Rae Carruth case: After murderous hitman dies in prison, how does victim’s mother feel?

If the man who murdered your daughter later dies in prison, how would you feel about it?

Saundra Adams, whose pregnant daughter Cherica Adams was killed in 1999 in one of Charlotte’s most heinous crimes, has faced that situation over the past couple of days. Van Brett Watkins, the hitman who admitted to shooting Cherica Adams four times during the murder trial of former Carolina Panther No. 1 draft choice Rae Carruth, died Dec. 3 in a North Carolina prison, at age 63.

Adams found out about Watkins’ death — which came in a hospital and was by natural causes, according to a spokesman for the N.C. Department of Adult Correction — six days after it happened. And since then she has felt a complicated range of emotions for her daughter’s killer, she said in a phone interview Monday.

Anger was part of what she felt. So was shock. But so was one more emotion that surprised her the most: Sadness, for Watkins and for his family.

“I really had a reaction that I didn’t plan,” Adams said. “I was really sad. I mean, I was visibly upset.”

Watkins and Adams had maintained a sporadic correspondence by letter during the past 20-plus years, with Watkins writing Adams close to a dozen letters from prison. Adams said she wrote him back about half the time.

Several times, Watkins would send her $10 or $20 along with the letters, asking her to spend it on her grandson. Adams told Watkins repeatedly that she had forgiven him for the murder, which she said was necessary to do for her own mental well-being.

“I do feel like Watkins was totally and truthfully remorseful for what he did,” said Adams, who has raised her grandson, Chancellor Lee, since his premature birth on the day of the 1999 shooting. “Chancellor and I believe in heaven and hell, and I don’t want Watkins to go to hell and be forever doomed. We’re praying that he had his soul right with God.”

Watkins always claimed that Carruth, the father of Cherica Adams’ unborn baby, had orchestrated a murder-for-hire hit in 1999 because he didn’t want to pay child support for another child. It emerged in court testimony that Carruth had a son already with another woman and was paying $3,000 a month in child support.

Carruth, the Panthers’ No. 1 draft choice in 1997 as a University of Colorado wide receiver, has always disputed this theory. But a Charlotte jury found the idea believable enough that Carruth spent nearly 19 years in prison, for conspiracy to commit murder.

Watkins, the admitted triggerman in the drive-by ambush of Cherica Adams on Rea Road in south Charlotte on Nov. 16, 1999, got a stiffer sentence. Before he died in prison, he wasn’t scheduled to be released until 2045.

I visited Watkins once in prison, in 2018, and conducted a surreal three-hour interview with him through two panes of bulletproof glass. During that interview, Watkins said he wished Carruth was dead, and also claimed that he had killed four other people before Cherica Adams in other states but had gotten away with all of those crimes.

Watkins would also write me letters — about 15 of them over the years, often asking for money (which I didn’t send) or apologizing again for his role in killing Cherica Adams and injuring her child, Chancellor Lee Adams.

Letters between hitman and victim’s mom

Chancellor Lee Adams was born prematurely with cerebral palsy and other disabilities because he was deprived of oxygen too long due to the chaotic circumstances of his birth. But while his mother didn’t survive being shot four times by Watkins, he did. Chancellor Lee graduated from high school in Charlotte, and is now 24 years old. Saundra Adams said she believed it was “no coincidence” that Watkins died 24 years after the crime. Cherica Adams had also been 24 when she was killed.

In his final letter to Saundra Adams, earlier this year, Watkins begged Adams to come visit him in prison in Raleigh.

“I prayed about it,” Saundra Adams said. “And I said to myself, ‘You know, I don’t really think I need to go visit him because I have forgiven him.’ And I don’t want to just open up this whole box of questions that I have, because none of the questions that I could ask him would bring Cherica back. So I decided against it.”

Saundra Adams has always believed that Carruth, who turns 50 in January, was the one ultimately at fault for her daughter’s death because he was convicted of orchestrating the murderous plot, rather than Watkins. Watkins stalked Cherica Adams for several months, he told me in 2018, before committing the murder.

“Watkins was just paid to do a job,” Adams said. “He just wanted some money. And he didn’t care who he was killing, you know? He didn’t have a personal relationship with Cherica. If there’s anyone that I blame for Cherica’s death, it’s Rae. He had the personal relationship with her and he conspired (to plan) this whole thing.”

Carruth, for his part, always claimed through his attorney that Watkins killed Adams in violent retribution for Carruth backing out of a potential drug deal that he had first promised to finance for Watkins, then reneged upon.

This became known as the “drug deal gone bad” defense. The jury didn’t find it very plausible, sending Carruth to prison for nearly 20 years (although the jury didn’t not convict Carruth of first-degree murder, much to the chagrin of the prosecutors). When Carruth left prison in 2018, he moved to Pennsylvania. Saundra Adams said she had reason to believe that Carruth now lives back in his homestate of California.

‘I won’t forgive Rae Carruth’

I went to visit Watkins at Central Prison in Raleigh in 2018, in an interview that took more than six months to arrange and was part of The Observer’s “Carruth” podcast and multi-part series. Part of the reason it was so difficult was that Watkins kept getting put into solitary confinement and losing his visitation privileges.

On the day of the interview, Watkins walked into the prison’s visiting room slowly, using a cane.

Although only 58 years old at the time, he looked closer to 75. Throughout our three-hour interview, conducted through two panes of glass that had a tiny grate of metal inserted in them so you could hear each other, Watkins rocked back and forth on his chair, trying unsuccessfully to get comfortable.

He yelled some. Whispered some. He was most animated when talking about Carruth, whom he blamed for putting him in prison.

“I won’t forgive Rae Carruth,” Watkins said. “I want him dead.”

Watkins was also angry about Carruth’s impending release — Carruth was let out of prison a few months after Watkins and I spoke — and said he was “trying to figure out” a way to get Carruth killed during his final few months in prison.

Of the four additional murders that Watkins admitted to that day, he wouldn’t give any details and also said he wouldn’t help authorities solve those crimes because all of the men he had killed had deserved it.

I came out of the interview with my head reeling, unsure how much of what Watkins said was true and how much had been made up for my benefit.

About the Adams family, though, Watkins spoke gently throughout our interview. He had held onto one of the letters Saundra Adams had written him for 15 years and said her forgiveness of his crime was one of the most important things that had ever happened to him. Through the letters, he had had much more contact with Saundra Adams then Carruth did, even after Carruth’s release.

The man that killed Mommy Angel

In his last letter to Saundra Adams, earlier in 2023, Watkins wrote of his health problems.

“He did tell me that he gotten to where he could barely walk,” Adams said. “And in his final letters to me, he got a lot more personal. He told me about how he had come from a family of law enforcement officers and that he was kind of the black sheep of the family. He wanted his family to know he had changed, for the better, and was remorseful for what he had done.”

Adams told Chancellor Lee of Watkins’ death on Saturday night. Because Chancellor Lee has limited understanding of the world due to his disabilities, she explained it this way, she said, using their nickname of “Mommy Angel” for Cherica.

“Chancellor could see I was visibly upset,” Adams said. “So I told him that the man that killed Mommy Angel had died in prison. I told him that man was getting old, and he was not doing well ... and that the man had asked me to forgive him, and I did, but I hoped that he had also asked God to forgive him.”

Saundra Adams had one final request before we hung up the phone to end our conversation about the death of her daughter’s killer.

“If you find the address of the Watkins family,” she said, “could you give it to me? I’d love to send them a card.”