I was Chris Watts’ secret mistress. There’s so much I never told police
His vile ‘animal mode’ sex… the explicit recovered texts… and obscene way he talked about his wife: Part one of the extraordinary interview

t began with a flick of her thumb.

Amanda McMahon was in the middle of a bitter divorce and custody battle when she opened Tinder, looking for something discreet and uncomplicated, far removed from the dysfunction of her daily life.

Scrolling through profiles near Greeley, Colorado, she stopped on a man who appeared to be seeking the same thing.

His name was Chris. He was tall, muscular, handsome and in his early 30s. She swiped right. So did he.

After Chris broke the ice with a direct message, she claimed they exchanged phone numbers and began texting. Introductory pleasantries quickly gave way to flirtation and, after a few weeks, they agreed to meet in person.

They met in a Chick-fil-A parking lot, where Chris told McMahon he was separated from his children’s mother and claimed she was using the kids against him in a bitter custody dispute of his own. It was one of many lies he’d tell her.

From there, they drove separately to McMahon’s home where, she would later tell police, he became frighteningly rough during sex, pulled her hair and wrapped his hands around her neck.

McMahon gave that account just weeks after the man she knew only as Chris – Chris Watts – was arrested for fatally strangling his pregnant wife, Shanann, and murdering their two young children, Bella and Celeste, in August 2018.

At the time, McMahon told investigators the encounter had been a one-off; a ‘fast and furious’ fling in the spring of 2018 that left her shaken and feeling dirty, but was otherwise inconsequential.

Now, in an exclusive sit-down interview with the Daily Mail, she said that was not strictly true.

Speaking publicly in detail for the first time, McMahon claimed she and Watts actually saw each other for months, in a secret, transactional relationship that began far earlier than she previously disclosed, around April or May 2017.

McMahon explained that she concealed the extent of their relationship from police because she was terrified the truth would be used against her in her own custody fight.

‘I was so fearful of having it blow up in my face… it had to do with substances. It had to do with reckless sex, reckless behavior,’ McMahon told the Daily Mail.

‘Disclosing that entire web… isn’t something you want to put out in the public when your ex-husband will load it into a gun and use it as ammo.’

hat initially drew McMahon to Watts, she said, was the story he told her about his own life.

He never referred to Shanann as his wife or ex-wife. Instead, McMahon said, he called her his ‘baby mama’ and accused her of withholding his children from him as they fought over the terms of their separation – a tale of domestic misery that closely mirrored her own.

But Watts was lying. He and Shanann were still married, and at the time McMahon now says their encounters began, there was no separation or custody battle. The marital crisis Shanann would later describe in anguished messages was still months away. On Shanann’s Facebook page, Watts was still smiling through family beach days and birthday celebrations, publicly playing the part of a supportive father and devoted husband.

When she first met Watts in person, McMahon said he pulled up beside her in the Chick-fil-A parking lot, rolled down the passenger window and playfully told her to ‘get in here,’ gesturing for her to climb into his truck. 

He looked a little different from his profile picture, she remembered thinking, but she didn’t mind.

Watts was very forward, confident and sure of himself. He was also sweet, perhaps overly so.

‘Looking back on it, I could tell any kind of sweetness he had was very fake,’ McMahon said. ‘I won’t say forced, because he was able to turn on the charm for anything he needed…but something about him felt off.’

Before long, McMahon invited Watts back to her nearby apartment so the pair could continue getting to know one another.

Watts spoke about his job as an oil field operator for Anadarko Petroleum. He also divulged more information about his relationship with Shanann, confessing to money troubles and referring to his children’s mother as a ‘crazy b***h’ whose sole purpose in life appeared to be to make him miserable.

Still, they managed to salvage the mood and the pair decided to put on a movie, McMahon said.

From McMahon’s modest selection of DVDs, Watts chose Shutter Island, the Leonardo DiCaprio thriller in which a man kills his wife after discovering she murdered their children.

In retrospect, the choice would prove chilling.

Watts would later tell police a false version of the same story – claiming he strangled Shanann only after seeing her kill their daughters. It was another lie that police quickly saw through.

But at the time, McMahon said, the movie was little more than background noise as the nature of their encounter began to shift.

Amanda McMahon at home (photography by James Breeden)

What happened next began consensually but took a turn that McMahon said left her unsettled. 

Suddenly, Watts became extremely rough and aggressive, putting his hand around her throat and choking her, McMahon alleged.

‘He had just this animalistic fury come over him,’ she said. ‘He just went into like a zone. He just didn’t look the same in his eyes.

‘In the snap of a finger, he went from normal to crazy – like brutal, almost.’

McMahon recalled that in that moment, she was worried Watts would hurt her.

‘I remember just kind of being scared to really say anything,’ she continued. ‘It happened way too fast, and it threw me off.’

What she told police in 2018 was a much shorter version of the same encounter.

In that interview, according to investigative records, McMahon said Watts had been ‘really fast and aggressive,’ pulled her hair, put his arms around her neck and attempted anal sex. She described the episode then as a ‘rape fantasy’ and told detectives she had to push him off.

Now, McMahon says that while the account was true, it was incomplete.

What she failed to tell detectives was that the encounter was not isolated, that it happened far earlier than she said, and that Watts would continue drifting in and out of her life in the months that followed.

Between the late spring of 2017 and early 2018, McMahon claimed she saw Watts a handful of times and had sex with him on at least two other occasions.

McMahon alleged that Watts would also periodically contact her for access to her prescription opioids, and claimed he expressed a desire to get ‘messed up.’

‘I had my own prescription that he would essentially beg for things out of,’ McMahon claimed. 

‘It seemed he wanted to get away from something or numb himself… and honestly, I was trying to forget things too, so I understood where he was coming from.’

McMahon’s new claim about Watts seeking opioids from her now intersects with a separate allegation that emerged years after the murders.

Watts reportedly claimed from prison that he drugged Shanann with oxycodone in an attempt to end her pregnancy in 2018 – but the allegation has never been independently corroborated.

Investigators also found a deleted, misspelled search for ‘oxycodon 80mg’ on Watts’ phone, records showed. But the files do not establish when the search was made, why it was made or who entered it, and the entry does not prove Shanann was ever drugged.

Photography by James Breeden

McMahon said she never ‘used’ with Watts nor saw him consume the pills she claimed she provided to him. 

However, McMahon claimed Watts on at least one occasion asked if she had access to any ‘uppers’, such as Adderall, to which she insisted she didn’t. 

During their encounters and communications, Watts would repeatedly bash and bad-mouth Shanann, namelessly referring to her as a ‘f***ing psycho’ and a ‘gold digger,’ McMahon claims.

‘He would say the most awful things… talking her down and making her seem like a horrible, unstable person… say[ing] he wished she’d work and complain that he had to support her,’ she said.

‘Any shot you could take, he took…he just did not like that poor woman.’

The majority of their subsequent meetings are blurry to McMahon now, she claimed, citing her frequent use of prescription opioids at the time.

When they were apart, Watts would initiate flirty texts, she further claimed, and would occasionally request racy pictures. McMahon recalled she sent one non-nude selfie, but declined to send anything more explicit.

Gradually, though, McMahon explained she grew tired of Watts, as well as listening to his complaints about his marriage, fielding his alleged requests for opioids and receiving texts from him at all hours of the night.

The relationship came to a natural end in March 2018 when she changed her phone number and didn’t bother to contact Watts to inform him of the change, she claimed.

When asked why she continued to entertain Watts after the frightening nature of their initial encounter, McMahon said that, due to the ongoing turmoil in her personal life, she was locked in a self-destructive spiral.

‘It was just pure recklessness on my part,’ she admitted. ‘I wasn’t able to see my kids at the time… I was just looking to numb that area of my life, just to feel anything.’

Looking back, there were clear warning signs that with Watts, all was not what it seemed.

McMahon said that when they were together, his phone would often ring or buzz, which he’d race to silence or conceal. She now believes those notifications were coming from Shanann.

McMahon once glanced over at his phone, noticing the background was a photo of his two daughters, though he rarely spoke about the girls and never shared their names.

‘He appeared normal… but there was something not right about him,’ she said.

In the weeks before the murders, Chris Watts was having an affair with his co-worker, Nichol Kessinger

It would be months before McMahon would see Watts’s face again.

McMahon immediately recognized her former lover when scrolling through Facebook in August 2018, stunned as she watched him plead with local news cameras for information about his ‘missing’ family.

Despite playing the concerned husband for the cameras, Watts knew exactly where his family was all along.

Bella, four, and Celeste, three, were found submerged inside two crude-oil storage tanks on a property owned by Watts’s employer. Shanann, 34, who was 15 weeks pregnant at the time, was buried in a shallow grave nearby.

Watts was arrested two days later and eventually admitted to fatally strangling Shanann and smothering their children. He has been sentenced to life behind bars.

Prosecutors said Watts murdered his family after beginning an affair with his co-worker, Nichol Kessinger, weeks earlier, with whom he had imagined starting a new life.

McMahon said she felt sick when she realized that virtually nothing Watts had told her was true.

Within days, she was interviewed by police after she posted on Facebook about meeting Watts on Tinder and her post was forwarded to the Frederick Police Department.

During questioning, she told detectives she was only ‘99.9 percent’ sure the man she met was Watts but said she wouldn’t be certain enough to testify against him in court.

Today, she claimed she wasn’t being honest. McMahon said she was always completely certain of Watts’s identity but didn’t want to be publicly linked to him or the murders more than she already had been.

The Daily Mail found McMahon after poring through thousands of discovery documents and police files.

McMahon initially agreed to provide text messages between herself and Watts, which she claimed had recently been recovered from her iCloud.

However, she later declined to turn them over, citing their explicit and compromising nature and concerns that her children might one day see them.

The Daily Mail has since reviewed a handful of screenshots of the messages but couldn’t independently verify their authenticity.

Watts would deny ever meeting with McMahon in an interview with police, insisting his only extramarital affair had been with Kessinger. 

McMahon said she was unsurprised by Watts’s denial, and insisted that ‘everything out of his mouth is a lie in some form.’

It’s unclear whether investigators viewed McMahon as a viable witness. A request seeking comment on the matter has not yet been returned by the Weld County District Attorney’s Office.