REVEALED: The ‘evil’ YouTube sleuth cashing in on tragedy by spreading sick rumours about one of America’s most brutal murders

The murder of Shanann Watts and her two young daughters was a crime so shocking it sent ripples round the globe. Shanann, 34, was pregnant and excited about having a brother for four-year-old Bella and three-year-old Celeste. Then, one night in August 2018, she returned home from a business trip and disappeared, along with the girls.

As concerns mounted, her husband Chris – a clean-cut, apparently doting father – stepped in front of cameras and pleaded for information on his family.

It was a despicable charade. He’d murdered them all. He’d strangled his wife, then smothered his daughters and pushed their tiny bodies into an oil tank on land where he worked in the US state of Colorado, burying Shanann in a grave nearby.

The horrific crime, and the court case that followed, featured in the Netflix documentary American Murder: The Family Next Door in 2020.

Nearly seven years on, Shanann’s family are still reeling from events they describe as ‘the most devastating thing’ a family can experience.

Yet, as this family soon found out, nowadays this agony is often magnified by so-called ‘armchair detectives’ who have sprung up in recent years on blogs, YouTube and TikTok. These people make a living by trawling over the misery of others.

And, while the crime might have occurred in the US, it was a British ghoul who pushed Shanann’s family over the edge.

Speculation from armchair detectives has become a familiar feature of tragedy here, as seen in cases such as the disappearance of mother-of-two Nicola Bulley, 45, in January 2023, whose body was finally found in the river Wyre in Lancashire a month later.

Who could forget the social media frenzy as online ‘sleuths’ picked apart the minutiae of not just her disappearance but her life, fuelling the spread of outlandish theories? ‘You’ve got reality going on but then they’re watching it like a soap opera,’ Nicola’s partner Paul told a documentary last year.

It is a sentiment Shanann’s mother Sandra Rzucek, father Frank and brother Frankie can well understand. ‘There’s not one second we don’t think about our family,’ says Sandra, talking exclusively to The Mail on Sunday. ‘Then to deal with this, on top of that… It has been a living hell.’

For the Rzuceks there was one name that stood out among the barrage of amateur sleuths. It was Alan Vinnicombe, a 70-year-old grandfather and father-of-three who goes by the name the Armchair Detective (AD for short).

Vinnicombe, a former DJ and restaurateur who now plays poker, is not from Colorado, where the crime happened, or even North Carolina, where the Rzuceks live.

He lives in Somerset, England, where he presides over a bustling and potentially lucrative cottage industry built on scrutinising tragedy. Even though he was kicked off YouTube in 2023, he still operates on other platforms, and his most recent focus is the death of One Direction star Liam Payne.

He has also covered cases including those of estate agent Suzy Lamplugh, who vanished in 1986; newsreader Jill Dando, who was murdered in 1999; paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – and Chris Watts.

Court documents say Vinnicombe has made at least 184 videos about the Watts case since 2018, sharing them with his 79,100 subscribers on his old Armchair Detective Blue YouTube channel.

But in February Frankie Rzucek secured a landmark legal ruling, winning a claim for harassment against Vinnicombe after a deputy High Court judge ruled he’d failed to provide a compliant defence despite multiple opportunities.

This week, in their first interview with British media, the Rzuceks spoke about their agonising ordeal at the hands of Vinnicombe and those like him. ‘The mental abuse has been so bad,’ says Sandra. ‘It’s hard to breathe sometimes. He has caused so much damage.

‘Instead of being allowed to grieve, we were subjected to a different kind of cruelty.

‘For years, Alan Vinnicombe spread vile lies about our family, twisting the truth and turning our pain into entertainment.’

Vinnicombe claimed there was a sinister cover-up, implicating the Rzuceks and suggesting that, had she lived, Shanann would have been against them.

Then came his repeated slurs against Frankie, whom he branded a scammer and ‘dishonest’ for his efforts to raise money to bring legal action against Vinnicombe.

What hurts most is the fact that such ‘entertainment’ is a money-spinner. Social-media sleuths are often called ‘tragedy pimps’, as YouTube can be very lucrative thanks to advertising revenue.

Money can also be made on Patreon, the subscription site on which followers can still join Vinnicombe’s ‘study group’. Prices start at £4.50 a month but you can pay up to £85 to become a sponsor partner, which earns you a monthly private audience with him.

A deeply religious woman, Sandra addresses Vinnicombe when she insists: ‘I always said, “You did this for your own greed”. It wasn’t that you cared about my family. You saw money. And it’s a shame, it’s a God-forsaken shame.’

Only in the past month, since Frankie’s case was successful, does she feel she’s started to heal.

‘It’s like I lost 30 pounds off my shoulders,’ she says. ‘And I pray to God that this doesn’t stop here as I don’t want another family to go through what we have been through.’ Their ordeal began on August 13, 2018, when Chris Watts murdered his family. Nobody saw it coming, least of all Sandra.

Married for six years, life in the Watts’ home in the middle-class suburb of Frederick seemed idyllic to those on the outside. Shanann worked in online sales and regularly posted about family life on social media.

Sandra says of her daughter’s marriage: ‘I’ve been married for 44 years and it reminded me of when Frank and I were first together. Precious. Beautiful.’

But, in the summer before Shanann’s death, things became strained. She stayed with her parents for six weeks, while her husband stayed in the family home.

‘She was trying to FaceTime him and he’d be sleeping or say, “Sorry, I was in the shower” or “I was working out”,’ Sandra recalls. The details of what happened in the early hours of that night in August are unimaginable.

After his family’s bodies were discovered, Watts claimed that he’d killed Shanann because she had smothered their daughters.

Only later did he admit that he had killed her first after confessing to having an affair. Next, he drove their daughters to an oil field and smothered them before pushing their bodies into a fuel tank.

He would eventually be handed five life sentences – and Sandra remembers the moment she heard the worst details in court.

‘We did not know that my granddaughter Bella fought to stay alive, that she bit her tongue in several areas. We did not know that he had to cram them down and dislocate their arms to get them to fit in an eight-inch hole.

‘I lost half my family. I waited my whole life to be a grandmother and they were all taken so fast and for no reason.’ It’s what makes any suggestion that she has played the ‘victim card’ – one of Vinnicombe’s throwaway barbs – so vile.

The killings sparked a media frenzy. When the Rzuceks flew to Colorado, they faced a melee of paparazzi and YouTubers.

Others shared their views from overseas. These untrained experts sitting behind screens might not have visited the scene, but they all had their own theories about what had happened and why. Nothing was above scrutiny – even Shanann’s character. It wasn’t long before the Rzuceks noticed the Armchair Detective – Vinnicombe.

At first his videos were about what had happened, says Sandra. Then they became more pointed, questioning the neighbours and what they had seen. ‘My husband went on his channel and said “Please stop”, “Stick to the truth”… then the next thing you know he [Frank] got blocked.

‘Then my son went on and said “Hey, you blocked my father”, but he carried on. He just wanted to keep going because he was getting views and making money.

‘Then he started mocking the police, saying he could have done better. The more lies he spread, the more people searched.’

She adds: ‘Six-and-a-half years and it has been awful – people camping at your door, flying drones over your house, showing people your car licence plate, your driveway, putting your life in jeopardy.’ She knows Vinnicombe is just one among many but, she says, he fuelled the flames.

In Frankie’s particulars of claim, filed at the High Court against Vinnicombe, he highlights a video from 2021, titled ‘Chris Watts – What have we learned in three years’, in which the Armchair Detective suggests that Frankie is ‘protecting the mistress’ and ‘concealing information’ regarding the murder. Vinnicombe adds that if Shanann was alive she would not be in the same ‘corner’ as her family. Sandra despairs.

‘People wanted more answers,’ she says. ‘They thought it [the solving of the case] had been too fast. They couldn’t believe Chris had done this all by himself. But he did. And we knew that from day one, but people just had to get on this bandwagon, spreading lies and rumours for views and money.

‘Other YouTubers saw what Vinnicombe was doing and mimicked it. And then it got worse. There was an outpouring of love on the internet, but you’ve got 20 per cent that’s just pure evil.

‘I had people say evil things about my daughter and grandchildren, just the most hateful things.’

She doesn’t want to dwell on it but, not so long ago, a total stranger from Finland arrived at their home unannounced. Twice.

The second time, when police were called, they found he had a knife with a 14-inch blade, a Bible and a pair of rubber gloves. He was arrested, pleaded guilty to felony stalking and carrying a concealed weapon and – after serving prison time – was deported to Finland by the US Department of Homeland Security.

She’s not suggesting he was connected to Vinnicombe, but is justifiably scared. ‘If it wasn’t for my faith, I don’t think any of us would be standing,’ she says.

To those who question why the Rzuceks don’t simply ignore those like Vinnicombe, she says: ‘He made sure we couldn’t ignore it. He tagged me, he tagged all of us. Any time people searched our name, his channel would pop up.’

Vinnicombe’s presence is certainly pervasive. He has written a book about Chris Watts’ case called The Shadow Man: I Saw What Law Enforcement Didn’t See.

The battle between the family and Vinnicombe only worsened when they tried to get his YouTube channel shut down for breaching ‘community guidelines’.

Vinnicombe questioned Frankie’s motivations for crowdfunding his legal fight. One video, documented for the court, even suggested ‘there is no court case’.

As for YouTube, Sandra is at a loss. ‘I begged YouTube to stop [him]. He actually got worse when we hired [British law firm] Cohen Davis.’ While no court order was made for YouTube to step in, Vinnicombe’s channel was suddenly closed in September 2023, after the case had started.

Cohen Davis’s director Yair Cohen says: ‘This wasn’t just about winning a lawsuit – it was about proving that victims of online harassment have legal recourse and that people cannot use platforms like YouTube to terrorise families.’

Vinnicombe, who unsuccessfully counter-claimed that he had been harassed and denies all allegations of wrongdoing, told the court he had suffered ‘immeasurable torment, abuse and harassment’.

He told The Mail on Sunday: ‘I am drawing up an appeal. I am afraid I cannot comment further for legal reasons.’ However, a close friend said: ‘Alan is not a bad person. He genuinely didn’t mean any harm by Shanann’s family.’

The friend said the situation had ‘got out of hand’, adding: ‘A picture of a former address he was living at was posted by one troll and it was attacked and a window was smashed with a brick. People have sent him funeral notices and even his children have been threatened.

‘He feels people have really misunderstood him. He is a true-crime junkie. His online style is very conversational. He just talks it all through on screen, saying “On the one hand this, on the other hand that”. He doesn’t take a position unless he has the evidence to back it up. He had no idea it would all spiral so out of control.

‘He hasn’t spoken about the case for three years but still people post about it constantly. The internet and social media are so toxic.’

Quite.

The Rzuceks, meanwhile, are left to go on without precious family members, though Sandra feels their presence constantly.

‘From the moment I wake, to the moment I go to bed, they walk with me,’ she says. No wonder she wants action to be taken to stop those affected by tragedy from being victimised all over again.

• Additional reporting: Simon Trump