Evil Eyes by Corey Mitchell Read Free Book Online Page A

him as he went to visit his girlfriend Beverly Frye’s house.
    “He knew we were watching him,” Bunten recalled with relish. “He’d get out at a traffic light and yell at private citizens, thinking they were cops.”
    Watts would occasionally jump in his car and head out of the Detroit area. Sometimes he would drive for more than three hundred miles, stop, turn around, and head

    EVIL EY ES 55

    back home. He was always on the go, always on the prowl, and always on the lookout.
    Bunten turned up the pressure when he secured a search warrant for Watts’s Inskter apartment and the Ceaser household as well. Officers did not find anything in his apartment. They did, however, find a tennis shoe with blood on it in his mother’s house. The blood could not be traced.
    The main reason for searching Watts’s various prem-ises had been established. Bunten was trying to get under his suspected murderer’s skin.
    Bunten continued to be a nuisance for Watts. A few days later, on November 26, 1980, Bunten secured a warrant for a tracking device for Watts’s Grand Prix. Four days later, the detective secretly attached the bug-ging device, a “beeper type transmitter,” to the undercar-riage of Watts’s ride.
    “He got paranoid,” Bunten said of Watts. “He knew we were watching him and the longer we watched him, the less he’d move around. He got to where he almost couldn’t leave his neighborhood.”
    Indeed, the killings in the greater Detroit Metropoli-tan area and Ann Arbor area came to a halt over the next two months.
    The warrant for the tracking device ended on January 29, 1981.
    That same day, Bunten moved in for the kill. He cor-ralled Watts at the Ceaser home on the 28000 block of Avondale Street and brought him into the Detroit Police Department Homicide Section for questioning.
    The interrogation lasted more than five hours. Despite Bunten’s seasoned ability at getting suspects to talk, he could not crack Watts.

    56 Corey Mitchell

    “I used every means I know to get somebody to confess. . . . He’s so streetwise, nothing would work.”
    Again Bunten was surprised by how easygoing Watts was. “He was nice. He was polite. If you can forget what he does, he’s seems like a soft-spoken, timid, but personable, pleasant person.”
    Watts, however, refused to answer most of Bunten’s questions. At one point in the interview, he did admit to Bunten that he was “possibly emotionally ill.” He did not elaborate.
    Bunten believed he knew how to break through Watts’s steely exterior. “I not only know you did these, I know ‘how’ you did them,” he assured Watts.
    The detective rose from the interrogation-room table, walked up directly behind Watts, and thrust his left arm around the man’s neck. He was attempting to emulate what he believed was Watts’s preferred method of attack. “We knew the women had been attacked from behind.
    The killer had wrapped his left arm around their throat, then reached over their right shoulder and stabbed them,” Bunten recalled. “The blouses were pulled up at the front, and marks on the throat of one, just under the chin, came from a man’s wristwatch on a left arm.
    “I got up and walked behind him and said, ‘You grabbed them like this. Then you pulled their heads back like this’”—as he jerked back the African American’s head—“‘and you reached over with your right arm and stabbed them like this!’”
    Watts began to cry. Bunten had finally struck a nerve. “He started crying,” Bunten stated incredulously. “Just broke down and started crying. It was the first real emotion we’d seen from him. I thought he might break for
    a minute, but he didn’t.”
    Watts wanted to see his mother. Bunten, somewhat

    EVIL EY ES 57

    taken aback by the regressive emotions on display, decided to go along with it. He suspected that if Watts got to see his mommy, he would confess. He agreed.
    “That was probably a mistake. After that, he wouldn’t say a