He would have no idea just how much bigger it really was.
*
EVIL EY ES 17
August 10, 1982, Harris County District Attorney’s Office, Special Crimes Unit, Houston, Texas
Carl “Coral” Eugene Watts leaned forward in his sturdy wooden chair with his elbows on the long, dark brown conference table. The handsome man placed his chin on his fists. With him were his court-appointed attorneys, Zinetta Burney and Don Caggins, of the law firm of Burney, Caggins and Hartsfield. Watts’s twenty-one-year-old girlfriend, Sheila Williams, whom he met at church, knew Caggins, who taught a paralegal course she had taken. Caggins specialized in civil rights issues. His part-ner, Burney, handled criminal matters. The three sat and waited.
The five-foot-eleven-inch, 160-pound, African Ameri-can Watts looked bored.
After several minutes, the door opened. In walked a cadre of Houston police detectives, including Tom Ladd, his younger brother, Jim Ladd, Kenny Williamson, and Mike Kardatzke. They were joined by Harris County as-sistant district attorneys (ADA) Ira L. Jones II and Jack Frels. The six men took their places around the rectan-gular table.
They were not there just simply to talk about Watts’s attack on Lori Lister and Melinda Aguilar. Watts had many more stories to tell. Thirteen years earlier to the day, in Los Angeles, California, Charles Manson’s band of followers brutally massacred seven people, including actress Sharon Tate, in a crime that shocked the world and was splashed all over the headlines. The story Coral Eugene Watts began to tell was even more astounding and frightening.
Tom Ladd took charge of the questioning during the videotaped proceedings.
“Okay, Coral, we’re gonna start this off. You understand,
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at this point, during this interview, we’re only gonna talk about cases that fall under the Harris County District Attorney’s Office jurisdiction.” Watts solemnly nodded his head. “We’ve decided that a good way to start this was, we’re gonna go over the ones we talked about yesterday. All right?”
“Uh-huh,” Watts muttered.
Carl Eugene Watts was born in Killeen, Texas, on November 7, 1953, to parents Richard and Dorothy Mae. One year prior to his birth, his parents were married in Coalwood, West Virginia, located in the southernmost portion of the state. Richard Watts, who was several years older than Dorothy Mae, was also a private in the army. He had been transferred in 1953 to Fort Hood in Killeen, a town almost directly between Austin and Waco—an area that later would be known as the “Texas Bermuda Trian-gle,” with such outlandish crimes as the Charles Whit-man University of Texas tower shooting of fifteen people on August 1, 1966, the massacre of eighty-two Branch Da-vidians, led by David Koresh, at Mt. Carmel, just outside of Waco, on April 19, 1993, and the country’s most noto-rious mass murder by a single individual, George Hennard, who killed twenty-two diners at a Luby’s Cafeteria (a twenty-third person died later) in Killeen, Texas, on October 16, 1991.
Before Hennard’s rampage, Killeen was known as the home to Fort Hood. On January 15, 1942, the United States War Department selected the tiny town, located sixty miles northeast of Austin, as the location for its Tank
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Corey Mitchell
Destroyer Tactical and Firing Center. At that time the base was known as Camp Hood. After the acquisition of more than 108,000 acres of land and the infusion of nearly
$23,000,000, Camp Hood opened its gates on September 18, 1942. Within half a year, there were nearly ninety-five thousand troops and more than four thousand prisoners of war on-site.
Within two years, at the end of World War II, the base was stripped down, equipment was removed off-site, and the troops dwindled to eleven thousand, along with just under two thousand POWs. By 1950, Camp Hood had been renamed Fort Hood.
By the time Richard Watts was assigned to Fort Hood, the camp had been transformed into a permanent instal-lation for troop training during the Korean War. Many grunts from Fort Hood were shipped out to the Far East to face combat.
Allegedly, the Watts family packed up their belongings and relocated back to Coalwood just three days after Carl’s birth. One year later, the Watts family welcomed a daughter, Sharon Yvonne, into the family.
By 1955, the idyllic structure of the Watts clan had been ripped apart. Richard left Dorothy and the kids forever. No specific reason was ever given for his departure.
Dorothy once again packed up her meager belongings, dressed up her two children, and hopped into her car and drove straight through to the tiny town of Inkster, Michigan, located just fifteen miles west of Detroit.
Dorothy Mae Watts took a job as an art teacher at a nearby Detroit high school. Somehow, she managed to cope raising her children while maintaining her job.
Dorothy often returned to Coalwood, West Virginia, to visit her mama, Lula Mae Young. Coalwood is best-known as the home to author and budding scientist Homer
EVIL EY ES 23
Hickam, who wrote about the small town in his bestselling book,
Rocket Boys
, which was later made into a popular movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal, renamed
October Sky
. Hickam may have even encountered Watts at the time when Watts would visit his grandmother.
Hickam described Coalwood as a town that “was built for the purpose of extracting the millions of tons of rich bituminous coal that lay beneath it.” The two thousand residents of Coalwood all worked for the local mining company, Carter Coal Company, which eventually became Olga Coal Company, and lived in company-owned homes. Most workers were known as “bone pickers,” the men who separated the rock from the coal. Carl loved to visit his West Virginia grandmother, who lived in a house on a hill with nothing but the forest behind it. While he was there, Carl adapted the thick Appalachian drawl common to the area and prevalent among his cousins. They would draw out the letters in Carl’s name until it sounded like coral, like a coral reef—a beautiful organism that lives beneath the surface and is dangerous to the touch. Carl liked the Coalwood-ized sound of
his name, so he asked his mother to change it for him.
Carl Watts was now known as Coral.
It would be the first of several dramatic changes in his life.
Coral loved the backwoods of the Appalachian coun-tryside. He and his sister, Sharon, used to enjoy playing in the creek behind their grandmother’s home. That is, until Lula Mae found out what they were doing and had a fit. She warned the children that the creek was full of snakes and they were putting themselves in danger by playing out there.
The West Virginia forests held a plethora of trophies for Coral to hunt. His favorite prey was the jackrabbit. He
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enjoyed hunting down the beautiful creatures with his grandfather. He also enjoyed the touch of their soft pelts. He also learned how to skin the li’l critters.
According to
Houston Chronicle
reporter Evan Moore, Watts’s grandmother believed that Coral “was always a good little boy.” He enjoyed being close to women. “He was always around me or his mother. Even when the children got older and some of the boys would be goin’ out at night, maybe drinkin’ or chasin’ women or gettin’ in trouble, he stayed right up here with me. He wasn’t interested in that sort of thing.”
Back in Inkster, Michigan, Watts struggled in school. According to Moore, he had difficulty with school but put in long hours for his homework. The extra effort paid off as Watts earned good grades.
In 1961, however, Watts suffered a major setback. He was stricken with meningitis, an inflammation of the membrane that surrounds the brain and spinal cord, caused by a viral infection. Actually, he and Sharon both were stricken. Dorothy took both of her children to Detroit General Hospital, which took in Sharon but refused to see Coral. No reason was given.
Sharon had contracted bacterial meningitis and was given a clean bill of health.
Coral, on the other hand, was not so lucky. He suffered from a debilitating fever and was forced into an extended hospital stay at Herman Keifer Hospital. It turned out that not only did he have a severe bout of meningitis, but he was also diagnosed with polio. While in the hospital, Coral was subjected to numerous painful spinal taps and was often isolated from the rest of the patients.
The combination of meningitis and polio kept Watts down so much physically that he missed the entire third grade of school. His attention span dropped after that
EVIL EY ES 25
point and his studies suffered as a result. Watts used to complain that after the bout of meningitis his memory often failed him.
In 1962, Dorothy Mae Watts met a mechanic’s assistant from Detroit named Norman Ceaser. Coral’s stepfather had six children of his own before he married Dorothy. Together, the couple had two more children, which made for an extremely crowded household. Also, a household in which it was very easy to get lost in the mix if you did not attempt to get noticed.
According to Coral’s younger sister, Sharon, Coral did not stand out. “He was always real quiet and almost shy. He was just very introverted.” She also discussed his temper. “He was actually very even-tempered, mainly because he used to just hold everything in. It would take a lot to get under his skin or to upset him.” Apparently, when he did get upset, he was quite volatile.
According to Sharon, Watts was not violent or abusive to her or anyone else in the family. She also stressed that neither their mother nor their stepfather ever abused any of the kids. In fact, they doted on Coral at her expense. She stated if anyone picked on anyone, it was she who picked on him.
Despite Watts’s personal and mental setbacks, he seemed to be growing up and becoming a normal kid, with a strong love of sports. Sharon Watts also recalled he worked through his frustrations in life with sports. Coral was an excellent baseball player, football player, and track star, who specialized in the one-hundred-yard high
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hurdles. He was quite the star athlete at Northeastern High School and seemed to be calmer when competing. Watts was also a successful boxer, who won a Golden Gloves boxing title in the middleweight division. He eventually quit boxing. He told his sister he quit “because he couldn’t take a punch.” He had always landed the punches and scored the knockouts; but the first time he
got knocked down, he gave up on the sport.
Unfortunately, Watts’s walk on the right side of life was short-lived. His academics took a beating. By the time he was fifteen years old, he was only reading at a fourth-grade level. He just did not seem to care anymore.
Watts’s first run-in with the law occurred around 7:30
A
.
M
. on June 25, 1969, at age fifteen. He had been earning spending money as a paper delivery boy in nearby Detroit. One morning, as he delivered papers to an apartment complex in Detroit, he attacked a twenty-six-year-old white woman, Joan Gave, one of his regular customers.
Watts knocked on Gave’s door. As she opened it, he reared back his arm and punched her square in the face, completely unprovoked. He continued to punch her in the face. Gave eventually bellowed out a scream. Watts took off. Instead of fleeing the scene, however, Watts returned to complete the delivery of his papers. When he was done, he went home.
Four days later, several police officers showed up at the Ceaser household doorstep. They were there to arrest the minor Coral. When they cuffed him, he did not seem too concerned. When asked why he did it, Watts replied, “I just felt like beating someone up.”
Instead of being held in juvenile detention, Watts was taken to the Lafayette Mental Clinic, a forensic psychi-atry center located in Detroit, on September 2, 1969. While in Lafayette, Watts admitted that he first had sex at fourteen. He did not, however, have much interest in girls. He also claimed that he was raised to believe that sex equaled “wicked behavior.”
According to Watts’s patient evaluation, he also experienced some disturbing dreams of beating up women and even killing them. When asked how he felt after such a dream, he responded, “I feel better after I have one.” After several weeks of evaluation and treatment, Watts still did not express remorse for his attack on Gave. His mother and stepfather were at a loss for his unpredictable behavior. Dorothy Ceaser did tell Dr. Gary M.
Ainsworth, her son’s mental clinician, that Coral would often make his sister cry with his bullying behavior.
Though Coral’s parents were clueless, Dr. Ainsworth understood exactly what was happening. The doctor believed that Coral was “an impulsive individual who has a passive-aggressive orientation to life. There is no evidence of psychosis in the examination, although there
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[is] some confusion in thinking when the situation becomes overly complex.”
Dr. Ainsworth concluded by stating that Watts “is a paranoid young man who is struggling for control of strong homicidal impulses. His behavior controls are faulty, and there is a high potential for violent acting out. This individual is considered dangerous.”
The clinic’s recommendation for Watts was outpatient treatment.
He was free to go.
Coral Eugene Watts was released from Lafayette Mental Clinic on November 7, 1969. It was his sixteenth birth-day.
Over the next five years, from 1969 to 1974, Watts reported back to the Lafayette Mental Clinic for outpatient treatment less than ten times. He also began to dabble in drugs, including marijuana, methamphetamine, and a variety of pills. He started to withdraw from his friends. He also got into trouble at school for his behavior with girls.
Coral’s lone source of enjoyment seemed to come from sports. He continued to excel in football and boxing. He received All-City honors as a tailback for Northeastern High School in Detroit. On the football field or in the boxing ring were the only times he could take out his frustrations on another human being and not worry about getting into trouble with the law. He claimed that it was his way of dealing with abusive parents. Coral later stated that his mother was verbally abusive and that his stepfather, when he was not drunk, was mean and physically abusive. Claims that everyone else in Watts’s family has denied.