Criminology - Jaye Potter Mintz

Episode Date: August 25, 2024

In 1987, Jaye Potter Mintz was murdered inside her North Carolina home. Inside the home but left unharmed was her son who was about to turn two. The child saw at least some of the horrific acts and was able to tell the police that a mean man hurt his mommy. Join Mike and Morf as they discuss the murder of Jaye Potter Mintz. Jaye was trying to sell a waterbed through the classified ads in the newspaper. It is thought by most that a man who answered the ad went to Jaye's home and murdered her. But no one around the home saw anything or anyone at the house that day.  You can help support the show at patreon.com/criminology   An Emash Digital production

Criminology is a true crime podcast that may contain discussion about violent or disturbing topics. Listener discretion is advised. Everyone and welcome to episode 32 of the criminology podcast. I'm Mike Ferguson. And this is Mike Morford. Mr. Morford. How you doing, buddy? I'm doing good.

I have the COVID last week when we recorded. I was fighting something. Turns out it's COVID. It's my first time. So I'm in the COVID club finally after four years. Yeah. I remember you saying, you know, you weren't feeling great last week and you were having kind of a tough time with your breath,

you said. And, but you never know what that stuff can be. And then turns out it was COVID. Yeah. So I put up with it for a few days. And Monday said, you know what? I got to go to the doctor. And he said you got COVID.

So here I am battling it later and recording with you. It's kind of amazing, though, that you made it, uh, what, that many years without getting it. Yeah, my poor wife and kids have each had it a couple times. All right, let's go ahead and give our Patreon shoutouts. We had Scott Gooden and Brooke Elaine, who jumped out at our highest level. So we appreciate that new support. It really helps us out.

Yeah, thanks so much for taking the time to help the show. And for anyone else that would like to, you can head over to patreon.com slash criminology to get signed up. And everyone, don't forget. We mentioned a few episodes back that we're already gearing up for and very excited about CrimeCon 2025 in Denver. CrimeCon 2025 is September 5th through the 7th at the Gaylord Rockies Resort and Convention Center. You hope to see everyone there for our annual Criminology joint meetup with T-Cat.

And of course, we want to help you save some money if you want to go. Just head to crimecon.com to get your badges and use our code criminology. at checkout to save 10% on your standard badges. But don't wait because these passes really do go very fast. All right, now that we have all of that out of the way, let's get into this week's case, and we're discussing the brutal and shocking unsolved murder of a young mother in her home.

The only potential witness was her son, but he was too young to help the police. It's been 37 years, and no one so far has been, able to identify the suspect. But hopefully with evidence and DNA, they may be closing in on the killer. We're talking about the 1987 case of Jay Potter Mints out of North Carolina. Beverly Jay Potter, who went by Jay, was born on December 5th, 1963, to parents William and Lorene.

Jay spent her entire life in North Carolina, attending North Brunswick High School in Leland, graduating from their 1983. Jay was already had over heels for her high school sweetheart, a young man named William Allen Mitz, and the two were married on November 26, 1982, when Jay was three months pregnant with the couple's first child, a son named BJ. But not long after they got married, things soured between the young couple, and they decided to separate. William joined the United States Army. They soon got back together, and in 1985, when William was stationed in Germany, Jay went with him for a brief time, when they ended up separating again, Jay was pregnant with her second son, Andrew.

After they separated the second time, Jay moved with her two sons into a house near her mom, Lorenes, in Leland, North Carolina, along with her cousin Angela. The home they moved into had belonged to her family since 1923. It was just half a mile away from Jay's parents' house and just as close to the homes of her grandparents and her aunt and uncle. So she would have a lot of support there while living with Angela and her young daughter. Jay found a job as a waitress at the Hong Kong restaurant in nearby Wilmington and was trying to move on with her life.

Just a little background on the community where Jay lived, though it's still pretty small compared to a lot of other places, the town of Leland, North Carolina, has had quite a population boom. When Jay lived there in the mid-late 80s, there were less than 2,000 people. people there. Now there are over 30,000. Leland, North Carolina lies on the southeast portion of the state, close to the border with South Carolina. It's about 90 miles southeast of Fayetteville, North Carolina, and 90 miles northeast of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. This was a quiet and safe town, one that Jay felt comfortable raising her sons in. On February 23rd, 1987, William was still stationed

and overseas in Germany, and 23-year-old Jay was going to finish up plans for Andrew's birthday party. He was about to turn two. Four-year-old BJ was with William's mother, his paternal grandmother for the day. Just before 10 a.m., Jay's mom, Lorene, called her about an ad she had placed in the Morningstar newspaper. Jay had a queen-sized waterbed that she wanted to sell, and the newspaper was running a special on free classified ads, so she decided to take advantage. No one bought the waterbed before the ad time was up. So Jay placed the ad again.

The special pricing was one free ad per customer. So Jay just used Lorene's phone number this time so that it was technically a new ad. It wouldn't cost or anything to run it again. All the classified ad morph. I mean, you know, we're in the 80s here. This is pre-internet. There's no Facebook marketplace. You know, there's no, I can't even think of all the,

different classifieds that are on the internet or ways to sell things on the internet eBay. I mean, you just, there's a plethora of things. Your options were pretty limited in the 1980s if you wanted to sell something. And kind of the go-to was, you know, a classified ad in the newspaper. Or if you had a car, you would go through something like auto trader maybe or something like that. Yeah, it was definitely old school, but it worked. I bought and sold a lot of things over this classified ads myself. But the one thing that really hasn't changed with technology,

at least in my mind, is that at some point, you're still going to have to figure out how to meet someone, to show them this physical item that they may want to buy. And therein lies some dangers. You're meeting potentially a stranger, possibly at your own home. It happens, you know, X amount of times all over the world every day. But there is some inherent danger in that.

I think that was one of the drawbacks to putting ads in papers back in the 80s. You never knew who might show up. There's no real tracking system. Yeah, at least today, you know, you might be course. responding with somebody, let's say, on Facebook marketplace. Now, they could have a fake account, who knows. But there's a little bit more maybe of a paper trail today than there would have been in the 80s. On the morning of the 23rd, a man called Lorin to ask about the waterbed.

He wanted to see it before agreeing to purchase it. So Lorraine gave him Jay's address. Some reports say that Jay's home was located on Village Road. and others mention it as being on rural route three. So it seems that at some point, the rural route was renamed with street names and J Street became village. When this man called about the waterbed,

Larene didn't think anything of it. So she gave the man her daughter's address. Again, we're talking about 1987. She couldn't just text him a picture of it or direct him to a post on Facebook for pictures of the bed. This is just one of those glaring indicators of how times have changed. He had seen the advertisement and called the number listed. Nothing strange about any of that on the surface.

Lorraine called Jay to tell her that the man would be coming by that day. There was a slight problem with this, though. Jay told Lorene that she had just sold the waterbed to someone else that morning. So she should tell the man not to be coming. waste his time. Unfortunately, this was before caller ID, and the man hadn't given Lorene his phone number. Not giving Lorene his phone number could have been simply an oversight, or it could have been calculated on his part. It was certainly bad timing, but Lorene figured it was no big deal, just a bit of disappointment since Lorene said the bed was still available, but anyone would

understand how this misunderstanding could have happened since it was Lorene's number listed, but the bed wasn't actually with her. Jay would just have to have. to wait for the man to arrive and simply tell him that the bed had already been sold. Lorraine had no idea that the call to Jay about the bed would be the last conversation she ever had with her. And there's a couple of things that are running through my head. You know, one is, and we talk about it in many episodes, a conversation, many times, very innocuous, that turns out to be the last conversation that a person has with a loved one.

That's a very haunting thought to me. But then here you have the added element that Loreen directed this person to her daughter. Now, through no fault of her own, her daughter used her phone number to place this classified ad. And, you know, like we said, it on the surface seemed like a pretty routine thing. But obviously, as we're going to find out, it turns out to be anything. but routine and the guilt and remorse that inevitably would set in, that would be something very tough to deal with.

I think there's a lot of cases we talk about where there's somebody feel some kind of guilt when they really shouldn't has nothing to do with them. It's just circumstances of how things unfolded, but it wasn't there. They're not at fault, but I can understand how they might feel like they are. Yeah, and I think the knotted fault thing is a tough one because it's very easy to see in many of these situations that, you know, a person did nothing wrong. They didn't cause what happened to happen. But I don't think that's going to stop the remorse or the guilt because there's always going to be that what if, you know, what if I didn't pass this on? What if she had.

used my phone number. You know, there's just, there's a lot of stuff to these cases. Right around the time, Lorene and Jay were talking on the phone about the bed, Jay's cousin Angela, bully left for the day, heading to work. It's not clear from any of the articles, but it seems likely that Angela took her daughter to a babysitter or a family member's house on the way to work, leaving Jay and Andrew alone in the home. Around noon, Lorene stopped by Jay's house. After she knocked and there was no answer, she tried the doorknob. The front door was

unlocked. Lareen instantly fell like things were off. Jay never left the front door unlocked like this and if she had, why wasn't she coming to the door or at the very least calling out you know, come in from

inside. As she opened the door, Lorine heard only little Andrew. He was crying, this wasn't the normal cry from a toddler, though. It's been described as whimpering. Larene followed the sound of his cries to the back bedroom and found Andrew next to the body of his mother. She was lying on a bed with her hands tied behind her back. A pillowcase had been placed over her head. As Lorraine got closer and pulled the pillowcase off her face, she realized that Jay's throat had been slashed.

Lorraine grabbed Andrew and ran out of the house, screaming to the flower shop next door. Jenny Mintz, whose last name is a total coincidence because she's not related to Jay's husband Williamman's answered the door. Jenny called the police for Lorraine, who was still hysterical. Police headed to Jay's house and found a brutal and shocking crime scene,

one they weren't used to dealing with because these kinds of things didn't happen in Lila. An autopsy would reveal that Jay had been sexually assaulted and stabbed multiple times before being killed. and that her throat was slit so deeply. She was nearly decapitated. She died due to blood loss from the multiple injuries, at least eight stabbing.

Thankfully, Andrew was unharmed, at least physically, who knows what kind of hellish things. He may have witnessed, though. According to Lorene in an NBC news interview, Andrew didn't know his mommy was dead. He thought she was coming back. She tried to get information from him about what he had seen, but all he could tell her was

mean man hurt mommy. Mommy cry. It was clear that he had seen everything. He just didn't have the words to explain what happened. And if that doesn't break your heart, Morph, then you might want to get yourself checked out. That is so extremely sad to think about, you know, this very very, you know, this very, very young child saying mean man hurt mommy mommy cry and then knowing that he witnessed this very violent vicious act against his mother. Yeah, you'd have to wonder in Jay's final moments.

She was probably horrified that something was going to happen to her son. That was probably the last thing she thought about was what's going to happen to Andrew. Yeah, as most moms probably would. We know by and large, moms are selfless. They would do anything for their children. And I'm sure that Jay had thoughts about her son above even her own situation at that point. The information gathered from almost two-year-old Andrew was that someone had knocked on the door. And when Jay looked out the people,

she didn't see anyone there. He was able to express through motions he made that as soon as she opened the door, a white man he didn't recognize came inside. We know he saw the man stab J since he made stabbing motions while recounting the story to his grandmother. We don't know how exactly Andrew communicated all of this

about the people, but it was clear that he had some clues about what had happened. There was no sign of forced entry at the home, so this memory of his mom opening the door to her killer seemed to match up. Looking at pictures of the house from around the time of the murder, there is no people in the front door. There may be one in the back door, which is the door that investigators believe was used by the killer to enter and exit the home. In records existing online today, there seems to be no mention of why investigators think this, since all reports

note that the front door was unlocked. News about Jay's murder shocked the small town. Most people thought something like this couldn't happen, but now it had. Tony Cummings, a homicide investigator with the State Bureau of Investigation told USA Today. It was a very brutal, very difficult crime scene. Investigators believe that Jay's killer was wearing gloves due to the absence of fingerprints found at the scene. They also believed that the knife used to murder Jay belonged to the killer and that he took it with him when he left. Adorty. found Jay's newspaper added the scene. It had been circled in red. Investigators believe that this newspaper clipping was left there by Jay's killer. Some reports note that authorities felt

this was the killer taunting the investigation, but perhaps he was just trying to get out of the house quickly and dropped or forgot about the clipping. It could also be that the clipping had nothing to do with the murder at all. Most people in online discussion forums on this case seem to agree with the police that the clipping was left by the killer and that the killer likely came to the home led there by the advertisement. After all, Lorene, Jay's mom, had directed a man she talked to on the phone to her daughter's house.

So there was someone going to the house that day in relation to the head. But it's hard to imagine someone getting so angry over a waterbed being sold out from underneath them, that they would rape and kill someone in front of such a young child. But then again, many people have killed over trivial matters. It's also possible that replying to the waterbed ad was a way that a predator may try to get into a home and attack a victim he was interested in. And I think to me, of those two different theories, I would definitely lean towards the second one.

Yeah, is it possible that someone was upset that maybe the waterbed had already been sold, they had wasted their time. Yes, that's absolutely possible, but how likely is it that that mere fact alone would send a person in a rage and cause them to do something like this? It seems much more plausible that this was a person intent on doing harm to someone and maybe even specifically Jay, but it could have just been a way to show up at someone's house and then assess whether, you know, there was a female there alone, basically a killer looking for opportunity. That just seems much more likely to me. In the suburbs of D.C., a woman fails to show up for work and is found brutally murdered.

I wonder what's emergency? We just walked in the door and there's blood in the front. For the next two decades, the case remained unsolved until new technology allowed investigators to do what had once been impossible. A new series from ABC Audio in 2020, blood and water. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. While most people think that the killer had something to do with the waterbed ad, police had to consider other possibilities as well. Could this have been personal? The other most obvious suspect in cases like these are often looked at first. The estranged husband. In this case, William Mence had one of the best alibis possible.

He was in another country. And his absence definitely would have been noticed. Now, this doesn't rule out the possibility that he could have hired a hit man, but it definitely means that he could not have committed to murder himself, as his alibi was confirmed. So I think the police had to juggle a couple different things here. They had to consider the possibility that Jay was killed by this, one of these people interested in the waterbed because some clues pointed to that.

But at the same time, most crimes like this are usually personal. There's the person killed knows their killer. And oftentimes it's someone very close to them. So it makes sense that they would also want to rule out William Min. her husband, even though he was, you know, in the military in another country. Yeah. And I don't know that that's all that uncommon, right? Police kind of working multiple angles at the same time. You know, we're going to rule out the husband. We're going to rule out some other people close to her, but we're also going to be looking into this other avenue or

these other avenues as well. I think more if it's when they don't do that, that we see in some of these cases where things start to go sideways, right? You talk about tunnel vision, getting too locked in on one suspect to the exclusion of everything else. And then, you know, way down the line, we find out that, well, this suspect that they were so focused on, couldn't possibly have done it. And so what does that mean? Well, a lot of time in some cases passes,

and it's a lot of lost opportunity in the investigation. Police looked closely at the relationship between Jay and William. And there's no indication that anything was so nasty or contentious between them that he would want to hire a hit man to kill his wife. There's no mention of any complicated custody battle. He was off in the army and she was taking care of the kids. There really wasn't any reason for William to want Jay dead that the police could find. It doesn't seem like he lived a very content life after Jay died, however.

In 1993, just six years after Jay's murder, William Mintz took his own life. His cause of death was asphyxiation due to carbon monoxide. It's not clear why William took his own life. But of course, there were those that were convinced he felt guilt over what happened to Jay. And any time, you know, we're researching a case. You know, you look online, you see comments by people, you are going to see in a situation like this. People trying to make the connection between William ending his life and the murder of his wife. But, you know, it was six years later.

Does it mean it couldn't be possible? No. But it seems like a flyer to me. Well, to their credit, they did at least look at William and properly rule him out as best they could. And, you know, it didn't stop people from being suspicious of him why he chose to take his own life. It may have been for any number of reasons. We don't know. So were there any people close to Jay that may have wanted her dead?

Jay had dated a few guys since separating from William, including her boss at the restaurant, David Wong. The two had recently started seeing each other, which seems like it could be a good lead, but he did have an alibi. He was at his house with a plumber. So the man Jay had been married to and the man she was dating. Both had airtight alibis. Please talk to all of the people who knew Jay best. But no one could think of anyone that would want to hurt her, especially so violently. Jay's cousin Renee told Star News Online. If you had to describe her in three words, it would be smart, beautiful, and shocked. She was just a wonderful person. Jay's aunt, Laura Hobbs, told WWA.Y, she was real shot. She was real sweet. Pretty. She was beautiful. There were some admirers that were mentioned

to police by people that knew Jay. Her cousin Angela told Dateline that Jay received unwanted attention from several admirers around the time of her murder. There was a man who had write, I love you, Jay, and the gravel driveway outside of their house, and another man who left a single red rose for Jay at the restaurant where she worked. But it seems Jay wasn't alarmed by these two guys, and she didn't feel threatened. We assume investigators looked into them,

but their names have never been released, and there are no further details about either of them. And I don't think that it's out of the ordinary, that Jay would have admirers, right? I mean, listen to the descriptions that people gave about her. She was very sweet. She was pretty. She was beautiful.

You know, she was working in a restaurant. She would have encountered probably a good number of men. And some of those men would have found her attractive. And maybe even as it sounds like would have become enamored. with her wanting to go out with her things like that a lot of you know there's many women who experienced that and maybe some of the attention is wanted and maybe a lot of it is unwanted yeah the police had their work cut out from because they had to check all the different people in jays life out to see if any of them were someone that might be dangerous or you know had a a major crush on her

that was maybe not reciprocated by her. So, you know, they had to check all these people out. And that's why they wanted friends to come forward to tell them who they should talk to. But as we talked about, you know, these two guys and what they did, none of that sounds like it was too stalkerish, right? I get it. Writing, I love you, Jay, leaving a single red rose at her restaurant. to me, it sounds like people who really wanted to try to get her to go out with them maybe. But like you said, Morve, all of these people have to be checked out.

Jay's mom, Loreen, told USA Today, I've thought of every theory. So have investigators. They couldn't figure out who had a motive in the case. Her cousin, Renee Braswell, told the Huffington Post. She was always nice to everyone. and never said an unkind word. Talk to anyone who knew her, and they'll all say the same things.

She was a sweet, wonderful person. We don't understand how anybody could ever hurt someone like her. John Carr Davis, who was sheriff at the time, said, it completely baffled us. So we have a murder in a very small town, right? A couple of thousand people, not a big town, not a big city. and you have all these people saying they can't imagine who would want to hurt this wonderful woman.

And all of that kind of leads me in the direction that, you know, maybe this wasn't personal. There was no personal connection. This was someone, as I mentioned earlier, kind of out looking for a moment of opportunity. maybe they had responded to a number of classified ads looking for what they felt was the right opportunity to do whatever it is they wanted to do obviously we know what they did was horrific and i think when there is is no clear motive and it doesn't seem like it's personal and more and it's more random and that makes the job of the investigators that much tougher Yeah, I absolutely think that's true. You know, when you have a motive, well, that leads you in certain directions.

But a motiveless crime by its very nature is much, much harder to solve. You're going to have less avenues to, you know, go down. Focus from police seemed to fall back on the waterbed ad once again. And that one way or another, that ad led to Jay's death. many people believe that the fact that the killer brought the nylon rope he used to bind Jay's hands is proof that the murder was premeditated. But it's not out of the question that someone who was going to transport a waterbed might have brought some rope if they plan to use it to keep the bed more secure during transport. So perhaps the person came there intending on buying a waterbed and somehow a murder happened instead. But one thing that goes against this waterbed buyer theory is that no nearby

residents reported seeing any strange cars or trucks at Jay's house, which seems to point away from someone looking to buy her bed. Someone prepared to transport a waterbed would have likely been driving a truck, that they would want to park as close to the door as possible. On the other hand, someone going to the home prepared to kill Jay would likely know to park where they wouldn't be seen and would walk up to the house, which had a pretty heavily wooded area behind it. It's always possible that the killer did park a vehicle in the driveway, and it just wasn't noticed by witnesses. There was a roofing crew working at the house across the street.

They would have had a great view of Jay's house. But none of the men on the crew saw or heard anything out of the ordinary, although there were only three of them on the crew. Dr. Maurice Godwin, a criminal investigative psychologist who was hired. by Jay's family to work on the case, told the Huffington Post, it's one of the things that stands out the most. In the same Huffington Post article, Tony Cummings, a retired investigator with the State Bureau of Investigation, said,

her house was on a well-traveled road. There was a restaurant less than one-tenth of a mile east and a flower shop next door, and there was a roofing crew working on a house across the street. How did he get in, commit such a brutal crime, and be unseen and unknown? It seems that there was no shortage of potential witnesses. Yet somehow the killer slipped in and out without being noticed.

And, you know, when you go back to the description of the murder, my thought is there would have been blood everywhere. Very difficult to think that, you know, this killer would not have had blood on them as they exited the house. Now, this heavily wooded area behind the house, and the thought by investigators that it was most likely that the killer entered and exited through the back door. Does that help explain why some of these people with potential witnesses just didn't see anything? Yeah, and I wonder if that could also point to someone living right there close to the crime scene that knew there and knew how to move along the tree,

or along the woods without being spotted. Yeah, all questions to consider. Now, some people have asked the question, why was two-year-old Andrew Spare? If Jay's killer was a serial killer or some type of thrill killer, why not also murder Andrew too? Yes, he was a child,

but we have discussed plenty of child victims. On this podcast, Tony Cummings, a homicide investigator with the State Bureau of Investigation, told USA Today. I felt it was critical Andrew was left unharmed. Just why Andrew was spared

as anyone's guess. Maybe as twisted as the killer was. He couldn't kill a child. Maybe they just weren't worried that a two-year-old could ID them. And I think both of those are possibility. You know, we've talked about very depraved individuals

on this podcast who have even come out and said that even for someone like them, there was a line that they were unwilling to cross. Sometimes that was murdering a child. And then you have this thought that there would be maybe in their minds no need because Andrew was so young, he wasn't going to be able to give police any details about him. And I think that's just one more puzzle piece in the puzzle of why was he spared. And it's a good thing that he was.

But, you know, it just doesn't clear anything up for investigators. No, and it probably adds to some people's suspicion of maybe some close to Jay, right? Someone who had a problem with Jay, but would never have wanted to harm Andrew. For the next 20 years after Jay's murder, Lareen lived with immense guilt over her daughter's death until she passed away in 2007. Jill Watts, Jay's sister, told NBC News, she lived with so much pain and guilt for the rest of her life.

Jay's cousin Renee told the Huffington Post, the only thing that kept Jay's mom going as long as she did was her grandchildren. Looking back at Lorene's own words, it's clear. Lorraine felt awful for possibly giving Jay's killer directions right to her home. Larene told USA today, I have felt like it was my fault because of that call. If he was a total stranger and picked it out of the paper, I sent him there. Larene did provide some insights on the mail caller saying it was a very ordinary voice,

not a southern accent, but not a northern one. It wasn't heavy or high. It was just normal. And I touched on this briefly a little bit earlier, but this immense amount of guilt that Larene felt. You just knew that that was going to be the case. How could it go any other way? But even, you know, to your point, more, there really was no fault on the part of Lorene.

But that doesn't seem to matter when it comes to the family members of victim. Yes, in your mind, you might rationally know that there was nothing else you could have done. or that what you did wasn't wrong. But it may not stop that guilt. And I think for a lot of people, it doesn't. You know, guilt's not always a rational thing. And this call to Larene once again reminds me of the lack of technology back then. It wasn't like today where, you know, everything's digital, leaves a footprint,

leaves a track, you know, back then, if somebody called you and hung on, up and you wanted to figure out who they were, you know, maybe you could try and call the operator, but that stuff was hard back then. So, you know, trying to figure out who called during in the first place would have been an uphill battle. Yeah, I mean, you know, when you're talking about 1987, that was so long ago. I don't remember exactly when, you know, caller ID came about star 69, things like that, or exactly what technology the police had to try to try to track, you know, numbers or calls placed to someone's house. But it could have very well have been likely that this call was placed from a pay phone or

something like that. So it wouldn't have mattered anyway. Now, we should clarify that the bed that Jay was found dead on has been stated in many sources to be the same water bed that she had been trying to sell. the bed that Loreen says had already been sold. We weren't able to find any information about who Jay said she sold the waterbed too. Perhaps she sold it as part of a verbal agreement and the buyer was going to pick it up later. If she really sold it to someone, the identity of that person remains a mystery because they have never come forward saying they agreed to buy it. And to me, this is a very strange part of the case.

It's a little murky, right? We don't have all the details. But if there was a real buyer for this waterbed, again, we're talking about a small town. The news of Jay's murder shocked the community. It would have been everywhere. Doesn't it seem likely that this person would have come forward at some point to the police and said, you know, I had a conversation. with her. We had a tentative agreement or we had some type of agreement for me to buy this waterbed.

If the person that was getting the bed was in that town, you think it was a small enough town. They would have known the police wanted to talk to people that reached out about that waterbed and they would have been willing to come forward. The other possibility is maybe they lived further away. Maybe they were outside of that town or in the next town over further out in the county. So maybe they just weren't aware that they were being sought. Yeah, I mean, there are a number of possibilities. But to me, it seems as though if there was this verbal agreement, that maybe the person who made it had a real, you know,

vested interest in not coming forward to police because maybe they were the killer or they were involved somehow. Yeah, that seems pretty logical. Dr. Maurice Godwin, the criminal investigative psychologist who was hired by Jay's family to work on the case, told the Huffington Post, I believe the individual had been stalking her. From looking at the circumstances, Dr. Godwin doesn't think it was luck that Jay was alone and that no one saw the killer. He explained, the person was comfortable watching the house and going in. He knew there was not an adult male in the home, so he had to be watching. And this is a real scary thought to me.

And probably, I'm sure it is for most people listening. The thought that someone is casing your home, watching you, waiting for, let's say, an opportunity to strike. That's scary stuff. Jay's cousin Renee told the Huffington Post that after placing the ad for the waterbed, Jay had started receiving strange calls. every so often, the person would sometimes hang up, but other times the caller would taunt both Jay and Angela, depending on who answered, with statements that were sexual in nature.

Renee also remembered something pretty interesting. She told the Huffington Post, the calls always came right after she got home and the person would hang up. So that's another reason. We're thinking somebody was watching her. In 1987, you couldn't just use your cell phone to call someone from outside of their home. If someone was physically watching for her to come home, they likely had to be a neighbor or live very close to see when she got home. Of course, there's always the possibility that someone learned her schedule.

But the way it's been described was that it was very consistent in occurring within minutes. after when Jay would get home. Now, it's been said that, you know, it likely had to be a neighbor or someone close, but I don't think that's necessarily true. This could have been someone watching Jay, knew her schedule. We described where she lived.

There were shops. She lived right next door to a shop. There was probably a pay phone somewhere. So I'm just not sure that, you know, it had to have been someone who lived, have right there around her. Yeah, one thing I take away from it is, you know, now you've got these calls coming into play. It's just one more avenue.

The police have to go down to say, hey, are these calls connected to the murder? Or are they just random prank phone calls that happen a lot back in the 1980s? People like to play games on phones and hang up and things like that. So maybe some of that was going on, but police have to consider all possibilities here. Jay's cousin Angela told NBC news about an incident that happened about a week before Jay was killed. As Angela walked past Jay's doorway, she noticed that she was lying in bed and looked upset. According to Angela, Jay had been frightened by a dream about a strange man trying to kill her. Dr. Goddvern feels that Jay was being stalked, but explained to the Huffington Post,

that he also doesn't think this was a sexual advance, turned rejection, turned anger, turned murder. He seems to have another idea. telling Star News Online, you're dealing with a case that has the hallmarks of a serial killer. USA Today ran a feature covering Jay's murder in February 2000, the day before the 13-year anniversary that brought a lot of new attention to the case. There were multiple jurisdictions that had similar unsolved cases. One case was the murder of 19-year-old Kathy Sue Swartz in Three Rivers, Michigan. On December 2nd, 1988,

Kathy was stabbed multiple times. Before she was strangled to death, her killer had attempted to sexually assault her, and there were signs that she had fought back during the attack. Kathy's nine-month-old daughter was with her in another room during the murder. Could this have been the work of a serial killer who was targeting mothers while they were home alone with their children? It seemed like a good potential lead and a stretch at the same time.

In early 2023, some answers finally came in Kathy's murder. Investigators used DNA taken from a bloody fingerprint left at the scene to create a profile and using forensic genetic genealogy. Her killer was identified as 53-year-old Robert Odell Waters, who would have been 18 at the time of Kathy's murder. He was arrested in May 2003 in South Carolina. but took his own life in his cell at the jail. It seems that the cases aren't related.

The good news in Jay's case is that investigators also recovered DNA from her killer. According to Dr. Godwin in a Star News interview, the DNA was recovered from the vaginal area, pillows, and sheets. How much can be done with that DNA and what has already been done with it isn't clear. But hopefully it eventually helps ID Jay's killer. And to me more of just the mere fact that they have DNA. I think lends a lot of hope in solving Jay's murder. I mean, you and I have seen a lot of amazing work over the past several years in this area of

forensic genetic genealogy. I think there's a good chance that we could see something very similar as to what happened in solving Kathy's murder. The problem in some of these cases is that, and I think you said it, you just don't know exactly, you know, how good the sample is. You don't know what they've already done with it. They don't always share that information. A lot of times, the news just kind of comes out of the blue. Boom, we've solved it. And, you know, we may just have to wait for something like that in this case as well. Yeah, we also don't know the condition, how well is preserved.

You know, so there's a lot of unanswered questions, but the fact that they have DNA is a good starting point. But like you said, there's a lot of variables, right, with the DNA, especially when it was collected in 1987. Now, we talked about regret in this case, like the regrets that Lorene had for sending a would-be waterbed buyer over to her daughter's home, but she wasn't the only one with regrets. Jay's cousin Renee recalls the last time Jay called her just one day before her murder. She told NBC News, I was sick in the bed. So I told my friend who answered the phone to just let her know. I'd call her back. It's my biggest regret.

Why couldn't I have gotten out of bed to talk to her? She added, you just never think something like this will ever happen. And that's absolutely true. I mean, how many times do all of us say, hey, you know, I'm busy right now. Let me call you right back. Well, what if you never talk to that person again? Would you feel bad? Yeah, absolutely you would.

Yeah, it's human nature. None of the family members ever stepped back inside the house where Jay died. This one horrific incident had erased 64 years of happy memories in the home. It was sold in August 1987, just six months after Jay's murder. The town was shocked by the murder, but people reacted differently. Jenny Mintz, who ran the floor shop next door, thought that Jay must have known her killer, since there was no sign of forced entry, and she didn't plan to adjust her habits or routine much. She even kept both the doors of the shop unlocked, telling one local newspaper

that if you lock the doors, you'll just keep the honest people out. The bad ones will get in. On the other hand, a different neighbor, Francis B. Jacobs, told the same paper, how you have to have strong, strong locks now. And Sheriff John Carr Davis stated that sales of firearms in the area had increased by 300%. And how many times have we heard that? Right. Murder in a town that's not used to murder.

Number one, you're going to have an increase in the sale of firearms. People are going to be scared. They're going to try to get something to defend themselves. I think a lot of people are also going to look at their, their own home security, maybe strengthen locks, maybe get a security system. But then you have, you know, the flor shop owner next door who kind of went the other way, thinking this person targeted jet. So there's no reason for me to be worried.

I think it just shows you, right? That not everyone acts the same, you know, after this type of horrific tragedy. And it does seem like it was a one-off because there were no other reports of any similar cases in that town following this murder. Lieutenant Israel West with the Brunswick County Sheriff's Office who has been working on the case since 2016, told NBC News, we don't consider Jay's case a cold case. It's just unsolved. In 1989, the case file was 32 inches thick. By 2021, the case file contained 22,000.

pages. Many investigators, including Dr. Godwin, think this case can be solved someday and that the killer's ID is in those 22,000 pages. He told WECT.com, the perpetrator is in those files. A 2018 article noted that detectives with the Brunswick County Sheriff's Office planned to look into borrowing an M-back to use in some of their unsolved cases. But by July, they had been able to purchase one of their own. At the time, each device cost $35,000. An M-back is a device that actually pulls DNA out of materials from surfaces, like a vacuum picking up dust and dirt. This helps capture DNA that can't be obtained through swabbing. There may be more information about the case that the public doesn't know. In 2021, Lieutenant Israel West wouldn't comment on the report of whether or not

a car was spotted leaving the crime scene. And I always think that there's a lot the public doesn't know because the police, they just don't disclose everything they know, everything they're working on. It's not in their best interest. Jay's sister Jill told NBC News, we're just trying to hold out hope for an answer to why this happened to her. Someone knows. All they have to do is come forward. Renee told the Huffington Post, it's up to us now to make sure the case stays in the spotlight and every year we think this is the year it will be solved but nothing happens it's devastating and we wanted to come to an end captain phil perry one of the original investigators on the case continued to work on it even after his retirement in 2011 as part of the cold case unit

he passed away at the age of 78 just eight days shy of the 31st anniversary of jays death one thing's seems clear. The police work in this case aren't giving up on finding out who killed a young mom in front of her son. They remain focused on identifying him. If you have any information about the murder of Beverly J. Potter Mints, please call the Brunswick County Sheriff's Office at 910-253-2777. So more of as we wrap up this case, you know, it is a perplexing one. You have this angle of the classified ad for the watch. bed. And I think a lot of people who look into this case are very drawn to that as most likely having something to do with the murder. Either the murderer used the classifieds as a way to scope out

potential victims, or this is a person who already had their sights set on Jay for whatever reason. Maybe they were infatuated with her, even though the police have said, they don't think this is a rejection type scenario. But this wouldn't be the first instance we've seen of people using the classifieds to, you know, target their victims. You know, there's not a lot of reasons to just walk up to someone's house, knock on the door. Now you can pretend to be a salesperson or something like that, but to try to figure out if someone's home alone or if the woman is there, but there's no husband, there's no male there. This is something that killers often try to figure out.

As scary as we think they are, and they are, don't get me wrong, a lot of these individuals don't want to take the, chance of having to go up against another male inside the home. And to be honest with you, this is kind of my theory, that this was not necessarily a person who even knew Jay. This could have been a stranger to her, maybe from, you know, outside of the town who just used the classifieds as a way to scope out. potential victims. And I think like we talked about through this entire episode,

there's just so many different avenues that the police could potentially go down to look and see if any of them lead to the case being resolved. But there's no clear path where the police feel they need to go that one direction. It seems overwhelmingly, though, that if there is a clear path, it's probably towards the waterbed,

classified ad having something to do with Jay's murder. But the good news in this case, right, is that they do have some DNA. Now, how viable it is, what it will lead to, that's something that we're just going to have to wait to see you. But you'd always rather have DNA than not, right? Doesn't it seem as though there's more hope in these cases where you have DNA? But that's it for our episode on Jay Potter, Mence. If you love the show, but haven't done so yet, you know, go out, give us a five-star rating.

You can leave a review. Also, keep telling your friends. That word of mouth about the podcast really helps us out. If you want to find us on social media, we're on X with the handle at Criminology Pod. And you can find us on Facebook by going to Facebook.com slash criminology podcast. And you can join our Facebook discussion group, criminology podcast, discussion and fans. So that's it for another episode of criminology. But Morph and I will be back with all of you next Saturday night with a brand new episode. So until then for Mike and Morph. We'll talk to you next week.

Take care everyone.