December 5, 2023 • 49 mins
An online feud escalates offline, resulting in a double murder. This is the story of the “The Facebook Murders” of Mountain City, Tennessee.
The Greatest True Crime Stories is a production of Diversion Audio.
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This series is hosted by Mary Kay McBrayer. Check out more of her work at www.marykaymcbrayer.com.
This episode was written by Nora Batelle
Editorial Direction by Nora Batelle
Developed by Scott Waxman, Emma DeMuth and Jacob Bronstein
Produced by Antonio Enriquez
Directed and Edited by Mark Francis
Theme Music by Tyler Cash
Executive Produced by Scott Waxman, Mark Francis, and Jacob Bronstein
Special Thanks to:
Dennis Brooks, Too Pretty To Live: The Catfishing Murders of East Tennessee
https://abcnews.go.com/US/social-media-feud-led-murder-young-tennessee-couple/story?id=34346840
https://www.tncourts.gov/sites/default/files/janelle_leigh_potter_cca_majority_opinion.pdf
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Diversion audio. A note this episode contains mature content and
descriptions of violence that may be disturbing for some listeners.
Please take care in listening. Mountain City, Tennessee, is a
(00:34):
small place, the kind of place where everyone knows each other.
Maybe you run into your high school teacher at the
grocery store or your dentist at the diner. That kind
of place. You know. If you're from there, it's warm
and friendly. If you're in then you can do no wrong.
If you're not from around there, it's a little different.
(00:59):
You can find real suspicion. It's not hard to feel
like an outsider. I mean, Mountain City is a little
bit country. It's up in the Tennessee Mountains. As the
name probably told you so. Beautiful, but not always easy.
There's not a lot of money around. People can be tough. Still.
(01:25):
Everyone leaves their doors unlocked, whether you're local or not.
You don't expect someone to break in and shoot you
in the face, or slit your throat, or put a
bullet through your girlfriend's brain while she's holding your infant
child in her arms, or leave that baby lying there crying,
(01:47):
covered in its mother's blood. Welcome to the greatest true
crime stories ever told. I'm Mary Kay mcbrair. I'm a
(02:07):
writer of true crime, which means I live inside the
research wormhole. I'm constantly reading about crime, but I'm not
necessarily interested in the headline grabbing elements, the blood and
the gore, all of that. I'm more interested in the
people behind these stories and what we can learn about
(02:30):
society by looking at their experiences. That's what I explore
here every week when I dig into crimes where a
woman is not just a victim. She might be the detective,
the lawyer, the witness, the coroner, the criminal, or a
combination of those roles. As you probably already know, women
(02:54):
can do anything. Today's episode is part one of the
Catfish Killer. It's not your usual true crime story. This
one's intense and twisted. It's one of the most bizarre,
hard to piece together murder stories I've ever come across.
(03:16):
In fact, to get through all the weird details of
this whole sordid tale, I need some extra space. So
this is the first of a two episode mini series.
It's the story of a young couple who are murdered
in cold blood. It's also the story of a very
(03:36):
unusual family, violent online messages that may or may not
be tied to the CIA, multiple fake identities, and a
lot of other mind boggling stuff that you would not
expect in a sleepy little place like Mountain City, Tennessee.
(04:07):
If you're listening to this podcast, then you have to
be at least a little tech literate. More than likely,
if you're a true crime follower, you have some tricks
up your sleeve, right. I know I've talked about doing
this myself before, but I'd bet you're like me, the
(04:27):
one who does all the recon on your friends, blind dates,
reverse image searching, or Google lensing as they've rebranded it,
all the photos of their matches, checking for photos of
them standing in doorframes to see if they're lying about
their height, because if they'll lie about something as trivial
as that, who knows what else they'll lie about. You're
(04:49):
probably the one who puts their phone number into a
simple Internet search to make sure they're not only an
actual person, but a person who also exists in and
interacts with the world. I mean, you know they have
or have had, a job, some relatives, a place to live,
(05:10):
some friends who can vouch for them. I remember the
first time I told my mom I had to take
all those precautions. She was totally bewildered that things had
changed so much, from just walking up to someone on
(05:32):
a dance floor and striking up a conversation to so
much research, planning, vetting, all before you even know whether
you like them. And y'all, my mom is a young
sixty she has an online business. She's not like doing
taxes on her advocus. The learning curve on an online
(05:55):
presence is steep, and it's not flattening out anytime soon.
If anything, it keeps extrapolating. I mean, I was a
late adopter to TikTok, and now I'm grandma over here
swiping the wrong direction on her screen. And don't get
me started on these insufferable Twitter interface changes. All that
(06:16):
to say, the Internet has deeply affected our communication, for
better and worse. I'm a millennial, so I barely didn't
have the Internet in my life, and I can still
clock how it's somehow easier and harder to talk to people.
For example, how many times have I genuinely thought I
(06:37):
responded to that text or lost the link among my
apps many messengers, or assumed someone had a snappy tone
in a comment on one of my photos, and is
there anything that will make my heart do an elevator drop,
like being en route and losing cell service. Plus there's
(07:00):
weird sort of etiquette to social media, and there's no
real Emily post guide for navigating it. We'll get mad
if our friends don't love heart our selfies in the
first few minutes of the post going live. But if
an acquaintance likes twelve of our photos at three am, yikes.
(07:24):
We're going to start this episode meeting a woman named
Tracy Greenwell. She was a pretty normal Mountain City woman,
born and bred. She worked a couple of jobs, including
at the pharmacy in town. That's where she met twenty
nine year old Janelle Potter in two thousand and nine.
Janelle was always coming in for medication. She had some
(07:46):
chronic health issues, including diabetes and an auditory disorder that
meant she had trouble detecting the tone of people's statements.
She couldn't really tell sarcasm or teasing from serious statements,
for example, which is huge. I mean, tone is everything.
Those issues naturally took a toll on her social life.
(08:10):
She was very socially awkward, sometimes hugging people she barely
knew as if they were old friends. She was constantly
sending Facebook friend requests to people she'd only met in passing. Plus,
while she wasn't helpless by any stretch, she couldn't drive
or work because of her health issues. She also still
(08:33):
lived with her parents, Buddy and Barbara. They had all
moved to Mountain City back in two thousand and four
from Pennsylvania. Basically, Janelle didn't really have a social life.
As far as Tracy could tell from their encounters in town,
most of Janelle's life was spent on the family computer,
(08:57):
scrolling through the profiles of the people she'd friend or quested,
looking at photos of them living their full lives. That
made Tracy feel bad for Janelle. She had a Facebook
account just like everyone else by two thousand and nine,
but she was a Mountain City woman. She knew that
(09:19):
community friendship, all of that. It was important and it
had to take place in real life. So she decided
to do what I think is a really very very
kind thing. She reached out to the Potter family asking
(09:40):
if Janelle wanted to go to the mall in the
neighboring city Boone. Something odd happened. Then Janelle's parents, Buddy
and Barbara, insisted Tracy come over and spend some time
with them first. My parents did this sort of vetting
when I was an elementary school. Imagine being a grown
(10:03):
ass woman wanting to go to the mall with a
new friend, and your mom needs to meet them first.
Imagine now. It had been obvious to Tracy from the
get go that the Potters were very protective of Janelle.
It wasn't just that she lived with them. That's common enough.
(10:24):
She was also always with one of her parents. But still,
Tracy was surprised that she had to meet the parents
before just going to the mall with their adult daughter.
But she shrugged off the weirdness. She had started this
good deed, and she wasn't going to stop now. She
(10:45):
headed over to the Potters. Dennis Brooks, a Tennessee prosecutor,
eventually wrote the book Too Pretty to Live about everything
that happened in Mountain City, and Brooks described Janelle's dad,
Buddy this way. Quote he had been a marine, and
he was one of those types that like to remind
(11:07):
the world of that fact. He wore the ball caps.
To prove that status, he had a wall at home
with all his military pictures, medals, and decorations prominently displayed.
I'm from what used to be a small town in
the South. If you are too, then you know this
(11:28):
guy right. He's also always carrying a gun, or several
guns Buddy carried even around his own house. But maybe
the oddest thing about Buddy is that he regularly bragged
about having worked for the CIA. He wouldn't say much
more than that, though, he insisted that he could not
(11:51):
give any details about that work. I just to me,
nothing says I'm a liar more than bragging about working
for the CIA. Homie, No, you did it. Nobody who
works for the CIA admits they work for the CIA.
Janelle's mom, Barbara, meanwhile, was the type to talk and overdrive,
(12:16):
just a constant words dream, the kind of person where
half an hour in you have to wonder do you
even need me for this conversation? And there was a
kind of edge to how she spoke. She and actually
the whole family, seemed to have a lot of problems
with people, like people had wronged them or were mean.
(12:40):
The Potters use the word mean a lot down around here,
people say mean when they mean cruel, but mean also
means inferior or base and sometimes this is something else
that stuck out to Dennis Brooks and I can't help
but agree or seemed to make these crazy jumps from
(13:02):
saying someone was mean straight to saying they wanted to
kill her. That is a bit of a leap, and
none of it really makes for the best conversation when
you're talking to someone you barely know, like Tracy. But
(13:24):
Tracy worked in the service industry. That meant she had
special skills like extreme patience and knowing how to deal
with all types of personalities. She made a good impression
(13:52):
on the Potters, and after a few visits to their house,
Janelle was allowed to go off to Boon with her.
After that, Tracy kept calling Janelle and inviting her to
hang out. Her perspective seemed like, well, the Potters are odd,
but Janelle seems like a basically nice person who really
(14:15):
needs some friends. Now, call me an alarmist, but if
a twenty nine year old ain't got friends, maybe there's
a reason for that. I mean, it's not like she's
fourteen and awkward. She's a grown ass. Second, career aged woman.
If she doesn't have even one friend, maybe she don't
(14:36):
want any. But Tracy is a real white hat. She
not only took Janelle to the mall after meeting her parents,
she even introduced Janelle to her group of friends that
included her brother, Bill Payne, a charming local playboy, and
Jamie Kurd, a cousin and close friend of Bill's. This
(15:01):
was a group that liked to drink, even pop a
few pills here and there, but they were respectful of
Janelle's much more sheltered experience. While Tracy did sometimes take
her to a party or a bar, they also went
rock climbing with her that kind of thing, and Tracy
even had the idea of setting Janelle up with Jamie Kurd.
(15:24):
He was in his late thirties, but he had been
single his whole life, and Janelle was also very single.
They could be perfect together, and Tracy seemed to be right.
Despite the fact that Janelle thought her protective parents wouldn't
approve of a relationship with Jamie and so kept this
(15:45):
all very quiet, she did start calling him to chat regularly.
The two seemed to be getting closer, but meanwhile, Janelle
was also calling Tracy's brother Bill to chat. So that's
a fun twist that I did not see coming. But
(16:06):
that was one match that would never work. Bill always
had a girlfriend. In late two thousand and nine, there
was a new one, a pretty young brunette named Billy Jean,
who Bill had met at the factory where they both worked.
So if Janelle had a crush on Bill, she'd just
have to get over it and focus on Jamie instead,
(16:28):
who really liked her. That's what happened on the surface.
Tracy was happy to see Jamie and Janelle's relationship blossom
into something romantic, despite the fact that Janelle was still
keeping it a secret from her parents. She even took
Janelle to the mall and boone and then invited Jamie
along as well, so the couple could have a date together. Still,
(16:52):
most of Jamie and Janelle's relationship was virtual. She would
call him from her family phone, and eventually he got
her a secret self to communicate more easily. They'd stay
up talking for hours late at night, and while they
didn't have much opportunity to develop the physical side of things,
Janelle sent Jamie some very racy photos. As Dennis Brooks
(17:15):
puts it, in his Too Pretty to Live they involved
quote every part of Janelle's body, which I mean, do
your thing, girl. But you might be wondering, why is
all this secrecy necessary? Like Buddy and Barbara might be
protective of Janelle, and with her health issues and her
(17:36):
social awkwardness, maybe they had a reason to be. But
surely they wanted their daughter to find love, have a
family of her own, all of that, right. I mean,
she's almost thirty, and while she isn't your average grown woman,
she's not incapable of any of that. But the thing is,
Janelle did have a reason to be this secretive about Jamie.
(17:57):
Her parents had actually met him. He came over to
the potterhouse a few times, ostensibly to help fix some
issues with a family computer, and Barbara and Buddy didn't
like him. Barbara called him quote ignorant and said he
quote smelled And she said that knowing that he was
(18:21):
interested in Janelle. No wonder Janelle didn't want to tell
her mother Jamie was her boyfriend. I'd be nervous too.
Janelle's parents were all she had. It's not like she
could run away to a friend's house or just kind
of shrug and stick out her tongue at her mom
for not liking her boyfriend like you or I might do.
(18:51):
When her parents discovered Janelle's secret cell phone in the
spring of twenty ten, they confiscated it to put too
fine a point on it here, but she's thirty years
old anyway. Jamie was not to be deterred. He threw
another phone into the bushes outside the Potter house so
(19:13):
they could keep talking, which is pretty hot, and their
relationship continued. Meanwhile, Bill Payne, Tracy's brother, the one Janelle
seemed to have a crush on, he started getting more
serious with that girl he'd met at the factory, Billy Jean.
By the end of twenty ten, she'd moved in and
(19:34):
she was pregnant. Love was in the air of Mountain City,
but so was something else, or rather in the ether online,
and it was not loving, not at all. Bear with me.
This is really disturbing, and I want to mention this
(19:56):
next part I want to read to you is very
oddly written. It's totally missing any real sense of grammar,
but full of misspellings and bizarre syntax, so it's gonna
be hard to read aloud. It's an online post from
a message board, and it's got that, you know, typical
(20:16):
anonymous tone. So just visualize that while I read this,
and if I start talking extra loud, I'm not shouting
at you. Those parts are written in capitals. Quote I'm
about to fight with you, Billy. Why don't you shut
up your fucking mouth, you bitch. One day girl, you
(20:37):
are going to get beat up really good and left
for dead. You better shut up, you bitch. Go fuck
a cow for all I care. Damn hooker, slut bag
whore and your bastard baby take it with you and
leave this fucking town. You won't leave here alive. Keep
on doing your damn fucking shit, bitch. Fuck you and
(20:58):
Bill and your fucking so called baby. Go after my
wife again, you little fucking wharbag. I hope you die,
and I hope it's a painful death.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
You're a fucking nobody.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Posts like that horrible paragraph started showing up in April
twenty eleven on Topics, a website which hosted city specific
forums for cities around the country. The Mountain City page
was fairly active, mostly full of benign messages about local issues,
until the appearance of the posts about Billy Jean Hayworth,
(21:50):
Bill Payne's girlfriend, and several of her friends, especially Lindsay Thomas.
They were nasty. Now, the thing about topics is you
can post under any name, so there were apparently quite
a few people creating these posts, but the main one
(22:10):
was named Matt Potter. The other accounts tended to respond
to Matt Potter using very similar language. On Facebook, Matt
Potter was listed as Janelle Potter's brother. Now, she didn't
actually have a brother, just one sister, Christy, who was
(22:33):
not on great terms with the rest of the family.
But based on the things this Matt was saying, he
did seem to be associated with Janelle because he and
the other similar accounts on topics weren't just saying truly
nasty things about Billy, Jean, Lindsay and their other friends.
(22:56):
They were also saying positive things about Janelle and pitting
her against these other women for example. And again bear
with me, because everything about this post is so incredibly gross.
They are whores, no good people, and that have nothing
(23:16):
else to do. They are nasty sluts and don't Lindsay
have HIV? Is what I heard small Town and I
know this is true. What guy would want that bitch.
She is so ugly and she is mad because Janelle
is so pretty and sweet and nice. They are trying
(23:37):
to hurt Janelle all the time like they have other girls.
It's so sad. I went to school with her and
she is a bitch, nasty ass. She was HVI now
and she will give it to a lot of guys now.
They better get tested. I Am not even going to
(23:59):
try to explain everything wrong here because I'd basically have
to explicate that word for word, and who among us
has the patience to examine that kind of hate on
that level of detail. I trust you get the idea. Obviously,
Billy Jean, her boyfriend Bill, Lindsay Thomas, and the other
targets of the posts were not happy, and they made
(24:21):
the same connection between Matt Potter and Janelle that I
just did. They also thought they basically understood why this
was happening. Janelle had had a crush on Billy and
now she was jealous of Billy Jean, simple enough, even
if the reaction was extreme. But they barely knew Janelle.
(24:44):
So in the autumn of twenty ten, it was Tracy
Greenwell who decided to try clearing the air she'd been
the one to bring Janelle out into Mountain City social
life after all. In November twenty ten, Tracy typed the
following on Janelle's Facebook page, your friend Matt needs to
(25:09):
leave Billy Jean and Lindsay Thomas off the Topics website.
You lost my brother Bill as a friend, and I'm
not happy with you either. Janelle's response was denial. She
denied any connection to Matt or his Topics posts, both
online and in person. She said she had no idea
(25:31):
who he was, and in fact, as she put it,
there had been a lot of trash talking about her
in Mountain View from Billy Jean and Lindsay. She was
the victim. She started messaging more and more people on Facebook,
posting and talking in real life about how mean Billy Jean,
(25:52):
Lindsay and their friends were. She said they were posting
mean things on her Facebook wall anonymous, and she constantly
had to delete the comments, things like you're ugly and
nobody likes you. Now, I want to take a step
back here and barring the really egregious language that Matt
(26:14):
Potter and his fellow Topics trolls were using in their posts,
this all still sounds fairly straightforward, right. Janelle is jealous
of Billie Jean, so she goes after her and her
friends via Matt Potter, who is maybe a friend or
maybe just Janelle herself using a pseudonym on topics. The
(26:36):
girls retaliate honestly, with much milder language than Matt Potter.
Maybe Janelle takes that extra seriously because of her auditory disorder,
but still, basically, it's a tale as old as time.
Jealousy just played out on the Internet, and a lot
of people in town thought it was that simple at
(26:58):
first too. But the thing is, Janelle said things were escalating,
seriously escalating. She said it wasn't just that Billy Jean,
Lindsay and their friends were being quote unquote mean, They
were actually harassing her. She couldn't take the cruelty. It
(27:22):
was unbearable. Not just the mean Facebook posts. She said
they were calling her and saying horrible things all the time,
driving by her house constantly fast as if to threaten her,
throwing rocks onto her family's property, even shooting bullets over
her house. She said she had gotten a rape threat
(27:45):
from one of the women's male friends. What kinds of
things were people saying about you. Just I was a
bad person that was horrible, threatened to get raped.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
Listen.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Pretty scary. Yes, that was Janelle speaking to a reporter
about her allegations. Later on on an episode of the
ABC program twenty twenty. She was so scared, she said,
she feared for her life. If this Matt Potter was
defending her against her harasters on an online forum, well
(28:17):
he might be using strong language, but he wasn't wrong
about those girls. That was what Janelle said, again and again,
with support from her furious parents, and in Janelle's high pitched,
innocent voice, with her wide round eyes and gangly awkward frame, well,
(28:38):
it was hard to believe she'd be associated with the
kind of violent rhetoric Matt Potter was using. She's the
type you expect to call people sweetie in a message,
not poor. On the other hand, though, Billy, Jean and
(29:03):
Lindsay were adamant that they weren't doing any of these violent,
threatening things to Janelle. They weren't throwing rocks or shooting guns.
They weren't even posting on her wall. If someone was
doing that, it certainly wasn't them. In fact, by twenty eleven,
(29:23):
Lindsay Thomas was claiming that Janelle was harassing her. Frustrated
by Janelle's frequent Facebook posts claiming that she was quote
unquote mean, she finally called the Potter household to say
Janelle needed to stop this inexplicable Facebook crusade. After that,
(29:46):
she started getting calls from the Potter household, at first
just a few, but then ten or fifteen a day.
Some of them were from Janelle complaining that Lindsay was
harassing her. Buddy was often on the phone with her
(30:07):
backing up her complaints. Other calls were silent, just the
sound of breathing on the line. Lindsay could see the
caller id whatever sounds were coming through the phone, so
she decided to file a phone harassment suit against Janelle.
(30:29):
It finally came to trial in November twenty eleven, but
the judge dismissed the case, arguing that Lindsay could not
prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Janelle was guilty. So,
while the whole town knew something or other about this
feud brewing online and on the phone, a lot of
(30:52):
people started to find it strangely confusing. They didn't know
what to believee Kurd took Janelle's side, abandoning his old
friends for a secret lover. Obviously, Janelle's parents took her
side as well. They were enraged that anyone was attacking
their innocent, sweet daughter. Tracy and most other Mountain City
(31:16):
locals sided with Lindsay Thomas, Billy Jean, Bill Payne, and
their friends. They knew their friends wouldn't threaten anyone. Eventually,
most members of the warring factions had unfriended each other.
It seemed like there were two versions of reality and
(31:38):
you just had to pick one, but then there was
only one version. This clip aired on that same episode
of ABC's twenty twenty Okay, Do You Want a Hitch?
DCPRS two. Around ten am on January thirty first, Roy
(32:14):
and Linda Stevens, former neighbors of the Paines, drove up
to the paint house. Roy was just planning to run
in pick up his mail, but both Bill and Billy's
cars were parked outside, so he guessed at least one
of them might be home. After going through the unlocked
(32:36):
back door, he gave a holler calling for the couple.
There was no answer. Roy ambled toward the bedrooms. He
hollered again as he went, hoping not to interrupt the
young parents in an intimate moment, but again there was
(32:58):
no answer. That's when he saw the blood at their
bedroom door, and then Bill lying on the bed. Roy
ran to him, grabbed Bill by the arms and yelled
build it and move. Roy ran from the room back
(33:20):
to the car, screaming at Linda to call the police.
Something was wrong. Bill was hurt. Roy ran back toward
the house. Linda ran after him. She knew CPR, she
had to try it. But when she reached Bill, he
(33:42):
was stiff and cold, his ice still. She reached for
his neck, looking for a pulse. Instead, she felt the
gash his throat had been cut. He was dead. Linda
ran out to the living room to call nine to
(34:03):
one one. Roy heard a noise coming from the second bedroom.
He ran that way. That's when he saw Billy Jean
lying on the floor, her baby in her arms, and
a blood soaked hole in her head. Her baby was
(34:24):
the one that made the noise. Billy Jean was dead,
the baby was alive. I mean, that's an image you
(34:45):
can't get out of your mind, even just hearing it secondhand,
That baby lying in his dead mother's arms for hours.
You can't even really say anything about it. Just have
to sit with it. Bill Payne and Billy Jean Hayworth
(35:05):
were dead, killed violently and precisely. Bill was shot once
in the face, then his throat was sliced. Billy Jean
was shot once in the head. This was done by
someone experienced with violence. The police's first thought was drugs.
(35:29):
A lot of violent crime around the area had to
do with drug deals, and Bill and Billy Jean did
occasionally sell a pill or two to their friends alongside
doing some drugs themselves. Especially Bill. Their friends admitted that
to investigators immediately. They wouldn't have said a word of
(35:51):
it while their friends were alive, but if it was
going to help catch whoever did this, they'd spill it.
All those are good friends. But police weren't impressed. Selling
a few pills to friends wasn't the kind of dealing
that got you murdered, not like this, not in cold blood.
(36:17):
That's when they started thinking about the internet feud, the
one that everyone in town knew about, the one that
started simply enough but got stranger and by the end
didn't seem to fully add up or make any sense.
(36:39):
But still, as far as anyone in Mountain City could tell,
one thing was clear. The only people that had a
real problem with Bill and Billy Jean were the Potters.
On February second, two days after the murder, police had
(37:00):
to the Potter household, less than ten miles from the
crime scene. They spent an hour there chatting with the family.
All three of the Potters denied any knowledge of the
crime beyond what they'd seen on TV the past two days,
but they were downright talkative about their ongoing feud with
(37:21):
the victims. Janelle said, quote, they had been harassing the
living crap out of her. But when police asked her
why they were harassing her, she said, quote, it came
out to be a jealousy thing. They said I was
(37:42):
too pretty, that I wasn't from here, so I was
never going to be accepted. Now, the second part her
not being from there, fine, But the first part that
she's too pretty, that's a really creative explanation for the
(38:02):
whole feud. Getting harassed as a thirty year old woman
because you look too good. It doesn't make a ton
of sense to me. Sure, I think we can all
agree some jealousy was involved in the whole dynamic, but
not in that direction. Police were similarly skeptical and confused
(38:27):
by the Potter's story of violent harassment over Janelle's good looks,
but they left more sure than ever. While it was
astonishing to think that a Facebook feud could have somehow
resulted in murder, the Potters were the only people in
Mountain City that seemed to have a real dislike for
(38:49):
Bill and Billy Jean as in a motive. Plus, Buddy
Potter was a former marine, not to mention, he had
a personal arsenal in his house that was not uncommon
in the area or with country people in general, or
(39:09):
any VFW, but it meant that he had the skill
and the means to commit a precise, professional crime like
the one at the pain household. But Buddy also had
health issues of his own. He'd been out of work
on disability for years now thanks to a back injury.
(39:30):
It was unlikely that he'd gone after the two victims alone,
which meant if he committed this crime, he committed it
with an accomplice. When some digging turned up the information
that Jamie Kurd, Bill Payne's cousin was Janelle's secret boyfriend.
Police knew just where to go next. It seemed that
(39:54):
while this case was odd cracking, it would be simple
for the moment. But if you thought the story up
to this point was crazy, buckle in, because this is
where it starts to get truly weird. About a week
(40:19):
after the murders, Jamie was sitting in the police station.
The conversation went on for hours. At first, Jamie insisted
he didn't know anything. Sure there was a conflict between
the Potters and the victims, but he insisted that this
had nothing to do with him. That he was friendly
(40:40):
with the Potters, but he wasn't dating Janelle at all anyway.
But then a few hours in the police began to
wear Jamie down. They said, maybe you are dating Janelle.
Maybe you were involved in the murders, but just as
(41:03):
a watchman. Maybe you just slit Bill's throat, but Buddy
Potter already shot him, so you didn't really murder him.
It was just a body. Then maybe you were pressured
into it, scared for your own life. Jamie still didn't
(41:29):
say much, but he started to grunt and nod. He
grunted and nodded enough times that police put together a
statement for him a confession. He signed it. He admitted
that he had done it. He participated in the murder
(41:52):
of his own cousin and his cousin's girlfriend, leaving their
baby in her cold arms. He did it with Buddy
Potter for Janelle. This is a huge confession and maybe
(42:12):
the case could have ended there. An angry father and
boyfriend decided to put an end to Janelle's feud once
and for all with murder. But people around town knew
Jamie Kurd before he'd got entangled up with the Potters.
(42:37):
People generally liked him. He was a quiet guy, but
hard working. He'd been devoted to his parents. He took
care of both of them when their health declined and
stayed by their sides until they died. And Bill wasn't
just his cousin before he got involved with the Potters.
(42:59):
He was also one of Jamie's best friends. Mountain City
didn't know Buddy potterwell, but everyone thought Jamie's involvement was strange,
and I do too. You'd think it would take a
lot to turn a guy like that murderous against his
(43:22):
cousin and friend, even when it came to protecting the
girl he loved Also, it's worth mentioning Jamie Kurr might
be quiet, but he wasn't stupid. Even if he had
felt murderous, would he really be dumb enough to go
(43:42):
on a killing spree where his girlfriend and her family
and of course her boyfriend would be the only obvious suspects.
It just seems well, the whole crime seems like a
really odd mix of prof nationally executed but bizarrely thought out.
(44:06):
Maybe this case wasn't simple after all. Maybe something was
missing here. That's why police paid attention when Jamie mumbled
something strange at the end of his interrogation. Here's here.
(44:31):
That's a clip from a TV docu drama based on
Dennis Brooks book also called Too Pretty to Live. It's
the real take from Jamie's interrogation. And let me repeat
what he just asked. Is the CIA here here, as
(44:53):
in at this little police station in Mountain City, Tennessee,
where we are discussing a murder case. Obviously this is
a really serious case, a double homicide, and I'm still
thinking about that baby. I could see a world in
which maybe the FBI might be involved things that involve
(45:17):
the phone and internet and thus can easily cross state
lines sometimes bring in the FEDS, but the Central Intelligence Agency.
Why would the CIA be at Jamie Kurd's interrogation. The
police tried to push Jamie on why someone from the
(45:39):
CIA might be there. He mumbled something about a Chris
and then wouldn't say much else. Investigators were stumped, so
they decided to let it go for now and focus
on Buddy Potter. Maybe he would provide some clue as
(46:00):
to what this might all be about, or rather who.
They just needed Jamie to call Buddy and get him
to admit some role in this crime, then they could
arrest him and bring him in for questioning. The ploy worked.
(46:23):
When Jamie asked Buddy if he got rid of everything
from Bill's he said uh huh, and that was enough
for an arrest and an interrogation about what exactly happened
the morning of January thirty first. But it was arguably
Barbara Potter who gave investigators a bigger lead into the
(46:46):
whole strange affair. She also spoke briefly on the phone
call to Jamie, and she said she'd heard Jamie got
arrested because Chris emailed her and told her Chris again,
there was no one in Mountain City named Chris. No
(47:09):
one the Potters knew anyway, and who outside of Mountain
City would be tracking the town's arrests. The police now
had two crucial pieces to fit into this whole strange puzzle.
Chris and the CIA join me next week on the
(47:53):
Greatest true crime Stories Ever told for the second part
of our story about Janelle Potter and the murders of
Bill Payne and Billy Jean Hayworth. It's a wild journey
into secret emails, secret identities, and secret agencies. We'll also
be talking to Dennis Brooks, the prosecutor on the case.
(48:14):
I'd like to shout out a few key sources that
made it possible for me to tell this week's story,
including Brooks's book Too Pretty to Live the Catfishing Murders
of East Tennessee. As the prosecutor, Brooks had incredible access
to the case and he shares a lot of great insights,
so stay tuned for that episode. Other great resources on
(48:37):
the case include the ABC twenty twenty episode. They have
the interviews with both Janelle and her mom, Barbara, which
are fascinating, and of course, the court documents from the trial,
which we'll get into next week. For more information about
this case and others we cover on the show, visit
Diversion Audio dot com. Sign up Diversion's newsletter and be
(49:02):
among the first to hear about special behind the scenes
features with the hosts and actors from Diversion's podcasts, more
shows you'll love from Diversion and our partners, and other
exclusive tidbits you can't get anywhere else. The Greatest True
Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of Diversion Audio.
Your host is me Mary Kay mcbraer. This episode was
(49:26):
written by our editorial director, Nora Battel. Our show is
produced and directed by Mark Francis. Our development team is
Emma Dmouth and Jacob Bronstein. Theme music by Tyler Cash.
Executive producers Jacob Bronstein, Mark Francis, and Scott Waxman. Diversion
(49:54):
Audio
Diversion audio. A note this episode contains mature content and
descriptions of violence that may be disturbing for some listeners.
Please take care in listening. Mountain City, Tennessee, is a
(00:34):
small place, the kind of place where everyone knows each other.
Maybe you run into your high school teacher at the
grocery store or your dentist at the diner. That kind
of place. You know. If you're from there, it's warm
and friendly. If you're in then you can do no wrong.
If you're not from around there, it's a little different.
(00:59):
You can find real suspicion. It's not hard to feel
like an outsider. I mean, Mountain City is a little
bit country. It's up in the Tennessee Mountains. As the
name probably told you so. Beautiful, but not always easy.
There's not a lot of money around. People can be tough. Still.
(01:25):
Everyone leaves their doors unlocked, whether you're local or not.
You don't expect someone to break in and shoot you
in the face, or slit your throat, or put a
bullet through your girlfriend's brain while she's holding your infant
child in her arms, or leave that baby lying there crying,
(01:47):
covered in its mother's blood. Welcome to the greatest true
crime stories ever told. I'm Mary Kay mcbrair. I'm a
(02:07):
writer of true crime, which means I live inside the
research wormhole. I'm constantly reading about crime, but I'm not
necessarily interested in the headline grabbing elements, the blood and
the gore, all of that. I'm more interested in the
people behind these stories and what we can learn about
(02:30):
society by looking at their experiences. That's what I explore
here every week when I dig into crimes where a
woman is not just a victim. She might be the detective,
the lawyer, the witness, the coroner, the criminal, or a
combination of those roles. As you probably already know, women
(02:54):
can do anything. Today's episode is part one of the
Catfish Killer. It's not your usual true crime story. This
one's intense and twisted. It's one of the most bizarre,
hard to piece together murder stories I've ever come across.
(03:16):
In fact, to get through all the weird details of
this whole sordid tale, I need some extra space. So
this is the first of a two episode mini series.
It's the story of a young couple who are murdered
in cold blood. It's also the story of a very
(03:36):
unusual family, violent online messages that may or may not
be tied to the CIA, multiple fake identities, and a
lot of other mind boggling stuff that you would not
expect in a sleepy little place like Mountain City, Tennessee.
(04:07):
If you're listening to this podcast, then you have to
be at least a little tech literate. More than likely,
if you're a true crime follower, you have some tricks
up your sleeve, right. I know I've talked about doing
this myself before, but I'd bet you're like me, the
(04:27):
one who does all the recon on your friends, blind dates,
reverse image searching, or Google lensing as they've rebranded it,
all the photos of their matches, checking for photos of
them standing in doorframes to see if they're lying about
their height, because if they'll lie about something as trivial
as that, who knows what else they'll lie about. You're
(04:49):
probably the one who puts their phone number into a
simple Internet search to make sure they're not only an
actual person, but a person who also exists in and
interacts with the world. I mean, you know they have
or have had, a job, some relatives, a place to live,
(05:10):
some friends who can vouch for them. I remember the
first time I told my mom I had to take
all those precautions. She was totally bewildered that things had
changed so much, from just walking up to someone on
(05:32):
a dance floor and striking up a conversation to so
much research, planning, vetting, all before you even know whether
you like them. And y'all, my mom is a young
sixty she has an online business. She's not like doing
taxes on her advocus. The learning curve on an online
(05:55):
presence is steep, and it's not flattening out anytime soon.
If anything, it keeps extrapolating. I mean, I was a
late adopter to TikTok, and now I'm grandma over here
swiping the wrong direction on her screen. And don't get
me started on these insufferable Twitter interface changes. All that
(06:16):
to say, the Internet has deeply affected our communication, for
better and worse. I'm a millennial, so I barely didn't
have the Internet in my life, and I can still
clock how it's somehow easier and harder to talk to people.
For example, how many times have I genuinely thought I
(06:37):
responded to that text or lost the link among my
apps many messengers, or assumed someone had a snappy tone
in a comment on one of my photos, and is
there anything that will make my heart do an elevator drop,
like being en route and losing cell service. Plus there's
(07:00):
weird sort of etiquette to social media, and there's no
real Emily post guide for navigating it. We'll get mad
if our friends don't love heart our selfies in the
first few minutes of the post going live. But if
an acquaintance likes twelve of our photos at three am, yikes.
(07:24):
We're going to start this episode meeting a woman named
Tracy Greenwell. She was a pretty normal Mountain City woman,
born and bred. She worked a couple of jobs, including
at the pharmacy in town. That's where she met twenty
nine year old Janelle Potter in two thousand and nine.
Janelle was always coming in for medication. She had some
(07:46):
chronic health issues, including diabetes and an auditory disorder that
meant she had trouble detecting the tone of people's statements.
She couldn't really tell sarcasm or teasing from serious statements,
for example, which is huge. I mean, tone is everything.
Those issues naturally took a toll on her social life.
(08:10):
She was very socially awkward, sometimes hugging people she barely
knew as if they were old friends. She was constantly
sending Facebook friend requests to people she'd only met in passing. Plus,
while she wasn't helpless by any stretch, she couldn't drive
or work because of her health issues. She also still
(08:33):
lived with her parents, Buddy and Barbara. They had all
moved to Mountain City back in two thousand and four
from Pennsylvania. Basically, Janelle didn't really have a social life.
As far as Tracy could tell from their encounters in town,
most of Janelle's life was spent on the family computer,
(08:57):
scrolling through the profiles of the people she'd friend or quested,
looking at photos of them living their full lives. That
made Tracy feel bad for Janelle. She had a Facebook
account just like everyone else by two thousand and nine,
but she was a Mountain City woman. She knew that
(09:19):
community friendship, all of that. It was important and it
had to take place in real life. So she decided
to do what I think is a really very very
kind thing. She reached out to the Potter family asking
(09:40):
if Janelle wanted to go to the mall in the
neighboring city Boone. Something odd happened. Then Janelle's parents, Buddy
and Barbara, insisted Tracy come over and spend some time
with them first. My parents did this sort of vetting
when I was an elementary school. Imagine being a grown
(10:03):
ass woman wanting to go to the mall with a
new friend, and your mom needs to meet them first.
Imagine now. It had been obvious to Tracy from the
get go that the Potters were very protective of Janelle.
It wasn't just that she lived with them. That's common enough.
(10:24):
She was also always with one of her parents. But still,
Tracy was surprised that she had to meet the parents
before just going to the mall with their adult daughter.
But she shrugged off the weirdness. She had started this
good deed, and she wasn't going to stop now. She
(10:45):
headed over to the Potters. Dennis Brooks, a Tennessee prosecutor,
eventually wrote the book Too Pretty to Live about everything
that happened in Mountain City, and Brooks described Janelle's dad,
Buddy this way. Quote he had been a marine, and
he was one of those types that like to remind
(11:07):
the world of that fact. He wore the ball caps.
To prove that status, he had a wall at home
with all his military pictures, medals, and decorations prominently displayed.
I'm from what used to be a small town in
the South. If you are too, then you know this
(11:28):
guy right. He's also always carrying a gun, or several
guns Buddy carried even around his own house. But maybe
the oddest thing about Buddy is that he regularly bragged
about having worked for the CIA. He wouldn't say much
more than that, though, he insisted that he could not
(11:51):
give any details about that work. I just to me,
nothing says I'm a liar more than bragging about working
for the CIA. Homie, No, you did it. Nobody who
works for the CIA admits they work for the CIA.
Janelle's mom, Barbara, meanwhile, was the type to talk and overdrive,
(12:16):
just a constant words dream, the kind of person where
half an hour in you have to wonder do you
even need me for this conversation? And there was a
kind of edge to how she spoke. She and actually
the whole family, seemed to have a lot of problems
with people, like people had wronged them or were mean.
(12:40):
The Potters use the word mean a lot down around here,
people say mean when they mean cruel, but mean also
means inferior or base and sometimes this is something else
that stuck out to Dennis Brooks and I can't help
but agree or seemed to make these crazy jumps from
(13:02):
saying someone was mean straight to saying they wanted to
kill her. That is a bit of a leap, and
none of it really makes for the best conversation when
you're talking to someone you barely know, like Tracy. But
(13:24):
Tracy worked in the service industry. That meant she had
special skills like extreme patience and knowing how to deal
with all types of personalities. She made a good impression
(13:52):
on the Potters, and after a few visits to their house,
Janelle was allowed to go off to Boon with her.
After that, Tracy kept calling Janelle and inviting her to
hang out. Her perspective seemed like, well, the Potters are odd,
but Janelle seems like a basically nice person who really
(14:15):
needs some friends. Now, call me an alarmist, but if
a twenty nine year old ain't got friends, maybe there's
a reason for that. I mean, it's not like she's
fourteen and awkward. She's a grown ass. Second, career aged woman.
If she doesn't have even one friend, maybe she don't
(14:36):
want any. But Tracy is a real white hat. She
not only took Janelle to the mall after meeting her parents,
she even introduced Janelle to her group of friends that
included her brother, Bill Payne, a charming local playboy, and
Jamie Kurd, a cousin and close friend of Bill's. This
(15:01):
was a group that liked to drink, even pop a
few pills here and there, but they were respectful of
Janelle's much more sheltered experience. While Tracy did sometimes take
her to a party or a bar, they also went
rock climbing with her that kind of thing, and Tracy
even had the idea of setting Janelle up with Jamie Kurd.
(15:24):
He was in his late thirties, but he had been
single his whole life, and Janelle was also very single.
They could be perfect together, and Tracy seemed to be right.
Despite the fact that Janelle thought her protective parents wouldn't
approve of a relationship with Jamie and so kept this
(15:45):
all very quiet, she did start calling him to chat regularly.
The two seemed to be getting closer, but meanwhile, Janelle
was also calling Tracy's brother Bill to chat. So that's
a fun twist that I did not see coming. But
(16:06):
that was one match that would never work. Bill always
had a girlfriend. In late two thousand and nine, there
was a new one, a pretty young brunette named Billy Jean,
who Bill had met at the factory where they both worked.
So if Janelle had a crush on Bill, she'd just
have to get over it and focus on Jamie instead,
(16:28):
who really liked her. That's what happened on the surface.
Tracy was happy to see Jamie and Janelle's relationship blossom
into something romantic, despite the fact that Janelle was still
keeping it a secret from her parents. She even took
Janelle to the mall and boone and then invited Jamie
along as well, so the couple could have a date together. Still,
(16:52):
most of Jamie and Janelle's relationship was virtual. She would
call him from her family phone, and eventually he got
her a secret self to communicate more easily. They'd stay
up talking for hours late at night, and while they
didn't have much opportunity to develop the physical side of things,
Janelle sent Jamie some very racy photos. As Dennis Brooks
(17:15):
puts it, in his Too Pretty to Live they involved
quote every part of Janelle's body, which I mean, do
your thing, girl. But you might be wondering, why is
all this secrecy necessary? Like Buddy and Barbara might be
protective of Janelle, and with her health issues and her
(17:36):
social awkwardness, maybe they had a reason to be. But
surely they wanted their daughter to find love, have a
family of her own, all of that, right. I mean,
she's almost thirty, and while she isn't your average grown woman,
she's not incapable of any of that. But the thing is,
Janelle did have a reason to be this secretive about Jamie.
(17:57):
Her parents had actually met him. He came over to
the potterhouse a few times, ostensibly to help fix some
issues with a family computer, and Barbara and Buddy didn't
like him. Barbara called him quote ignorant and said he
quote smelled And she said that knowing that he was
(18:21):
interested in Janelle. No wonder Janelle didn't want to tell
her mother Jamie was her boyfriend. I'd be nervous too.
Janelle's parents were all she had. It's not like she
could run away to a friend's house or just kind
of shrug and stick out her tongue at her mom
for not liking her boyfriend like you or I might do.
(18:51):
When her parents discovered Janelle's secret cell phone in the
spring of twenty ten, they confiscated it to put too
fine a point on it here, but she's thirty years
old anyway. Jamie was not to be deterred. He threw
another phone into the bushes outside the Potter house so
(19:13):
they could keep talking, which is pretty hot, and their
relationship continued. Meanwhile, Bill Payne, Tracy's brother, the one Janelle
seemed to have a crush on, he started getting more
serious with that girl he'd met at the factory, Billy Jean.
By the end of twenty ten, she'd moved in and
(19:34):
she was pregnant. Love was in the air of Mountain City,
but so was something else, or rather in the ether online,
and it was not loving, not at all. Bear with me.
This is really disturbing, and I want to mention this
(19:56):
next part I want to read to you is very
oddly written. It's totally missing any real sense of grammar,
but full of misspellings and bizarre syntax, so it's gonna
be hard to read aloud. It's an online post from
a message board, and it's got that, you know, typical
(20:16):
anonymous tone. So just visualize that while I read this,
and if I start talking extra loud, I'm not shouting
at you. Those parts are written in capitals. Quote I'm
about to fight with you, Billy. Why don't you shut
up your fucking mouth, you bitch. One day girl, you
(20:37):
are going to get beat up really good and left
for dead. You better shut up, you bitch. Go fuck
a cow for all I care. Damn hooker, slut bag
whore and your bastard baby take it with you and
leave this fucking town. You won't leave here alive. Keep
on doing your damn fucking shit, bitch. Fuck you and
(20:58):
Bill and your fucking so called baby. Go after my
wife again, you little fucking wharbag. I hope you die,
and I hope it's a painful death.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
You're a fucking nobody.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Posts like that horrible paragraph started showing up in April
twenty eleven on Topics, a website which hosted city specific
forums for cities around the country. The Mountain City page
was fairly active, mostly full of benign messages about local issues,
until the appearance of the posts about Billy Jean Hayworth,
(21:50):
Bill Payne's girlfriend, and several of her friends, especially Lindsay Thomas.
They were nasty. Now, the thing about topics is you
can post under any name, so there were apparently quite
a few people creating these posts, but the main one
(22:10):
was named Matt Potter. The other accounts tended to respond
to Matt Potter using very similar language. On Facebook, Matt
Potter was listed as Janelle Potter's brother. Now, she didn't
actually have a brother, just one sister, Christy, who was
(22:33):
not on great terms with the rest of the family.
But based on the things this Matt was saying, he
did seem to be associated with Janelle because he and
the other similar accounts on topics weren't just saying truly
nasty things about Billy, Jean, Lindsay and their other friends.
(22:56):
They were also saying positive things about Janelle and pitting
her against these other women for example. And again bear
with me, because everything about this post is so incredibly gross.
They are whores, no good people, and that have nothing
(23:16):
else to do. They are nasty sluts and don't Lindsay
have HIV? Is what I heard small Town and I
know this is true. What guy would want that bitch.
She is so ugly and she is mad because Janelle
is so pretty and sweet and nice. They are trying
(23:37):
to hurt Janelle all the time like they have other girls.
It's so sad. I went to school with her and
she is a bitch, nasty ass. She was HVI now
and she will give it to a lot of guys now.
They better get tested. I Am not even going to
(23:59):
try to explain everything wrong here because I'd basically have
to explicate that word for word, and who among us
has the patience to examine that kind of hate on
that level of detail. I trust you get the idea. Obviously,
Billy Jean, her boyfriend Bill, Lindsay Thomas, and the other
targets of the posts were not happy, and they made
(24:21):
the same connection between Matt Potter and Janelle that I
just did. They also thought they basically understood why this
was happening. Janelle had had a crush on Billy and
now she was jealous of Billy Jean, simple enough, even
if the reaction was extreme. But they barely knew Janelle.
(24:44):
So in the autumn of twenty ten, it was Tracy
Greenwell who decided to try clearing the air she'd been
the one to bring Janelle out into Mountain City social
life after all. In November twenty ten, Tracy typed the
following on Janelle's Facebook page, your friend Matt needs to
(25:09):
leave Billy Jean and Lindsay Thomas off the Topics website.
You lost my brother Bill as a friend, and I'm
not happy with you either. Janelle's response was denial. She
denied any connection to Matt or his Topics posts, both
online and in person. She said she had no idea
(25:31):
who he was, and in fact, as she put it,
there had been a lot of trash talking about her
in Mountain View from Billy Jean and Lindsay. She was
the victim. She started messaging more and more people on Facebook,
posting and talking in real life about how mean Billy Jean,
(25:52):
Lindsay and their friends were. She said they were posting
mean things on her Facebook wall anonymous, and she constantly
had to delete the comments, things like you're ugly and
nobody likes you. Now, I want to take a step
back here and barring the really egregious language that Matt
(26:14):
Potter and his fellow Topics trolls were using in their posts,
this all still sounds fairly straightforward, right. Janelle is jealous
of Billie Jean, so she goes after her and her
friends via Matt Potter, who is maybe a friend or
maybe just Janelle herself using a pseudonym on topics. The
(26:36):
girls retaliate honestly, with much milder language than Matt Potter.
Maybe Janelle takes that extra seriously because of her auditory disorder,
but still, basically, it's a tale as old as time.
Jealousy just played out on the Internet, and a lot
of people in town thought it was that simple at
(26:58):
first too. But the thing is, Janelle said things were escalating,
seriously escalating. She said it wasn't just that Billy Jean,
Lindsay and their friends were being quote unquote mean, They
were actually harassing her. She couldn't take the cruelty. It
(27:22):
was unbearable. Not just the mean Facebook posts. She said
they were calling her and saying horrible things all the time,
driving by her house constantly fast as if to threaten her,
throwing rocks onto her family's property, even shooting bullets over
her house. She said she had gotten a rape threat
(27:45):
from one of the women's male friends. What kinds of
things were people saying about you. Just I was a
bad person that was horrible, threatened to get raped.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
Listen.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Pretty scary. Yes, that was Janelle speaking to a reporter
about her allegations. Later on on an episode of the
ABC program twenty twenty. She was so scared, she said,
she feared for her life. If this Matt Potter was
defending her against her harasters on an online forum, well
(28:17):
he might be using strong language, but he wasn't wrong
about those girls. That was what Janelle said, again and again,
with support from her furious parents, and in Janelle's high pitched,
innocent voice, with her wide round eyes and gangly awkward frame, well,
(28:38):
it was hard to believe she'd be associated with the
kind of violent rhetoric Matt Potter was using. She's the
type you expect to call people sweetie in a message,
not poor. On the other hand, though, Billy, Jean and
(29:03):
Lindsay were adamant that they weren't doing any of these violent,
threatening things to Janelle. They weren't throwing rocks or shooting guns.
They weren't even posting on her wall. If someone was
doing that, it certainly wasn't them. In fact, by twenty eleven,
(29:23):
Lindsay Thomas was claiming that Janelle was harassing her. Frustrated
by Janelle's frequent Facebook posts claiming that she was quote
unquote mean, she finally called the Potter household to say
Janelle needed to stop this inexplicable Facebook crusade. After that,
(29:46):
she started getting calls from the Potter household, at first
just a few, but then ten or fifteen a day.
Some of them were from Janelle complaining that Lindsay was
harassing her. Buddy was often on the phone with her
(30:07):
backing up her complaints. Other calls were silent, just the
sound of breathing on the line. Lindsay could see the
caller id whatever sounds were coming through the phone, so
she decided to file a phone harassment suit against Janelle.
(30:29):
It finally came to trial in November twenty eleven, but
the judge dismissed the case, arguing that Lindsay could not
prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Janelle was guilty. So,
while the whole town knew something or other about this
feud brewing online and on the phone, a lot of
(30:52):
people started to find it strangely confusing. They didn't know
what to believee Kurd took Janelle's side, abandoning his old
friends for a secret lover. Obviously, Janelle's parents took her
side as well. They were enraged that anyone was attacking
their innocent, sweet daughter. Tracy and most other Mountain City
(31:16):
locals sided with Lindsay Thomas, Billy Jean, Bill Payne, and
their friends. They knew their friends wouldn't threaten anyone. Eventually,
most members of the warring factions had unfriended each other.
It seemed like there were two versions of reality and
(31:38):
you just had to pick one, but then there was
only one version. This clip aired on that same episode
of ABC's twenty twenty Okay, Do You Want a Hitch?
DCPRS two. Around ten am on January thirty first, Roy
(32:14):
and Linda Stevens, former neighbors of the Paines, drove up
to the paint house. Roy was just planning to run
in pick up his mail, but both Bill and Billy's
cars were parked outside, so he guessed at least one
of them might be home. After going through the unlocked
(32:36):
back door, he gave a holler calling for the couple.
There was no answer. Roy ambled toward the bedrooms. He
hollered again as he went, hoping not to interrupt the
young parents in an intimate moment, but again there was
(32:58):
no answer. That's when he saw the blood at their
bedroom door, and then Bill lying on the bed. Roy
ran to him, grabbed Bill by the arms and yelled
build it and move. Roy ran from the room back
(33:20):
to the car, screaming at Linda to call the police.
Something was wrong. Bill was hurt. Roy ran back toward
the house. Linda ran after him. She knew CPR, she
had to try it. But when she reached Bill, he
(33:42):
was stiff and cold, his ice still. She reached for
his neck, looking for a pulse. Instead, she felt the
gash his throat had been cut. He was dead. Linda
ran out to the living room to call nine to
(34:03):
one one. Roy heard a noise coming from the second bedroom.
He ran that way. That's when he saw Billy Jean
lying on the floor, her baby in her arms, and
a blood soaked hole in her head. Her baby was
(34:24):
the one that made the noise. Billy Jean was dead,
the baby was alive. I mean, that's an image you
(34:45):
can't get out of your mind, even just hearing it secondhand,
That baby lying in his dead mother's arms for hours.
You can't even really say anything about it. Just have
to sit with it. Bill Payne and Billy Jean Hayworth
(35:05):
were dead, killed violently and precisely. Bill was shot once
in the face, then his throat was sliced. Billy Jean
was shot once in the head. This was done by
someone experienced with violence. The police's first thought was drugs.
(35:29):
A lot of violent crime around the area had to
do with drug deals, and Bill and Billy Jean did
occasionally sell a pill or two to their friends alongside
doing some drugs themselves. Especially Bill. Their friends admitted that
to investigators immediately. They wouldn't have said a word of
(35:51):
it while their friends were alive, but if it was
going to help catch whoever did this, they'd spill it.
All those are good friends. But police weren't impressed. Selling
a few pills to friends wasn't the kind of dealing
that got you murdered, not like this, not in cold blood.
(36:17):
That's when they started thinking about the internet feud, the
one that everyone in town knew about, the one that
started simply enough but got stranger and by the end
didn't seem to fully add up or make any sense.
(36:39):
But still, as far as anyone in Mountain City could tell,
one thing was clear. The only people that had a
real problem with Bill and Billy Jean were the Potters.
On February second, two days after the murder, police had
(37:00):
to the Potter household, less than ten miles from the
crime scene. They spent an hour there chatting with the family.
All three of the Potters denied any knowledge of the
crime beyond what they'd seen on TV the past two days,
but they were downright talkative about their ongoing feud with
(37:21):
the victims. Janelle said, quote, they had been harassing the
living crap out of her. But when police asked her
why they were harassing her, she said, quote, it came
out to be a jealousy thing. They said I was
(37:42):
too pretty, that I wasn't from here, so I was
never going to be accepted. Now, the second part her
not being from there, fine, But the first part that
she's too pretty, that's a really creative explanation for the
(38:02):
whole feud. Getting harassed as a thirty year old woman
because you look too good. It doesn't make a ton
of sense to me. Sure, I think we can all
agree some jealousy was involved in the whole dynamic, but
not in that direction. Police were similarly skeptical and confused
(38:27):
by the Potter's story of violent harassment over Janelle's good looks,
but they left more sure than ever. While it was
astonishing to think that a Facebook feud could have somehow
resulted in murder, the Potters were the only people in
Mountain City that seemed to have a real dislike for
(38:49):
Bill and Billy Jean as in a motive. Plus, Buddy
Potter was a former marine, not to mention, he had
a personal arsenal in his house that was not uncommon
in the area or with country people in general, or
(39:09):
any VFW, but it meant that he had the skill
and the means to commit a precise, professional crime like
the one at the pain household. But Buddy also had
health issues of his own. He'd been out of work
on disability for years now thanks to a back injury.
(39:30):
It was unlikely that he'd gone after the two victims alone,
which meant if he committed this crime, he committed it
with an accomplice. When some digging turned up the information
that Jamie Kurd, Bill Payne's cousin was Janelle's secret boyfriend.
Police knew just where to go next. It seemed that
(39:54):
while this case was odd cracking, it would be simple
for the moment. But if you thought the story up
to this point was crazy, buckle in, because this is
where it starts to get truly weird. About a week
(40:19):
after the murders, Jamie was sitting in the police station.
The conversation went on for hours. At first, Jamie insisted
he didn't know anything. Sure there was a conflict between
the Potters and the victims, but he insisted that this
had nothing to do with him. That he was friendly
(40:40):
with the Potters, but he wasn't dating Janelle at all anyway.
But then a few hours in the police began to
wear Jamie down. They said, maybe you are dating Janelle.
Maybe you were involved in the murders, but just as
(41:03):
a watchman. Maybe you just slit Bill's throat, but Buddy
Potter already shot him, so you didn't really murder him.
It was just a body. Then maybe you were pressured
into it, scared for your own life. Jamie still didn't
(41:29):
say much, but he started to grunt and nod. He
grunted and nodded enough times that police put together a
statement for him a confession. He signed it. He admitted
that he had done it. He participated in the murder
(41:52):
of his own cousin and his cousin's girlfriend, leaving their
baby in her cold arms. He did it with Buddy
Potter for Janelle. This is a huge confession and maybe
(42:12):
the case could have ended there. An angry father and
boyfriend decided to put an end to Janelle's feud once
and for all with murder. But people around town knew
Jamie Kurd before he'd got entangled up with the Potters.
(42:37):
People generally liked him. He was a quiet guy, but
hard working. He'd been devoted to his parents. He took
care of both of them when their health declined and
stayed by their sides until they died. And Bill wasn't
just his cousin before he got involved with the Potters.
(42:59):
He was also one of Jamie's best friends. Mountain City
didn't know Buddy potterwell, but everyone thought Jamie's involvement was strange,
and I do too. You'd think it would take a
lot to turn a guy like that murderous against his
(43:22):
cousin and friend, even when it came to protecting the
girl he loved Also, it's worth mentioning Jamie Kurr might
be quiet, but he wasn't stupid. Even if he had
felt murderous, would he really be dumb enough to go
(43:42):
on a killing spree where his girlfriend and her family
and of course her boyfriend would be the only obvious suspects.
It just seems well, the whole crime seems like a
really odd mix of prof nationally executed but bizarrely thought out.
(44:06):
Maybe this case wasn't simple after all. Maybe something was
missing here. That's why police paid attention when Jamie mumbled
something strange at the end of his interrogation. Here's here.
(44:31):
That's a clip from a TV docu drama based on
Dennis Brooks book also called Too Pretty to Live. It's
the real take from Jamie's interrogation. And let me repeat
what he just asked. Is the CIA here here, as
(44:53):
in at this little police station in Mountain City, Tennessee,
where we are discussing a murder case. Obviously this is
a really serious case, a double homicide, and I'm still
thinking about that baby. I could see a world in
which maybe the FBI might be involved things that involve
(45:17):
the phone and internet and thus can easily cross state
lines sometimes bring in the FEDS, but the Central Intelligence Agency.
Why would the CIA be at Jamie Kurd's interrogation. The
police tried to push Jamie on why someone from the
(45:39):
CIA might be there. He mumbled something about a Chris
and then wouldn't say much else. Investigators were stumped, so
they decided to let it go for now and focus
on Buddy Potter. Maybe he would provide some clue as
(46:00):
to what this might all be about, or rather who.
They just needed Jamie to call Buddy and get him
to admit some role in this crime, then they could
arrest him and bring him in for questioning. The ploy worked.
(46:23):
When Jamie asked Buddy if he got rid of everything
from Bill's he said uh huh, and that was enough
for an arrest and an interrogation about what exactly happened
the morning of January thirty first. But it was arguably
Barbara Potter who gave investigators a bigger lead into the
(46:46):
whole strange affair. She also spoke briefly on the phone
call to Jamie, and she said she'd heard Jamie got
arrested because Chris emailed her and told her Chris again,
there was no one in Mountain City named Chris. No
(47:09):
one the Potters knew anyway, and who outside of Mountain
City would be tracking the town's arrests. The police now
had two crucial pieces to fit into this whole strange puzzle.
Chris and the CIA join me next week on the
(47:53):
Greatest true crime Stories Ever told for the second part
of our story about Janelle Potter and the murders of
Bill Payne and Billy Jean Hayworth. It's a wild journey
into secret emails, secret identities, and secret agencies. We'll also
be talking to Dennis Brooks, the prosecutor on the case.
(48:14):
I'd like to shout out a few key sources that
made it possible for me to tell this week's story,
including Brooks's book Too Pretty to Live the Catfishing Murders
of East Tennessee. As the prosecutor, Brooks had incredible access
to the case and he shares a lot of great insights,
so stay tuned for that episode. Other great resources on
(48:37):
the case include the ABC twenty twenty episode. They have
the interviews with both Janelle and her mom, Barbara, which
are fascinating, and of course, the court documents from the trial,
which we'll get into next week. For more information about
this case and others we cover on the show, visit
Diversion Audio dot com. Sign up Diversion's newsletter and be
(49:02):
among the first to hear about special behind the scenes
features with the hosts and actors from Diversion's podcasts, more
shows you'll love from Diversion and our partners, and other
exclusive tidbits you can't get anywhere else. The Greatest True
Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of Diversion Audio.
Your host is me Mary Kay mcbraer. This episode was
(49:26):
written by our editorial director, Nora Battel. Our show is
produced and directed by Mark Francis. Our development team is
Emma Dmouth and Jacob Bronstein. Theme music by Tyler Cash.
Executive producers Jacob Bronstein, Mark Francis, and Scott Waxman. Diversion
(49:54):
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