Michigan serial killer Coral Watts is subject of new crime series on Oxygen network
Among his Michigan victims were the mother of a 3-year-old girl and a former Detroit News food writer.
But it's suspected that serial killer Coral Eugene Watts slayed far more women than those tied to his court cases and confessions.
Watts, who died in 2007 while serving two life sentences in Michigan, is the first subject of a new true crime series called 'Unknown Serial Killers of America.' It premiered May 18 on the TV network Oxygen.
The series explores 'murderers who remain unknown to the general public, although they were as deadly as Dahmer and Bundy,' according to the Oxygen True Crime website.
Watts was the focus of the first episode but before that he was the subject of much Free Press reporting amid the prosecution of his crimes.
Here's what to know:
Watts has been called one of the nation's most prolific serial killers. He operated in the 1970s and 1980s, confessed to killing people in Texas and Michigan, and was almost released on parole down south before Michigan stepped in with murder cases.
Courts identified the serial killer who confessed to killing roughly a dozen women in Michigan and Texas as Coral Watts, but the Oxygen show identifies him as Carl 'Coral' Watts.
The serial killer was born in Texas and named Carl, but 'changed his first name to Coral to reflect how Carl was pronounced in the Southern drawl of his mother's family,' the Free Press reported in 2004.
Though born in Texas, Watts' parents divorced, and his mom moved him to Inkster, the Free Press reported in 2004.
In his youth, he spent some time with a family member in West Virginia and stayed in Detroit's Indian Village, the Free Press reported. He attended Western Michigan University for a period.
A former police chief once said his department's heavy surveillance of Watts after three deaths in Ann Arbor may have driven Watts to leave the state.
Watts wound up back in Texas and later confessed to numerous murders there.
Watts specifically confessed to 12 killings in Texas and one in Michigan but was convicted of two deaths in Michigan that he never copped to.
When Watts died, it was reported that investigators thought he may have killed as many as 80 people.
A Michigan investigator who tracked him and is included in the Oxygen show, Paul Bunten, once described an interview with Watts and three others in Texas in the early 1980s.
Bunten said to Watts: "I don't have enough fingers and toes to count how many people you killed."
Watts, according to Bunten, said: "There are not enough fingers and toes in this room."
That's according to a Free Press report.
Bunten, a former Ann Arbor investigator who became the police chief in Saline, later told the Free Press: "The number of women he actually killed is probably staggering.'
Watts assaulted some women who survived, including several believed to have been in Windsor. Others were killed in his attacks.
Suspected:
Watts was interviewed but never convicted in three 1980 stabbing deaths in Ann Arbor. The suspect sought in the case was deemed the "Sunday Morning Slasher" given the time the three women were found.
There was the Pioneer High School senior, Shirley Small, 17; the popular student hotspot Brown Jug Restaurant night manager Glenda Richmond, who was in her 20s; and University of Michigan graduate student and former airline stewardess Rebecca Greer Huff, 30, according to reports from The Ann Arbor News.
A Court of Appeals order noted that Watts told an investigator they didn't need to keep looking for the killer in the Ann Arbor cases.
As determined by conviction:
Gloria Steele, 19, was a young mother and Western Michigan University sophomore when Watts stabbed her to death in 1974.
Helen Dutcher was a 36-year-old woman living in Ferndale when Watts stabbed her to death in December 1979 in an alley near 8 Mile and Woodward Avenue.
As determined by confession:
Jeanne Clyne, 44, was a former Detroit News food writer and wife. Clyne was walking home from an appointment when Watts stabbed her to death on Halloween 1979 in Grosse Pointe Farms.
Watts also confessed to strangling, hanging and drowning women in Texas.
The women identified by the Free Press as his victims were: Linda Tilley, 22, a University of Texas senior; Elizabeth Montgomery, 25, who was walking her dog; Susan Wolf, 21, who was stabbed two hours after Montgomery; Phyllis Tamm, 27, who had been jogging; Margaret Fossi, 25, a student at Rice University; Elena Semander, 20, a University of Houston student; Emily LaQua, 14, who had recently arrived in Texas to be with her father; Edith (Anna) Ledet, 34, a newlywed celebrating her graduation from medical school; Yolanda Garcia, 22, the mother of a 6-month-old; Carrie Jefferson, 32, a post office worker; Suzanne Searles, 25, a graphic artist and aspiring children's book illustrator, and Michelle Maday, 23, who was leaving her own birthday party.
Within hours of his attack on Maday, Watts tried to kill a pair of roommates in Texas. He tried to drown one and as he did, the other escaped over a second-story balcony with her hands bound and screamed for help, the Free Press reported in 2004.
Police arrived and arrested Watts. He got a plea deal. In exchange for his murder confessions, he pleaded guilty to burglary with intent to commit murder and got immunity in those murders he admitted to, the Free Press reported.
He was sentenced to 60 years in prison in 1982 but between an appellate decision and good behavior, he was set for parole in 2006, according to Free Press reports.
In 2004, amid news coverage and pleas by officials, a witness to Helen Dutcher's murder in Ferndale reached back out to police. He provided key testimony at trial.
Watts was convicted in Dutcher's death and, despite his pleas of innocence in the case, was sentenced to life in prison in late 2004. He was also charged in Gloria Steele's death.
Watts died in 2007 from prostate cancer in the prison ward of a Jackson-area hospital, the Free Press reported at the time. He was 53.
He had just been sentenced the week before in the death of 19-year-old Gloria Steele in Kalamazoo, the New York Times reported.
While doing newspaper deliveries in his teens in Detroit, Watts beat a woman because he 'felt like it,' the Free Press reported. She was able to fend him off, and he was committed for several months to receive psychiatric treatment.
A Texas official told a reporter that Watts viewed women as 'evil.'
There was some debate over whether a bout of meningitis could have impacted Watts. He also described abuse at home and the killing of an uncle by an aunt, according to reporting by the Free Press.
However, a psychologist once said Watts knew the difference between right and wrong but had no regard for it, the Free Press reported.
One Michigan investigator who had sought Watts, Paul Bunten, once asked Watts why he killed, according to a Free Press article at the time of Watts' death.
"He said he would take that to his grave, and he did," Bunten said.
The show airs at 7 p.m. Sundays on Oxygen. Though the Watts episode ran May 18, it appeared to be listed for a re-run on the evening of May 19 and appeared viewable through services like YouTube TV.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Coral Watts subject of 'Unknown Serial Killers of America' on Oxygen
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