Evil Eyes (25 page)

Watts spent the next fifteen days locked away in soli-tary confinement. In addition, he lost all 181 good-time credit days he had earned up to that point.

Watts was also added to a higher-security-risk list. As a result, he was transferred to the Texas Department of Corrections Eastham Unit in Lovelady, Texas, thirteen miles west of Trinity on FM 230. Eastham had a rougher reputation as a correctional facility that was capable of keeping its guests in line and behind bars. One way of doing that was forcing the inmates to perform difficult farm-based chores, such as working with cows, calves, and heifers, train security dogs and horses, farm mainte-nance, working crops and feed mills.

Watts was one of more than twenty-four hundred inmates at Eastham.

The intervening years provided some interesting changes in the way that crime was fought in Texas and in the world. The first such situation involved the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP). The idea for a computerized database to be used to track murders that were possibly committed by serial offenders had been kicked around for more than twenty-five years by a man named David Brooks, of Los Angeles. Brooks worked on the case of Harvey Glatman, a pseudo-photojournalist from Los Angeles who had a penchant for setting up fake photo shoots and killing his would-be models. Brooks had antagonized his superiors for decades before they finally stood up and took notice.

In August 1983, Brooks, along with Sam Houston State University criminologist Dr. Doug Moore, held a symposium at Sam Houston State, which is located in Huntsville. Dr. Moore was appointed the project director for VICAP and given a grant from the United States Justice Department for $136,000.

Moore referenced that cases such as the Coral Watts murders and the earlier Dean Corll/Elmer Wayne Henley/ David Brooks (no relation to the aforementioned FBI

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agent) killing spree combined with recent statistics indicated that nearly five thousand people “are murdered each year without apparent motive by sadomasochists, child abusers, or wholesalers of child pornography.” Moore believed that such a centralized, nationwide system would have been useful in attempting to capture Watts sometime during the middle of his murderous rampage. “The fact is, there were strong suspicions about Watts,” the professor reasoned. “A centralized information site could have delivered more information on the patterns of behavior he was suspected of exhibiting in other places.” Moore hoped that VICAP would be accepted by a national agency as the latest in modernized crime-fighting technological advances. “We think we’ll be able to find more serial or mass murders, rapes, and molestations,”

Moore inferred.

Justice Department spokesman Drew McKillips lauded the efforts by Brooks and Moore and the virtues of the V ICAP program. “The mass murders (most serial killings were called ‘mass murders’ back in the day) now are turn-ing up as if by sheer accident through a casual remark made by two investigators on a plane.” VICAP would pool these pieces of information together and help to coor-dinate killers’ patterns for investigating authorities to use in their attempts at capturing a killer.

Moore stated at the Sam Houston State symposium that the formal presentation would take place the following June before the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delin-quency Prevention. The goal was to attain approval and $10 million in funding.

Harriett Semander, and her husband, Zaharias, were not going to let the pressure off Coral Watts. The couple

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filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Watts for the death of their daughter Elena—despite the fact that they knew they would probably never receive a penny from the confessed killer of their beloved daughter. The lawsuit stated that they were seeking compensation for “damages to the familial unit and loss of love, advice, comfort and companionship.” They also claimed to suffer from severe mental anguish over the death of their daughter.

The Semanders had no ill-conceived notion that they would ever get paid by Coral Watts. They mainly filed the suit to remind him that they were always going to be watching him, that there was someone out there who would not forget the women that he had killed and that they would always be there to remind him of their pain and loss. Watts was served with the process on September 10, 1984. It would be nearly four-and-a-half years later before a court made a decision on the case.

Less than one month later, it was discovered that the Board of Pardons and Paroles did not have any official mention of the murders Coral Watts had committed. In addition, there was no mention of the deadly-weapon charge in the attack on Lori Lister included in the file. Harriett Semander was disgusted when she found out. “No confession? I just want to scream. I just don’t want to believe it.”

Harris County trial bureau chief Bert Graham, of the district attorney’s office, could not believe it either. Graham was worried that there could be serious reper-cussions down the line when Watts would come up for parole. “There’s no sense taking even a five percent chance on somebody like Watts.”

Parole board chairman Ruben M. Torres did not seem fazed. He informed Graham that the file would be ready to go by the time Watts would be eligible for parole for

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the first time in 2002. “I can assure you,” Torres attempted to comfort, “there will be adequate information in the file when the file is received.” He added, “That’s been my experience since 1979. You can only go by past history.”

If the past history of the Coral Watts case was any indication, Graham believed the file needed to be updated immediately. “I can guarantee you they are going to have a statement of facts on Coral in a couple of days.”

Another consequence to the Coral Eugene Watts murder spree involved the so-called “multiple murder” bill. Had Watts been convicted of the murders of the thirteen women he had confessed to killing, he would not have received the death penalty back then. Texas, the execution-happy capital of the United States, known for its “Texecutions,” did not have legislation in place for a criminal such as Coral Watts.

Since Watts neither raped his victims nor robbed them, he would not have an additional offense tacked on to elevate his charges to a capital offense. At the time the only types of crimes that constituted capital murder in Texas were:

• Murder of an on-duty peace officer or firefighter
  

• Murder in the course of kidnapping, burglary, robbery, aggravated sexual assault, or arson
  

• Murder for hire
  

• Murder while escaping a penal institution
  

• Murder of a penal employee while incarcerated in a penal institution
  

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On June 29, 1984, a Moroccan national named Abdelkrim Belachheb mowed down six people with a gun at a Dallas, Texas, nightclub known as Ianni’s Restaurant. Belachheb was not charged with capital murder, since multiple murder was not on the books at the time.

Belachheb was convicted on November 15, 1984, and received a life-in-prison sentence. Four months later, Tony Polumbo (D-Houston), a state representative, helped pass a new measure, House Bill 8, that would include multiple murders—whether at one time, or as part of a series of ongoing murders—onto the list of crimes that would immediately constitute a capital offense. Polumbo cited not only the Dallas shooting, but also the case of Coral Eugene Watts.

The bill was passed by both the Texas House and the Senate the following month; it was later signed into law by Texas governor Mark White.

Coral Watts’s time in prison from 1984 to 1987 was low-key—at least to the eye of the public. Apparently, he had been spending his time in a productive manner. He began to hit the prison library to bone up on the law. He also began to hit the weights to build up his strength, so as to protect himself. Prisoners who kill a score of females tend to be targeted by inmates looking to make a name for themselves.

As a result Watts became angrier, stronger, and smarter. Zinetta Burney, Watts’s defense attorney, spoke of an annual visit she made with Watts’s mother, to visit her former client. Watts was sequestered in a prison psychi-atric ward. What Burney saw scared the hell out of her. “He’s taken his evil to greater heights,” Burney informed the
Houston Post
. “I feel he is more dangerous than ever before. He still thinks in terms of killing and

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murder, but I’m not sure that he’d only kill women anymore.”

Burney also said that the prison guards basically treated Watts like an animal . . . and she felt they were right to do so. “In prison they used to treat him like anyone else. Now he comes to see his mother in handcuffs with guards on either side of him, and he looks like if they turned his hands loose, he would just attack. It’s almost animal-like.”

Larry Fossi, Meg Fossi’s husband, still burned the torch for his late wife. The now-thirty-year-old widower stated, “I have not stopped thinking about it. I have not stopped missing Meg. I don’t think I ever will.” As for Watts, he simply burned. “I still get chills when I go through Huntsville.”

Fossi, like Harriett Semander, wanted Watts to know that he would never quit the fight to keep him behind bars. “I will not rest in peace as long as Watts is alive. I very much regret Coral Watts is alive.”

Harriett Semander spoke of an unwanted, bizarre kinship she had with her daughter’s killer. “He’s like a part of the family. When you think of Elena, you think about Coral Watts. He has become a part of my life.”

Semander was worried that somehow Coral Watts would, yet again, slip through the cracks. He had been so lucky so many times before, she was convinced that something would happen again. “If he comes up for parole twenty years from now,” the headstrong yet soft-spoken Greek mother insisted, “I’ve asked the parole board to notify me.”

Finally Ken Williamson, who was part of the four-man Homicide team that interrogated Watts during the confessions, expressed his concern that Watts might be released in the future. “I know good and well he did more

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killings.” He also said of Watts that “I don’t think he’s going to be cured.”

Williamson added a chilling coda: “I guarantee he’ll do it again if he gets out. And the exact words he told us were ‘If I ever get out, I’m coming back to Houston.’”

The thought of America’s most notorious serial killer being paroled seemed impossible. And in of all places

. . . Texas. The one state with a worldwide reputation as a hard-ass on all criminals—especially brutal serial murderers.

That reputation did not deter Coral Watts from seeking his freedom. The five years in prison that he had spent strengthening his body protected him from those inside. He hoped the simultaneous strengthening of his mind would protect him from those outside the prison walls. One of his first attempts at obtaining freedom came in the form of a writ of habeas corpus that he filed on May 30, 1986. The nine-page, hand-printed petition displayed an advanced understanding of the law, usually beyond most prisoners. Watts proclaimed that he was “being unlawfully restrained of his liberty” and that his conviction for a “Bergalrey [
sic
] of A Habitation with Intent to commit Murder” and his subsequent sentence was “in violation of the Petitioners Constitutional Right guaranteed to him pursuant to the Fifth (5
th
) and Four-teenth (14
th
) Amendments of the Texas and United

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States Constitutions thereby rendering the plea and Conviction Void and unavailable for any Purpose.”

Watts reasoned that he had been tried unfairly because “Petitioner was Questioned by three (3) detectives being Tom ladd, Jim ladd, and an unknown investigator without counselor, unknown detective made threats of Physical brutality to Petitioner as well as other methods to get people to talk. . . .”

One of those methods, Watts claimed, included threat-ening to take his daughter, Nakisha, away. “On August 9, 1982,” Watts opined, “officers made . . . threats to taking Petitioners daughter . . . and place her in a home if Petitioner would not make a confession to a series of crimes to
clean up the books
.” Watts was no longer fessing up to the murders. He continued: “Whereas on August 9, 1982 Petitioner made confessions as well as Plead guilty to an offense for sixty (60) Years before of [
sic
] threats to take his daughter and placing her in a home. (Note: Defense Counsel and Prosecution were fully aware of such threats before, during and after Petitioner entered his Plead of Guilty).”

Watts attached an affidavit from former girlfriend Sheila Williams to the petition. In the affidavit Williams backed up Watts’s claims in regard to his daughter. She swore that she “was living with Coral Watts prior to and during his incidental arrest for an alleged series of offenses,” and that she had taken care of his daughter, Nakisha, after Watts’s arrest. She added, “I was later barred from our apartment where Police confiscated the apartment whereas we had lived by changing the lock and denying me entry.” Williams explicitly swore that “officers then took Coral Watts daughter
Nakisha Watts
from my custody without Coral Watts’ permission or request, whereas as Coral Watts on regular intervals demanded

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Houston Police to return his daughter
Nakisha Watts
back to my and my mother’s custody.” She concluded by saying that “this action by Houston Police was to be used as compulsion against Coral Watts.”

Funny how Sheila Williams never mentioned this pertinent bit of information to the press during the intervening four years.

Watts’s very well-reasoned, yet grammatically chal-lenged petition, was dismissed without a second glance.

Watts’s next petition was not so quickly dismissed.

On July 7, 1987, Watts again handwrote a petition for habeas corpus. He discovered a loophole in the Texas law, which he used to his advantage. When Judge Shaver sentenced him five years earlier, he stated that Watts had used the water from Lori Lister’s bathtub as a “deadly weapon.”