There is no definitive science on what causes a serial killer — nature? nurture? — but surely the fact that Carl Eugene Watts nearly died as a child from meningitis plays into his later depredations. Before his brush with death, he was apparently a normal child. Afterwards, he began having dreams of torturing and killing women and girls. Crucially, these dreams did not bother Watts — he enjoyed having them.
At some point, dreams weren’t enough. As a young teen, he beat a customer on his paper route, and in college he lost his football scholarship and was expelled for stalking and assaulting women.
He went to a new college and escalated from assault to outright murder. Unlike most serial killers, Watts did not only “hunt” close to home — he traveled all over Michigan to find his victims, and when he later relocated to Texas, he drove out of his way to Houston to find more. Also unlike most serial killers, Watts did not hunt within his racial group; most of his victims were white.
Eventually arrested, Watts was primed to be paroled early due to a legal technicality. Prosecutors essentially begged witnesses to come forward so that they could charge him with something — anything — to keep him in prison. The tactic worked and a new case saw him sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2007 of prostate cancer.
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