CRIME HUNTER: Sunday Morning Slasher murdered up to 100 women

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Coral Eugene Watts began having his vivid dreams of torturing and murdering women when he was around 12 years old.

His nocturnal fantasy life was setting the table for a lifetime of perversion and bloodshed. Some law enforcement estimates put him on par with serial killer Samuel Little, who was believed to have notched 100 victims.

Watts is in that dire ballpark.

And yet, he had none of the infamy of Little, who drove across the country preying on addicts, sex workers and homeless women.

One homicide detective recalled: “Watts did say one thing eventually. ‘There aren’t enough fingers and toes in this room for the number of women I’ve killed.’ This was chilling.”

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Carl “Coral” Eugene Watts was born in Killeen, Texas, in 1953. As a child, he moved with his family to the Detroit area, where he struggled to adjust.

When he was eight or nine years old, he caught meningitis. Family members later said they noticed a dramatic change in his personality.

The young boy became bashful, quiet, and introverted, and he struggled in school. As a result of the meningitis, he experienced chronic sleeplessness.

And then there were the hyper-violent dreams. He later claimed he committed his first murder in Michigan when he was just 15 and was convicted of several sex attacks.

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Despite his lousy grades, Watts earned a football scholarship to Lane College in Tennessee, later saying exercise gave him an outlet for the rage that lay within him. He became a star football player and later, a Gold Gloves fighter. After three months, he was booted from Lane College for stalking women.

He returned to Michigan, where a string of horrific attacks on women soon followed.

On October 30, 1974, Gloria Steele, 20, was kidnapped, tortured and killed by Watts in Kalamazoo. The Western Michigan University student was discovered with a crushed windpipe and 33 stab wounds in her chest.

Steele was his first known murder, but Watts was also strongly suspected of being the killer in the September 6, 1972, murder of Zenaida Tomes, 20. She had been stabbed 45 times.

He was also suspected in the disappearance of Nadine Jean O’Dell, 16, on August 16, 1974.

Watts was nabbed for a pair of assaults around that time and questioned about the murders and disappearances. At a state mental hospital, psychologists had a dire outlook on his future.

The claimed Watts was “extremely hazardous, lacking in remorse for his crimes, impetuous, careless, and emotionally distant, with a high likelihood of recidivism.”

In 1976, five women were attacked and murdered in Detroit. The papers called the unknown killer the “Sunday Morning Slasher” because the slayings all occurred on Sundays around 4 a.m.

Watts had a predilection for slender, blond, white women. One was Detroit News reporter, Jeanne Clyne, 44, who was stabbed to death on October 31, 1979, outside her home in suburban Grosse Point Farms.

But in 1979, a man named Joseph Foy watched in horror as a small-framed Black man stabbed Helen Dutcher to death in Ferndale, Michigan. Foy would be very important indeed.

The bloodbath continued with grisly, similar murders in Michigan and Texas. Shirley Small, Glenda Richmond and Rebecca Greer-Huff were a few of his Michigan victims. But things were getting hot, so Watts high-tailed it to the Lone Star State.

In 1982, Watts attacked roommates Melinda Aguilar and Lori Lister in Texas. Aguilar’s lucky escape helped cops nab Watts. But not before he murdered another woman, Michele Maday, on the same day.

His body count mounted to 13 confirmed kills in Michigan, with the victims almost all young white women between the ages of 14 and 44. He killed with strangulation, stabbing, bludgeoning and drowning.

Even though he was nabbed in 1982, it didn’t emerge until 1990 that he was a serial homicidal maniac with dozens of victims.

Watts escaped detection for so long because he murdered around the country. And despite his sick fantasies, he rarely performed sex acts with his victims. Even DNA made his capture impossible.

He confessed to 13 murders and was sentenced to 60 years in prison, but he ended up receiving immunity for a technicality that cut his sentence to 24 years.

It took years, but Watts was eventually linked to dozens of unsolved murders and missing women in the areas where he lived. He is suspected in the disappearances of Michigan women Suzanne Searles, Linda Tilley, Susan Wolf, Emily Laqua, Edith Ledet and others.

It would be Joseph Foy who witnessed the brutal murder of Helen Dutcher, who would seal Watts’ fate. He recognized the transient killer from the news in 2004.

Assistant Attorney General Donna Pendergrast, who had been the principal homicide attorney in Wayne County, Michigan, said Watts was not on her radar.

“I received a call from a reporter in Texas who asked me what Michigan was doing about Coral Eugene Watts,” Pendergrast said. “I responded, ‘Who?’”

In November 2004, a jury found Watts guilty of the first-degree premeditated murder of Helen Dutcher.

Then in 2007, the low-key killer died behind bars of cancer at the Ionia Maximum Correctional Facility in Michigan.

bhunter@postmedia.com

@HunterTOSun