A Deal With The Devil?

Steve Kroft Reports On Confessed Serial Killer Coral Eugene Watts

(CBS)  It took Watts more than a week to describe how he had stalked and killed each of his victims -- and he led investigators to three shallow graves.

What was he like? "Very congenial. He didn’t act like a killer until you started listening to what he’s telling you or following his directions to his crime scenes," says Ladd. "[He had an] excellent memory. Very, very intelligent. He never got the facts of one murder mixed up with the facts of another murder. He never missed."

So why did he do it? "We'd ask him. We said, 'Well, why'd you kill this girl or that girl?' And he goes, 'They have evil in their eyes,'" says Ladd, who adds that almost all of Watts' victims were picked out at night. "We said 'Coral, you couldn’t see her eyes.' And he said 'Yeah. She’s got evil in her eyes.'”

How did he operate? "He'd get in that car of his, and he'd drive around," says Ladd. "Sometimes, he’d drive all night long. And then he’d see a female, and whatever it was about that female, which we still to this day don’t know, why he picked one girl, and passed up 20 others."

Once he picked his victim, Watts killed quickly. None of the victims were sexually assaulted. Most were killed just steps from their front doors. "One girl, he just walked up and she turned and he stabbed her one time in the heart and turned around and ran away," says Ladd. "Probably didn't spend 15 seconds there even at the scene, and then an hour and a half later, he killed another one."

At one point, Watts said he was willing to confess to 22 murders in Michigan, and a call went out to detectives like Bunten in Ann Arbor.

"The next day, we sat down with our prosecuting attorney and we all agreed that you don’t give immunity to somebody who’s committed murder. There’s just no way you can do that," says Bunten.

Even to clear up cases? "Just because we couldn't prove it doesn't mean we don't know who did it," says Bunten.

Did he ever give any indication as to why he had committed these murders? "He says, 'I'll take that to my grave with me,'" says Bunten. "He's driven to do this. What drives him, I have no idea."

But Bunten said he did manage to have one last conversation with Watts in a Texas penitentiary: "I said, 'Coral, I haven't got enough fingers and toes to count the number of people you’ve killed, have I? And he looked around the room and said, 'There’s not enough fingers and toes in this room.'”

There were four people in the room, which would mean 80 victims. Does Bunten believe he is capable of killing that many people?

"Don't know. I asked him if he confessed to everything down in Texas, and he said, 'No,'" says Bunten. "I said, 'Why didn't you?' He made the statement to me that he doesn't want to go down in history as a mass murderer. And I said, 'You know what? That ship sailed.'"

At the time, it seemed a moot point, because everyone assumed Watts would die in prison an old man. But a series of court rulings changed that. As a first-time offender, Watts was granted time off for good behavior – three days off his sentence for every day served. So instead of serving a 60-year sentence, under Texas law, Watts would automatically be released after just 24 years.

"He'll have served less than two years for every Houston homicide victim that he murdered. That’s incredible. It’s never happened before in this country’s history," says Kahan.

Because Watts had been given immunity back in 1982, there was nothing Texas could do to keep Watts in prison. But Michigan was another story.

As soon as authorities in Michigan found out that Watts might be released, they created a special task force, headed by Lt. Bill Hanger, to begin digging through every unsolved homicide that Watts might possibly be linked to. Hanger says there are "roughly 90 cases we still consider him a suspect on."

They've got a suspect, but now they're trying to find the crime. Usually it works the other way around.

"He said that he would confess to 22 or so Michigan cases if he was granted immunity," says Hanger. "So I know there's at least 22 out there."

Last November, one month after this report was broadcast, Watts was in a Michigan courtroom charged with the murder of Helen Dutcher, a Detroit woman who was stabbed to death in 1979.

"They're looking for anything, any murder, any witness, any anything that they can pin on him," says Ron Kaplovitz, the court-appointed attorney for Watts.

He says his client may be a confessed serial killer, but he says there is not much physical evidence that he killed Dutcher: "None whatsoever."

Assistant Attorney Gen. Donna Pendergast had something else -- an eyewitness.

"It's really miraculous, but out of all the hundreds of cases that the task force was looking at, a witness from one of them said, 'Hey I know something' and he came forward," says Pendergast.

The state's star witness, Joseph Foy, had called police in 1979 to report the murder. Now, he told the jury he was certain Watts was the man he saw commit it.

The jury also heard emotional testimony from some of the Texas victims who managed to escape from Watts, including Aguilar, who identified Watts as the man who tried to kill her.

Finally, the jury heard Watts in his own words confess to murdering all those women in Texas.

It took just four hours to convict Coral Watts of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

But the courtroom celebration was short-lived. Watts is appealing his conviction. Melinda Aguilar hasn't stopped worrying that another legal loophole could result in his release.

"I can still remember when I had to identify him," says Aguilar. "Just the way he looked at me was one of those looks like, 'You just wait when I get out.' All I remember is his evil eyes."