain and the spinal cord.
So it's believed that Carl suffered brain damage from this virus.
And on top of this, Carl also suffered from polio and ended up missing his entire third
grade year due to long hospitalization periods.
So poor kid, he is getting a rough start here.
For sure.
Family members say that Carl's mental capacities had deteriorated during this year and he never
was the same after his illnesses.
So spoiler alert, Carl was later captured and stood trial for multiple heinous crimes.
And during his trial, psychiatrists performed tests on him and concluded that his IQ was
only around 75.
The average is 111.
So Carl suffered from lifelong delusions that could have contributed to his mental health.
And we're going to say probably went back to those illnesses that he had as a child,
but feel sorry for the child here, not the adult.
Yeah, absolutely.
When Carl was nine, his mother remarried a man who had six kids coming into the marriage
and the couple had two more children after that.
So between his step siblings and his sister, oh my gosh, Shelby, the head count in the
family was 10 kids and two adults.
That's 12 people in one house.
Yeah, that's a lot.
Obviously Carl got lost in the crowd and became somewhat invisible, which he didn't take it
to heart though.
Carl simply internalized everything, including the fact that when he was around the age of
12, he began fantasizing about torturing and killing girls and women.
Oh my gosh.
So think about that for a moment.
Isn't that crazy?
Yeah, that's very young to start thinking about something like that.
Oh yes.
As Carl reached adolescence, he went through the motions in school and only read at fourth
grade level.
He did take on a paper delivery route at the age of 15, but ended up attacking a 26 year
old woman during one of his morning routes.
Could you imagine?
Wow, was he a big kid?
He wasn't massively, he was probably just an average size.
Nothing really stood out about him.
Well, when the police tracked Carl down after that attack, he simply stated that he just
felt like beating someone up.
The end.
Yeah, I just felt like beating somebody up.
What?
Yep.
Carl was taken to the Lafayette Mental Health Clinic after this attack on his paper route
and was medically diagnosed with impulsive and passive aggressive tendencies.
Remember now, he is only 15 years old.
On top of this diagnosis, the psychiatrist also reported that Carl was paranoid and had
trouble controlling homicidal tendencies.
Oh my goodness.
Carl was ordered to receive outpatient treatment.
So obviously he's going to go to work every day, but he's also going to have to stop by
his medical facility and get some treatment on a regular basis.
That's a lot for a 15 year old kid.
Oh yes, absolutely.
Well, over the next five years, think about this for a moment, it is a lot for a 15 year
old kid, but Carl only went to outpatient treatment as ordered less than 10 times in
that five year period.
Wow.
I mean, if you're thinking about the math there, Shelby, he only went to outpatient treatment
nine times in five years.
So he really wasn't going at all.
Was he supposed to go daily, weekly?
I would assume that he would probably have to check in if anything, at least every 30
days.
So that would mean 12 times a year.
Yeah.
But he went less than 10 in five years.
Carl did report to the Lafayette Medical Clinic for a checkup in 1974.
And during this visit, the psychiatrist made an assessment that Carl was struggling with
his sexuality and continued to have strong urges to beat women up.
I don't know where that would come from.
Maybe just the transition to the step family and all the dynamics.
Who knows?
Yeah, that sounds likely.
That and his hormones going crazy at 15.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Well, I'm going to talk about a time period between 1974 and 1982.
By this time, Carl was pegged as the Sunday morning slasher and killed at least 12 women.
I'm going to provide you and our listeners a timeline of events in our show notes because
Shelby, the list is very extensive of Carl's victims.
And I do always try to give Carl's victims a name, whether they survived or not.
But again, there's a long list and I do want to warn you that there is a pattern in this
timeline of heightened violence as you go through it.
And according to police between 1974 and 1982, Carl went undetected because largely during
those years, many jurisdictions in those days notoriously did not talk to each other.
They simply treated their cases as local.
So there was not a lot of communication between jurisdictions.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
I don't even think cell phones had come out of that, had they?
No, cell phones came out in the early 2000s, like real or probably the turn of the millennium.
Carl also got away with his crimes for a long time because he never sexually assaulted anyone.
DNA evidence in those days was very minimal and sure authorities could collect hairs and
fibers, but imagine simply looking at those under a microscope for comparisons.
They simply didn't have that sophisticated equipment back then.
No, of course not.
Carl was dubbed this Sunday morning slasher because once police began investigating these
crimes, they noticed that all attacks occurred mainly outside women's apartment buildings
somewhere around 4 a.m.
What are these women doing out at 4 a.m.?
That's a good question.
I'm going to talk about a couple of cases where the victims knowingly engaged with Carl,
but I'm doing this to let you know his MO in this whole situation.
So think about that because it's likely that he used the same routine when attacking all
his victims.
So he's got the same MO, it's working for him, and of course he's going to use it on
the next unsuspecting person that comes along, right?
Right.
On October 25th, 1974, Carl paid a visit to Leonor Nazake's apartment asking to speak
with someone named Charles.
And Charles, by the way, is one of Carl's siblings.
So he's just knocking randomly on somebody's door asking if he could speak to Charles.
Oh, wow.
Mm-hmm.
Leonor was speaking to Carl with a chain lock on and said that nobody lived there by that
name.
She asked Carl if he'd like to leave a note and undid the lock.
I don't understand that.
She just told him that nobody by the name of Charles was there, but hey, would you like
to leave a note anyway?
That makes no sense to me.
No, it doesn't.
When her back was turned, Carl attacked, killing her, and he simply walked out of the apartment
like nothing ever happened.
Wow, that's crazy.
Mm-hmm.
Just five days later, Shelby, on October 30th, 1974, Gloria Steele was brutally attacked
at her apartment.
An eyewitness later told police that she had witnessed a black male walking up the stairwell
of her apartment looking for a guy named Charles.
This specific attack, Shelby, will come into play in just a little bit.
I'm very curious.
Mm-hmm.
A few weeks later, Diane Williams, the property manager from the same apartment complex, noticed
a man roaming around the property looking for a man named Charles.
Diane confronted him when he knocked on her own apartment door, and when she answered,
he immediately attacked.
But here's the clincher shelves and divine intervention, the phone rang, and Carl was
scared off when Diane was able to knock the phone off the hook and scream for help.
Wow.
Diane was later able to identify Carl in a lineup in December of 1974, and he was charged
with assault.
That's all they could get him for.
During his hearing, Carl asked to be admitted to the Kalamazoo Mental Hospital, as opposed
to spending 45 days in jail.
And he did end up spending one year in jail for his previous assaults on record.
But at this point in time in 1974, he ended up in the mental hospital, which is good because
he's had all those diagnoses, right?
Yeah, for sure.
But to me, it just sounds like he knows what he's doing.
So even though he does have those mental issues, I don't know, I just find it.
Well yeah, he's very methodical because he's walking around asking for Charles.
It works for him.
So he's going to keep on doing it, right?
Well, it does seem that Carl's took about a five year hiatus, mainly because Shelby,
during this time period, Carl got married and had a child.
However, killings did begin again in 1979, and it's believed that in all, Carl had that
upwards of 100 victims.
And when I was piecing together my notes, Shelby, I saw the same brutality amongst Carl's
victims.
I really didn't want to go over that for the next several minutes.
And that's why I put those in the show notes because it's very thorough.
You can see the timeline in a table.
There's just too many to talk about.
On December 1st, 1979, Helen Dutcher, age 36, was attacked, but one eyewitness was able
to provide a sketch to a sketch artist with a drawing that actually resembled Carl Watts.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
So that's the one that you would see on the news, right?
Of course, it's going to get some national attention at this point.
And throughout 1980, Carl conducted attacks on women at least once a month, if not more.
He did take about a two month break late in the summer.
And I believe that's when his wife ended up divorcing him during the summer of 1980, Shelby.
This may have been around the time that Carl was either acting erratically or on his rampage.
And that makes sense.
He's going through a divorce.
I'm sure there's a lot of emotions going on, so he's just going to look for Charles.
When things started up again in the fall, Carl crossed the border from Michigan to Windsor,
Ontario and assaulted a woman named Sandra Delpe.
She was 20 years old and coming outside of her apartment.
Sandra did thankfully survive this attack.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, so Shelbs, I'm actually pretty familiar with this area that Carl committed his crimes
because whenever I visit Aunt Beth up in Canada, I fly to the Detroit airport and end up driving
the rest of the way.
And you actually have to pass through Windsor as you cross that border from Michigan on
the way to Aunt Beth's house.
I don't know if you remember this because you were probably 13 when I took you there.
Yeah, I was so sick.
I think I had strep throat.
Oh gosh.
You might have that right now.
You should probably go to the doctor.
Yeah, I probably should.
In all, Carl committed at least eight murders in Michigan before he decided it was time
to leave town because he was beginning to get some heat from the police.
Like I said, that sketch was on the news by then and authorities had placed Carl under
24 hour surveillance.
Wow.
After his two attacks in Windsor, Carl headed back to his roots and relocated to Texas.
But not for nostalgic reasons, Shelby.
Carl went to Houston, Texas in the late 80s to blend in to what at the time was known
as the murder capital of the United States back in the 80s.
Oh my gosh.
Wow.
Which I did not know that because we know that is not the case today.
I didn't know that either.
The Michigan police were able to track Carl to Texas and even warned the police there
of his presence.
So they are starting to communicate, which is a good thing.
However, between October 1980 and May 1982, Carl committed 11 more attacks against women
where only two survived.
Oh, that's so sad.
Yeah.
After these two attacks, Carl broke into an apartment where Melinda Aguilar and Laurie
Lister were roommates.
Earlier in the day, Carl had attacked Laurie, leaving her for dead.
When Melinda arrived home from work, she discovered Laurie and immediately was attacked herself.
Oh, I don't know if he knew a second person was going to come along, but Carl had his
work cut out for him because neither woman had died at his hand.
As he dragged Laurie upstairs and began filling up the tub to finish the job by drowning her,
Shelby, renegade Melinda, dragged herself out of the apartment and got to a neighbor's
house for help.
How amazing is that?
That is amazing.
Very brave.
Carl discovered Melinda had disappeared.
So of course he fled the scene, but he was soon apprehended that very night.
And once he was detained, detectives asked Carl why he had attacked these women.
And his response, Shelby was, quote, they had evil eyes, unquote.
Yeah.
I wonder if he was in a sense stalking them.
And I don't know.
It just doesn't make any sense.
It doesn't.
But remember, he's been diagnosed with a lot of mental illness.
Yeah.
And that's all probably stemming from the meningitis that he had as a child.
Yeah.
Upon investigation, Texas authorities did not feel like they had enough evidence to
convict Carl for the attacks placed on Melinda and Laurie from that night that he got arrested.
But we do know that Texas is known for the death penalty, right?
Yes.
Well, prosecutors offered Carl immunity if he would provide information on the other
offenders.
He agreed to these terms and pled guilty to burglary with the intent to kill when he entered
Melinda and Laurie's home, which could potentially put him behind bars for 60 years.
Okay.
Well, that's good.
At least they're going to get him behind bars.
That is good.
But for all of the attacks that he made, 60 years just doesn't sound like enough.
No, absolutely not.
But let's just say that authorities are probably not quite aware yet how many attacks he has
made on women.
That's true.
Okay.
So I'm not sure if you caught this.
And I did say potentially 60 years behind bars, Shelby, because Carl's case was classified
as a use of a deadly weapon in the drowning incident.
Prosecutors considered that bathtub that he had put Laurie in as a deadly weapon.
Oh, wow.
I know.
The judge ruled his case as a nonviolent felon, which made Carl eligible for early release
from prison.
But he left her for dead.
How is that not violent?
Good question.
But it was a assault.
In these cases, Shelby, it's simple assault.
That's the crazy part of it.
I don't understand the legal system.
So I guess I have no place to make any judgment here.
It's just crazy.
Uh-huh.
Now, Carl was what the penal system considered to be a model prisoner, which allowed him,
Shelby, to subtract three days off his sentence for every one day served based on good behavior.
Can you believe that?
No.
This gave Carl a release date of May 9th, 2006.
I think at the time, there was a lot of overcrowding in the prison systems.
I don't know if they tried something new, but yeah.
What do you think about getting those three days off his sentence for every one day served?
I don't know.
That's just silly.
In 2004, Carl's release date undoubtedly created public outcry, obviously.
I'm sure.
If you look at the timeline, we know the wheels of justice do not act swiftly.
So people knew at least two years in advance that Carl would receive an early release date.
They came up with the three days off for every one day served.
So everybody was able to calculate when that release date was going to be because it was
announced.
And this obviously did not sit well with the public, nor with Mike Cox.
The Michigan attorney general at the time.
Now remember, he was attacking a lot of women in the Midwest, and then he made his way down
to Texas.
So obviously the Michigan attorney general did not have this case on the back burner.
After the Texas judicial system announced that Carl Watts would likely get that early
release, Mike Cox made an appeal to the public for anyone and everyone to come forward with
any information on the Carl Watts murder cases in Michigan that could inevitably put him
behind bars once again.
Wow.
Because Carl may have received immunity for his testimony in the Texas murders, that did
not apply to the Michigan murders.
That is a good thing, Shelby.
That's one smart attorney general.
Yeah, he is.
From this plea, naturally, witnesses did come forward.
One man who I had mentioned that had come forward back in December of 1979, he was the
one that gave that description to the sketch artist that resembled Carl Watts.
He came forward, Shelby.
Well, good for him.
Yes, absolutely.
Well, Carl did go on trial in Michigan, but the jury did not feel that this witness's
testimony held up.
But because the judge ruled that the jury could hear Carl's confessions from the Texas
cases, Carl was sentenced to two life sentences at the Lafayette Clinic, which is that mental
hospital that I had told you about, without the possibility of parole for the murders
of Gloria Steele and Helen Dutcher.
Well, that's good.
Absolutely.
At least he got those charges put on him.
Well, Carl was released from the Texas penal system in May 2006 after serving just 24 years
of his 60-year term, but he was immediately extradited to Michigan, where he was sentenced
to life in September of 2007.
So he ended up eventually dying in prison of prostate cancer at the age of 53, just
weeks after his sentencing, Shelby.
Wow.
Well, that is the story of Carl Watts, also known as the Sunday Morning Slasher.
So thank you, Alicia, for suggesting this storyline.
We would love to receive feedback on this and any of our other episodes.
So DM us on Instagram and make sure you leave a five-star rating.
What do you think, Shelbs?
Yeah, thanks so much, Alicia.
That was a very interesting story.
Do we have a teachable moment for today?
We do have a teachable moment.
It's short and sweet today, Shelbs.
I gave several examples today where women answered the door to a stranger.
I'm guilty of it.
I even had a woman barge into my house with her child one day because she wanted me to
fix her computer.
What?
Did I tell you about that?
No.
So for our listeners, John fixes computers for a living.
And if you live in Georgia, DM me.
I'll give you his information.
Well, this woman, Shelby, was actually there to speak to John, but he was not home.
And of course, when the doorbell rings, you're going to go answer it.
She literally barged her way in.
And in all aspects, Shelby, she could have been a decoy for anything else.
Somebody else could have been waiting.
She had a child with her.
So these are the little things that you need to think about.
Oh my gosh.
She was there for about an hour and I'm trying to fix her computer problems for her.
What?
You're too nice.
I am too nice.
He used to say, Oh, my wife is home.
Just ring the doorbell.
Uh-uh.
Don't do that.
Leave it on the porch.
Leave it in.
I don't know.
Just leave it somewhere.
But I'm not opening the door.
So here we go.
Teachable moment.
She's already in my house.
It could have been too late.
My point is, if you're not expecting anybody and I don't care if they know if you're home
or not, don't answer the door.
Call your significant other to see if they're expecting someone.
Call the police.
Whatever you need to do, but don't let them in the house.
I know that was really stupid of me.
It could be a matter of life and death.
Obviously, Carl used the ploy for looking for his brother in this case.
But you and I just had this conversation when we talked about the North Pond Hermit Shelves.
People will say anything as to why they're at your door.
So my teachable moment is listen to your gut.
Don't open the door to strangers.
You owe them nothing.
That's exactly right.
So there we go.
There you have it.
The story of Carl Eugene Watts.
Well, thanks.
That was a good one.
That was a pretty good one.
Thanks for listening to Dying to be Found.
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