Select by gender or name

Carl Eugene Watts Background

Born in 1953 in Kileen, Texas, Carl Eugene Watts seemed like a normal kid; he got decent grades and was a fan of hunting and skinning rabbits with his grandfather.

But by age 12, he began to have dark fantasies of torturing and killing the opposite sex. Soon, he started stalking girls, and months before his 16th birthday, he attacked a 26-year-old woman while he was delivering newspapers.

He was arrested at his home and ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment. The psychiatrist determined he had “homicidal urges” and deemed him a threat to society.

Despite this diagnosis, Watts was discharged but returned 9 times over the following years for outpatient therapy.

The therapy didn’t help, and while he was attending Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, he got kicked out of school for stalking and assaulting women.

Crimes escalate to murder

In 1974, he started a spree of attacks that involved stabbing, strangulation, bludgeoning, or drowning. As the bodies started piling up, the Ann Arbor newspaper named the perpetrator the Sunday Morning Slasher.

Watts struck in various jurisdictions in Michigan, mainly targeting white females between the ages of 14 and 44.

He moved to Texas in 1981 and picked up where he left off in Michigan.

It all came to an end on May 23rd, 1982, when he attacked two roommates at their Houston apartment, and one escaped from a window and got help.

Watts was arrested, and the Harris County District Attorney offered him a deal that would allow him to plead guilty to aggravated burglary in exchange for a 60-year sentence.

He would also get immunity for all his other crimes if he made a full confession.

Watts agreed to the deal and admitted to 19 attacks on women in Texas that left 13 dead.

The immunity deal did not apply to the crimes he committed in Michigan, and in 2004, they took him to trial for the murder of Helen Dutcher. He was convicted and given a life sentence. He got the same sentence when he was convicted of the murder of Gloria Steele in 2007.

On September 21st, 2007, just eight days after he was sentenced for Steele’s murder, he died of prostate cancer in a Jackson, Michigan, hospital at the age of 53.