Coral Eugene Watts Victims

Case background and investigation

Carl Eugene Watts, widely known by the nickname Coral, was born on November 7, 1953, and grew up in the Detroit area. Wikipedia's account of the case dates his killings to the years between 1974 and 1982, first in Michigan and then, after he moved to Houston in 1981, in Texas. His victims were women, most of them young, and the methods varied and included stabbing, strangulation and drowning.

Watts was arrested in Houston on May 23, 1982, after he attacked two women, Lori Lister and Melinda Aguilar, in an apartment, according to the Texas True Crime Blog's summary of the case. Both survived. Texas prosecutors then reached an agreement with him: he would plead guilty to burglary with intent to murder and receive a 60-year sentence, and in return for describing his crimes he would not be prosecuted for the murders he admitted.

According to NBC News, the immunity covered 12 killings, 11 in Texas and one in Michigan. Wikipedia states that he formally confessed to 13 murders and later claimed many more. He led detectives to the graves of three victims. Investigators in several jurisdictions have said they suspect him of additional killings, but the total has never been established.

The sentence did not hold as intended. A Texas appeals court ruling on how the offense had been classified, combined with the state's mandatory release rules of the period, cut the time he would serve by more than 35 years, NBC News reported, and his release was scheduled for 2006. He had told authorities that he would kill again if freed, according to the same report.

In January 2004 Michigan's attorney general made a televised appeal for information about unsolved cases that fell outside the immunity agreement. A witness came forward who said he had seen the 1979 stabbing of Helen Dutcher, 36, in a Detroit suburb. Watts was tried in Michigan and convicted of her murder on November 17, 2004; he was sentenced to life in prison the following month. On the day of that verdict, authorities in Kalamazoo charged him with the October 1974 killing of Gloria Steele, a Western Michigan University student.

A jury convicted him of Steele's murder on July 27, 2007, and he was sentenced on September 13, 2007, to life without parole. Watts died of prostate cancer eight days later, on September 21, 2007, at age 53, while in Michigan custody. He was never tried for the killings covered by the Texas agreement.