Carl Eugene Watts

Before Carl was born, in 1942, Richard was transferred to Killeen and assigned to Fort Hood Army Base because it was chosen as the site for the American Army's Tank Destroyer Tactical and Firing centre.

Three days after his birth, they returned to West Virginia, where they had grown up, and a year later, Sharon, their second child, was born.

Watts' parents divorced when he was less than two years old due to an unsatisfactory marriage, and his mother raised him.

Carl Eugene Watts (November 7, 1953 – September 21, 2007), also known by his nickname Coral, was an American serial killer dubbed "The Sunday Morning Slasher" who murdered numerous women and girls over an eight-year period.

He is suspected of being the most prolific serial killer in United States history.

He died of prostate cancer while serving two sentences of life imprisonment without parole in a Michigan prison for the murders of Helen Dutcher and Gloria Steele, although the number of his victims may have exceeded 100.

Carl Eugene Watts was born in Killeen, Texas to Richard Eugene Watts and Dorothy Mae Young on November 7, 1953.

His father was a private first class in the Army, and his mother was a kindergarten art teacher.

They had married in Coalwood, West Virginia.

In 1962, Dorothy Mae married Norman Caesar, a mechanic, with whom she had two daughters.

The two moved to Inkster, Michigan where she found employment as a high school art teacher.

Watts disliked his new stepfather, which made it difficult for him to adapt to his new familial environment.

Watts claimed that he was referred to as a "mama's boy" and that he often worried about losing his mother's attention.

Dorothy Mae, Carl, and Sharon frequently visited Dorothy's mother and family in Coalwood, where Dorothy was born and raised.

In the rural region near his grandmother's home, Carl learnt to hunt and skin rabbits with his grandfather at this time, an activity he really enjoyed.

Carl later adopted the nickname "Coral," which was the southern pronunciation of his name, as a result of Watts' passion for the southern town and his native cousins.

Coral reportedly had academic difficulties in Inkster but yet managed to get decent grades.

Watts and his sister contracted meningitis when he was eight years old, which nearly killed him and caused him to be held back a year and miss the third grade.

Watts was brought to the Herman Kiefer Hospital, where he had to be kept apart from other patients and undergo spinal taps.

Journalists claim that Watts' body temperature was so high that physicians worried it might have caused brain damage.

After his illness, his family members also noticed a change in his personality, describing him as bashful, quiet, and introverted.

His attention span dropped and he began to suffer from a poor memory.

Watts struggled to keep up with other pupils when he returned to school since he had been held back one grade and had experienced chronic sleeplessness as a result of his sickness.

Coral started having violent dreams about battling off and killing the wicked spirits of women, which interrupted his sleep cycle.

When detectives questioned him about his crimes and asked him why he killed women, he responded that he wanted to "free their spirits" because they had "evil eyes."

By the time he was 12 years old, according to Watts, he began to relish his sleep-induced fantasies of torturing and killing girls and young women.

Teenage Watts started stalking girls at this time, and it is thought that he killed his first victim before the age of 15.

He frequently received failing grades in school, and by the age of 16, he could read only at a fourth-grade level.

He was severely bullied at school as well.

Police were able to identify a 15-year-old Watts as a culprit in the assault on 26-year-old Joan Gave on June 29, 1969.

While delivering newspapers on his route, Watts knocked on Gave's apartment door.

Watts beat Gave when she opened the door and abused her violently.

He then continued on his delivery route as if nothing happened.

Gave immediately contacted the authorities who apprehended Coral at his home.

He was ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment at the Lafayette Clinic in Detroit, a mental hospital.

During a psychiatric evaluation, Coral was asked if his dreams and nightmarish visions disturbed him, he replied, "No, I feel better after I have one," and claimed that they were not nightmares because "he enjoyed them."

He further elaborated that his motivation for assaulting Gave was because he "just felt like beating someone up."

According to a psychiatric assessment, Watts was revealed to have a mild intellectual disability with an intelligence quotient of 75, and to have a delusional thought process and no evidence of psychosis.

However, a police officer interrogating Watts after his arrest later stated that he appeared to be "very, very intelligent" with an "excellent memory."

Also, Watts' psychiatrist later reported that Coral was an "impulsive individual who has a passive-aggressive orientation to life" and who is "struggling for control of strong homicidal impulses."