Chris Watts' dark 'fantasy' that drove him to murder family revealed by prison pen pal

Chris Watts' 'motherly' penpal has revealed what she believes led him to murder his pregnant wife Shanann Watts and their two children, four-year-old Bella and Celeste, three.

Cherlyn Cadle has been in contact with Watts for a number of years, speaking to him via letter and over the phone, after he was sentenced to a life behind bars in 2018 in the horrific case detailed in the Netflix film American Murder: The Family Next Door.

Crime author Cadle wanted to try and understand more about Watts and what could've driven him to perform such hideous acts.

The 72-year-old has now spoken out about the murderer's dark 'fantasies' and how it could've sparked his desire to completely destroy his family.

At the time of the murders, Watts had been having an affair with Nichol Kessinger and since then has bragged in his prison letters to Cadle, claiming he and mis mistress were having sex three or four times a day.

Chris Watts and his wife Shanann and two children, Belle and Cece (Netflix)

While their pen pal friendship started off with Cadle being a motherly figure, their correspondence became much darker when Watts started revealing intimate details of his relationship with Kessinger.

Grandmother Cadle described their secret romance as 'very sexual, very twisted, very mixed up' and suggested this was 'part of why I believe he did what he did,' according to an interview with the Daily Mail.

She believes he got some kind of sexual thrill from telling her about his sex life, as well as the heinous crimes he committed.

"I think there's some sort of fetish there," she said. "To say things to shock people. And he told me, who he saw as a mother figure, those details about different sex acts he did with a woman."

Cadle previously released a book called The Murders of Chris Watts, in 2020, where she included gruesome letters in which he detailed his desires to kill his wife and failed initial attempts to murder his daughters.

Watts left people all over the world horrified after it was discovered that he was the man responsible for strangling his pregnant wife and suffocating his two daughters, before burying Shanann in a shallow grave and disposing of his children in crude oil tanks.

Watts was having an affair with his co-worker Nichol Kessinger (Netflix)

The 40-year-old even appeared on local TV pleading with people to come forward with information to find his missing family.

He eventually confessed to his crimes in November 2018, after narrowly avoided the death penalty and was instead handed five life sentences without parole, having spent the last seven years inside the Dodge Correctional Institution, a maximum security prison in Wisconsin.

Watts' former cellmate Dylan Tallman previously revealed the killer had turned to religion American journalist Nancy Grace called him out live on television.

He recalled: "She addressed him through the TV, saying, 'Chris Watts, I want to talk to you.' They showed pictures of his wife and daughters.

"It affected him. He fell to his knees and confessed his sins. It sounds weird, but that's when he became a man of faith.

"I think that was his rock bottom, when he was confronted with all the things he had done and how many lives he had ruined. That was a lot for him. He turned to God after that."