The woman who had an affair with Chris Watts before he killed his family told police that he had been losing weight and was getting little sleep in the weeks before he murdered his pregnant wife Shanann Watts and their two daughters, 4-year-old Bella and 3-year-old Celeste.
CrimeOnline obtained a transcript of an August 21 phone interview Kessinger gave investigators. The Weld County District Attorney provided the transcript along with additional documents as part of a Colorado Open Records Request.
Kessinger had been involved in an affair with Chris Watts at the time of the murders. The two reportedly met at Anadarko Petroluem, where they both worked at the time, and began a relationship sometime in June that continued until Shannan Watts went missing with her daughters in mid-August. Two days later, Kessinger contacted authorities to inform them of her relationship with Watts. The documents released by the Weld County District Attorney’s Office show that investigators spoke with Kessinger several times, in person and on the phone, in the days following her disclosure.
In the August 21 interview, conducted by phone with Colorado Bureau of Investigation Agent Kevin Koback, Kessinger discusses Watts’s use of Thrive, a nutritional supplement patch that Shanann Watts sold as a Multi-Level Marketer for a company called Le-Vel. Kessinger said that Chris had lost a lot of weight in the weeks and months preceding the murders and had become very fitness-focused.
Kessinger said that Watts had recommended she also use Thrive, but that she wasn’t interested and he didn’t push the issue.
“I do remember him mentioning to me when he first tried to introduce me to Thrive … that you needed one patch a day … and when he would hang out with me, he always wore two — always wore two,” Kessinger said.
“So the thing that caught my attention about this recently when I was thinking about it is the fact that … I think maybe the reason he was doing the two a day, and this is just speculation, is because it had, like, plateaued so maybe he was doubling up because he thought it had plateaued. So the reason that this comes to my attention is because of this weight loss … he lost 13 pounds in about 5 weeks.”
Kessinger said that Watts seemed to have a lot of energy, and that she would often need to take a nap after work on days she would see him.
“He, like, didn’t need to sleep,” Kessinger said. “And he was always that way …when we would hang out … I would try to get him to go to bed at, like, 10:00 every night. I’m, like, ‘If you’re gonna stay here, you need to go to bed at, like, 10:00 because I have to get up and go to work in the morning and so do you.'”
“And he would keep me up, like, every night … it kind of fluctuated, but typically I would say that we went to bed… when he stayed the night at my house on those nights, somewhere between 11:00 and midnight every night. And it used to bug me because … I was so tired.”
“It was like he was on speed,” Kessinger said.
CrimeOnline also received a transcript of a CBI interview with Nicole Atkinson, a close friend of Shanann Watts and the person who first called police to report her missing on August 13. Atkinson also worked selling Thrive, and told an investigator that Watts had “lost 70, 80 pounds” since he stared using Thrive and working out more in the preceding six months.
When the investigator asked Atkinson more about Thrive, she said that it “time releases vitamins and minerals into your body all day long,” giving you energy and “mental clarity.”
“You actually stop craving [food] that you would normally want,” Atkinson said, telling the investigator that she no longer craved certain sweets or drank coffee since she started using Thrive.
Chris Watts pleaded guilty last month to killing his wife and daughters, and is now serving multiple life prison sentences without the possibility of parole.
