Her Name Was Nichol Kessinger

And her lover, Chris Watts, destroyed his entire family for her.

You’ve seen her photographs: she is not dazzling. I don’t think she’s even pretty, really. She does have a big toothy white smile and wide eyes, posing for photos with her married lover. There is no doubt that Chris Watts preferred brunette women; Nichol has long dark hair, and Shanann, the pregnant wife he strangled to death, had shorter black hair, always carefully coiffed. In photo after photo of a smiling Shanann, and there are hundreds and hundreds, her makeup is always meticulous, her lipstick is always freshly applied. Nichol Kessinger wears no cosmetics in her photos. Her skin is clear, but plain. Shanann always had a custom manicure, different digits adorned with polish designs. Nichol’s nails, we see in the photos, are short and unpolished.

Chris Watts told authorities that Nichol Kessinger “…took his breath away.” This after carrying on with her within his failing marriage to a far more attractive woman, the mother of his two little daughters, Bella and Celeste. This after impregnating Shanann with the baby he told her he desperately wanted.

And this after he murdered Shanann, Bella, Celeste, and his unborn baby son, Niko. One by one. With his own two hands.

In the month leading up to the murders, those hands no longer caressed his wife, much to her dismay. Chris had been increasingly distant with Shanann, cagey about their unborn son, cold to her frantic attempts to decipher how her loving husband could suddenly become a stranger.

Shanann told her friends that she didn’t know what was going on, but I think she knew. She may not have known her name, but she wasn’t stupid. Shanann Watts knew that there was one big problem in her marriage, and it was Nichol Kessinger.

So she isn’t dazzling and she held a mundane job at the same company that employed Chris Watts, Anadarko. Was she a fascinating conversationalist? We know that she loved to “sext” back and forth with her lover. She feverishly deleted as many of the exchanges as she could during the week after Chris strangled his family. We know she was certainly interested in Shanann Watts and her life. Nichol Kessinger searched for her on Google almost a year before the murders. She researched lots of other topics, too: wedding dresses. Men who marry their mistress. How to delete text messages so that law enforcement cannot read them. Shanann Watts’ Facebook page, again and again and again.

What was it, then, about Nichol Kessinger? What about her was so compelling that Chris Watts would annihilate his own flesh and blood for a fresh start with her? Did he honestly think that he would have a new life with Nichol? What was it about her that made a seemingly normal everyday man turn to brutal, calculated, messy murder?

Nichol Kessinger does not seem a siren in her photographs. When you listen to her police interviews on YouTube, her voice is grating and nasal. I sit and I hear her voice and I think, “this is the femme fatale? This is the woman whose love was apparently worth four innocent lives?”

Her name was Nichol Kessinger. I say “was” because she is now a member of the Witness Protection Program. This mundane mistress has been given a second chance, a new life, and a new name. The same that her rival, Shanann Watts, would have been given if her husband had simply divorced her.