Sheriff Nearly Committed SUICIDE After What He Witnessed | Disturbing True Crime Documentary

11:03 in the morning. A 16-year-old girl sends one last message to her boyfriend. Just three words, really. She’s home. She’s fine. She’s listening to music. He has no idea it’s the last time he’ll ever hear from her. Minutes later, there’s a knock at her bedroom door. It isn’t a stranger. It’s someone she has known almost her entire life.

Someone who has sat at her family’s dinner table. Someone who was supposed to be family. He’s carrying a bag. Inside it are things no visitor should ever bring into a teenage girl’s bedroom. He tells her it’s just a conversation. It isn’t. Within minutes, she stops replying to every message on her phone. And in broad daylight, in a quiet residential street in Bristol, England, with neighbors going about their afternoon just feet away, her body is carried out of the house and placed into the trunk of a car.

Here’s what should stop you cold. Her stepmother comes home less than 2 hours later. She walks into that house and the people responsible are still inside. They act like nothing happened. A few hours after that, her boyfriend shows up at the front door, worried sick, asking where she is. They tell him she just left.

The whole time they’re saying it, her body is sitting in a car parked right outside, close enough to touch. That night, they bring her back into the house and they are not finished. The next day, while her father is on the phone with police, frantically reporting her missing, the two people who know exactly where she is walk into a shop and calmly buy supplies.

That same evening, they sat down together and watched a video. The title of that video will make your stomach turn once you learn it.  I didn’t search up anything about her house.  Um if there is more to it, don’t miss it. And they haven’t seen her now.  No.  You phoned Brian with  all our friends and contacted us and asked them where she is and none of them know.

 What’s her name?  Uh Rebecca Watts.  Her name was Rebecca Watts. Everyone called her Becky. And what happened to her over the next 12 days would become one of the largest and most disturbing investigations in the history of British policing. A case that would expose secrets hiding in plain sight inside her own family.

Secrets that, once uncovered, would leave detectives and an entire  nation struggling to understand how something this dark could unfold behind such an ordinary front door. This is the story of how it happened, how it unraveled, and how the people closest to Becky Watts finally ran out of lies. Before we go any further, if you’re watching this, drop a comment and let me know what city or country you’re tuning in from tonight.

It’s always something to see how far these stories travel. And if true crime documentaries like this one are your thing, consider subscribing because there’s a lot more of this coming. Now, let’s rewind. Back to the ordinary Thursday morning when nobody yet knew anything was wrong. Thursday, February 19th, 2015.

 It’s an unremarkable morning in the St. George area of Bristol. Gray skies, the kind of ordinary Thursday nobody remembers until they’re forced to. Becky had spent the previous night at a friend’s house, the way 16-year-olds do. Nothing unusual, nothing that gave anyone pause. She came home the next morning and by all accounts, that was the last time her family saw her.

When she left again, she took her tablet, her phone, her laptop, and that was it. No overnight bag, no change of clothes, no sign she was planning to be gone for more than a few hours because she wasn’t planning to be. This wasn’t a girl packing to run away. This was a girl who expected to be home by dinner. And then she simply stopped.

No replies to texts, no calls answered, no trace on social media. And for Becky, that alone was strange enough to set off alarm bells. Friends who knew her said she practically lived on her phone, always messaging someone, always reachable. A friend she’d spoken with just the day before said she seemed completely normal.

No stress, no fights, nothing weighing on her. Nothing that looked like a girl about to disappear. By late afternoon, the silence had gone on long enough that it stopped feeling like a coincidence, and started feeling like something else. At 4:00 p.m., a call went out to 999. Rebecca Watts, 16 years old, was officially reported missing.

Her father, Darren, did what any terrified parent does in that first helpless hour. He turned to the internet, posting a plea on Facebook that would soon be shared thousands of times over. His daughter had left that morning to meet her boyfriend and simply never arrived. None of her friends had seen her. The police were already searching.

And he was scared. Scared in a way he’d never admit to feeling before. Detective Richard Awon, one of the senior officers assigned to the case, later said the thing that worried investigators most wasn’t just that Becky was gone. It was the silence around her disappearance.  Becky Watts, who’s 16, was last seen at her Bristol home.

   It’s the last point of reference that we can actually place her at. And clearly, we’re trying to look at what happened after she left.  It’s 5 days since Becky left her home in the St. George area of Bristol with just her laptop and a phone. Police say nobody has heard from her since then.  Friends, family, and the people that are really dearest to her, that I would expect to have regular contact with, at least one of those people, we’ve had no contact with her, so we really are very concerned about her

well-being.  A teenage girl who never went quiet online had now gone completely dark. As if she’d vanished not just from her house, but from the internet itself. Within hours, the story wasn’t just a local concern anymore. It was spreading. Across news outlets, across social media, across a city that was about to spend the next 12 days holding its breath.

But to understand what was about to happen to Becky Watts, you first have to understand who she was and the people who surrounded her. To understand what Bristol lost on that February afternoon, you have to go back further than the missing person’s report. You have to go back to June 3rd, 1998, the day Rebecca Watts was born.

Her parents, Darren and Tanya, had already separated by the time she arrived. For a while, she lived with her mother, but concerns about neglect eventually led to Becky and her older brother Dan being taken into the care system. One of those quiet family hardships that rarely makes headlines, but shapes a childhood all the same.

Not long after, the two children went to live with their father, Darren, and that’s where Becky’s world steadied. The people who knew her described someone who was, in the best possible way, a handful. Strong-willed, a little fiery when she needed to be. She had a sharp sense of humor that could catch you off guard, and around the people she trusted, she was confident, loud, fully herself.

But that confidence didn’t always travel with her. At school, she was quieter, more reserved, almost a different version of the girl her family knew at home. One of her teachers remembered her differently still, as someone with an enormous capacity for kindness. The kind of student who noticed when someone else was struggling and did something about it.

She didn’t have a huge circle of friends. She didn’t need one. The friends she had, she held on to tightly, and they held on to her the same way. The kind of small, fierce loyalty that only really exists between teenagers who’ve chosen each other. Her family kept growing. Darren began a relationship with a woman named Angie, who brought her own son into the picture.

A young man named Nathan, several years older than Becky, who’d known her since she was a toddler. In 2013, Darren and Angie married, and the blended family stood together to celebrate it. Nathan served as a groomsman, and Becky, alongside Nathan’s girlfriend Shauna, stood as a bridesmaid. On paper, it was a family photograph like countless others.

Two households folding into one. A wedding day meant to mark a fresh start. Less than 2 years later, that same family would be sitting in front of television cameras, pleading for information about where their 16-year-old daughter had gone. Nobody in that wedding photo could have imagined what was coming. Nobody watching the vows, the toasts, the dancing, could have guessed that two of the people standing closest to the happy couple were about to become the center of a nightmare.

But that’s exactly where this story is headed. Because the investigation into Becky’s disappearance was about to lead detectives right back into her own family. And what they’d find there would be almost impossible to comprehend. Five days. That’s how long it had been since Becky Watts vanished with nothing but a laptop and a phone.

 And in five days, investigators had almost nothing to show for it. No messages, no sightings, no trace. Officers combed through open ground near her house. The kind of search that usually turns up something, even something small. This time, nothing. By Wednesday, February 25th, police made a decision that told the family just how serious things had become.

They asked Darren and Angie to leave their own home, so a full forensic search could be carried out. Still nothing. So, the search widened. Six separate teams fanned out across Bristol, moving through wooded areas and three additional properties. The College of Policing and the National Crime Agency were brought in to assist.

The kind of specialized backup that isn’t called in for a routine runaway. A helicopter circled overhead. Officers checked Troopers Hill Nature Reserve and a nearby lake. Places where searches for missing people sometimes end tragically. But not this time. Online, the hashtag find Becky had taken on a life of its own.

With police using social media to keep the public engaged and watching. With the physical search coming up empty, investigators shifted focus to the people who knew Becky best, hoping the answer wasn’t buried somewhere in the woods, but sitting inside a conversation nobody had had yet. They started with her stepmother, Angie.

But the two people who had actually seen Becky last, according to the family’s own timeline, were her stepbrother, Nathan Matthews, and his girlfriend, Shauna Hall. Oddly, arranging that conversation wasn’t simple. It took some doing before police finally got the pair into the station to talk. Shauna did most of the talking, walking detectives through what she said had happened that day.

On its own, her account sounded plausible enough. But a few things about the interview didn’t sit right with the officers in the room. Shauna seemed unusually upbeat, almost bright, in a situation that called for anything but. Nathan, by contrast, barely seemed present, as if the disappearance of his own step-sister was something happening to someone else entirely.

And then there was the detail that troubled Detective Richard Eon most. Their two accounts lined up almost perfectly. In his experience, people who live through the same event separately tend to remember it differently. A few details out of sync, a couple of small contradictions. That’s normal. What Nathan and Shauna gave police instead was two stories so closely matched they seemed rehearsed.

Still, a feeling isn’t evidence. And with 9 days now gone since anyone had heard from Becky, the public search only grew louder. Volunteers walking the streets, posters going up on every corner, a city refusing to stop looking.  I think we got there about 11:00-ish, heard music upstairs which she and Becky had been in then.

 Mhm.  Um I went into the kitchen to get a cigarette. Went to go outside to have a cigarette. My daughter wanted to come and join cuz she wanted to come out with me, so I took her down to the garden to help feed the rabbit while I had a cigarette. Um probably it was about 15-20 minutes. Um then we came back up.

I went to the kitchen to get a drink. I think I was washing my hands. Then I heard the front door slam. And then I think it wasn’t till a lot later on that Angie asked me if Becky had gone out.    And I said, “Yeah, I heard the door go.” She must have gone out earlier. Washing my hands, I think, I heard the door slam.

 Uh  front door. Um again, I didn’t look at the time or think anything of it, so I didn’t really kind of like, “Oh, what was that?” It was    It was just the door, so Becky must have gone out.  I’ve accidentally got this in the wrong order here.  Okay.  Can I go back to this scene? Right, let me just go back slightly then, if I  could.

 The door slamming then, you’ve got to get from the kitchen through to the living room.  Yes.  So,  how far away from that front door would you have been?  Um but you’ve got the front door, living room, and about halfway up the hallway  Mhm.  is the kitchen.  Mhm.  So, I would have been at the sink. So, that you a distance, a reasonable amount, you  know what I’m saying?  Okay.

 Immediately before this sound of the door slamming, what could you hear then?  Um I think  it was just TV news again, to be honest. I was kind of more, you know, trying to make sure that they let me back and get my drink.  Yeah.  Um    No, I heard stomping downstairs. Cuz that’s what made me think that Becky left in a mood.

 So, I said to Angie cuz I was like the door slammed, I wasn’t sure if that was the wind.  Yeah.   I took it because there was like quite stomp stomp stomp downstairs. I assumed you know, she was in a bit of one of her tantrums.  Yeah. Are you thinking that’s the front door that slammed?  Yeah.  [clears throat]  Okay. Um And who did you think that was then?  Well, Becky.

 I mean, I think what we’ll do is we’ll probably wrap the interview up. And now, we’ve been talking for 2 hours, it’s quite a long time. Um  My back’s killing me.  I know.  And particularly don’t like her, but obviously, [snorts] I don’t particularly like her. Obviously, what annoys me is the way she speaks to like my mom sometimes.

She can be like rude or whatever, which I think even actually specific time.  Has he Nathan had any sort of concerns about speaking to us?  Not that he’s told me, no.  No.  No. But if he does, I wouldn’t know though.  Yeah. How how is he finding it?  I mean, he’s found it quite hard, actually.

 Again, he’s kind of more thinking, like God, if it was or again, knowing how hard it’d be for his mom at the moment. You know, because Becky was almost like a daughter a daughter to her.  Yeah. And then over the weekend, have you have either you or Nathan been involved in searching for Becky or doing any searching?  No, I wasn’t aware they were doing a search.

 I didn’t realize until um I think it was yesterday  Yeah.  I went on my Facebook and obviously, there was news articles and pictures popped up about that they did the search.  You were at the address at the time Rebecca or Becky, I think most people know as yeah, Becky.  Bex.  Yeah, okay. Do you know her as Becky or Bex?  Uh usually call her Bex.

 What we’re most interested in is finding Becky. Yeah, that’s what the police want to do.  Yeah.  Then investigators went back to the one place they hadn’t fully torn apart, the house itself. This time the major crimes unit came with them and forensic teams moved room by room.

 In Becky’s bedroom, on the door frame, they found something small and easy to miss if you weren’t looking closely. Faint traces of blood. And inside that blood, a set of fingerprints. Nathan and Shauna were brought back in for a second round of questioning. This time with investigators watching them far more closely than before. But even with the blood and the prints in hand, police still didn’t have enough to make an arrest.

Not yet. Then the lab results came back. The fingerprints in the blood on Becky’s door frame belonged to Nathan Matthews. It took several more agonizing hours to identify whose blood it actually was. Investigators made their decision in advance. If the blood was Becky’s, they would move immediately. No more waiting, no more careful questioning.

An arrest on suspicion of kidnapping. The results came back. The blood was Becky’s. On Saturday, February 28th, 2015, 9 days after a mother’s love and a father’s plea had gone out to the entire country, Nathan Matthews and Shauna Hoare were arrested at a house in Bristol. It felt for a moment like the beginning of an answer.

What no one in that house yet understood was that the truth waiting behind Nathan Matthews’s front door was so much darker than a kidnapping. And it was about to change the entire investigation. An arrest isn’t an answer. It’s a door swinging open onto more questions. And the deeper investigators looked into Nathan Matthews, the more that door seemed to lead somewhere they didn’t want to go.

Nathan was 10 years older than Becky, and he’d known her since she was barely 2 years old, since the day his mother, Angie, first started seeing her father, Darren. But knowing someone for that long doesn’t always mean closeness. His relationship with Darren had always carried an edge of tension. Nathan didn’t take well to anyone stepping into his mother’s life or his own.

He got along fine with Becky’s older brother, Dan. The two played video games together, spent time together, the ordinary rhythm of stepbrothers who’d made peace with the arrangement. With Becky, there was almost nothing. Nathan rarely spoke to her. He didn’t even live under the same roof, choosing instead to stay with his grandmother nearby, dropping in on his mother’s household when it suited him.

There were warning signs along the way, the kind that only look like warning signs in hindsight. When Nathan was 19, he once pulled up to the family home with a car full of young girls, and Darren wouldn’t let any of them through the front door, sending Nathan straight back out to take them home.

 Years later, when Becky was a teenager battling an eating disorder, a real frightening decline that terrified her family, Nathan waved it off entirely, insisting she was just doing it for attention. It would take Becky roughly a year to recover. And then there was Shauna. Back in 2008, when Nathan was 21, he brought a new girlfriend home and introduced her to the family as 19 years old.

She was actually 15. Once Darren figured out the truth, he sent her home immediately. He’d fought hard to get his children back after their time in the care system, and he wasn’t going to let anything jeopardize that stability again. Nathan and Shauna stayed together anyway. They eventually had a daughter of their own, and Darren, for reasons he could never quite put into words, never fully trusted her.

None of that on its own was proof of anything, but it was the shape of a pattern. And patterns were exactly what investigators were starting to build. Back at the station, detectives used a careful strategy on Nathan. Let him talk. Build his confidence. Let him think he was in control of the conversation. Then pivot hard into direct, pointed questions.

While that was happening in one room, Shauna was being worked through her own account in another. Then forensic teams moved into the house Nathan and Shauna actually lived in. What they found was chaos. Clutter in every room. Mess piled on mess. The kind of home that had clearly been neglected for a long time.

But one room broke the pattern entirely. The bathroom was just as filthy and forgotten as everything else around it. Except for the bathtub. It was spotless. Not just clean. Gleaming. Scrubbed to a shine that had no business existing in a house that looked like this. Investigators noticed it immediately. Nobody said what it might mean out loud.

Not yet. Outside the interrogation room, the city was grieving in the open. Flowers piled up outside the family’s house. St. Ambrose Church opened a book of condolences and stayed lit late into the night so people could come sit with candles. And somewhere in the middle of all of it was a detail almost too cruel to comprehend.

Becky had been killed on her brother Dan’s 20th birthday. Investigators kept their cards close. Telling Nathan and Shauna only that forensic teams had been through their home. Never specifying what had actually been found. Letting the uncertainty do its own work.  Everything seemed normal. Nothing  seemed wrong.

 Nothing, you know, it seemed the same as it would any other day.  Have you got any concerns or suspicions that Nathan or any other member of your family or extended family might be  responsible for her disappearance?  No. No.  Is there anything that happened that could be significant in the disappearance of Rebecca?  No.

 You’re absolutely sure?  Yes.  I know you’ve got something  to tell us.  Mhm.  I can see it in your face.  I’m just making sure there was nothing like a weird significant  thing that I hadn’t thought of. Um I don’t know.  Then, after two more grueling days combing through that same cluttered house, they got the piece that changed everything.

Two small receipts from a hardware store called B&Q. The purchase had been made on the very Friday Becky was reported missing. An electric circular saw, safety goggles, protective gloves, a mask. Store surveillance confirmed exactly who had bought them. Nathan Matthews. He and Shauna were arrested a second time.

This time, the word attached to their names wasn’t kidnapping. It was murder. Police had to walk back into the Watts family’s living room and tell them the case had changed completely. That this was no longer a search for a missing girl, but a murder investigation. And that the two people under suspicion were sitting at their own kitchen table days earlier pretending to grieve alongside them.

Darren would later describe that moment as the one where his entire world gave way beneath him. Behind closed doors, the pressure kept building. And on Tuesday, March 3rd, at 10:26 at night, it broke. Nathan’s lawyer delivered a written statement to police, and Nathan himself couldn’t bear to hear it read aloud, physically covering his ears rather than listen to his own words.

In it, he admitted responsibility for Becky’s death. He described arriving at the house with Shauna, carrying a bag containing items meant to restrain her, going up to her bedroom under the pretense of just talking, and then a struggle, one in which his mask slipped and Becky saw his face.

 He said that was the moment everything spiraled beyond his control and the moment she died. But a confession wasn’t the end of the horror. It was only the beginning of understanding it. Because after Becky’s death, Nathan had used that bathtub, the one that gleamed while the rest of the house rotted, along with the very tools he’d bought that same day, to do something to her body that investigators would spend the next several days trying to fully piece together.

12 days after Becky Watts walked out of her family’s life, a private ambulance away from a residential garden on a small Bristol estate. Detectives had made the discovery the night before. The outcome her family had quietly feared for nearly 2 weeks now confirmed in the worst possible way. Her remains had been dismembered, and in the days that followed, the search widened even further.

 The information suggested that Becky’s body had been cut up, and a search at the new location resulted in the discovery of body parts. Although formal identification procedures have not yet been completed, we have made Becky’s family aware of this discovery.  Three men and two women were arrested on suspicion of helping to hide what had happened on top of Nathan and Shauna.

The people living in the house where the remains were found insisted they hadn’t known what was inside the bags left there. Some would later admit guilt to assisting an offender. Two others facing the same accusation were ultimately cleared.  As a result of this latest development, a further three men and two women have been arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender.

They remain in police custody at this time, as do the man and woman arrested on suspicion of Becky’s murder. This is devastating news for Becky’s family and friends, and our thoughts are with them. We will continue to offer every support we can to them during this terrible ordeal.  Detective Sergeant John Dowding led that final search, uncovering suitcases and bags where Becky’s remains had been carefully wrapped and hidden.

A deliberate, methodical effort to make sure she was never found. The forensic report that followed was almost unbearable to read. Becky had fought back, hard. She’d suffered extensive injuries in that struggle. The official cause of death was asphyxiation, with additional wounds inflicted afterward. Her body had changed so much that investigators could only confirm her identity through DNA testing.

 For the officers of Avon and Somerset police, who had turned this into one of the largest search operations the force had ever run, who had genuinely hoped until the very end that they might bring Becky home alive, this was the ending nobody wanted to write. And yet, even with a confession in hand and a body finally found, the full truth still wasn’t finished revealing itself.

Because investigators weren’t convinced they had the whole story yet. Especially when it came to exactly how much Shauna Hall had really known, and how far back this had all actually begun.  What’s your knowledge of him killing Becky?  Found out yesterday morning.  You found out yesterday morning?  Um prior to that, I had no idea they had any involvement in anything at all.

 And how do we know you  weren’t involved in this the killing of Becky.  Proof?  There would be no proof. I haven’t touched anything  or been anywhere near her alive or dead. Who would have hit her? Who is to speak? So, there’s no reason that you should or shouldn’t believe me. Um I can just obviously tell you that I genuinely had no idea.

 And yeah, I didn’t always like Becky, but she was a nice enough girl. She was so young. And the fact that we’ve got a little girl ourselves. I’m carrying his unborn children. I don’t understand how we could have done it to us.  Remember the opening of this story? The messages that stopped. The stepmother who came home to strangers acting normal.

The boyfriend turned away at the door while Becky’s body sat feet away in a parked car. By the time this case reached its end, investigators had reconstructed nearly every minute of it. And once you hear it laid out in full, it becomes almost impossible to comprehend how anyone sat through that day and said nothing.

It started at 10:50 that Thursday morning when Becky came home after a night at a friend’s house. Nathan and Shauna arrived not long after, stopping at a Tesco on the way to pick up batteries. A small, almost forgettable errand that would later read like something far more calculated. They knew Angie had a hospital appointment that day, which meant Becky would be home alone.

And instead of parking on the street the way Nathan usually did, he backed the car into the driveway, angling the trunk toward the front door. At 11:03, Becky sent her boyfriend that final message. Just listening to music, nothing more. She never replied to him again. In the minutes that followed she was attacked and strangled and her body was placed into the trunk of that car parked in plain sight on an ordinary residential street.

At 12:45 Angie came home. Nathan and Shauna simply carried on as though nothing had happened. At 5:00 Becky’s boyfriend arrived at the door worried because she’d gone quiet. Shauna answered, made a show of checking Becky’s room, and told him she wasn’t there. He spoke with Darren and Angie and together they agreed it wasn’t like Becky to disappear like this.

Nobody in that conversation knew she was already gone or that her body had been sitting in a car outside for hours. At 7:00 that evening, after spending most of the day in the company of Becky’s grieving yet unknowing family Nathan and Shauna finally left and drove home bringing her body with them. What happened next took place in that same bathtub investigators would later find scrubbed unnaturally clean.

Afterward, the two of them ordered pizza and Chinese food as though the day had been like any other. The following day, Nathan invented an excuse, a friend supposedly needing help and left the house to buy items that would later be tied directly to disposing of evidence. That afternoon at 3:10 Shauna sent him a strikingly casual text.

“What time do you finish work? lol” 50 minutes later at 4:00 the 999 call went out. Becky Watts was officially a missing person. Shauna even shared Darren’s Facebook appeal asking the public to help bring his daughter home. When police came to the house that evening at 6:35 Nathan and Shauna calmly told them they’d heard Becky leave the house that same morning.

A detail that placed her disappearance safely after the moment she’d actually died. By 9:00 that night, the two of them were home, sitting in front of a laptop, watching a YouTube video whose title left little to the imagination about what it was for. Over the days that followed, they made repeated trips out to buy cleaning and concealment supplies.

 On February 23rd, police returned to their door and got no answer. That afternoon at 4:38, someone on a phone linked to the couple typed “find Becky Watts” into Google. Two minutes later, Shauna called her estranged mother, a woman she hadn’t spoken to in 4 years, and arranged to meet that same evening. Then, in the early hours of February 24th at 2:19 in the morning, a CCTV camera caught a white van moving from Cottonmill Lane toward the property where Becky’s remains would later be discovered.

Almost certainly, the vehicle used to move her body to its final hiding place. With Nathan’s written confession in hand, investigators still weren’t finished. They needed to know exactly how much Shauna had known and when. She maintained that she’d only learned the full truth the day before Nathan’s statement was written.

Police weren’t convinced that was the whole story, and they kept digging. After 96 hours of questioning, Nathan Matthews was formally charged with the murder of his step-sister.  What was the question again?  About the the idea that  you got, and you said it might have been something on TV or you had a dream.

 I was I came up with the idea to scare her. Cuz like to try and basically make her more appreciative of life so she’d be more appreciative for other people.  She’d be like grateful that, you know, she wasn’t harmed or anything like that, or you know. Cuz obviously, um she’d leave things out on the floor for my mom to trip over.

And obviously, we’d talk to her, um like saying nasty comments and talk to her like dirt on the floor. And I thought I thought I was, you know, able to scare her. And obviously, her will be harmed, but obviously be released. Obviously, when she got back, she obviously would have been scared and more appreciative of things.

 So, tell me what you thought you were going to do.  Obviously, stick her in  the suitcase. Obviously, put tape around her mouth so she wouldn’t make any noise. What the plan was was to get her in the car to make up some up to say to say to Shauna, um obviously, I had to leave like to help someone or do something some up.

 I was thinking of like a wooded area, whatever. Obviously, take her back out. Obviously, still have the mask on. And obviously, like scare her and you know, say something along the lines of, you know, you’ve got to start treating people um    start treating people better and then not being a [ __ ] or self-centered.

 And then like make a threat of um you know, or you know, or this could happen again or worse or something like that. I hadn’t figured out exactly how to obviously walk like obviously walk away after without obviously I don’t know if she’d try and follow. I’m assuming she wouldn’t have followed because on our theory, you wouldn’t want to follow someone who just obviously has done that.

And obviously, would have come back. Or I would have obviously um chucked away obviously everything first and then come back. And obviously would have acted as normal. I come back to me mum’s. Obviously, acted as normal.  Shauna, at that point, was charged only with perverting the course of justice. There simply wasn’t enough yet to charge her with murder.

But, investigators didn’t stop there. Over the following 8 weeks, they tore through phone records and computer data from both of their devices. And buried inside one of Shauna’s phones, they found something that reframed the entire case. A string of deleted messages, recovered from the depths of the device, in which she and Nathan had discussed abducting and confining another young girl entirely unrelated to Becky.

Alongside that, investigators uncovered additional digital material involving minors. Evidence that disturbed even seasoned detectives. And then, once again, it was the physical evidence that closed the gap between suspicion and certainty.  So, the first message is uh 9th of 12th, 2014, at time of 12:48, and it says to Shauna, and  um, it says, “Fuck you.

 Bring me back two pretty schoolgirls then.” D 1, I think that says. Tell me about that text message.  No comment.  Next message is 9th of December, 2014, at 18:14.    It says from Shauna. Just went to Costcutter’s and saw a very    big cat, pretty petite girl. Almost knocked her out to bring her  home. LOL. And it’s crosses and zeros.

Shauna, what can you tell me about that? No comment. Am I right in thinking that this girl was similar to Becky’s age? No comment.  Shauna’s DNA was found on the bag used to conceal parts of Becky’s body. It was also found on one of the masks. There was no explaining that away. On June 22nd, Shauna Hoare was formally charged with the murder of Becky Watts.

Before the legal system caught up to what had happened, the family had to say goodbye.  Good afternoon to you and welcome to BBC News. The stepbrother of the schoolgirl Becky Watts has been found guilty of her murder. 28-year-old Nathan Matthews suffocated 16-year-old Becky while trying to kidnap her from her home in Bristol in February.

 Her dismembered body was found in a garden shed. His girlfriend Shauna Hoare was acquitted of murder today, but found  guilty of manslaughter.  Justice has been done for beautiful Becky. Now the formalities have been concluded, we can begin the process of grieving properly and rebuilding our lives.

 Lives that could never ever be the same.  Becky’s funeral was held at St. Ambrose Church on April 17th, open to the public, with mourners lining the streets as her coffin passed by on a horse-drawn carriage. The burial afterward was private, just close family. As the coffin was carried out of the church, a single white dove was released into the sky above Bristol, climbing higher until it disappeared from sight.

The trial began on October 6th, 2015 at Bristol Crown Court, and even a family that had already endured the unthinkable wasn’t prepared for everything that surfaced. It emerged that 2 years before her death, Becky had confided in a friend that Nathan had described in specific detail exactly how he planned to kill her.

She never told her family. Witnesses from Nathan’s time in the cadets and later the Territorial Army painted a picture of a young man once known for a kind of cheeky confidence whose temper had begun surfacing more and more over the years. Moments of snapping, of throwing things when frustration took over. Prosecutor William Mosley QC laid out for the jury a motive that went beyond simple resentment toward Becky.

He argued the two defendants shared a disturbing common interest tied to the ages of the people they targeted. Meaning this wasn’t only about anger or jealousy toward a step sister. There was a second motive underneath it. One far darker than anything the public had been told before. Shauna took the position that she was innocent, telling the court she had acted out of fear of her own boyfriend.

The prosecution rejected that framing entirely, arguing the two of them had operated as partners from the very start. One plan, one crime, carried out together. Perhaps the most striking testimony came from someone almost nobody expected to hear from. Shauna’s own estranged mother. A woman she’d barely spoken to in years.

The court heard that in the days right after Becky vanished, Shauna suddenly wanted to reconnect. Showing up and calling out of nowhere. Her mother recalled one unsettling moment from that time. A joke Shauna tossed off almost casually. I know why you keep coming over. You’re hiding from the police because you kidnapped Becky.

Her mother remembered it because Shauna didn’t laugh when she said it. The jury didn’t need long. After just 3 hours of deliberation, they returned a unanimous verdict. Shauna Hall, guilty of kidnapping and manslaughter. Nathan Matthews, guilty of kidnapping and murder. Shauna Hall was sentenced to 17 years in prison.

 Nathan Matthews received a life sentence with a minimum term of 33 years before parole could even be considered. A term the judge suggested might never actually arrive. As he was led out of the courtroom, Nathan kept his eyes down. Unable to face the family sitting just feet away. Even the judge, delivering his final remarks, was visibly moved to tears as he addressed what the Watts family had endured.

Becky’s mother, Tanya, released a statement that needed no embellishment. My beautiful, kind, funny, loving, loyal, feisty, creative daughter has been murdered. Every day has been a living nightmare. It’s like the worst of all horror movies, but this is real. This is my child. She was only 16. How am I meant to cope with that? In June 2016, both Nathan Matthews and Shauna Hall appealed their convictions.

Both appeals were rejected. The verdict stood. In the aftermath, a formal child protection review examined whether any of this could have been caught in advance. Its conclusion was difficult in its own way. There had been no clear, direct warning signs pointing to what Nathan and Shauna would eventually do. But the report did note that not enough attention had been paid to the wider environment around Becky, including the stepbrother and girlfriend who turned out to be so central to her death.

It also connected some of Becky’s earlier anxiety and difficult behavior directly to bullying from Matthews himself, a thread that had existed for years, unnoticed for what it was. Darren later wrote a book about his daughter called Becky, The Heartbreaking Story of Becky Watts, and in one interview admitted he wished he personally had the power to ensure Nathan face the harshest consequence possible.

The grief took a visible toll on him, dramatic weight loss, broken sleep, a body and a face that friends said became almost unrecognizable in the months that followed. And yet, through all of it, Darren and Angie didn’t fall apart from each other. They stayed together, carrying that grief side by side, rather than letting it pull them in different directions.

 It really is a way of breaking. And I’ve lost a couple of family members of family because I won’t turn on her. I will never desert her, never. If this doesn’t  break us up, then nothing’s going to.  The city carried some of that weight, too. A balloon launch was held in Becky’s memory. A march brought the center of Bristol to a complete standstill.

Football stadiums fell silent for a minute in her honor. And in a local park, a small apple tree was planted for her. A quiet, living symbol of growth in the place where so much had been lost. Those who loved Becky Watts always came back to the same words to describe her.  Oh, it’s really hot anyway cuz of the microwave.

 Like a tornado. Like a hurricane. And, in the same breath, like a ray of sunshine. She had a way of walking into a room and making the people around her feel like they truly mattered. That’s the girl this case was always about, not the crime that ended her life, but the 16 years she spent living it fully, fiercely, and on her own terms.

Becky Watts should have had decades more ahead of her. Instead, her story became a documentary a nation still returns to, and a reminder of how much can hide behind the closed doors of an ordinary-looking home.