The Sunday Morning Slasher: Carl Watts and the Deal That Almost Set Him Free
10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories
Joe
4.9 • 638 Ratings
🗓️ 5 August 2025
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sometimes the most dangerous people are the ones who slip through every crack in the system. Carl Eugene Watts should have been stopped at fifteen when he first attacked a stranger. He should have been caught in college when a student was stabbed thirty-three times. He definitely should have been arrested in Michigan when police had him under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Instead, he moved to Houston and killed twelve more women before anyone could touch him.
What happens when childhood trauma meets untreated mental illness and a justice system that keeps making deals with the devil? You get someone who confessed to over a dozen murders, got immunity for all of them, and nearly walked free after twenty-four years. The Sunday Morning Slasher earned his nickname by attacking women in the early hours when they felt safest, moving so fast that witnesses said entire encounters lasted less than fifteen seconds.
This is the story of missed opportunities, failed systems, and one nineteen-year-old woman who jumped from a second-story balcony to save her roommate's life. It's about how Carl Eugene Watts almost got away with what experts believe could have been over 100 murders, and why it took a desperate last-minute effort from Michigan authorities to make sure he never saw freedom again.
#CarlEugeneWatts #SundayMorningSlasher #SerialKiller #TrueCrime #HoustonMurders #MichiganMurders #ImmunityDeal
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When Carl Eugene Watts was caught red-handed trying to drown a woman in her own bathtub, |
| 0:06.0 | Houston police thought they had him dead to rights. |
| 0:08.0 | So they made a deal. |
| 0:10.0 | He'd confessed to 12 murders in exchange for complete immunity. |
| 0:14.0 | What could go wrong? |
| 0:16.0 | Well, as it turns out pretty much everything, because 24 years later, |
| 0:20.0 | Carl was about to walk free, |
| 0:22.6 | and authorities realized they'd made a bargain |
| 0:24.6 | with someone who may have killed over a hundred women. |
| 0:27.6 | ... You know how sometimes people try to explain away terrible behavior by pointing to a rough childhood? |
| 0:57.7 | Well, Carl Eugene Watts had pretty much every textbook example of childhood trauma you could think of. |
| 1:04.8 | Born in 1953 in West Virginia, Carl's early years read like a psychology case study waiting to happen. His father was one |
| 1:13.1 | of those stern military types who probably thought showing emotion was a sign of weakness. When |
| 1:18.9 | Carl was young, his parents divorced, leaving him in that classic single mother household situation. |
| 1:24.9 | Then, because life apparently wasn't complicated enough, his mother remarried and |
| 1:29.1 | started having more children. Carl watched his place in the family hierarchy shift, and jealousy |
| 1:34.8 | began to fester. Now, millions of kids grow up with divorced parents, military fathers, and blended |
| 1:40.8 | families without becoming serial killers. These circumstances alone don't create monsters, |
| 1:46.7 | but there was something fundamentally different brewing in Carl's brain, something that would |
| 1:52.1 | take these ordinary childhood struggles and twist them into something far more sinister. When Carl was |
| 1:58.4 | eight years old, life threw him another curveball that would prove to be |
| 2:02.1 | absolutely devastating. He and his younger sister both contracted meningitis, which basically was a death |
... |
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