Christine Watkins shark attack

On a moonless mid-June night, a young woman named Christine Watkins went swimming off Old Mill Road beach in Amity, Long Island, and was attacked and killed by a massive great white shark. The attack, which occurred in the early hours of the morning, was the first in a series of fatal encounters that would plunge the summer resort community into a crisis of fear, denial, and economic desperation. The event is not merely a plot catalyst; it is the primal scene of the novel, establishing the shark as a force of nature that is both mindless and terrifyingly purposeful, and it sets in motion the moral and professional dilemmas that define Police Chief Martin Brody's arc.

The Attack

Christine Watkins had been drinking at a party with her date, Tom Cassidy, and a group of friends at a house on Old Mill Road. Around one in the morning, she and Cassidy went down to the beach. After a brief, drunken sexual encounter on the cold sand, Cassidy fell asleep, and Watkins decided to go for a swim. She entered the water confidently, swimming with a jerky, head-above-water stroke, and moved out to where the water covered her shoulders. A hundred yards offshore, the great fish, which had been moving silently through the night water, sensed a change in the sea's rhythm. Its lateral line, a series of thin canals filled with mucus and dotted with nerve endings, detected the vibrations of her movements. The fish turned toward shore. As Watkins began to swim back, the vibrations grew stronger, and the fish recognized prey. It closed on her, hurtling past a dozen feet to the side, but the woman felt only a wave of pressure. Then the fish smelled her, and the erratic, sharp vibrations signaled distress. It began to circle close to the surface, its dorsal fin breaking water. For the first time, Watkins felt a wave of fear, though she did not know why. Adrenaline shot through her, urging her to swim faster. She was fifty yards from shore. The fish turned suddenly, dropped below the surface, and with two quick thrusts of its tail, was upon her. At first, she thought she had snagged her leg on a rock or a piece of floating wood. There was no initial pain, only one violent tug on her right leg. She reached down to touch her foot, but could not find it. She reached higher on her leg, and then she was overcome by a rush of nausea and dizziness. Her groping fingers had found a hub of bone and tattered flesh. She knew that the warm, pulsing flow over her fingers in the chill water was her own blood. Pain and panic struck together. The woman threw her head back and screamed a guttural cry of terror. The fish had moved away, swallowing her limb without chewing. Now it turned again, homing on the stream of blood flushing from her femoral artery. This time it attacked from below, hurtling up under her, jaws agape. The great conical head struck her like a locomotive, knocking her up out of the water. The jaws snapped shut around her torso, crushing bones and flesh and organs into a jelly. The fish, with the woman's body in its mouth, smashed down on the water with a thunderous splash, spewing foam and blood and phosphorescence. Below the surface, the fish shook its head from side to side, its serrated triangular teeth sawing through what little sinew still resisted. The corpse fell apart. The fish swallowed, then turned to continue feeding, cutting back and forth through the dissipating cloud of blood.

Discovery and Aftermath

Cassidy awoke in the early morning cold, shivering. He found Watkins's clothes on the beach but could not find her anywhere in the house. He woke his host, Jack Foote, and together they called the police. Patrolman Len Hendricks took the report, and Chief Brody, roused from sleep, drove to the beach at dawn to search. He found no sign of a body. Later that morning, Brody and Hendricks returned to the beach with Cassidy. Hendricks, walking east along the sand, discovered a clump of seaweed that seemed unusually large. When he reached it, he bent down to pull some of the weed away. Suddenly he stopped, frozen rigid. He fumbled for his whistle, put it to his lips, and tried to blow; instead, he vomited, staggered back, and fell to his knees. Snarled within the clump of weed was a woman's head, still attached to shoulders, part of an arm, and about a third of her trunk. The mass of tattered flesh was a mottled blue-gray. Brody, who had heard the whistle, arrived and saw what was inside. He felt bile rise in his throat. He called to Cassidy, who identified the remains as Christine Watkins. Brody told him, "Offhand, I'd say she was attacked by a shark." Cassidy's knees buckled, and he sank to the sand, retching. The stink of vomit reached Brody, and he vomited too. The coroner, Carl Santos, later confirmed the cause of death as shark attack, noting that the damage was consistent with a very large great white shark.

The Suppression of the News

The attack on Christine Watkins became the first test of what the novel calls the "Amity understanding"—the tacit agreement among the town's power brokers to suppress any information that might harm the summer tourist economy. Brody, initially wanting to close the beaches and publicize the danger, was pressured by Mayor Larry Vaughan and newspaper editor Harry Meadows to keep the story quiet. Vaughan, who had his own financial entanglements with a Mafia-connected real estate scheme, argued that a shark panic would ruin the town. Meadows, after consulting with an expert from Woods Hole who said the odds of another attack were astronomical, agreed to suppress the story. Brody, against his better judgment, acquiesced. The attack was not reported in the local paper, the Amity Leader, and the beaches remained open. This decision, born of economic fear and political pressure, directly led to the deaths of Alexander Kintner and Morris Cater, and it became the source of Brody's profound, unshakeable guilt. The Watkins attack, though hidden from the public, was the event that set the entire tragedy in motion, a secret that would later be exposed with devastating consequences.