Christine Watkins
Christine Watkins, a young woman from Idaho who had hitchhiked east, was the first person killed by the great white shark that descended on Amity. Her death, which occurred during a late-night swim after a party, was not merely a tragedy but the catalyst that exposed the fault lines in the community. The subsequent suppression of the news about her death, driven by economic fears, directly led to further fatalities and forced Police Chief Martin Brody into a moral crisis that defines the novel's central conflict.
Identity and Background
Christine Watkins was a guest of Jack and Mrs. Foote at their house on Old Mill Road. She was described as a drifter with no family or close friends, having hitchhiked east from Idaho. Her date for the evening was Tom Cassidy, a man who admitted he did not know her very well. She was approximately twenty-five years old, about five feet seven inches tall, and weighed between 120 and 130 pounds, with sandy blonde hair and hazel eyes. The novel offers little more about her inner life; she exists primarily as a victim, a fact that Mayor Larry Vaughan later uses to justify the cover-up, noting that "Miss Watkins was a nobody" who "won't be missed."
The Attack
On a cold mid-June night, after a party at the Foote house, Christine Watkins and Tom Cassidy went down to the beach. The water temperature was around fifty degrees. Cassidy, who was drunk, fell asleep on the sand after they had sex. Watkins, after calling back to him without receiving an answer, ran into the water and began to swim with a jerky, head-above-water stroke. A hundred yards offshore, the great fish sensed the vibrations of her movements through its lateral line. It closed on her, and at first she felt only a wave of pressure. The fish then circled, its dorsal fin breaking the water, and when it attacked, it first took her leg. She reached down in the blackness and found "a hub of bone and tattered flesh." The fish swallowed her limb and then attacked again from below, its jaws snapping shut around her torso, crushing her bones and flesh. The corpse fell apart as the fish shook its head, and the pieces dispersed, some sinking to the bottom, others drifting in the surf.
Aftermath and the Cover-Up
When Watkins did not return, Cassidy woke the Footes, and they reported her missing to the Amity police. Patrolman Len Hendricks took the call, and Chief Brody was roused from bed. The next morning, Brody and Hendricks searched the beach and found her remains—a woman's head still attached to shoulders, part of an arm, and about a third of her trunk, snarled in a clump of seaweed. The coroner, Carl Santos, confirmed the cause of death as a shark attack. Brody wanted to close the beaches and publicize the danger, but he was overruled by Mayor Larry Vaughan and newspaper editor Harry Meadows, who argued that the news would ruin the summer tourist season, upon which the town's economy depended. The attack was kept quiet, a decision that Brody would come to regret when the shark killed again. The suppression of the news about Christine Watkins's death is the foundational act of negligence that haunts the rest of the novel, transforming a natural disaster into a man-made catastrophe.
