The man accused of killing his wife and two young daughters was formally charged Monday with nine felony counts – including unlawfully terminating a pregnancy.
Christopher Watts, 33, was also charged with three counts of first degree murder, two counts of first degree murder of a child under 12 while in a position of trust and three counts of tampering with bodies.
District attorney Michael Rourke was due to detail the reasons for the charges later Monday.
Watts’s wife Shanann and their two children disappeared from their home in Frederick, Colorado last week. Shanann was 15 weeks pregnant with their first son.
Watts, 33, is due in court in Greeley, Colorado, on Tuesday morning.
The charges come exactly one week after Watts had reported his wife and children missing.
Christopher Watts (above on Friday) has been charged three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of evidence tampering following his arrest last week

Prosecutors filed murder charges on Monday against Watts following his arrest last week for the murders of his wife Shanann and daughters, Celeste, 3, and Bella, 4, in Colorado
He went on local television to plead for them to return home but within days cracked and admitted he had killed them, police say. Since then, as inmate number 18-12255, he has been held at Weld County Jail on the outskirts of Greeley. He is being kept away from other prisoners for his own safety, according to Fox News.
Shanann Watts’s body was discovered on Wednesday two days after she disappeared from the family’s five-bed, four-bath home in Frederick, Colorado, 30 miles north of Denver. She was expecting a boy the couple intended to call Nico.
She was in found in a shallow grave dug on land owned by the oil company Anadarko, where her husband worked as an operator.
The bodies of the couple’s two daughters, Bella, 4, and Celeste, 3, were found the following day submerged in cans of crude oil nearby.
Since the bodies were found, well-wishers have left several hundred soft toys, along with dozens of flowers, candles and balloons in the front yard of the $400,000 house on Saratoga Trail in Frederick that the couple bought in 2013.
Despite the image of a blissfully happy marriage that Shanann projected through frequent Facebook posts, in which she called her husband her ‘Rock,’ friends of the couple, who are both originally from North Carolina, have suggested they were having marriage problems.

The case has drawn national media attention to the town of Frederick, as well as hundreds of flowers and toys from friends and strangers
Nick and Amanda Thayer said Shanann had told them she thought her husband was cheating and on Monday Nickole Atkinson, who had dropped Shanann off at her home after the two had been on a business trip to Arizona told Good Morning America that after his wife had disappeared, Christopher had told her they were planning to separate.
Atkinson, 37, said in the weeks previous to her friend’s murder the couple had not seemed quite so loving, but that Shanann had not told her they were considering splitting.
‘’I didn’t find out that they were going to separate or anything like that until I called Chris that morning. When I called him and asked him where she was, that’s when he told me and I basically told him that that wasn’t my (concern) at that particular moment.’
Atkinson, who believes she is the last person apart from the killer to have seen Shanann alive, said she thought all along that Watts had killed his family as he did not seem concerned after she couldn’t get in contact with her colleague and friend.
‘He just kept saying that he didn’t know where she was and that she was on a playdate,’ she told ABC’s Clayton Sandell. ‘But he couldn’t give us the name of the friend.
‘I knew he had something to do with it the day I was at his house with him, but I didn’t want to think that.
‘Anyone in their right mind will start piecing things together and think something had happened, but you don’t want to go there. You want to believe the best in people,’ added Atkinson.
‘He was defending himself, but it just didn’t make sense. Like in that moment it is kind of surreal. He was just sitting there waiting for something to happen; it just didn’t seem right to me.’
Chris and Shanann Watts were also known to live well beyond their means and have had money problems. They filed for bankruptcy in 2015 owing some $70,000, and were due in court on Friday this week after their homeowners’ association had sued them for an unpaid bill of $1,533.80.
Shanann suffered from lupus, an autoimmune disease in which the body attacks its own healthy cells. Her brother Frankie Rzucek said on Facebook that because of the disease she had had to ‘beat the odds’ to get pregnant.
But things had started to look up for them after Shanann landed a well-paid job with Le-Vel, a nutrition supplement company, which involved her making frequent business trips, leaving her husband at home with their children.
Investigators have said all along that they believe the 5ft. 10in, 225lb., Watts had killed his family in their home and transported them to the windswept high prairie land that he had intended would be their final resting place.