Coral Eugene Watts

What the record shows

Coral Eugene Watts was a serial killer active in Michigan and Texas from 1974 to 1982. In 1982 he confessed to 12 murders under a Texas plea agreement that gave him immunity from prosecution for those killings in exchange for a guilty plea to burglary with intent to commit murder and a 60-year sentence. He was never convicted of any murder he confessed to. His only murder convictions came two decades later in Michigan, where juries found him guilty of the 1979 killing of Helen Dutcher and the 1974 killing of Gloria Steele, neither covered by the immunity deal. He died in custody in September 2007; a Michigan task force told CBS in 2004 he remained a suspect in roughly 90 unsolved cases.

According to the Michigan Court of Appeals opinion in People v. Watts (2006), Gloria Steele, a 19-year-old Western Michigan University student, was found stabbed to death in her Kalamazoo apartment on October 30, 1974. Watts, then a student there, was arrested the next month for non-fatal choking attacks on two other young women at their apartment doors. He admitted being at Steele's complex the day before the murder but denied killing her. Wikipedia reports that he pleaded no contest to assault and battery and served a year in jail.

The same opinion recites that Rebecca Huff and Glenda Richmond were stabbed to death in the Ann Arbor area in 1980, that Watts became the chief suspect after police stopped him on November 15, 1980, while he was following a woman, and that he then moved to Texas, where more homicides and assaults quickly began. He never directly confessed to the Ann Arbor murders, which were not part of the Texas deal.

The Associated Press reported that nearly all the killings Watts confessed to occurred in 1981 and 1982 in the Houston area. He was arrested on May 23, 1982, after attacking two women in a Houston apartment; CBS News reported that one, Melinda Aguilar, escaped from a balcony and a roommate was pulled from a bathtub. On the day he was due to stand trial, Harris County prosecutors agreed to a deal: Watts pleaded guilty to burglary with intent to commit murder, received 60 years, and confessed to the unsolved killings with immunity from murder charges. AP reports in November 2004 put the count at either 12 or 13 killings, all but one in Texas.

According to AP, a Texas appeals court ruling and mandatory release laws cut more than 35 years from the term, making Watts due for release in April 2006. Wikipedia and CBS News report that the appellate court found he had not been properly advised that the bathtub counted as a deadly weapon, leaving him classified as a non-violent offender eligible for good-time credit.

Facing that release, Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox made a televised appeal in January 2004. AP reported that a witness, Joseph Foy, then came forward to say he had seen the December 1979 stabbing of Helen Dutcher, 36, in a Ferndale alley from his back porch. Watts was tried in Oakland County, where Circuit Judge Richard Kuhn admitted his Texas confessions as evidence of a pattern; the defense challenged Foy's identification from 85 feet away, 25 years earlier. A jury convicted Watts on November 17, 2004, and he received the mandatory sentence of life without parole on December 7, 2004.

On the day of that verdict, Kalamazoo prosecutors charged Watts with Steele's murder. On April 25, 2006, the Michigan Court of Appeals allowed evidence of the two 1974 Kalamazoo assaults and the Huff, Richmond, Susan Wolf and Yolanda Garcia murders to show identity and motive, while barring 11 other murders and six assaults as unfairly prejudicial. A Kalamazoo jury convicted him in July 2007, and he was sentenced to life without parole on September 13, 2007, according to Wikipedia and the Detroit Free Press. He died of prostate cancer eight days later, on September 21, 2007, aged 53.

Watts was born in Killeen, Texas, on November 7, 1953, and grew up in Inkster, Michigan. According to Wikipedia, he was treated at a Detroit psychiatric clinic after assaulting a woman in 1969 and enrolled at Western Michigan University in 1974.