The man who may be America’s most prolific serial killer nearly walked free from prison after serving just 24 years for crimes that claimed more than a dozen confirmed victims, with investigators now estimating the true death toll could exceed 100 women across multiple states.
Carl Eugene Watts, known as the Sunday Morning Slasher, died of prostate cancer in a Michigan prison hospital in September 2007 at age 53, but not before a frantic legal battle 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 how close the justice system came to releasing him back onto the streets.
The case against Watts began taking shape in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when a series of brutal attacks on women in Ann Arbor, Michigan, created a pattern that police could not ignore. Victims were stabbed repeatedly, often more than 30 times, and left dead just steps from their own front doors.
Detective Paul Button of the Ann Arbor Police Department led the task force hunting the killer. The attacks all occurred in the early morning hours, predominantly on Sundays, leading local newspapers to dub the unknown assailant the Sunday Morning Slasher.
The victims ranged in age from teenagers to women in their 40s. They came from different racial backgrounds and different walks of life. The only constants were their gender and the time of day they were attacked.
Button received a crucial tip from a sergeant who had worked a case in Kalamazoo years earlier. The similarities between that case and the Ann Arbor murders were impossible to dismiss. The trail led directly to Carl Eugene Watts.
Watts had a documented history of violence against women stretching back to his teenage years. At age 15, he attacked a 26-year-old woman named Joan Gave, beating and kicking her before suddenly stopping and walking away.
Psychiatrists evaluated Watts after that attack and issued a stark warning. They described him as a paranoid young man struggling to control strong homicidal impulses and a serious threat to society. Despite that assessment, they released him on his 16th birthday.
Watts went on to graduate high school and briefly attended Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee on a football scholarship. He lasted only three months before being expelled after multiple women reported he was stalking and attacking them.
A female student at Lane College was found stabbed to death that same year. Many on campus believed Watts was responsible, but there was insufficient evidence to charge him.
By 1974, Watts had enrolled at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. Almost immediately, the attacks resumed. A woman named Lenor Nazaki answered her door to a man asking for someone named Charles.
When she unhooked the chain, he lunged at her and choked her until she lost consciousness.
Five days later, 20-year-old Gloria Steele was found dead in her apartment at the same complex. She had been stabbed 33 times in the chest.
Another attack followed soon after, but this victim fought back hard enough that Watts fled. Witnesses got a look at his car, a tan Pontiac Grand Prix. Both surviving victims picked Watts out of a police lineup.
During questioning, Watts admitted to attacking approximately 15 other women but said nothing about the murder of Gloria Steele. His lawyer had him committed to Kalamazoo State Hospital, where psychiatrists diagnosed him with antisocial personality disorder and warned again that he was extremely dangerous.
Watts served just one year in county jail for the assault charges. The murder charge never came. There was not enough evidence to make it stick.
After his release, Watts moved back in with his mother and stepfather in Inkster, Michigan. He fathered a daughter with an old childhood friend and briefly married a woman named Valyria Goodwill.
Goodwill later described Watts’s behavior as strange and unsettling. He constantly rearranged furniture compulsively. He took knives and hacked apart house plants.
He melted candles directly onto tables and scattered trash across the floor to rot.
The marriage lasted six months. By then, Watts was already killing regularly.
On October 31, 1979, 44-year-old Jean Klein was walking home from a doctor’s appointment in the middle of the day in Grosse Pointe Farms, a quiet affluent suburb. Someone attacked her on the sidewalk and stabbed her 11 times with what appeared to be a screwdriver. She died right there in the street.
In early 1980, Watts moved to Ann Arbor, about 40 miles west of Detroit. The violence escalated dramatically.
On April 20, 17-year-old Shirley Small was stabbed twice in the heart outside her home. On July 13, 26-year-old Glenda Richmond was stabbed 28 times outside her apartment. On September 14, 30-year-old Rebecca Huff, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, was found outside her residence with approximately 50 stab wounds.
All three attacks happened in the early morning hours. All three women were just steps from their front doors. None were robbed.
None were sexually assaulted. Just sudden overwhelming violence.
Button got a call from a sergeant who had worked one of the Kalamazoo cases back in 1974. The similarities were hard to dismiss. Button started digging into Carl Watts.
In October 1980, police in Canada reached out to investigators in Michigan. They had been dealing with a string of attacks in Windsor, Ontario, just across the border from Detroit. Women there were being slashed and stabbed.
Most survived, but barely.
Button noticed that Watts’s car had crossed into Windsor multiple times. Almost every time it did, an attack followed. One survivor picked Watts out of a photo lineup, though she said she could not be completely certain.
On November 15, 1980, two patrol officers in Ann Arbor spotted a brown Pontiac Grand Prix moving slowly behind a female student walking home. She noticed it too and ducked into a doorway. The officers pulled the car over.
The driver was Carl Watts. When they searched his car, they found screwdrivers and wood filing tools. They also found a book with Rebecca Huff’s name carved into the cover.
Still, this was not enough to charge him with murder. But it made him the primary suspect. Police placed Watts under round-the-clock surveillance.
They planted a tracking device in his car.
For months, they followed him everywhere. What they saw was deeply unsettling. Watts would drive hundreds of miles in a single night, circling neighborhoods, crawling through streets, searching, hunting.
He knew he was being watched. The murders in Michigan stopped completely.
In the spring of 1981, Watts quit his job and moved to Columbus, Texas, about 70 miles outside Houston. He was trying to shake his tails and start somewhere fresh.
Button immediately contacted Houston police and sent everything he had. Watts’s criminal history, photographs, details about his car, and a full breakdown of the Michigan murders. He warned them plainly.
Watts was a predator and needed to be watched.
Houston police did basically nothing. But understanding what Houston was like in 1981 is important. It had the highest murder rate in the entire country at the time.
Police were completely overwhelmed, underfunded, understaffed, and drowning in cases.
Watts found work as a mechanic for an oil company. On weekends, he drove into Houston and started killing again. A lot.
On September 5, 1981, 22-year-old Linda Tilly was found drowned in the swimming pool at her apartment complex in Austin. Authorities ruled it an accident.
A week later, 25-year-old Elizabeth Montgomery was stabbed while walking her dog near her Houston apartment. She managed to make it back inside but bled to death shortly after. Two hours later, 21-year-old Susan Wolf was stabbed in the arm and chest while carrying groceries to her apartment.
Both women died just steps from their front doors.
In January 1982, 27-year-old Phyllis Tamm was found hanging from a tree near Rice University. Watts would later confess that he strangled her and then staged the scene to see what police would do. At the time, they never suspected she had been murdered.
That same month, 25-year-old Margaret Fossi was found dead in the trunk of her car on the Rice campus. She had been struck in the throat with such force that her windpipe was crushed.
Also in January, Watts attacked a woman named Julia Sanchez as she was changing a flat tire along the highway. He slashed her throat and left her there. Somehow she survived.
On February 7, 1982, 20-year-old Elellanena Samander was found strangled, her body dumped in a trash bin near a bar she had visited earlier that night.
In March, 14-year-old Emily Laqua disappeared while walking to her new job at a restaurant. Her body was not found for five months, hidden inside a culvert.
On March 31, 20-year-old Mary Castillo was found strangled in a ditch.
On April 15, 21-year-old Yolanda Garcia was found stabbed to death in her front yard, still holding a bag with her work shoes inside.
The next day, 32-year-old Carrie Jefferson was strangled and stabbed after finishing her shift at the downtown post office. Watts buried her along a bayou.
On April 21, 25-year-old Suzanne Surles was grabbed outside her apartment. Watts strangled her but was not sure she was dead. To make certain, he forced her head into a flower pot filled with water.
Then he buried her.
On May 23, around 4 in the morning, 20-year-old Michelle Mday was choked to death outside her apartment. Watts dragged her inside and left her body in the bathtub.
Later that same day, he broke into another apartment in the same complex. Twenty-one-year-old Lori Lister had just gotten home from work when he grabbed her outside and choked her unconscious.
He pulled her inside and then ran into her 18-year-old roommate, Melinda Agular. He attacked her too. Agular went completely limp and played dead.
Watts used a wire hanger to tie her hands behind her back.
Then came a detail investigators would never forget. He clapped his hands and jumped up and down, visibly excited about what he thought he was about to do.
He left Agular there and went back to Lister, dragging her into the bathroom and turning on the water. While Watts focused on the tub, Agular managed to free her hands. She ran to the balcony, jumped from the second floor, screaming for help.
A neighbor heard her and rushed inside, pulling Lister from the bathtub just in time. Police arrived moments later and caught Watts as he tried to flee.
They arrested him and charged him with attempted murder and burglary with intent to commit murder. They realized who they were dealing with. But there was one problem prosecutors faced.
Watts was incredibly careful. He almost never left physical evidence. There were no fingerprints at the scenes.
No witnesses to the actual killings. No DNA linking him to the Houston murders.
Prosecutors looked at what they had and did not think they could win a murder trial. They were worried he would walk.
They did not tell Watts that. They told him they had him locked in on multiple murders and offered to cut him a deal. If Watts confessed to the unsolved murders and showed police where the bodies were, they would give him immunity for those murder charges.
He would plead guilty to burglary with intent to commit murder instead. He would get a 60-year sentence.
At the time, everyone thought that was good enough. Watts was 29 years old. A 60-year sentence meant he would die behind bars.
Watts took the deal. Over the course of about a week, he confessed to 13 murders in disturbing detail. Twelve in Texas and one in Michigan.
He led detectives to three different graves.
He described exactly how he killed each woman, what he did with their bodies, the tools he used. He showed no remorse.
When investigators asked him why, Watts said the women had evil in their eyes, just like the evil he saw in his dreams when he was a child. He claimed that by killing them, he was freeing their spirits.
The whole time he kept hinting that there were more. A lot more. Later, he claimed he had killed 40 women, then 80.
Eventually, he stopped counting altogether.
Investigators believe the real number could easily be over 100. This man attacked multiple women on the same day several different times.
On September 3, 1982, true to their word, Watts was sentenced to 60 years in prison.
But this is not where the story ends.
In 1989, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reviewed Watts’s case and found a technicality. When he accepted the plea deal, no one had told him that the bathtub and water he used to try to drown Lori Lister qualified as a deadly weapon under Texas law.
Because of that mistake, his conviction was reclassified from violent to nonviolent. In Texas, nonviolent offenders could earn three days off their sentence for every day served as long as they behaved.
Watts behaved. In fact, he became a model prisoner and accumulated good time credits at a staggering rate. The 60-year sentence was quietly carved down piece by piece.
By 2006, Watts was eligible for release at the age of 52. After confessing to 13 murders and hinting at dozens more, he was on track to serve just 24 years. He was going to walk free.
Back in Michigan, prosecutors went into overdrive. Watts had immunity for the murders he confessed to in Texas, but that protection did not extend north. If Michigan could tie him to even one killing, they could stop his release cold.
A task force reopened more than 200 unsolved cases across Michigan and Canada, combing through decades of files, reports, and half-forgotten leads. Anything that might hold up in court.
Then in early 2004, a man named Joseph Foy saw a news story about Watts’s possible release. Foy lived in Ferndale, Michigan. On the night of December 1, 1979, he looked out his window and saw something he would never forget.
He saw a man raise his hand and bring it down in a slashing motion. For a split second, the attacker looked up and their eyes met.
Foy called police immediately. He worked with a sketch artist and gave investigators everything he could remember. But the case went cold.
Now, nearly 25 years later, his memory combined with what investigators knew now was enough. Watts was charged with the first-degree murder of 36-year-old Helen Dutcher, the woman stabbed to death in that Ferndale alley.
He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Two days later, prosecutors announced they were charging him with another murder, the 1974 killing of Gloria Steele, the Western Michigan University student stabbed 33 times.
In July 2007, Watts was found guilty again. A second life sentence, no parole.
But it did not last long. Just months later, in September 2007, Carl Eugene Watts died of prostate cancer in a hospital in Jackson, Michigan. He was 53 years old.
He never fully confessed to everything he did. That is what makes this case so disturbing. Based on what investigators know, the patterns, the timelines, the confessions that kept changing, Carl Watts may have been one of the most prolific serial killers in American history.
A man who killed for decades. A man who nearly walked free. And a man most people have never even heard of.
