Murderer Chris Watts sent sickening texts to his mistress just hours after he killed his wife and children denying he had harmed them.
The dad smothered his two daughters and dumped their bodies in oil tanks. He then killed his pregnant wife, Shanann, in the same fashion and buried her in a shallow grave, in 2018.
But Watts told police he had no idea where his family were, and even begged for their safe return on local news just hours before he eventually confessed.
Watts said he brutally murdered his family just to be with his mistress Nichol Kessinger.
However, in a newly released police interview with Ms Kessinger, the final texts she traded with the murderer and her lover were revealed where Watts denied killing his family.
The video surfaced on a YouTube channel run by Shanann’s family, People reported.
During the lengthy police interview, Ms Kessinger said she texted Watts in the final time they spoke. She claimed to have said: "I kept asking him, 'What did you do, Chris? What did you do?' I asked, 'Where's your family?’
"I was still in my head. I was stressed out. So I texted Chris one last time, and I told him, 'If you did anything bad, you're going to ruin your life and you're going to ruin my life. I promise you that.' And he responded, 'I didn't hurt my family, Nicky.' And that was the last text. I never said another word to him after that."
She said those were the last texts they exchanged.
Ms Kessinger had been seeing Watts even though he was married. In the interview, she said how they discussed his “current relationship” on a number of occasions but it was “never hostile”.
Shanann was 15 weeks pregnant with Watt’s child at the time of her death - but Watts lied to Ms Kessinger that it was someone else’s kid.
Ms Kessinger described how Watts told her he had had a “disagreement” with Shanann the day of the murder.
He told her his family “weren’t here” but then a friend insisted the cops were called, confusing Ms Kessinger.
It wasn’t until a day later when Ms Kessinger began to look online that she realised Watt’s family were missing and something might be up.
In a confrontation between her and Watts, she said she tried to convince him to go and look for his family.
“He didn’t seem concerned as he should be, and seemed so concerned with us,” Ms Kessinger said.
At one point, when Watts said his wife had left her wedding ring behind - after he had killed her - he asked Ms Kessinger how much money he could get for it.
In the days following the murder as Watts' lies unravelled, Ms Kessinger distanced herself from him and eventually stopped contacting him.
When he confessed to the brutal murder he described to police how he rolled his wife’s body in a sheet and put it on the floor of the backseat of his truck.
He then seated his two girls Bella, four, and Celeste, three, on the backseat, just above their mother’s dead body.
Watts then drove to an oil work site about 40 miles from his home. He said he hadn’t planned to kill his daughters but smothered them there.
Watts is serving five life sentences plus 48 years in prison without the possibility of parole at the Dodge Correctional Institution in Wisconsin.
