Van Brett Watkins, the self-confessed trigger man in a plot by a then-Carolina Panthers player to murder his pregnant girlfriend in 1999, died earlier this month after decades behind bars, according to online records. He was 63.
Watkins died at a hospital from natural causes on Dec. 3, a Department of Adult Correction spokesperson told the Associated Press. It was not immediately clear when he’d been transferred to the hospital from Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he’d been incarcerated for more than 20 years.
Had he lived, Watkins would have been released in 2045, at the age of 85, according to department records.
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Two decades ago, Watkins testified that Rae Carruth, then a rising-star wide receiver in the NFL, had approached him and promised to pay him $6,000 to kill Cherica Adams, an on-and-off girlfriend eight months pregnant with his child.
“So he said, ‘How much would it take to beat up a girl and make her abort her baby?’” Watkins, who was then a local nightclub bouncer with a violent reputation, told the Charlotte Observer in a 2019 interview from jail.
“I said, ‘I don’t beat up a girl. I kill people,’” he continued. “He said, ‘How much would you charge?’” In Watkins’ telling, Carruth gave him $300 and promised to pay him the rest later.
On Nov. 16, 1999, Watkins shot Adams, a 24-year-old real estate agent, four times in a drive-by assassination near Carruth’s home. The football player watched the ambush from his own car, Watkins later said.
“Rae pulled off once the last shot was done,” he told the Observer, as Adams “[gurgled], drowning in her own blood.”
Adams managed to call 911 and implicate Carruth in her death by scribbling notes from her deathbed that placed him at the scene. She later slipped into a coma and died, but her baby survived. Born via emergency cesarean section with permanent brain damage and cerebral palsy, Chancellor Lee Adams was raised by his grandmother, Saundra Adams, and graduated from high school in 2021.
“I do feel like Watkins was totally and truthfully remorseful for what he did,” Saundra Adams told the Observer on Monday. “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 pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was given a 50-year sentence, but not before he testified against Carruth in a tumultuous three-month trial that was broadcast nationally by Court TV.
Carruth and his lawyers maintained that Adams was murdered in revenge after Carruth backed out of a drug deal—and not because Carruth wanted to wiggle out of paying child support, as prosecutors argued. Carruth was acquitted of the most serious charge of first-degree murder, but found guilty on three lesser charges, and was sentenced to prison in 2001.
He was released in 2018 at the age of 44, and reportedly moved to Pennsylvania.
Saundra Adams eventually forgave Carruth, Watkins, and two other co-conspirators involved in her daughter’s death, she told reporters in the years after the trial. But Watkins continued to seethe from behind bars.
“I won’t forgive Rae Carruth,” Watkins told the Observer in 2019. “I want him dead.”
For much of his incarceration, Watkins remained isolated from other inmates for up to 23 hours a day for disciplinary reasons. A spokesperson for the North Carolina Department of Corrections told ABC News in 2014 that Watkins was “a difficult inmate to deal with” and “generally a management problem” who’d been cited for various infractions. Watkins growled to the Observer in 2019 that he didn’t get many visitors “because I don’t want any.”
But Watkins also showed signs of growth. He converted to Islam in prison, and wrote more than a dozen letters to Saundra Adams throughout his incarceration. She wrote back about half the time, she told the Observer this week. In one final letter sent earlier this year, Watkins asked if Adams would come visit him, she said.
“I prayed about it,” Adams explained to the newspaper. “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.”
