Evil Eyes by Corey Mitchell Read Free Book Online

The officers pursued him on foot; however, Watts’s All-City running-back credentials helped him make it to his vehicle and blaze out of there. Unfortunately for Watts, his driving skills were no match for his athletic prowess. The officers caught up to him in their police cruiser and arrested him for driving with a suspended license and ex-pired license tags.
    A search of his vehicle led to the discovery of something quite unusual. Watts had an oversized dictionary in the backseat of his Grand Prix. Upon closer inspection the officers could see something scratched on the cover. It said, “Rebecca is a lover.” Detective Bunten could not help but be reminded later of the recent murder of Rebecca Huff. The search also turned up blood evidence as well as some wood-carving tools.
    The two officers brought Watts in for an interrogation at the Ann Arbor Police Department. “I was certain I had a prime suspect,” Bunten remembered. “What struck me

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    was how normal he seemed,” he said of the soft-spoken twenty-seven-year-old Watts. Bunten observed his perp’s calm demeanor. He did notice that Watts’s hands twitched slightly, his only sign of nervousness.
    Watts knew that Bunten was not there to talk to him about the vehicular infractions.
    “I know what you’ve been up to,” Bunten declared. “I can’t prove it yet, but I will.”
    Watts merely looked up at Bunten and said, “I want a lawyer.”
    Bunten stopped talking and allowed the suspect to make his phone call. Bunten had no evidence against Watts, so there was no justification in holding him any longer.
    Watts was free to go.
    That did not, however, prevent Bunten from pursuing his man. In essence, he became Watts’s stalker.
    Bunten was relentless in his endeavors. He began by calling other police jurisdictions and finding everything he could to tie Watts to the Sunday Morning Slasher killings. Bunten spoke with the Kalamazoo Police Department about the murder of Gloria Steele. Apparently, the wound patterns inflicted on Steele were reminiscent of the stab wounds on Glenda Richmond. Kalamazoo detectives informed Bunten that Watts was a key suspect in the Steele murder; however, they could not secure any evidence to pin it on him.
    Bunten discovered information about Watts’s various stints in mental institutions. He also found out that Watts may have been terrorizing the city of Detroit as well. Finally, Watts’s former psychiatrist and former attor-ney warned Bunten that he had probably found his
    killer.
    All of these factors led Bunten to round up several

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    officers and begin a 24/7 surveillance of Coral Eugene Watts. “We turned into insomniacs,” he stated.
    Apparently, at first, Watts was unaware of the watching eyes. Only five days after his arrest, at 7:00 P . M . on November 20, 1980, he allegedly attempted to attack sixty-year- old Rita Pardo in an apartment complex laundry room in Windsor, Ontario. A man wearing a dress shirt, dark pants, and a light brown trench coat grabbed Pardo from behind and began to choke her with his hands. She screamed and the man hightailed it out of there. Watts’s Grand Prix was not tracked crossing the border from Canada to the United States later that night; however, he was seen the next day wearing clothing that was similar to what Pardo described.
    The pressure of the surveillance was increased substan-tially the following day. According to Bunten, a meeting was held at the Detroit Police Department that included Bunten, Sergeant James Arthurs, Detroit Police Internal Affairs, the state of Michigan police force, Windsor, Ontario authorities, and Homicide Squad Seven. Their purpose: somehow try and find a way to stop Coral Eugene Watts before he killed again.
    They all followed Watts’s every move. They followed him to work at E&L Transport, the trucking company, located on the 21000 block of Hayden Road in Woodhaven; they followed him to the grocery stores; they followed