Carl ‘Coral’ Eugene Watts: the Sunday Morning Slasher and the plea deal that nearly freed him

• Born1953, Texas; given name Carl, known in court and in the press as Coral; raised in the Detroit area
• Known asThe ‘Sunday Morning Slasher’, the name given to the unidentified killer of three women in Ann Arbor in 1980; Watts was the prime suspect but was never charged
• Arrested23 May 1982, Houston, after an attack on two women in their apartment
• Texas pleaBurglary with intent to commit murder, 1982: 60 years, with immunity for the killings he confessed to (12 or 13, by different counts)
• Convicted of murderTwo, both in Michigan, neither of which he confessed to: a 1979 stabbing in Ferndale (2004) and a 1974 stabbing in Kalamazoo (2007)
• SentenceLife without parole, twice; Texas had been due to release him in 2006
• Died21 September 2007, aged 53, of prostate cancer, in a secure hospital ward in Jackson, Michigan

Coral Eugene Watts was arrested in Houston on 23 May 1982 after two women escaped an attack in their apartment. Within weeks he had confessed to killing a dozen or more women, most of them in the Houston area in 1981 and 1982, and to one killing in Michigan, where he had grown up and where police had long suspected him. Prosecutors had almost no evidence apart from what he told them. In return for his confessions, and for leading police to three bodies, they let him plead guilty to burglary with intent to commit murder and gave him immunity from prosecution for the killings he described. He was sentenced to 60 years.

That deal is why the case is still discussed. A 1989 appeals ruling and Texas good-conduct rules cut his time to less than 25 years, and he was due to walk free in 2006. Michigan prosecutors reopened two cold cases in which he had never confessed, and won murder convictions in 2004 and 2007, each with a mandatory life sentence. He died of cancer weeks after the second verdict.

This account rests on UPI reports from 1982, Associated Press coverage of the Michigan trials and of his death, a 2004 60 Minutes report by CBS News, a statement from the Michigan attorney general’s office, and reporting by the Dallas Observer, NPR, the Detroit Free Press and Oxygen, listed at the end. Where they disagree, it says so. Killings he confessed to but was never tried for are described as confessions, not as proven facts. The women he attacked, their families and the witnesses are not named.

Carl, Coral and Detroit

Watts was born in Texas in 1953 and named Carl. According to the Detroit Free Press, he later went by Coral, the way his first name sounded in his mother’s family’s Southern accent; most court records and news reports use Coral Eugene Watts. His family moved to the Detroit area when he was a child, and the Free Press reports that after his parents divorced his mother settled in Inkster, west of the city.

His record of violence against women began in his teens. UPI reported in 1982 that he attacked a woman at 14 and was committed to a psychiatric clinic; CBS put his age at 15 and said the woman was on his newspaper route; the Free Press says he spent several months in psychiatric treatment.

In 1974 he was a student at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. UPI reported that he was arrested twice that year for assaulting women and was a suspect in the stabbing death of a woman student; CBS said police lacked the evidence to tie him to it. That stabbing would be the case that convicted him 33 years later.

The Sunday Morning Slasher

In 1979 two women were stabbed to death in the Detroit area within weeks of each other: a 44-year-old woman in Grosse Pointe Farms on 31 October, and a 36-year-old woman in an alley in Ferndale, near 8 Mile and Woodward, in December, the Free Press reports. Watts would later confess to the first. He did not confess to the second.

In 1980 three young women were stabbed to death in Ann Arbor, and the killer became known as the ‘Sunday Morning Slasher’. Watts became the prime suspect, according to the lead investigator, Paul Bunten of the Ann Arbor Police Department, who later became police chief in Saline, Michigan. Bunten told CBS that he put Watts under 24-hour surveillance but could not gather enough evidence to charge him. A former Ann Arbor police chief told the Free Press that the surveillance may have pushed Watts out of Michigan. He was never charged in the Ann Arbor deaths.

In May 1981, UPI reported, Watts moved to Houston, where he worked as a bus mechanic. CBS reported that Bunten sent Houston police a packet of evidence and a warning about him.

Houston, 1981–1982

The killings Watts would later confess to began in September 1981 and ran until his arrest the following May, in Houston, Galveston and the surrounding counties, according to UPI. Most of the women were stabbed or strangled, the AP reported; at least one was drowned. He told Houston detectives that he targeted women who had ‘evil eyes’, according to the AP and the Dallas Observer.

On the morning of 23 May 1982 he attacked a young woman outside her apartment in Houston – in the parking lot, the AP reported – and forced her inside, where he tied up her and her roommate and began to fill the bathtub to drown her. The roommate escaped by jumping from a second-floor balcony and raised the alarm, and police arrested Watts nearby as he tried to get away, according to CBS, the AP and the Free Press. Earlier that day a woman living nearby had been found dead in her bathtub; hers was one of the deaths Watts went on to confess to.

The confessions and the deal

Watts’s lawyer offered a trade. In return for a guilty plea to a lesser charge and immunity from prosecution for murder, Watts would tell investigators about a series of unsolved killings. Prosecutors in Harris County accepted, because, they said, they had no evidence linking him to any of the deaths other than what he might tell them. The AP reported in 2004 that some victims’ families had pressed for the deal because it was the only way to learn what had happened to their relatives.

In August 1982 Watts agreed to plead guilty to burglary with intent to commit murder, for the May attack, and to accept a 60-year sentence, UPI reported. He then took detectives to shallow graves in Houston and in Brookshire, west of the city, and answered questions about unsolved deaths in Texas and in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan. In all, the AP said, he led police to three bodies. According to UPI, he also gave details of a Galveston attack for which another man had been convicted and imprisoned, and that man was cleared.

District Judge Doug Shaver, a former prosecutor, accepted the plea and sentenced Watts to 60 years, the most the charge allowed, on 3 September 1982, according to UPI and the Dallas Observer. Shaver said he would recommend that Watts never be paroled. The Harris County district attorney, John Holmes, said the sentence amounted to life in prison, UPI reported. Shaver also found that the water in the bathtub had been used as a deadly weapon, a finding that, under Texas law, limited the good-conduct credit Watts could earn.

Watts would talk only to jurisdictions that gave him immunity, his lawyer said. He offered to confess to 22 killings in Michigan in exchange for immunity, according to CBS and the Dallas Observer, and the authorities there refused.

How 60 years became 24

In 1989 the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals found that Watts had not been given proper notice that a deadly-weapon finding might be made against him, and the finding was deleted, the AP and the Dallas Observer reported. That changed how Texas counted his time. As a prisoner without a deadly-weapon finding, and as a first offender, he could earn good-conduct credit at the highest rate, three days for every day served, according to CBS and the Dallas Observer. Combined with mandatory release laws passed to relieve prison overcrowding, the AP reported, the ruling cut more than 35 years from his sentence.

Under Texas law, then, Watts would be released automatically in 2006, after serving about 24 years, and the immunity deal meant Texas could not charge him with any of the killings he had confessed to. The Michigan attorney general’s office said it would be the first time a known serial killer in the United States had been legally freed. According to the AP, Michigan police had suspected Watts in the Ferndale death for years but had not charged him, because they assumed he would be in his 80s if Texas ever let him out.

Michigan reopens its files

When Michigan officials learned how short the sentence had become, they set up a task force to review unsolved homicides in which Watts had been a suspect. CBS said it was led by Lieutenant Bill Hanger, who told the program there were roughly 90 cases in which Watts remained a suspect; the Dallas Observer described a 12-person task force formed by Assistant Attorney General Donna Pendergast.

In January 2004 the Michigan attorney general, Mike Cox, discussed the case on national cable television and asked anyone with information to come forward. The next morning a man called his office, according to the attorney general’s statement and the AP. He said he had seen the 1979 attack in Ferndale from his porch and had told police at the time. He identified Watts as the attacker. Michigan charged Watts with first-degree murder and brought him from Texas to stand trial.

The Ferndale trial, 2004

The trial opened in Oakland County Circuit Court in Pontiac on 8 November 2004, with Pendergast leading the prosecution and a court-appointed lawyer for the defense. Watts had never confessed to the Ferndale killing. The defense questioned whether the witness could have identified anyone in a dark alley from about 85 feet away, 25 years earlier, the AP reported. The judge let the jury hear Watts’s 1982 confessions, and a woman who survived his attack in Texas, as evidence of a pattern.

On 17 November 2004 the jury found him guilty of first-degree murder. He was sentenced in December to the mandatory term of life without parole.

Kalamazoo, 2007

On the day of the Ferndale verdict, the AP reported, Kalamazoo authorities charged Watts with the 1974 stabbing of a 19-year-old Western Michigan University student. He had not confessed to that killing either. A Kalamazoo jury convicted him of first-degree murder in July 2007, according to the AP, and in September he was sentenced to a second mandatory life term without parole.

Death

Watts had been held at the Ionia Maximum Correctional Facility and was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He died on Friday 21 September 2007 in a secure area of Foote Hospital in Jackson, a little more than a week after his second life sentence, a Michigan Department of Corrections spokesman told the AP. He was 53.

How many?

Watts was convicted of two murders, both in Michigan, and confessed to neither. He confessed to 12 or 13 other killings and was never tried for them. Beyond that, the numbers are investigators’ estimates, never tested in court:

• The Michigan attorney general’s office said he was a suspect in more than 25 killings and may have killed more than 80 women, the AP reported in 2007; the office’s own 2004 statement said he was suspected in 26 and had claimed more than 80.
• Hanger told CBS in 2004 that Watts remained a suspect in roughly 90 cases.
• Pendergast told the Dallas Observer in 2003 that she believed he could have killed as many as 100 women; CBS said authorities believed the number might be closer to 100; a forensic psychologist interviewed by Oxygen in 2025 put estimates beyond 100.
• Bunten told CBS, and later the Free Press, that Watts once said there were not enough fingers and toes in the room to count his victims. CBS took that to mean about 80. Bunten said he did not know whether it was true. The true number has never been established.

Where the sources disagree

• His name: the Free Press and Oxygen say he was born Carl and used Coral; the AP, UPI, CBS, NPR, the Dallas Observer and the Michigan attorney general all use Coral Eugene Watts.
• How many confessions: UPI reported in August 1982 that he had confessed to 11 Texas killings, and later that month at least 13; the AP gave 13 (12 in Texas, one in Michigan) in one 2004 report and immunity for 12 (11 and one) in others; CBS gave 12 Texas killings; the Dallas Observer 13 murders and five attempted murders; the Michigan attorney general 13 women, two of them in Michigan.
• The families and the deal: the AP reported that victims’ families pushed for the plea bargain as the only way to learn what had happened; UPI reported in 1982 that families criticized the 60-year sentence as too short.
• His first attack: UPI says he was 14; CBS says 15.
• The release date: the AP in November 2004 gave April 2006; the Dallas Observer gave 9 May 2006, and the Michigan attorney general and the AP in 2007 gave May 2006.
• The task force: CBS says it was led by Lieutenant Bill Hanger; the Dallas Observer says Assistant Attorney General Donna Pendergast formed it.
• The ‘more than 80’ figure: the attorney general’s 2004 statement says Watts claimed it; the AP (2007) quotes the office as saying he may have killed that many; CBS presents it as Bunten’s reading of a remark.
• Where he died: the AP and the Free Press say a secure ward of a hospital in Jackson; the Dallas Observer says a Michigan prison.
• The death on the morning of his arrest: UPI reported in 1982 that the woman found in her bathtub that day had been strangled; Oxygen says she was drowned.

The portrait

The portrait above is a detail of his page in Bloody America, the coloring book that gives one killer to each state; Watts is its Michigan entry. For other case files, see Dean Corll, also a Houston case, Gary Ridgway, whose plea deal traded confessions for his life, and Dennis Rader.

If you find an error in this account, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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Questions people ask

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Sources

Every date and name on this page was checked against at least two of the following. Where they disagree, the disagreement is stated in the text rather than resolved silently.

1. Confessed killer Coral Eugene Watts, 28, described as a…United Press International, 14 August 1982
2. A very difficult plea bargainUnited Press International, 29 August 1982
3. Evil Eyes: The Serial Killer Who Kept Beating the SystemDallas Observer (Glenna Whitley), 19 June 2003
4. A Deal With The Devil?CBS News, 60 Minutes (Rebecca Leung), 14 October 2004
5. Texas serial killer could walk the streets againAssociated Press (NBC News), 5 November 2004
6. Trial begins for serial killer set to go freeAssociated Press (NBC News), 8 November 2004
7. Confessed Serial Killer Could Be FreedNPR, Morning Edition (Quinn Klinefelter), 15 November 2004
8. Serial killer guilty in 1979 murder caseAssociated Press (NBC News), 17 November 2004
9. Statement of Attorney General Mike Cox on the sentencing of Coral Watts (reposted)Michigan Department of Attorney General, 7 December 2004, via LawFuel
10. Admitted serial killer Coral Watts, 53, dies; was serving life sentences in 2 Mich. slayingsAssociated Press (Arizona Daily Star), 21 September 2007
11. Obituary for a Serial KillerDallas Observer (Robert Wilonsky), 24 September 2007
12. Ann Arbor’s Sunday Morning Slasher Could Be America’s Most Prolific Serial KillerOxygen (Jax Miller), 18 May 2025
13. Michigan serial killer Coral Watts is subject of new crime series on Oxygen networkDetroit Free Press (Darcie Moran), via Yahoo News, 20 May 2025

The facts on this page come from public records and the published sources above. If you find an error, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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