True Crime Campfire - Wicked Web: The Tennessee Facebook Murders

Episode Date: December 17, 2021

There’s a Danish proverb that says, “If envy were a fever, then the whole world would be ill.” It’s probably true. I mean, everybody feels that poisonous little pang now and then. We all occasionally want something that somebody else has, maybe even resent them a little for having it. We learn to get past it, focus on the good in our own lives instead of obsessing about everyone else. But sometimes, envy can take over—spread through the soul like a kudzu vine, smothering and strangling and covering everything else. You can get trapped in it. And you can convince yourself that the only way out is destruction. Join us for a Southern gothic tale for the social media age: a story about love, family, betrayal, envy and manipulation. Sources:Too Pretty to Live: The Catfishing Murders of East Tennessee by Dennis BrooksMedium: https://medium.com/serial-napper/jenelle-potter-the-killer-catfish-51c0626cec7ABC's 20/20, Episode "Unfriended"Investigation Discovery special, "Too Pretty To Live"https://www.timesnews.net/one-of-three-facebook-murder-convictions-overturned-mother-granted-new-trial/article_4aea9524-0618-11ec-a093-8b71991a842d.htmlFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. There is a Danish proverb that says, If envy were a fever, then the whole world would be ill. It's probably true. I mean, everybody feels that poisonous little pang now and then. We all occasionally want something that somebody else has,

maybe even resent them a little for having it. We learn to get past it, focus on the good in our own lives instead of obsessing about everyone else. But sometimes envy can take over, spread through the soul like a kudzu vine, smothering and strangling and covering everything else. You can get trapped in it, and you can convince yourself that the only way out is destruction.

Join us for a Southern Gothic tale for the social media age, a story about love, family, betrayal, and manipulation. This is Wicked Webb, the Tennessee Facebook murders. So, campers, for this one, we're in the tiny town of four. Mountain City, Tennessee. January 31st, 2012. The neighbors of a young engaged couple, Bill Payne and Billie Jean Hayworth, were getting a bad feeling. A few moments earlier, they'd gone over to the Payne Hayworth's house to say hello to their young friends and gotten no response to their knock. That was weird. Bill and Billy Jean were always up and about it this time of the

morning, taking care of their seven-month-old son. The neighbors found the door unlocked, not unusual for that area at all, so they went ahead inside calling out for Bill and Billy Jean as they did. They were expecting to find everybody at the back of the house where they couldn't hear the door, something like that. But soon as they stepped foot inside the house, it was clear that something was off. A heavy kind of quiet was hanging in the air, the kind of quiet that feels more ominous than peaceful. And it didn't take the neighbors long to figure out why. As they passed the main bedroom, their hearts dropped. Bill Payne lay on the bed in a pool, of blood, pale as the sheets and clearly dead. Billy Jean lay on the floor nearby, just as

bloody and still. A moment later, the local 911 dispatch got a call from a frantic sounding woman. She said, honey, I need an ambulance, please, ma'am, there's no pulse. There's no pulse on either one of them. They're dead. The 911 dispatcher tried to get the woman to slow down a little, give a little more context, but the woman was close to panic. There's blood all over her head on the floor, she said. For the moment, forgetting that the dispatcher didn't even know who she was yet. But before the dispatcher could ask any more questions, the call took an even more disturbing turn.

Oh, my God, the caller said, there's a baby here. The neighbor lady had been headed out of the room with the phone when she heard a little gurgling noise and, oh my God. The little seven-month-old baby was there, still clutched in his mother's arms, his head smeared with her blood. The neighbor described the scene to the dispatcher. he's not crying she said he's awake must have cried till he couldn't cry no more you can hear the heartbreak in her voice as she says that and it's just ugh the baby wasn't hurt but how long had he lay there in his dead mother's arms it was a horrifying thought

when the police arrived a couple of things were immediately clear to them first this wasn't a robbery gone bad the house wasn't ransacked all the valuables still seemed to be there totally untouched. Both victims had been shot in the head, and Bill had a vicious slash across his throat. Whoever had done this had come here to do it, and the killings had the quick, efficient look of a professional hit. This was a premeditated double assassination, not the panicked act of a burglar desperate to escape. And second, they were going to need to call in the big guns to solve it. These big guns came in the form of Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Agent Scott Lott, who knew right away that the news of a double murder like this was going to hit this little town like a meteor. Billy Jean Hayworth and Bill Payne were a sweet 20-and-thirty-something couple, just on the cusp of starting their life together.

They'd met at the Thread Factory where they both worked, and now they were engaged, they had a brand-new baby, and they were very much in love. Friends later described them to Investigation Discovery as the kind of couple you rarely get to see, two people who were just made for each other. the type who could turn a simple trip to the grocery store into a good time. Bill and Billy Jean were the real deal. They just delighted in each other. Now, somebody had invaded their home and taken all that away from them, and the community was going to want to know why. Mountain City, a little place described by prosecutor Dennis Brooks,

as right out of a Norman Rockwell painting, was on edge, wondering if a night stalker-type serial killer had just claimed his first two victims. And if they were in danger now, too. But very quickly, as Agent Lott and the homicide detectives began to question Bill and Billy Jean's devastated family and friends, they started to feel like this might be a little more personal than that. Some nastiness had been brewing in Bill and Billy Jean's life, and one name kept hopping up again and again in the interviews. Potter. Specifically, a woman named Janelle Potter and her parents, Buddy and Barbara.

According to just about everybody, Agent Lott spoke to Bill and Billy Jean, and a good friend of theirs named Lindsay, had been tangled up in an ugly social media feud with Janelle for a while now. Janelle was in her early 30s, but she seemed a lot younger. She had an auditory disorder that made it kind of challenging for her to communicate. She didn't have a job, and she still lived with her parents, who still treated her like a child. Yeah, and in addition to her auditory issues,

Janelle had been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes as a kid, and apparently Buddy and Barbara had gone into overprotective parent mode at that point and never got out of it. Janelle's sister Christy told ABC's 2020, quote, Instead of being herself, my parents tried to make her fit in. They also, in the same breath, would say how different she was, and then she became unable to make friends normally. Ugh, not great.

Unsurprisingly, all this had made Janelle socially awkward, and she came across as really immature. Yeah, despite being a grown-ass woman, Janelle had a curfew, and she'd be in trouble if she came home past it. She wasn't allowed to drive, smoke, drink, or go to parties. Her parents monitored her social media accounts like you would a 13-year-old girl. Yikes. Ugh. Buddy and Barbara seem like the kind of parents who'd snoop under your mattress and read your journal. Yeh. Since the potters moved to Mountain City in 2005, Janelle hadn't really

developed any friendships outside of social media. She had a way of sort of startling people in real life. She came on too strong, treating total strangers like they'd known each other for years, and in an abrasive way, not a comfortable one. But one afternoon, a couple years before the murder, she went to the pharmacy to pick up some of her diabetes meds. The pharmacy clerk, Tracy Greenwell, had noticed her before. Tracy is one of those people who roots for the underdog, and she could tell Janelle was sort of in the shadow of her parents. She felt sorry for her, and finally, one afternoon, she struck up a conversation with Janelle and ended up kind of taking her under her wing. They started hanging around together, a brand new experience for Janelle who was used to being

sheltered and monitored 24-7. Tracy took her to the mall, took her out to eat, introduced her around. One time she even took her repelling at the popular rock climbing spot, and eventually Janelle met Tracy's brother, Bill Payne. And according to many of the people involved in the case, Janelle was immediately smitten with Bill. A lot of women's had been over the years. He was a charming guy, funny, good-natured, fun to be around, and he was welcoming to Janelle. He paid attention to her. For Bill, it didn't mean anything. He was already in love with Billy Jean by then, and they had the new baby. He was just being himself. He was nice to everybody. But for Janelle, that kind of attention was intoxicating.

Tracy could see trouble come in a mile away, and her solution was to introduce Janelle to yet another one of the dudes in her family. Her and Bill's cousin Jamie Curd. And it seemed to work. She and Jamie had instant chemistry, despite the fact that Jamie struck a lot of people around town is a bit of an odd duck. Kind of quiet, but not in a thoughtful way, not in a shy way, in like a creepy way. Like, he's one awkward silence away from telling you, you look prettiest with your eyes closed? Yeah, exactly in that kind of way. Billy Jean's sister Beverly told Investigation Discovery, quote, I didn't like him. He was weird. He watched everybody and everybody's moves.

Like posing for pictures with big guns, wore dark glasses at night. You know, that guy? We've all met that guy. But of course, Janelle was an odd one too, so that wasn't going to stop her. Janelle was into Jamie, but despite the fact that she was 30-something years old, Janelle was not allowed to date or even be alone with a man. for some reason it never seemed to occur to her that she was an adult and therefore allowed to do whatever the fuck she wanted to do so in order to avoid upsetting mommy and dad jeanelle had to sneak around and hide her growing relationship with jamie when bill found out about this and all the other weird restrictions jeanelle's parents were putting on her

he tried to warn jamie off her like dude this seems a little bit off i'd break up with this girl if i were you but jamie was a smitten kitten and he wasn't having any of it in fact the mere suggestion that he cut things off with Janelle pissed him off to the point where now there was tension between the cousins, who'd been really close up to now. I kind of suspect Jamie knew how Janelle felt about Bill because everybody else did, and maybe worried that Bill might start feeling the same way about her, which is bizarre because by all accounts, Bill and Billy Jean were a match made in heaven. But jealousy knows no logic campers, and jealousy is the nasty beating heart of this case. So as tension grew between the cousins, Janelle and Jamie got close.

closer and closer. I'm sure the secrecy made the whole thing much more romantic. Jamie even bought Janelle a secret cell phone so she could call him and text him behind her parents' backs. Ooh, secret phone. sexy. Buddy and Barbara did know that Janelle had made a new friend, but somehow she managed to convince him that that's all Jamie was. Janelle had a talent for convincing. Jamie was good with computers, and one of the main ways they engineered time together was for him to come over to fix the Potter's computers. Despite all the skulking around, Janelle's life was kind of sort of coming together for the first time. She was starting to get a taste of the world

outside her parents' protective cocoon. But then an unwelcome darkness started to creep in. Janelle had always been active on social media from the earliest days of its existence. Before she met Tracy Greenwell and the Payne Cousins, it was the only gateway she had to the world. Her sister Christine told 2020, she was really good behind a keyboard. as long as she didn't have to do it face to face. Mostly, she posted pictures of cute puppies, pretty landscapes, and smiling selfies. But despite her big, innocent-looking eyes and her little girl voice, Janelle wasn't afraid to throw down in a Facebook fight if somebody pissed her off.

Long before our story began, Janelle had a history of social media conflicts that she usually started herself. But not long after she and Jamie Curd became an item, somebody started leaving the social media equivalent of flaming bags of dog shit on Janelle's Facebook wall. Every source we could find said something about these comments being anonymous, which we assume means that Janelle didn't know the people posting this stuff, or that somebody was posting from sock accounts. And it was ugly stuff. Comments like whore. Like Janelle is an ugly fat toad. Like someone should kill Janelle. Someone should cut off her head. Someone should rape her. And Janelle had a very definite idea of who was behind the posts. Billy Jean Hayworth, Bill Payne's fiancé and the mother of his baby son. Tracy Greenwell later told 2020 that Janelle seemed obsessed with the idea that Billy Jean and a whole posse of her friends were harassing her.

She was always saying if somebody was mad at her or somebody hated her, Tracy said. She seemed paranoid about it, I thought. It was true that Billy Jean had pretty much hated Janelle on site and vice versa. You can't really blame Billy Jean. I mean, Janelle was transparently mooney about her fiancé Bill. Nobody's going to like that. So it didn't seem completely outside the realm of possibility that Billy Jean might decide to express her. herself on Janelle's Facebook page. But a lot of people who knew Billy Jean just didn't buy it.

She was such a laid-back person, and her focus was totally on Bill and their little boy. They didn't feel like she had the time or the energy to be getting into a Facebook brawl with Janelle. And Billy Jean denied it flat. Wasn't her, she said. Of course, whoever was behind the bullying posts, Mama and Papa Bear Potter weren't going to take it lying down. If somebody was going to come after their little girl, little 30-year-old girl, Remember, they were going to get in the fight. Barbara took to Facebook multiple times to defend Janelle. She later told 2020, I said, please don't post on Janelle's Facebook.

Please don't do this. Once or twice, she threatened to call the police to report the posters for harassment. For her part, Janelle started posting an avalanche of vitriol about Bill, Billy Jean, and their friend Lindsay. They were on drugs, she said. They were dealing drugs, partying all the time. Billy Jean was a slut who was sleeping around on Bill. Billy Jean and Lindsay were mean girls bullying her mercilessly

and it got even nastier than that she referred to the little baby as that devil baby once she posted that she wished Bill Billy Jean and that damn baby would just die which is wow you know I mean that right there shows you how socially off this woman was

because most people would know better than to say something like that in public no matter how pissed off they were you just don't go around saying you want babies to die. That automatically makes you the bad guy, right? Wishing death on babies, animals, and the elderly is like a one-way ticket to becoming mayor of Supervillain City. Pick on somebody your own size, right? It's just, no.

Nobody who knew Bill and Billy Jean bought anything Janelle was saying. Bill had had some trouble with painkillers before he started dating Billy Jean, but he'd gotten help for that. A lot of people struggle with that these days. and he'd never sold drugs. Once he and Billy Jean got together, especially after the baby was born,

he let that party lifestyle go. Billy Jean wasn't into it, and Bill wanted to do right by her and their son. And from then on, he'd been all about family. But Janelle kept on flinging accusations, not only at Bill and Billy Jean, but also at their good friend Lindsay. And before long,

Janelle started calling the police to complain about Bill and Billy Jean. They were driving past her house all the time, she said, making nasty prank calls. In one 911 call she said They're trying to set me up And I don't like this because I'm very sick Bill and Billy Jean were threatening to blow her dad's truck up

She said Once Janelle's mother Barbara called the police over to the house To see a rock that had allegedly been thrown at their house A small smooth stone about the size of a bar of soap And there was writing on it in Sharpie One side said Billy Payne The other Billy Jean And on the side it said

I swear to God I'm not making this up I'm your huckleberry Somebody has seen Altogether too many movies campers We are quoting Doc Holiday now Lord have mercy It's time to shut it down You know

I think if I were going to throw a rock At somebody's house I would make sure to sign my name on it Right And include a pithy movie quote too Just to make sure it's as sick of burn as possible And obviously to make sure I got caught Immediately of course

Always sign your crime Right What movie quote would you use? Ooh, good question. Maybe that one from Taken, you know, I have a very particular set of skills, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. Okay, that'd be good. That's good, but isn't it a little long for a rock-based form of communication? Shit, yeah, you're right.

Well, I'll have to give that some thought. What would you use? Asta la vista, baby. Easy. Oh, God damn it, that's really good. So, campers, tell us what you'd write on your rock. Never rub another man's rebar? That'd be a good one, too.

Anywho, so things were escalating. Janelle kept insisting that Billy Jean was stalking her, threatening her, harassing her in all kinds of ways, all because she was jealous of Janelle, and worried that Bill was going to leave her and the baby for her. Billy Jean denied it outright, said it was ridiculous, and Bill backed her up. Billy Jean and her best friend Lindsay got so sick of Janelle's constant harassment that they filed lawsuits against her but they didn't have enough evidence and the suits

got thrown out of court. Of course, Janelle's secret squeeze Jamie believed Janelle and he was furious at his cousin slash former best friend Bill. And naturally Janelle's parents were furious too. Buddy even went to talk to the sheriff himself at one point when the sheriff

very wisely, I think, advised him to quote, take the computer and throw it in Wittagga Lake, Buddy said Sheriff my daughter stays at the house all the time and that computer is all she has Of course he didn't know about all secret cell phone Jamie at that point

Janelle was good at making sure the people in her life only knew what she wanted them to know If Buddy had taken the sheriff's advice this story might have turned out very differently After the I'm Your Huckleberry Rock thing Janelle took to Facebook and unfriended Bill Payne According to her, Billy Jean saw that and unfriended her in retaliation, and by the end of the day, everybody had unfriended everybody. In the Facebook universe, this was the nuclear option.

But, hey, you know, maybe now everybody would just calm the hell down. Take a breath, de-escalate, go on with your lives. Yeah. Now you can't see the recipe videos and chain statuses I post about how if you care about this four child with cancer, you'll share. That'll show you. That'll show you all. If only. But that is not what happened.

Just days later, Bill and Billy Jean's neighbors stumbled upon their murdered bodies, Billy Jeans still clutching their baby son. And investigators were determined to figure out who did it. So, as I told you at the beginning of the episode, the name Potter popped up almost immediately as the detective started interviewing people close to the victims. So they went over to talk to Buddy, Barbara, and Janelle. They knew Buddy and Barbara were very protective of their daughter, and they knew something else about Buddy. He was a former Marine, a Vietnam vet who wore the title proudly and liked guns.

A lot. In fact, there's a picture out there of Barbara and Buddy gardening while packing large guns, and in Buddy's case, an actual bandolier full of ammo. In case of overly aggressive earthworms, I guess, what is this, arachus? For God's sake! You live in bumfuck nowhere, Tennessee, my dude. Dude, who you think's going to bow up on you while you're planting begonias? Relax.

You never know when the pansies your plant and will go rogue and enact revenge on us for our human meddling, Whitney. You can't be too careful. Now that I said that out loud, though, I heard it, and I actually think that wearing a bandolier while gardening may be the textbook definition of too careful. That's way too careful. Absolutely. So, anyhow, Janelle told the investigators she learned about the murders. she'd learned about the murders on Facebook that morning, of course. It's sad, Barbara said, and Janelle echoed her in her little girl voice.

It is sad. But Janelle couldn't resist bringing up the alleged harassment she'd been going through. She said, I mean, I'm sorry it happened, but all I can tell you is that they'd been harassing the living crap out of me. Agent Lott asked Janelle if she'd ever posted anything negative on social media about Bill and Billy Jean. Janelle shook her head. The only thing I had ever posted was Billy and Lindsay's. leave me alone. That's all I ever said. And then, Janelle came out with this astonishing statement. She said, it came out to be a jealousy thing. They said I was too pretty, that I wasn't from here,

and I was never going to be accepted. Too pretty. Wow. Yeah, that's a pretty standard thing for mean girls to throw at each other, right? I know whenever I've witnessed a nasty social media a brouhaha between a group of pissed off women. Somebody always ends up calling somebody else too pretty. And man, then the gloves just come right off. You bitch, your eyes are like twin pools of tropical sky, and I'm going to gouge them out for you. Oh, yeah, well, you looked like Angelini Jolie in that new dress last week,

and I swear to God, next time I see you in it, I'm going to set you on fire. Too pretty. Katie, that's it. You're fired. You're just too pretty. You're making me look bad. Okay, not to get too off course, but one time in middle school, one of my friends, who turned out to be a compulsive liar, different friend than the other ones I've told you all about. She told me that she had this like, digration confrontation with one of the girls who was mean to us, who was like, I'm mean to you because you guys are just so pretty without trying.

Like, you guys don't even wear makeup. Oh, come on. I think I believed it at the time, probably out of some kind of self-preservation of, like, my ego. Right, right. But now I'm, like, thinking that all of my friends in middle school were liars. So, Cynthia, if you're listening, go fuck yourself. Go fuck yourself, Cynthia. Too pretty.

So, Janelle also implied that Bill Payne probably had enemies all over town. Bill was always trying to push someone's button, she said. Bill ran his mouth about my father and Jamie, saying they were selling drugs. Janelle denied having anything to do with the murders, but this kind of talk directed at the victims struck the investigators as pretty suspicious, and they weren't sure they believed that Miss Janelle was as innocent as she claimed in all the social media back and forth.

But when the investigators went on Janelle's Facebook page later to check, it had been scrubbed clean. Clearly, somebody had deleted a lot of stuff. Hmm. Curious. But, yeah. Investigators try hard to avoid tunnel vision, and Janelle wasn't exactly the type of person

to pop into your mind when you pictured a cold-blooded killer. And she wasn't Bill and Billie Jean's only enemy. There was also cousin Jamie Curd, who'd been feuding with Bill and Billy Jean over the alleged harassment for months. Interestingly, when the investigators spoke to Janelle and her parents, they got the impression that Janelle was trying to keep her parents from knowing that Jamie was her boyfriend.

They'd already heard from multiple people that Janelle and Jamie were a couple. They'd even heard about the secret cell phone, but Janelle downplayed the relationship in front of her parents, and her parents insisted that Jamie was just a family friend who came over sometimes to fix the computer. This is the kind of thing a good detective wants to poke at with a stick to see if anything interesting falls out. So a few things later, they hauled Jamie in for questioning. He came in wearing the same dark shades he always wore, looking like he was about to throw up from the nerves. They asked him about the social media feud,

and Jamie said, I don't have Facebook. I don't know nothing about it. When they asked him who Janelle Potter was to him, Jamie said, she's a frant, just a friend. No, no, not his girlfriend, he insisted. Interesting.

Jamie denied killing Bill and Billy Jean, and the investigators kind of suspected he was telling the truth, at least they suspected he wasn't the one who actually pulled the trigger. But the guy had guilty written all over him and they wondered if he might be protecting someone else. Somebody like

Buddy Potter? Agent Lott had a feeling that that might be the case. They asked Jamie if he'd be willing to take a polygraph test and for some reason, he said yes. No one was surprised when he failed. Specifically, he failed the question,

do you know who killed Bill and Billy Jean? The investigators were convinced that Jamie knew who committed the murders and suspected he was there when it happened. And when they confronted him with the polygraph results, his reaction told them they were on the right track. Dude was sweating bullets. One of the TBI agents leaned in and said, Nobody believes you acted alone in this,

but I do think that Janelle is involved in this and her dad's involved in this. The Vietnam vet with a fondness for guns, the protective dad, who tried to get the sheriff involved in the alleged harassment of his daughter. It all fit perfectly. Jamie looked like he was trying to decide whether to fight or flee, and the agent chose that moment to pounce. He said, Jamie, are you the type of man who could shoot a woman, probably begging for her life with a baby in her arms? Jamie said, no! The agent scooted his chair even further into Jamie's little personal zone and said, then who shot him, who had the gun?

He did, Jamie said. He who, Jamie? Buddy? Jamie was quiet for a second, and then he said, yeah. There it was. And as suspects often do, now that he'd broken past that wall of denial, Jamie threw open the floodgates and launched right into the story of how the murders had happened. Early on the morning of January 31st,

he and Buddy Potter had driven over to Bill and Billy Jean's house. As they got out of the truck, Buddy handed Jamie a gun, said, I need you to stand at that door. They opened the front door quietly, slipped inside the house. Jamie watched as Buddy crept down the hall and into the main bedroom. He heard Bill Payne yell, what the hell? And then he heard a gunshot. Billy Jean ran out of the bedroom, the baby in her arms.

She started for the front door, but saw Jamie standing there armed and turned around to run the other way. But Buddy headed her arm. off, shot her in the head. She and the baby fell. And that was it. A senseless ending to a young couple's story, a story that had barely had a chance to get started. And now a baby boy was going to grow up without his parents. So was this all about the feud between Janelle, Bill, and Billy Jean? Was there something else going on, too? The investigators started to probe a little in that direction, but then Jamie stopped them cold, coming out with something the investigators couldn't have predicted if their lives depended on it.

Is the CIA here, he said? Yeah, like, uh, the agents were stunned into silence for a second. The CIA, uh, no? Why would you think that CIA would be here? Jamie mumbled something about Janelle's brother Chris being mad about things. The agents were confused, but for the moment they were more focused on getting Jamie to help them nail Buddy Potter. so they moved on, telling Jamie they needed him to make a recorded phone call to buddy

and see if he could get him to say something incriminating. Jamie, who must have realized he was in way over his head at this point, agreed without any back chat. Barbara answered the phone and immediately asked Jamie if he'd had a lie detector test. Yeah, Jamie said, and you passed it? Barbara said, Jamie said, yeah, liar. Well, that's wonderful, Barbara said. We've been praying our hearts out. Janelle even saw an angel today come in the computer room.

What? Okay. Seeing angels now. When Buddy picked up the phone, Jamie got right down to business. You got rid of everything from bills, didn't you? He said. Buddy said he had. Jamie said, okay, that makes me feel a lot better. Buddy said, yeah.

Now, this wasn't exactly a confession, but it was enough for the TBI to get an arrest warrant for old Buddy and haul him in for an interrogation. Buddy came in with a little swagger in his step. You could tell he felt confident that the TBI couldn't possibly have anything on him. That attitude went pretty damn flaccid, pretty damn quick, though, as soon as Agent Lott opened his mouth. Didn't take long for Buddy to get the picture. His friend Jamie Curd had spilled the beans.

And the TBI had been listening in on their sinister little phone call earlier that night. Buddy deflated like a punctured tire. And a moment or two later, it was all about the justifications. buddy said look when you hear people plotting to catch your daughter murderer they want to rape her because she's a virgin one of the agents jumped in to play good cop so in your mind you had no other choice buddy buddy said no especially when you hear somebody's put a three thousand dollar bounty on her head on my wife and me wow so there it was campers and the thing was you could tell buddy believed what he was saying with every atom in his being he had done done these murders because he had no choice but to protect his daughter from two evil people who wanted her tortured and dead. But with all that said, Buddy clammed up and asked for an attorney. And the agents were still left wondering what the hell had started all this. I mean, surely it

wasn't just a little Facebook back and forth and a little old river rock that said, I'm your Huckleberry on it. They hadn't heard anything about any bounty on the potter's heads. So this had to go deeper than a social media feud. And so it did. Remember when our boy Jamie asked that weird question about the CIA and then said something about Janelle's brother, Chris, being mad? The agents had let it drop at the time, but now that they had Buddy and Jamie in custody,

they started perusing the case file for the name Chris, and they found it. When they'd made Jamie call the Potter House to try and incriminate Buddy, Barbara had answered the phone and immediately asked if Jamie had been booked in polygraph. As the agents listened again to the recording of the phone call, they caught something they'd miss first. Barbara said she'd just gotten an email from Chris, who told her Jamie had been booked. There it was again. Chris, a shadowy CIA agent who Jamie Curd seemed to think was Janelle's brother.

Now, the local sheriff in Mountain City knew that Buddy Potter claimed to have once worked for the CIA. In fact, dude, prepare yourself for the cringe. dude had once shown up at the sheriff's office shooting his mouth off about how he normally carried a gun but out of respect for the sheriff he wasn't doing that today and how he used to work for the CIA and he was expecting to be reactivated any minute now he'd killed people before he wanted the sheriff to know for the government because you know that's what CIA operatives always do they make sure to inform the local law enforcement yeah let them know that oh I I I It can't be held responsible for whatever happens when I'm reactivated.

God Almighty. Now, whether Buddy was actually in the CIA, we don't know for sure. My guess is no, because he's such an obvious jackass. And as you said, you know, because CIA operatives don't tend to brag about it to anybody who listen. But according to prosecutor Dennis Brooks, the investigators did dig up something kind of disturbing about Buddy's service in Vietnam. Somebody close to the family claimed that during the war, Buddy had been part of a CIA-led mission where a Vietnamese village had been totally annihilated.

A village that, as Brooks put it, in his book, Too Pretty to Live, shouldn't have been touched. Oh, my God. Yikes. Now, was this true? We don't know. The government tends to wipe all records of missions like that from existence, but we do know this. Buddy was once prosecuted in a federal court for stolen valor, which is claiming military honors

he'd never been awarded. Which has just got to be one of the scummiest things you can do, in my opinion. Ugh. Right? Like, I hope the Chili's discount was worth it, you pathetic coward. Chili's discount. Anyway, despite all of that, though, Buddy and Barbies. Barbara and Janelle like to brag all over town about Buddy's alleged CIA exploits.

For the record, by the way, the CIA said they never heard of the guy, said they didn't have an operative named Chris in the area either. But campers, when the investigators executed search warrants on Jamie Kerr and the Potter family, the Chris' mystery began to unravel fast. First of all, while they were searching the Potter's house, Barbara, whose reaction to Buddy's arrest had already aroused suspicion that she'd been involved in the murders from the start. started blatantly trying to destroy evidence. Yeah, she, like, went over to a table and started ripping up pictures of Billy Jean Hayworth and her friends, like pictures that had been printed out from Facebook and had stuff like horror written all over them. And Barbara's just standing there tearing them up right in front of the cop's faces.

Smooth, babes, smooth, right? And in Jamie Curd's truck, holy fucking shit, y'all, they hit Patert. Garbage bags, full of shredded papers, most of which turned out to be printed out emails. Printed out emails. I'm going to say it three times because you don't need to print them out. The poor investigators had to spend, God knows how long, painstakingly taping them back together. But it was worth it. Because mixed in with the emails between Janelle and her mom, full of venom about Bill and Billy Jean,

and what they thought should be done to them, they found a slew of messages from the notorious Chris. The first thing they noticed about CIA man Chris, other than his atrocious grammar and spelling, was that the man seemed completely obsessed with Janelle. Janelle was so pretty, Janelle was so sweet, Janelle must be protected no matter what, and Chris was going to see to that.

And according to Chris, who Janelle needed protection from, was Billy Jean Hayworth and Bill Payne. Bill was selling drugs, he said. He and Billy Jean were in a gang who ran around killing and raping and pillaging and God knew what else. One message in particular caught Agent Lott's eye right away. Chris told Jamie that he was worried about Janelle, that Bill and Billy Jean had tormented her so badly at this point that he thought Janelle might take our own life. In other emails to Barbara and to Jamie,

Chris talked about CIA surveillance of the Payne-Haworth House, where all this alleged gang and drug activity was going on. They were plotting to kidnap, he said. They'd put a bounty on her head. Now, remember, this Chris was supposedly a CIA agent. Whatever intelligence he had on Bill and Billy Jean, you'd have to trust it, right? It seemed clear to the investigators that whoever this Chris guy was, he'd whip Jamie, Buddy, and Barbara into a frenzy of worry for Janelle and hatred for Bill and Billy Jean, the people allegedly harassing her.

So who was Chris? Well, fortunately for the investigators, he'd helped him. attached pictures of himself to some of the emails. Hmm. And thanks to the wonders of forensic IT, it didn't take long for the agents to find the source of those pictures. A guy named Chris Jaden, who lived hundreds of miles away in Delaware. Chris was a handsome guy. They quickly found him on Facebook and saw all the same pictures they'd seen attached to the CIA Chris emails. And guess what he did for a living, campers? Law enforcement. In other words, Chris Jaden was a guy who knew a little something about killing

without leaving any evidence behind. So investigators wasted no time getting in touch with the guy. Chris later told investigation discovery that he thought it was a prank phone call at first, a TBI agent asking him, are you in the CIA? But when the agents showed up at his house in Delaware a day or two later, he realized it was not a prank. These people had him in their crosshairs as a murder suspect. Chris was hugely confused, but he invited the agents inside,

and at his kitchen table, the TBI guys started showing Chris the taped-together emails, complete with pictures of him. Didn't take long for the Tennessee investigators to realize that Chris was genuinely bewildered and totally creeped out. He wanted to cooperate, though. He wanted to figure this thing out as much as they did. Finally, Agent Lott pulled out a picture of Janelle Potter. Do you know this girl? He said. It took Chris a second, but then he said, oh, yeah. Yeah, I went to high school with that girl. Did they have any kind of romantic relationship, the agents asked. Oh no, not at all, Chris said. I barely knew her.

But she knew him, he said, used to follow him around the halls at school to the point where it felt like stalking. She creeped him out. Chris said he hadn't thought about Janelle in years, not since graduation. But he remembered some things about her now. She was always courting drama, he said. She'd pretend to faint in the hallways just to get attention. The girl passed out more often than an age. 18th century English noblewoman with lead makeup and of course it's laced up too tight.

Cambers, it quickly became obvious to the investigators what was going on here. Somebody had been gone a catfishing. Someone had used the real Chris Jaden to create a false identity, CIA agent Chris, and that person had used this false identity to convince Jamie Curd and the Potters that Janelle was in serious danger from Bill and Billy Jean. Not only that, but as the IT specialist, O.D. into the computer records and online histories of everybody involved, it became clear that all the harassment in this case had come from Janelle and her mother, toward Bill, Billy Jean and

their friend Lindsay Thomas. They'd never harassed her back, never made any threats against her. All they wanted was for her to leave them alone. The investigators thought they had a pretty good idea of who was pulling the strings behind all this, and they subpoenaed the data from the Potter's home computer to check if their hunch was right. Now, take a seat campers, because I know this is going to shock you. When they trace the IP address on all the emails from CIA Guy Chris, guess what they found? Come on, guess. Every single one of the Chris emails had come from the Potter's own computer.

Get out. Janelle had orchestrated the whole thing, pulling three full-grown adults into a shared delusion, all to satisfy her own petty jealousy and desire for revenge. Must have made her feel so important, having her mom, dad, and boyfriend all baying for the blood of these people she hated. But how are they going to prove it? The prosecutor had a smart idea. He reached out to an expert in forensic linguistics, a guy named Dr. Robert Leonard.

He gave Dr. Leonard a whole bunch of known writing samples from Janelle and her mom and a whole bunch of the Chris emails. And when the expert compared them, he had no doubt. whatsoever. Janelle was CIA Chris. They made exactly the same unique little spelling mistakes transposed the same letters again and again. Use the same quirky turns of phrase. The prosecutor felt like he finally had enough to charge Janelle and her mom Barbara with first degree murder right alongside Buddy and Jamie. Why Barbara? We don't have time to go into everything they had against her, but from her emails to Janelle and CIA Chris, it was very clear she was in on the planning,

not to mention her attempts to destroy evidence after the fact. And in 2013, everybody went on trial. Jamie Curd, probably the case's biggest doofous and most pathetic pawn, took a 25-year plea and agreed to testify against everybody else. He did a pretty good job considering what a numb nuts he is, and the jury quite clearly believed him. Also during the trial, the prosecutor got his hands on a dynamite piece of evidence. A recording of a phone call Bill Payne had made to the Potters in the midst of all the harassment. Bill clearly fed up with Janelle's bullshit was trying to reason with her parents. Look, just tell her to stop posting this stuff about me being a bad father, dealing drugs, all that kind of thing.

Barbara jumped right in to defend Janelle, of course. It's not her. All she does is download music. She's not the one harassing you. I don't know who it is. Bill, in a moment of foreshadowing that gave me a chill down the back of my neck, told Barbara, she's lying to you. He had her figured out all right, saw through all her manipulation of mommy and dad, but Barbara, of course, couldn't see it.

And she ended the conversation with a threat. Leave us alone. If you call here again, I'm going to do something about it. During the whole conversation, you can hear Janelle crying in the background. Ms. Janelle Camper's is a champion weeper. Not since weepy Dedy Moore from the Abraham Shakespeare case have we seen such a fine competitor. She seems to use it as a weapon. Somebody says something she doesn't like, asks her a question

she doesn't have a good answer to, and here come the big old splashy waterworks, just like a squid with the ink or a skunk with the stinky butt, you know? And while she's wailing, she's peeking through her fingers to see if you're buying it and getting ready to leave her alone. But, of course, that kind of immaturity is what happens when you take a child and never let her grow up,

never let her figure out what failure feels like so she can learn how to overcome it, never let her do anything on her own so she can watch herself succeed. That's what happens when you infantilize your daughter to this kind of pathological degree. So we shouldn't be surprised. The only life skill they ever let Janelle learn was manipulation. And boy, did that come back to bite him in the ass, right? It only took the jury a few hours to convict Buddy, Barbara, and Janelle Potter of two counts of murder. they sentenced them each to two consecutive life sentences.

Janelle's sister later told investigation discovery that she still thinks about her dad sometimes, and sometimes her mom, but she doesn't think about her sister anymore. Janelle, she said, had taken what little there was of their family and destroyed it, and she couldn't forgive her for that. She has no desire to ever see her sister again, and I do not blame her. Now, last year, Barbara actually got granted a new trial. The appeals court ruled that it was a conflict of interest for her husband's attorney to represent her too and to continue representing Buddy and his appeals, which makes sense, I guess.

So for a minute there, it actually looked like Barbara was going to be going to trial again, but fortunately for Bill and Billie Jean's families and for the taxpayers of Tennessee, it didn't happen. Barbara took a plea instead, agreeing to plead guilty to murder in exchange for a 25-year sentence. And given that she's no spring chicken, there's a good chance Barb will never breathe freedom's air again. Let's hope not. As for Janil and Buddy, all their appeals have been denied. Bill and Billy Jean's little boy is being raised by family, and we hope he's doing well. I'm sure his family is telling him lots of stories about his mom and dad and how very much they loved him in the short time they had him to love.

So that was, I think we'll all agree, one hell of a wild one. Right, campers? You know we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get to. get together again around the true crime campfire. And we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Jerry, Paint Pink, Jordan, Leslie, Esther, and Caitlin. We appreciate you to the moon and back. And y'all, if you're not yet a patron, you're missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad free at least a day early, sometimes two, plus an

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