Would [Shannan] have wanted to start an emotional conversation when she got home, exhausted...?
I wouldn’t be surprised if the girls were already dead when Shannan came home, and Chris had an elaborate plan in the works.
All the murders were premeditated. Chris murdered the children before Shannan came home. That saved as much time as possible so that he could drive away with all three bodies and dispose of them as soon as he could in the early morning hours. I doubt there were many, if any words spoken between Chris and Shannan after she came home.
In the unedited video of Chris answering questions on his front porch, he responded: "It wasn't like an argument. We had an emotional conversation, I'll just leave it at that."
I don't know how detailed of a "conversation" one has with your wife while you are strangling her to death, but I do believe the description that "it wasn't like an argument". An argument requires an exchange of viewpoints, a debate for which Shannan had not one molecule of oxygen to spare.
I think he decided on the oil tank because he thought they would all fit. I bet at his chosen site it took time to get the bolts for the hatch undone.
Chris should have devoted more thought and planning to the denouement of his sordid scheme. I'm not certain that the hatch was bolted--was that reported somewhere? In many tank batteries, the hatch is on a hinge (sometimes unlocked) and can be easily opened from the outside. Carrying the kids up a stairway leading to the hatch and dropping them into the tank was probably easy. Carrying an adult up a stairway and then stuffing them into a unyielding steel aperture is another matter entirely.
Thus, Shannan's shallow grave not far from the tanks, another rookie move. It would only be a matter of time before someone arrived there to check on the operation of those tanks and the separator and noted the odor of human decomposition. Maybe his job at Anadarko was to oversee that area, which would probably require no more than one person driving there by truck intermittently. Perhaps his disposal of Shannan was unexpectedly hasty due to Nicole's unexpected arrival, a situation he thought he could improve upon if he could return at a later time.
Of course, that would been almost impossible, IMO. Once LE had time to size Chris up, they would have stuck to him like glue--electronically, direct surveillance, ways I haven't thought of. Even without Nicole mucking up his plans, I think he would have implicated himself in short order.
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