Evil Eyes (4 page)

Watts spoke with various staff members during his stay at the center. He even sought out help, but not for his mental state. Rather, he sought legal advice. He wanted to know what he needed to do to assure that he would not go to prison.

Dr. Benedek asked Watts if it bothered him that he attacked women.

“No,” he replied. “Getting caught bothers me.” “Aren’t you concerned about what you did to these

women?” “No.”

Watts’s trial for the assault and battery of Knizacky and Williams took place on December 19, 1975. He pleaded “no contest” to the two attacks and received a one-year jail sentence in the county jail.

He was not charged with the murder of Gloria Steele.

Watts was released from the Kalamazoo County Jail on August 24, 1976. He returned to Inkster, where he moved in with his mother and stepfather. He seemingly stayed out of trouble for the next few years. Watts hooked up with a childhood friend, high-school student Deloris Howard, and got her pregnant. Their relationship was rather subdued, according to Howard’s brother and friend of Watts, Fred Braggs.

“From what she has told me, I wouldn’t call him a Casanova. He wasn’t no romantic,” Braggs recalled, but Watts treated Howard well.

The couple did share enough affection to create a daughter, Nakisha Watts, who was born on February 3, 1979. Coral and Deloris had a seemingly healthy relationship, but, in reality, Watts turned into a deadbeat dad. He would not even claim Nakisha as his own flesh and blood; he took off.

Later that year, Deloris filed a claim in Wayne County Circuit Court against Watts and requested that he pay her

$70 a week for child support. On January 25, 1980, Judge Horace Gilmore ruled that Watts was indeed the

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girl’s father and that he must make restitution of $40 a week.

Howard claimed that she would not have filed a claim against her lover if he had not dropped a bombshell on her. She found out by reading the local paper that Coral had run off and got married to another woman.

Before Nakisha was born, Watts had met at a dis-cotheque a young black woman by the name of Valeria Goodwill. This was the post–
Saturday Night Fever
era. Watts and Goodwill dated and were married on August 17, 1979. The happy couple moved in together into his house on the 2200 block of Parker Street in Detroit.

Apparently, Coral’s mother was not a fan of Valeria.

Valeria was not a big fan of Coral, once she got to know him.

“One thing that bothered me,” Valeria stated in an interview with Michigan police, “he would go to sleep at night and either have nightmares or something. I don’t know what it was, but he would wake up suddenly and start fighting in his sleep . . . with his fists or something, like he was fighting somebody in his sleep.

“He wouldn’t say anything,” Valeria continued. “Sometimes he would fall out of the bed. One night I woke up and he was on the floor.

“He was still asleep. One night I woke up and he was kneeling outside the bed with his arms up on the bed and him kneeling down on the floor. I’ve seen him fall asleep on the couch and fall off the couch asleep and get back up on the couch and never wake up.”

Valeria continued the bizarre reminiscence. “I’d have to be very careful waking him up. If I would touch him waking up, he would almost jump out of the bed. I had to get out of the way.

EVIL EY ES 41

“He said he was nervous over his job, but I knew there was something the matter.”

Goodwill had no idea what was truly the matter with her husband.

Soon after their marriage, Goodwill reported that Watts’s behavior became erratic and unpredictable. First, he lost his mechanic job at a trucking company due to sloppy work. Instead of going out and looking for a new job, Watts would stay home and become fidgety and bored. His compulsive behavior began to surface when he would constantly rearrange the furniture. His once impec-cably neat habits dropped by the wayside. He acted slovenly and apathetic. It started out normally enough for a man in his early twenties—leaving clothes on the floor. It escalated to food wrappers and napkins left on the floor, to actual garbage dumped on the carpet. He refused to clean up after himself. His behavior became more bizarre each day. He took to chopping up the house-plants with a kitchen knife. He would slice up candle-sticks and then melt the pieces onto the kitchen table.

According to Goodwill, Watts began to display even more unusual behavior. Out of the blue he claimed he no longer believed in God. He got upset with her when she told him she wanted to put up a Christmas tree in their house. He also forbade her from wearing any beauty prod-ucts, such as makeup or wigs. He even flushed one of her wigs down the toilet in a bout of frustration.

Goodwill did not know what to make of her newlywed spouse. She became furious, however, when he started leaving the house at night without a word as to where he was going. He would often venture out without telling her anything, be gone for several hours at a time, and then return, often in a state of disarray. Sometimes his clothes would be rumpled or even torn.

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Goodwill did notice that most of her husband’s late-night jaunts took place after they had sex. After an intimate encounter with her husband, he would get up and walk out of the house.

“He would just get in the car and go. He’d be gone [for] hours and hours,” she recalled.

On one of Watts’s midnight excursions, on October 17, 1979, he was arrested for “disorderly prowling” outside a woman’s home in Southfield, a suburb fifteen miles northeast of Detroit. Someone spotted him and called the cops, who arrived and actually chased him down in a quick getaway attempt. Watts was arrested, but the charges were eventually dropped. He did, however, pay

$25 in fines for driving tickets for careless driving and driving without headlights, which occurred during the chase. The arrest of Watts placed him squarely on the radar screen of the Detroit police. There had been approximately five attacks on young women in the Southfield area the year before, from June until October 1978. The attacker’s modus operandi seemed to be the same every time. He would break into the women’s homes and the women would wake up to a man standing over them with his hands either on their mouths, breasts, or geni-tals. No one victim could positively identify Watts as their attacker, but each victim’s description seemed to re—

semble him closely.

Watts had been honing his skills. Things would get much worse after the birth of his daughter and the demise of his marriage.

On October 8, 1979, a twenty-two-year-old white female, Peggy Pochmara, an employee at the Detroit Metro Air-port, was found strangled in the front yard of a neighbor of her boyfriend in Detroit. She had not been sexually assaulted, nor had she been robbed.

On Halloween night forty-four-year-old former
Detroit News
food reporter Jeanne Clyne was killed after having been stabbed thirteen times outside her home in the up-scale neighborhood of Grosse Pointe Farms, northeast of Detroit. The time was approximately 6:45
P
.
M
. Again the victim had not been sexually assaulted, nor had she been robbed. Halloween revelers passed by Clyne’s bloody dead body without a second glance as they thought she was a Halloween prank.

Neighborhood residents described a well-built African American male as a potential suspect.

On December 1, 1979, thirty-six-year-old Helen Mae Dutcher was stabbed twelve times outside of H&M Clean-ers, near East Eight Mile Road and Woodward Avenue, just north of Woodlawn Cemetery. Dutcher’s murder was even witnessed by a man named Joseph Foy, who gave a police

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sketch artist a description of an African American male who looked strikingly similar to Coral Watts.

Two other women’s bodies were discovered in late 1979. Dawn Jerome’s asphyxiated corpse was located less than eighteen miles away in nearby Taylor. On September 21, 1979, thirty-two-year-old Malak “Mimi” Haddad’s headless body was discovered in Allen Park. She had apparently gotten out of her car and was heading home. Her head has never been recovered.

On March 10, 1980, Hazel Conniff, twenty-three, was strangled in Detroit. Conniff, who worked for the local telephone company, was found in the driveway of her boyfriend’s home tied to a chain-link fence with her own belt cinched around her petite neck. The eerie sight was punctuated by the position of her body, which was seated and facing forward. Conniff had not been raped or robbed.

Three weeks later, at 4:15
A
.
M
. on March 31, 1980, twenty-six-year-old Denise Dunmore’s strangled body was found in a Detroit parking lot. She had not been raped or robbed.

Seventeen-year-old high-school student Shirley Small’s dead body was discovered at 6:54
A
.
M
. on April 20, 1980, on a sidewalk seventy feet away from her family’s George-town Townhouse complex, between Packard Street and Page Avenue. She and her family lived on the southeast side of Ann Arbor, Michigan, approximately twenty miles from Inkster and forty-two miles west of Detroit.

Small had always enjoyed spending her weekend nights at the local skating rink. Small and her boyfriend had been in a rocky on-again, off-again relationship. This particular night, it appeared to be off-again. The couple got into an argument while at the skating rink and the young lady left in a huff to go home. It was a four-to-five-mile walk.

EVIL EY ES 45

Small’s boyfriend drove off after her at approximately 4:00
A
.
M
. He found her walking on the sidewalk and tried to coax her into his car. She would have nothing to do with him and continued on. The boyfriend gave up and drove off. She was seen by some neighbors at 4:30
A
.
M
.

When Small’s body was discovered, it was determined that she bled to death because of two stab wounds to the heart with a scalpel-like instrument. According to her autopsy report, it was actually one stab wound between the second and third ribs that was retracted and plunged back in without ever leaving her heart. Small also had six deep slices on her face: two on each of her cheeks, including one three-and-a-half-inch wound described as looking like a “hockey stick,” one over her right eyebrow, and one on her upper lip.

Small’s purse was lying on the ground next to her body. She also had not been robbed or raped.

One of Small’s neighbors, Dennis Casselberry, believed her murderer was probably someone she knew. “We were concerned, but figured it was a fluke— probably a personal thing.”

By May of 1980, Valeria Goodwill had had enough. She filed for divorce from Coral Eugene Watts.

On May 31, 1980, twenty-seven-year-old Linda Monteiro was found strangled outside her home in Detroit. She had just returned from a meeting for her church choir. Her body was found just four blocks from where Hazel Conniff’s had been discovered. As with the other women,

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Monteiro’s body showed no signs of sexual assault. It also did not appear as if she had been robbed.

Things seemed to slow down in June and the first half of July. By the middle of the month, however, they picked up with a vengeance.

On July 13, 1980, twenty-six-year-old Brown Jug Restaurant night manager Glenda Richmond was found dead just twenty-seven feet from her apartment door on East Ellsworth Road and Braeburn Circle, next to Ellsworth Park in Ann Arbor. She had been stabbed twenty-eight times in her left breast with a screwdriver.

According to police reports, Richmond, an Eastern Michigan University student, left work at 4:00
A
.
M
. She dropped off a fellow coworker at home and would have arrived at her own residence between 4:20 and 4:30
A
.
M
. At 5:17
A
.
M
., her body was discovered lying on her back. She wore blue jeans, a blouse, bra, and panties. Her blouse had been lifted up to expose her stomach.

Richmond had parked her car in the apartment complex parking lot and was walking toward her apartment. Her keys were found lying next to her corpse and her purse was still slung over her shoulder. Everything was still inside her purse. She had not been robbed or raped. On July 31, at 3:00
A
.
M
., aspiring model Lilli Dunn, twenty-eight, was abducted from her driveway on Agnes Street in Southgate, near Wyandotte and the northwest upper portion of Lake Erie. Dunn, like Jeanne Clyne, worked for the
Detroit News
, but as an accounting clerk. Two witnesses spotted the married mother fight, kick, and scream at her assailant as he dragged her into his car. The witnesses were unable to reach the car before it bolted out of there. Police later discovered her purse, a pair of high-heeled shoes, and a brush. They did not, however, find

Dunn’s body.

EVIL EY ES 47

Later that same day, at 3:43
A
.
M
., twenty-two-year-old, Windsor, Ontario, Canada, resident Irene Kondratowitz was grabbed from behind by a man and had her throat slashed as she walked to her home after a night of barhopping. She survived the attack but was unable to identify her assailant. According to the United States Customs authorities, Coral Watts’s 1978 brown Grand Prix was photographed crossing the border from Windsor into Detroit at 4:16
A
.
M
., soon after the reported time of the attack on Kondratowitz.

Less than two months later, at around 4:00
A
.
M
. on September 14, 1980, twenty-year-old University of Michigan Business School graduate student Rebecca Greer Huff was found dead outside her Walden Hills apartment, off Pauline Boulevard and South Maple Road. She had been stabbed fifty-four times with a screwdriver with a quarter-inch shaft.