December 12, 2023 • 55 mins
PART 2/2 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.
• Follow Diversion Audio on Instagram
• Explore more: diversionaudio.com
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
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
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.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Diversion audio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
A note this episode contains mature content and descriptions of
violence that may be disturbing for some listeners. Please take
care and listening. This is episode two of a two
(00:35):
part mini series. If you haven't listened to episode one
of The Catfish Killer, I recommend you press pause, go
listen to episode one, and then come back here because
episode one is important. But this episode is where the
story becomes totally wild. Imagine you get into work one
(01:01):
day and your assignment is three giant garbage bags full
of shredded paper. You're supposed to put all those sheets
of paper back together, one tiny strip at a time,
with just a few little letters to go on. And
(01:24):
since the actual contents of those documents is near gibberish
half the time, your job is twenty times harder. Actually,
to me, it sounds almost impossible, But that's the job
assigned to Special Agent Miranda Gaddis at the Tennessee Bureau
(01:46):
of Investigations. She spent a month matching letter after letter,
taping strips of paper together, one sheet at a time,
but she did it, and she provided in investigators in
Mountain City, Tennessee, with exactly the evidence they needed to
take not one, not two, not three, but four murderers
(02:12):
to court. Welcome to the greatest true crime stories ever told.
(02:35):
I'm Mary Kay McBrayer. I'm a writer of true crime.
In my work, I'm constantly reading about crime, but I'm
not necessarily interested in the headline grabbing stuff like the
blood and the gore. I'm more interested in the people
behind these stories and what we can learn about society
(02:57):
by looking at their experiences. You can meet me 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, criminal, or some combination
of those. As you probably already know, women can do anything.
(03:24):
Today's episode is the conclusion of our two part mini series,
The Catfish Killer. Nothing in this story is simple or straightforward.
That much was clear last week when we heard about
the baffling online feud plaguing Mountain City, Tennessee, and the
devastating double murder of Billy Jean Hayworth and Bill Payne.
(03:49):
But that was just the beginning of this story, because
now we get into the twisted and bizarre under belly
of the crime. Saga of Lies manipulation, secret identities, and
secret agencies that I, for one, could never have imagined.
(04:32):
At the beginning of last week's episode, the first part
of this story, I talked about how the Internet has
complicated our communication. I want to mention this quickly here
again at the top of part two, because it's fundamental
to our story. Technology makes communication both easier and harder,
(04:56):
but communication in a small circle implicates it even more.
I think that's partly because there's no one to check against,
there's no control group, there's no touchstone for normalcy. So
if you're about to fly off the rails, you can't
look back and see that no one else is going
(05:16):
there with you. Plus, if you get the right group together,
or rather the wrong group, they can feed into each
other's bullshit and build it up into something it's not,
and it takes almost no time at all, you know,
like on a reality show, one of those shows where
they get a bunch of strong personalities together and before
(05:39):
the end of the first week, two of them are
fistfighting over one eating the other's peanut butter. Just keep
that in mind as we return to our story. Last
time we were in Mountains City, Tennessee. It was February sixth,
(06:03):
twenty twelve, and a man named Jamie Kurd had just
confessed to assisting in the brutal murders of young mother
Billy Jean Hayworth and her boyfriend Bill Payne, who also
happened to be Jamie's cousin. But police didn't see Jamie
as the real catch. He confessed to committing this double
(06:26):
homicide with Buddy Potter, the father of his secret girlfriend,
Janelle Potter. Jamie said he and Buddy killed Billy, Jean
and Bill to protect Janelle, who you'll remember from the
first part of this story, was in the midst of
a vicious feud with the young couple, but Jamie insisted
(06:51):
Buddy was the one with the plan. Buddy was the
one shooting the bullets and looking at quiet nervous Jamie.
Police believed that, so investigators tried to set up a
little sting. The police had Jamie call Buddy and ask
(07:13):
him did you get rid of all the stuff from Bills,
and Buddy replied, uh huh, and that was enough for
them to arrest Buddy in the early hours of February seventh,
twenty twelve. They hauled him down to the station and
(07:33):
started their questioning. Buddy repeated what the Potter family had
said to police already as a reminder. That's Buddy, his wife, Barbara,
and Janelle. He reiterated his family did have issues with
the murdered couple, but they didn't know anything about their deaths.
(07:59):
The police took out a tape and played it for him. Hello, oh, high.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
And nightie around.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Yeah, you have a life pactor.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Yeah, yeah, you got rid of every signy. Okay, I'm
making go up there.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
The police had recorded Jamie's call to Buddy Potter. That's
a real snippet of the tape. It's from a TV
docu drama called Too Pretty to Live, based on a
book by Dennis Brooks of the same name. You just
heard Bill admitting to getting rid of the stuff from Bill's.
(08:51):
When Buddy heard that tape in the interrogation room, his
face went white. He lost his cocky confidence. For several minutes,
he sat there looking stunned. He muttered that he must
have misheard what Jamie said. Police exchanged glances. He might
(09:14):
not be cracking yet, but this was good. They would
get there. It took time, It took prodding and a
lot of different angles, it took more than it had
taken with Jamie. But when the detective suggested the only
(09:34):
reason you did it was because you were scared for
your family and you love your family, Buddy said yes.
And then he said more.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
When you hear people for lt to catch your daughter
murder her, they wanted to rape her because she's a
bird in Yeah, you gotta know what the chefs would you.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Again, that's a real clip from the station that day.
Again from Too Pretty to Live, Buddy says one more
important thing. After that, he says, the victims head quote
put a three thousand dollars bounty on Janelle's head, on
my wife and me, all of that. That is why
(10:31):
he did it. So let's take a beat here. What
is happening. I mean, police were looking for a confession
that Buddy committed the murders, and they were getting that,
so that's great. But Buddy was saying that he did
(10:52):
it because Billy Jean Hayworth and Bill Payne wanted to
rape and murder Janelle and had put a bounty on
his whole family. That just doesn't add up. Billy, Jean
and Bill might have had their differences with Janelle and
(11:13):
the Potters, but they were new parents and all around
nice people, well liked in their community, with no one
else in Mountain City ever reporting any kinds of problems
with them, and even Janelle's vocal public complaints about harassment
from the couple and their friends hadn't included anything this
(11:36):
frankly terrifying. Maybe what sticks out most to me, though,
is how would Billy, Jean and Bill have access to
hit men? So police were also baffled, but they couldn't
show that to Buddy. They had to keep pushing for
(11:56):
more information here, so they asked him to call his
wife and daughter and confess his crime to them. They
said he should tell them directly. He should tell them
about what he did.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Barbara, Yeah, before you find out somebody else to hold
you know I was involved in I understand that I
didn't want you took a differing.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
No more, and didn't you think about it more?
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Said my hear sigh.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Once again, that's taped from the real call from the
Too Pretty to Live movie, and it's an odd phone call.
Janelle hops on the line too, but neither she nor
Barbara really sounded shocked or upset. Instead, they offered Buddy alibis.
(12:58):
They both insisted it's not possible that he did it.
He was home with them. Maybe that's what Buddy needed
to hear in order to shut up, because when he
got off the phone, he asked for a lawyer. The
interrogation was officially over. Still, it was a valuable call
(13:23):
for the cops because after hearing Barbara and Janelle's reactions
for the first time, the investigators were starting to wonder
if they were involved too. I mean, think about it,
Maybe you would provide an alibi to a loved one
that had committed a horrible crime. I don't know, it's
(13:45):
a human response, I guess, to save someone you love.
It's hard to imagine what I do in a situation
like this, but if I had to guess, yeah, I'd
be pretty shocked that anyone I loved would do something
like that. And I can also see myself potentially thinking, well,
what was their reason and being open to hearing them out.
(14:07):
I'm not just anyone. I'm talking about like a core
four loved ones tops who I'd give the benefit of
the doubt. But I definitely can't see myself having no
reaction if you had no idea about the crime. And
we're hearing it for the first time, wouldn't you express
shock and horror at what was happening first before you
(14:30):
started throwing out alibis. Barbara and Janelle didn't, which made
police think that they already knew they might have two
culprits in custody, Jamie Kurd and Buddy Potter, but maybe
they should be looking for more. So the police searched
(14:55):
the Potter home and Buddy's truck. The Potter home and
Officer Woodward was sitting in the living room logging evidence
descriptions into a notebook as other officers brought him item
after item, notebooks stacks of paper. Sitting across from him
(15:17):
was Barbara Potter, and then she was standing next to him,
reaching down to the stack of papers at his left
and ripping them up. Woodward looked up at her, incredulous
and asked slowly, what have you got there? Barbara didn't
(15:40):
say anything, She just handed back the stack. Some of
the papers were torn now, but Woodward could see clearly
what they were. Photographs printed out on a home computer
of Billy Jean Hayward and her friends like Lindsay Thomas
(16:02):
in bikinis and sexy Halloween costumes, very normal, cute photos,
the kind anyone would have posted on Facebook, but scrawled
underneath them were captions like Billy whore and Panface. Pan
Face was the same name the so called Matt Potter
(16:24):
had used in his horrible angry Topics posts, the ones
that started the whole feud between the Potters, Billy Jean
and her friends. So another link between the Potter family
and these posts. Another link showing just how much the
(16:44):
Potter family hated Billy Jean, like who does that? Printing
out photos of girls from Facebook and writing cruel names
underneath It was the behavior of an angry child, But
there were no children in this house, only thirty year
(17:05):
old Janelle in her middle aged parents. Back at Buddy's truck,
police made an even bigger discovery. There were the bullets.
(17:27):
They were the same kind of bullets used in the murders,
but they also matched in a more specific way. They
had little markings on top, almost like someone was doodling
on them with a carving knife that matched the bullets
(17:49):
used in the murder too, So bingo more evidence that
Buddy did shoot the gun. But that's not even the
biggest piece of evidence. They found in his truck and literally,
I mean physically huge. In the back of the truck
(18:10):
there were three garbage bags full of shredded paper like
ready to burst open. Police immediately asked an agent at
the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to put these documents back together.
Special Agent Miranda gaddis the woman the saint, the one
(18:31):
I mentioned back near the beginning of this episode. This
is the fun part of looking back in time because
we get to skip over the grueling, weeks long puzzle
work Miranda had to do to get her results, and
the results she got were very strange. The papers turned
(18:53):
out to be printouts of emails emails between Barbara Potter
and someone signing off as Chris. Chris, remember Chris from
the last episode, who may or may not be associated
(19:17):
with the CIA, the one Jamie Kurr mentioned in his interrogation.
These printouts, as well as the digital files police obtained
from both the Potter family and Jamie Kirr's email accounts,
suddenly revealed a lot more about who Chris was, about
(19:41):
his association with the CIA, and about what exactly he
had to do with the double murder of Billy Jean Hayworth.
And Bill Payne. I want to go on a bit
(20:17):
of a journey with you. Here into the massive archive
of emails from Chris. In addition to those printouts, police
also get warrants for digital files and end up with
more emails, Facebook messages between Chris and Barbara, and texts
(20:38):
between Chris and Jamie. No messages between Janelle and Chris,
though Buddy didn't use email or any other digital communication,
so no messages between him and Chris either, But mentions
(21:00):
in the messages between Barbara and Chris, plus all those
shredded print outs and Buddy's car show that Barbara passed
the messages on to her husband. He was up to
date on the conversations. And let me tell you, they
are a trip. They span about a year, starting in
(21:24):
late twenty ten, right around the time that Billy Jean
Hayworth got pregnant and moved in with Bill Payne, and
they continue right up until the time of Bill and
Billy Jean's murders. Chris introduces himself as a CIA operative
(21:44):
from the same area of Pennsylvania the Potters moved from.
He was actually born in the same hospital on the
same day as Janelle and attended school with her. But
in twenty ten, Chris is getting in touch with the
(22:04):
Potters in a professional capacity because he has been following
events in Mountain City and sees that Janelle is in
danger from people like Billy Jean Hayworth, Bill Payne, and
Lindsay Thomas. These people are scary and dangerous. They are
(22:24):
tied up in serious drug dealing, and they hate Janelle.
In fact, they have violent intentions towards her. He knows
what they say about her behind closed doors. They want
to rape her, they want to murder her. Eventually, Chris
(22:50):
tells them that Mountain Cities local drug dealing gangsters have
put a bounty on the heads of all the Potters.
But Chris knows that Janelle is a sweet, good person.
These people are after her because of that, and because
she is so pretty prettier than them. Chris is here
(23:16):
to protect her. That's why he keeps the Potters and
Jamie updated on what's happening at the pain residence. That's
why he writes posts as Matt Potter on Topics defending Janelle.
That's why he wants to kill all Janelle's enemies before
(23:38):
they kill her. No wonder the Potters were so scared.
Chris also tells both Jamie and Barbara that Jamie is
a victim of the gang's hatred as well. He's in
it too. That seems to be why in the spring
(24:00):
of twenty eleven, when Jamie's mom died, the Potter parents
decided to reach out to him, and they invited him
into their home as a family friend. Although Janelle and
Jamie still keep their romantic relationship a secret, now they
(24:20):
can see each other much more frequently. So that's the
content of these messages. Pretty terrifying stuff. But I need
to read some of them aloud for you guys. I'm
not going to preface it before I read this time.
But remember Chris says that he's the one writing the
(24:45):
Matt Potter posts, and if you remember those from the
last episode, well this should sound familiar. May twenty eleven,
Lindsey will back off fast and stop things. But that's
(25:08):
if I let her live. I choose that for her
boyfriend and Bill and Billy and that damn baby, I
will see when I want to kill them. Then I'm
getting some of the cops. No one would ever miss them.
I'm going up to Bulldog Road now and I'm also
(25:28):
going to run into horrorpans slept face ugly as a
mudface bitch and her fucker of a BF. I'm getting
on where they are going and what they do, and
getting a lot of sense about what they do daily.
So I have been on them. They are calling from bills,
go to a payphone and say something. They are playing games,
(25:54):
so me, Chris, government agent, give by the FEDS with
guns and as he tells Barbara and Jamie, licensed to kill.
And yet his grammar is terrible, he can't spell. He
sounds less like a government employee and more like, I
(26:16):
honestly don't know, like maybe a very angry teenager. But
somehow Jamie and Barbara seem to buy into this. And
this gets back to that initial sort of paranoia and
suspicion that was a part of Barbara all the time,
(26:37):
that expectation that people were out to get her and
her family, and that disliking someone translated into wanting to
harm them. Jamie, meanwhile, I wonder if maybe he was
so desperate to get closer to Janelle, and Chris kind
of brought them closer, not just by getting Barbara to
(26:59):
warm up to him him, but also by giving them
this common enemy and something to talk about. Janelle talked
to Jamie about Chris a lot. He was like a
brother to her, she told him. Meanwhile, investigators honed in
on some other factors here. First, this so called CIA
(27:25):
agent was so interested in Janelle. In fact, she seemed
like his main interest. He was constantly tracking her enemies
and he couldn't stop praising her. Second, while Janelle's language
was a lot less violent, she never cursed. Even Chris's
(27:47):
writing style, including consistent spelling quirks, matched hers very closely.
A linguist forensics expert confirmed this. Third, all Chris's emails
came from the Potter family IP address, and they all
came from Janelle's accounts. Let me repeat that every single
(28:13):
message Chris sends, whether it was an email, a text,
or a Facebook message, came from Janelle's accounts or phone number.
The explanation for this was that Chris was hacking into
Janelle's accounts to communicate, because of course, as a CIA agent,
(28:35):
you could do things like that, and in fact had
to do things like that to keep a low profile.
This explanation is so absurd that it would be funny
if two people hadn't been murdered. And then there's the
fact that, as twenty eleven wears on and Jamie and
the Potter parents get more paranoid about the gang that
(28:58):
was out to kill them, Chris keeps upping the ante
and stoking their fear, but he never actually materializes to
quote unquote get rid of their enemies. No one has
ever actually seen Chris in real life.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
Ever.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
None of this seems to raise Barbara, Jamie, or Buddy's suspicions,
but it does prompt Barbara to start pushing for something.
She wants Chris to get Buddy a CIA badge so
he has license to kill like Chris apparently has. She
sends messages like this one and another heads up. She
(29:42):
has her own unhinged writing style quote, Bud is so
mad and I'm one hundred percent behind whatever happens. You
guys meet when you are ready, Chris. Maybe Bud will
have ID by then and can use CIA go et
cetera for his protection. Get the jobs done. You know,
(30:06):
they all need to go, and the ones left need
to be given a big scare as they watch and
wonder am I next? In late November twenty eleven, Barbara
also sends this message to Jamie. By the way, if
you talk slash text with Chris, ask him if he
(30:30):
thinks the CIA will back up Buddy if he takes
it into his own hands. He is worried he will
get locked up for doing nothing or you know what
a worry. They are trying to kill Janelle little by little.
It seems that they are going to keep going after
(30:50):
all of us until we're dead slash gone not right,
and the cops are behind them per Chris. By the
end of twenty eleven, Barbara and Buddy no longer expect
Chris to kill their enemies for them.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
That much.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
They've come to terms with, so they are ready to
take things into their own hands and kill Bill Payne
and Billy Jean Hayworth themselves, hopefully with the approval of
the CIA, all because of the hatred Chris had been
spewing at them for the past year. Now, I should
(31:33):
point out, in case you had any doubts, there's no
evidence that anything Chris said was true regarding gangs, bounties,
or violent plans to hurt the Potter family. In fact,
there's evidence that a lot of the things Chris was
saying were untrue. He created this terrifying danger out of nothing.
(31:56):
He created the hatred and effect caused the murders for
no reason. Barbara contributed by spreading the hate, by believing
in it without a second thought, and by helping plan
the murder. Buddy and Jamie actually committed the crime, but
(32:22):
none of it would have happened without Chris, his lies
and the hatred He had planned it in the fertile
soil of the Potter Home. Investigators and eventually Dennis Brooks,
the Tennessee prosecutor tasked with litigating the case, were convinced
of that, and after looking at the mountains of evidence,
(32:42):
they were convinced that they knew exactly who Chris really was.
(33:03):
Chris gave Barbara and Jamie his full name a few times.
Chris Jaden spelled with a T that's tjad n. He
also attached photos of himself to some of his messages,
lots in law enforcement uniforms, wanted a Phillies game. Always
a handsome young man, Investigators were startled to find that
(33:28):
he was, in fact a real person, had actually gone
to school with Janelle back in Pennsylvania. Now he lived
in Delaware, where he did work in law enforcement. Are
you as confounded as I was when I heard this information?
(33:49):
Then the police contacted him, Chris sounded genuinely surprised to
get the call, really shocked at questions about Mountain City, Tennessee,
the CIA, and Janelle. He didn't know anything about Mountain City,
much less anyone who lived there. He worked in law enforcement, yes,
(34:12):
but as a constable at a local hospital, not for
Central Intelligence. He did remember Janelle, although he didn't really
know her. They'd gone to high school together. She had
acted like she had a crush on him, and he
had tried to be nice to her, but he never
gave it much thought. He was handsome and popular, she
(34:36):
was a little odd. After graduation, he never thought about
her ever again, not once until now. Obviously. Those photos
of him, some of them were profile pictures from his Facebook,
accessible to the public, including people he wasn't friends with
(34:59):
on the platform, like Janelle. Some of them weren't actually him.
They were photos of very similar looking guys. He pointed
out a picture of a man in a uniform one
officers had assumed was him. The likeness was so good,
(35:20):
but Chris said he'd never warned that kind of uniform
maybe the photos of him available on the internet weren't
enough for whoever had stolen his identity, as Dennis Brooks
points out, and too pretty to live. Who knows how
long the real culprit spent scraping through the Internet looking
(35:42):
for photos of men who were a match. Because whoever
these investigators from Tennessee were looking for, they believed Chris Jaden.
It wasn't him. It was And I think you've probably
come to the same conclusion as the cop at this point,
Janelle all along, sitting up on that computer that had
(36:08):
been her lifeline for so long. It was Janelle posing
as Chris, turning him into a creature of her own, making,
someone obsessed with her safety and her enemies, someone who
would kill for her, someone who would get the real
(36:28):
people in her life to kill for her. It's a
really hard thing to wrap your head around, or at
least it was hard for me. I get jealousy, which
it seems pretty clear Janelle felt towards Billy Jean and
by extension, her friends. I get rejection, poisoning what was
(36:53):
once a crush for Bill. I even get trash talking
all of these people. But Janelle did some thing so
much more extreme. I mean, she catfished her parents and
her boyfriend, and she manipulated them into committing murder. I
keep thinking about that auditory disorder she had. I wonder
(37:17):
if maybe she misunderstood some of her social interactions with
the mountain city locals. And I know how it feels
in those small towns. I said it at the top
of the last episode for our reason. Those are the
kinds of places where everyone will do anything for the
people they know and love, but they can be hard
on outsiders. Maybe Janelle did get made fun of or
(37:44):
feel left out, and that stings. Maybe for Janelle, because
of her disorder, it did more than just sting. But
the fact of the matter is, whatever she thought she heard,
she went on to make up blatant lies, and no
matter how mean a comment might be murder in response.
(38:06):
That's obviously not okay, that's obviously wrong. We may never
totally understand what went on in Janelle's head. She's never
admitted to her role in these crimes, not to being
Chris or any of it. But Dennis Brooks and his
team got her convicted. They got Barbara convicted, they got
(38:28):
Buddy convicted, all on two counts. Of first degree murder
and conspiracy to commit murder, all sentenced to life in prison.
All three of them have appealed their convictions. Janelle and
Buddies were upheld in court. Barbara was eventually granted a
(38:50):
new trial on the grounds that her original attorney presented
a conflict of interest because he had previously represented Buddy,
But the case actually made it back to trial. Barbara
pled guilty to two counts of facilitating first degree murder
in exchange for a reduced sentence twenty five years. For
(39:11):
the first time ever, she admitted some amount of guilt
at least, even if we're still waiting on Janelle. Jamie
Kurd cooperated with the prosecution from the start, not only
admitting guilt but doing extensive interviews with the prosecution. So
during the original trial he received the same plea deal
(39:32):
that Barbara eventually got from the get go, twenty five
years in prison for two counts of facilitating first degree murder.
None of it brings back the parents of that baby.
He's going to spend his whole life without the parents
who loved him, who would have cherished him and supported him.
(39:56):
Nothing can change that. But has been served, and that's
in no small part thanks to the tenacity of Dennis
Brooks and navigating the wild ins and outs of this
crazy case. His book Too Pretty to Live breaks down
his account of the madness, and I'm lucky enough to
(40:17):
have spoken to him about the case myself that's coming
up after the break Stay with us, Dennis. It is
(40:50):
so nice to meet you, and thank you so much
for coming to talk to me. I just wanted to
jump right in and ask, because this is so compelling
to me, talk a little more about the part of
family dynamics, because I just feel like there have to
have been some conditions that made Janelle into the kind
of person who would do what she did, and then
(41:10):
there were probably some things that made her parents into
the kind of people who would respond to what she
did with murder.
Speaker 1 (41:17):
My conclusion was they had all sort of victimized one another.
That Janelle grew up with some disabilities. I think she
was in special education. I had a high school diploma
that was specially had related. She wasn't totally unable to
do things, but she had some limitations, some challenges, and
(41:42):
I took it from her history and from talking to
her older sister, Christie, who did not have those types
of limitations that she had. Janelle had led a sheltered
upbringing even into adulthood, staying there at the family's home,
being cared for as a child, still even into her
(42:03):
late twenties, and not really having the ability or the
freedom to grow and spread her own wings. And I
think that manifested itself in a loneliness that was natural
for her, and she took that in directions that were unhealthy.
Now likewise, her ability to manipulate her parents and get
(42:28):
them to believe things that weren't necessarily true, you know,
she victimized them in turn. And I think it's just
sort of a perfect storm of a sort of dysfunction
that breeds something that's unimaginably horrible for people who were
(42:48):
probably totally unsuspecting of what was going on.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
So, as we are moving into, like deeper into the
Internet age, are there any other cases that remind you
of this woman?
Speaker 1 (43:02):
You know, the Potter family, they committed one of the
worst things that's ever happened in our four county district.
And it's it's it's it's surprising. You know, it's not typical.
I don't think it's typical here or probably anywhere else.
But obviously the Internet plays its way into cases now
where it didn't before. Our murder files are now voluminous
(43:24):
because we're getting phone dumps, phone extraction reports and uh
Facebook messenger search warrant returns, and you know, they're a
whole lot more convoluted, and you've got a whole lot
more information, and you know, sometimes a lot of that
electronic communications become really imperative in your cases.
Speaker 2 (43:45):
Does the advance in technology make the justice system better
or worse? Or is it easier or harder?
Speaker 1 (43:55):
What do you think? Well, you have the limitations of time.
You've only got so much time in today to be
able to to devote to a case. And you know,
the Potter case was pretty much my work life for
a significant amount of time, which means all those aggravated
burglaries and rapes and DUI's that were also on my
(44:15):
docket didn't get my attention as much. And that's that's
a cost people don't understand. When it's a complicated case,
then that becomes the only thing you've got to do
because when when you walk in there in front of
the jury, you've got to present the case, which means
not only just I'm going to give them information, but
(44:36):
I've got to call out the information that they need
to hear. You know, the Potter Case, we put in
two hundred and six pages. I still remember two hundred
and six pages of emails total, but that wasn't even
ten percent of what I had to go through, and
I had to go through them over and over and
over and keep calling them out. When I wrote the book,
I had to do the same thing, because you know,
(44:57):
I felt like I had to show the insanity to
the reader.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
What does your workday look like when you're doing something
like that.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
Typically I'll go in early to work and I've got
two or three things I really want to accomplish. I'm
lucky if i can get half of one of them accomplished,
because I'm always interrupted by victims calling in, or you know,
somebody on the staff asking questions about something, or officers
having search warrants for me to look at, and so
(45:27):
it's really hard to focus on something that is convoluted
and complex. And I remember on the on the Potter Case,
I would actually take my laptop and go over to
the local park and just sit out there without my
phone for hours, where I could concentrate on it. There
was one time me and my wife went to Las
(45:48):
Vegas and during the four hour flight out there, I
had my laptop out reading Janelle's emails and categorizing them
because you know, I'm not being bothered then. But you
can only devote so much time like that to so
many cases at one time in your in your career.
You can't do that with all of them doing that.
Speaker 2 (46:08):
So I guess, I mean, this is the book, So
this is one of the big two or three of
your career. So how do you celebrate when you get
a big victory like that?
Speaker 1 (46:17):
You just hug the families who are involved and you
go on. For me, I started writing a book because
it was the day after the verdict, and you know,
I took the day off and the case just wouldn't
shut off.
Speaker 3 (46:33):
In my head.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
I'm sitting there thinking, you know, somebody's going to write
a book about this, so I wonder if I could.
And I just opened up a computer and I started.
I wrote a whole chapter in a flash, it seemed like.
And I looked back at it, I thought, yeah, I
had sounds pretty good for me, I thought, and uh,
(46:55):
I just kept going and it was it was a
way to release the case from my brain.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Oh absolutely, what are the biggest lessons that you've carried
with you from this case or from writing about the case.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
One motivation I had for writing the book was that
hopefully someone out there who was a criminal investigator and
aspiring criminal investigator and aspiring or current prosecutor could have
a story where they see, you know, the sausage being
made on something that's that's complicated and important and and
(47:35):
maybe inspire them to go that extra length to pursue justice.
You know, it's it's real simple to prosecute some people,
but other people are also culpable, and but it's going
to take a little more work. And you know, you
hope that, you know, if it was your family member
(47:57):
that was affected, that as a victim, that someone would
take enough interest to go the extra mile and get
this done. And I thought this was a good example
of it having happened, you know, by co counsel Matt
Rourke and the TBI agent Scott lot Johnson Kinny Sheriff's Departments,
(48:21):
Joe Woodard. We we'd worked as a team on it
and put it together. And you know, one of my
favorite things about writing the book was I actually explained
how you know, and trying to prove Janelle and Barbara
were writing what they were writing doctor Lennard, who was
the forensic linguistic expert from Hofstra University. This was a
(48:43):
fun story. He's way up in New York and he
sounds like a Yankee. He doesn't sound like anything like us,
you know. But I'd found him on a Google search
on one of those nights where I'm like, how do
I prove that Janelle was writing? This is Chris And
I found him and I sent an email to him.
I didn't figure he would answer, but like the next
(49:04):
day he responds and he's like, yes, this is exactly
the kind of case I work on. And I send
him all our stuff and he's telling me, you know what,
we really need the gold standard for what I do.
I need a known sample that they write by typing it.
And you know, we had a lot of known handwriting samples.
(49:26):
You know, we had people to identify their handwriting as
being theirs. But he said, you know, there can be
some nuances in how they write handwriting versus how they
write on a computer. So you know where our question
samples are. Emails where they've typed on a computer. We
really need known samples that are typed on a computer.
(49:46):
And I positive that problem to Investigator Ward over at
Johnson K Sheriff's Department. I'm like, you know, we've got
this problem. He says, we need that, and he says, well,
it's funny. They've been coming around Janelle and Barbara wanting
to make complaints about all these people trashing their house
and vandalizing the property. I said, well that there you go.
(50:08):
Bring them in there to your office, put them at
the computer, tell them you want them to write everything
they can so that you can look into this. So
he's he's doing that one evening and he's texting to me.
You know, I'm two counties away and he's telling me
all they're there at the computer. I'm like, oh, it's great,
and we're like scheming here, and they finally get done.
He sends me the in the email what they had typed,
(50:31):
and then I afforded to uh doctor Leonard up at
Hofstra And by the end of the night, doctor Leonard
is examining their known writing samples. And you know, they
had no idea that we were doing that to them.
That was a good team exercise to get one piece
of the of the case, and it was an important
(50:52):
piece because that really helped our known samples when we
analyzed it against.
Speaker 2 (50:58):
The question was, Yeah, I love to hear about that teamwork.
I feel like we don't get to hear about that
a lot. So love it when it works out like that.
And that's so cool too that they were like, we
have a complaint and they're like, by all means, please,
I God, I love that. Okay, So I have one
more question. What do you hope people take away from this?
(51:19):
And what's the biggest takeaway for you? Like, what's the
most important thing?
Speaker 3 (51:22):
You know?
Speaker 1 (51:23):
And you see it when you watch the Catfish TV
show on MTV. You know, they keep showing and there's
no telling how many people are out there in America,
in the whole world that are getting duped online by
people that are pretending to be someone they're not. And
you know, I think people are, especially if you're more
(51:44):
of a lonely type person, you're very susceptible to being
induced to an emotional relationship with someone and having that exploited.
And you see that on those TV shows such as
that here in this case too, you know sometimes they're
just getting exploited of the their emotions, their love, their money.
(52:07):
But here there's actually two people that died as a
result of that kind of thing, and so it's something
that people need to.
Speaker 3 (52:18):
Be aware of.
Speaker 2 (52:26):
That's a great note to end on, and thank you
so much for talking to me. I loved every second
of it. Really grateful to have had this opportunity with you,
so thank you. Join me next week on the Greatest
(53:03):
true crime Stories Ever told for an episode on a
woman who played a crucial role in taking down one
of the biggest mob bosses in New York City, Lucky Luciano.
I'm talking about one of our first female African American
lawyers and prosecutors in the United States, Unice Hunting Carter.
(53:27):
I'd also like to shout out a few key sources
that made it possible for me to tell this story.
First of all, Dennis Brook's Too Pretty to Live the
Catfishing Murders of East Tennessee. You've heard me site from
it over the course of these past two episodes, and
now you've heard from the author Dennis Brooks as well,
but read it for yourself for even more detail. I
also want to shout out the court documents from the case,
(53:49):
which are available online and very informative. For information about
this case and others we cover on the show, visit
diversion Audio dot com. Sign up for Diversion's newsletter and
be 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
(54:11):
other exclusive tidbits you can't get anywhere else. That's Diversion
Audio dot Com to sign up for the newsletter. The
Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of
Diversion Audio. Your host is me Mary Kay mcbraer. This
episode was written by our editorial director, Nora Battel. Our
(54:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (55:01):
Diversion Audio
Diversion audio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
A note this episode contains mature content and descriptions of
violence that may be disturbing for some listeners. Please take
care and listening. This is episode two of a two
(00:35):
part mini series. If you haven't listened to episode one
of The Catfish Killer, I recommend you press pause, go
listen to episode one, and then come back here because
episode one is important. But this episode is where the
story becomes totally wild. Imagine you get into work one
(01:01):
day and your assignment is three giant garbage bags full
of shredded paper. You're supposed to put all those sheets
of paper back together, one tiny strip at a time,
with just a few little letters to go on. And
(01:24):
since the actual contents of those documents is near gibberish
half the time, your job is twenty times harder. Actually,
to me, it sounds almost impossible, But that's the job
assigned to Special Agent Miranda Gaddis at the Tennessee Bureau
(01:46):
of Investigations. She spent a month matching letter after letter,
taping strips of paper together, one sheet at a time,
but she did it, and she provided in investigators in
Mountain City, Tennessee, with exactly the evidence they needed to
take not one, not two, not three, but four murderers
(02:12):
to court. Welcome to the greatest true crime stories ever told.
(02:35):
I'm Mary Kay McBrayer. I'm a writer of true crime.
In my work, I'm constantly reading about crime, but I'm
not necessarily interested in the headline grabbing stuff like the
blood and the gore. I'm more interested in the people
behind these stories and what we can learn about society
(02:57):
by looking at their experiences. You can meet me 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, criminal, or some combination
of those. As you probably already know, women can do anything.
(03:24):
Today's episode is the conclusion of our two part mini series,
The Catfish Killer. Nothing in this story is simple or straightforward.
That much was clear last week when we heard about
the baffling online feud plaguing Mountain City, Tennessee, and the
devastating double murder of Billy Jean Hayworth and Bill Payne.
(03:49):
But that was just the beginning of this story, because
now we get into the twisted and bizarre under belly
of the crime. Saga of Lies manipulation, secret identities, and
secret agencies that I, for one, could never have imagined.
(04:32):
At the beginning of last week's episode, the first part
of this story, I talked about how the Internet has
complicated our communication. I want to mention this quickly here
again at the top of part two, because it's fundamental
to our story. Technology makes communication both easier and harder,
(04:56):
but communication in a small circle implicates it even more.
I think that's partly because there's no one to check against,
there's no control group, there's no touchstone for normalcy. So
if you're about to fly off the rails, you can't
look back and see that no one else is going
(05:16):
there with you. Plus, if you get the right group together,
or rather the wrong group, they can feed into each
other's bullshit and build it up into something it's not,
and it takes almost no time at all, you know,
like on a reality show, one of those shows where
they get a bunch of strong personalities together and before
(05:39):
the end of the first week, two of them are
fistfighting over one eating the other's peanut butter. Just keep
that in mind as we return to our story. Last
time we were in Mountains City, Tennessee. It was February sixth,
(06:03):
twenty twelve, and a man named Jamie Kurd had just
confessed to assisting in the brutal murders of young mother
Billy Jean Hayworth and her boyfriend Bill Payne, who also
happened to be Jamie's cousin. But police didn't see Jamie
as the real catch. He confessed to committing this double
(06:26):
homicide with Buddy Potter, the father of his secret girlfriend,
Janelle Potter. Jamie said he and Buddy killed Billy, Jean
and Bill to protect Janelle, who you'll remember from the
first part of this story, was in the midst of
a vicious feud with the young couple, but Jamie insisted
(06:51):
Buddy was the one with the plan. Buddy was the
one shooting the bullets and looking at quiet nervous Jamie.
Police believed that, so investigators tried to set up a
little sting. The police had Jamie call Buddy and ask
(07:13):
him did you get rid of all the stuff from Bills,
and Buddy replied, uh huh, and that was enough for
them to arrest Buddy in the early hours of February seventh,
twenty twelve. They hauled him down to the station and
(07:33):
started their questioning. Buddy repeated what the Potter family had
said to police already as a reminder. That's Buddy, his wife, Barbara,
and Janelle. He reiterated his family did have issues with
the murdered couple, but they didn't know anything about their deaths.
(07:59):
The police took out a tape and played it for him. Hello, oh, high.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
And nightie around.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Yeah, you have a life pactor.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Yeah, yeah, you got rid of every signy. Okay, I'm
making go up there.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
The police had recorded Jamie's call to Buddy Potter. That's
a real snippet of the tape. It's from a TV
docu drama called Too Pretty to Live, based on a
book by Dennis Brooks of the same name. You just
heard Bill admitting to getting rid of the stuff from Bill's.
(08:51):
When Buddy heard that tape in the interrogation room, his
face went white. He lost his cocky confidence. For several minutes,
he sat there looking stunned. He muttered that he must
have misheard what Jamie said. Police exchanged glances. He might
(09:14):
not be cracking yet, but this was good. They would
get there. It took time, It took prodding and a
lot of different angles, it took more than it had
taken with Jamie. But when the detective suggested the only
(09:34):
reason you did it was because you were scared for
your family and you love your family, Buddy said yes.
And then he said more.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
When you hear people for lt to catch your daughter
murder her, they wanted to rape her because she's a
bird in Yeah, you gotta know what the chefs would you.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Again, that's a real clip from the station that day.
Again from Too Pretty to Live, Buddy says one more
important thing. After that, he says, the victims head quote
put a three thousand dollars bounty on Janelle's head, on
my wife and me, all of that. That is why
(10:31):
he did it. So let's take a beat here. What
is happening. I mean, police were looking for a confession
that Buddy committed the murders, and they were getting that,
so that's great. But Buddy was saying that he did
(10:52):
it because Billy Jean Hayworth and Bill Payne wanted to
rape and murder Janelle and had put a bounty on
his whole family. That just doesn't add up. Billy, Jean
and Bill might have had their differences with Janelle and
(11:13):
the Potters, but they were new parents and all around
nice people, well liked in their community, with no one
else in Mountain City ever reporting any kinds of problems
with them, and even Janelle's vocal public complaints about harassment
from the couple and their friends hadn't included anything this
(11:36):
frankly terrifying. Maybe what sticks out most to me, though,
is how would Billy, Jean and Bill have access to
hit men? So police were also baffled, but they couldn't
show that to Buddy. They had to keep pushing for
(11:56):
more information here, so they asked him to call his
wife and daughter and confess his crime to them. They
said he should tell them directly. He should tell them
about what he did.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Barbara, Yeah, before you find out somebody else to hold
you know I was involved in I understand that I
didn't want you took a differing.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
No more, and didn't you think about it more?
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Said my hear sigh.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Once again, that's taped from the real call from the
Too Pretty to Live movie, and it's an odd phone call.
Janelle hops on the line too, but neither she nor
Barbara really sounded shocked or upset. Instead, they offered Buddy alibis.
(12:58):
They both insisted it's not possible that he did it.
He was home with them. Maybe that's what Buddy needed
to hear in order to shut up, because when he
got off the phone, he asked for a lawyer. The
interrogation was officially over. Still, it was a valuable call
(13:23):
for the cops because after hearing Barbara and Janelle's reactions
for the first time, the investigators were starting to wonder
if they were involved too. I mean, think about it,
Maybe you would provide an alibi to a loved one
that had committed a horrible crime. I don't know, it's
(13:45):
a human response, I guess, to save someone you love.
It's hard to imagine what I do in a situation
like this, but if I had to guess, yeah, I'd
be pretty shocked that anyone I loved would do something
like that. And I can also see myself potentially thinking, well,
what was their reason and being open to hearing them out.
(14:07):
I'm not just anyone. I'm talking about like a core
four loved ones tops who I'd give the benefit of
the doubt. But I definitely can't see myself having no
reaction if you had no idea about the crime. And
we're hearing it for the first time, wouldn't you express
shock and horror at what was happening first before you
(14:30):
started throwing out alibis. Barbara and Janelle didn't, which made
police think that they already knew they might have two
culprits in custody, Jamie Kurd and Buddy Potter, but maybe
they should be looking for more. So the police searched
(14:55):
the Potter home and Buddy's truck. The Potter home and
Officer Woodward was sitting in the living room logging evidence
descriptions into a notebook as other officers brought him item
after item, notebooks stacks of paper. Sitting across from him
(15:17):
was Barbara Potter, and then she was standing next to him,
reaching down to the stack of papers at his left
and ripping them up. Woodward looked up at her, incredulous
and asked slowly, what have you got there? Barbara didn't
(15:40):
say anything, She just handed back the stack. Some of
the papers were torn now, but Woodward could see clearly
what they were. Photographs printed out on a home computer
of Billy Jean Hayward and her friends like Lindsay Thomas
(16:02):
in bikinis and sexy Halloween costumes, very normal, cute photos,
the kind anyone would have posted on Facebook, but scrawled
underneath them were captions like Billy whore and Panface. Pan
Face was the same name the so called Matt Potter
(16:24):
had used in his horrible angry Topics posts, the ones
that started the whole feud between the Potters, Billy Jean
and her friends. So another link between the Potter family
and these posts. Another link showing just how much the
(16:44):
Potter family hated Billy Jean, like who does that? Printing
out photos of girls from Facebook and writing cruel names
underneath It was the behavior of an angry child, But
there were no children in this house, only thirty year
(17:05):
old Janelle in her middle aged parents. Back at Buddy's truck,
police made an even bigger discovery. There were the bullets.
(17:27):
They were the same kind of bullets used in the murders,
but they also matched in a more specific way. They
had little markings on top, almost like someone was doodling
on them with a carving knife that matched the bullets
(17:49):
used in the murder too, So bingo more evidence that
Buddy did shoot the gun. But that's not even the
biggest piece of evidence. They found in his truck and literally,
I mean physically huge. In the back of the truck
(18:10):
there were three garbage bags full of shredded paper like
ready to burst open. Police immediately asked an agent at
the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to put these documents back together.
Special Agent Miranda gaddis the woman the saint, the one
(18:31):
I mentioned back near the beginning of this episode. This
is the fun part of looking back in time because
we get to skip over the grueling, weeks long puzzle
work Miranda had to do to get her results, and
the results she got were very strange. The papers turned
(18:53):
out to be printouts of emails emails between Barbara Potter
and someone signing off as Chris. Chris, remember Chris from
the last episode, who may or may not be associated
(19:17):
with the CIA, the one Jamie Kurr mentioned in his interrogation.
These printouts, as well as the digital files police obtained
from both the Potter family and Jamie Kirr's email accounts,
suddenly revealed a lot more about who Chris was, about
(19:41):
his association with the CIA, and about what exactly he
had to do with the double murder of Billy Jean Hayworth.
And Bill Payne. I want to go on a bit
(20:17):
of a journey with you. Here into the massive archive
of emails from Chris. In addition to those printouts, police
also get warrants for digital files and end up with
more emails, Facebook messages between Chris and Barbara, and texts
(20:38):
between Chris and Jamie. No messages between Janelle and Chris,
though Buddy didn't use email or any other digital communication,
so no messages between him and Chris either, But mentions
(21:00):
in the messages between Barbara and Chris, plus all those
shredded print outs and Buddy's car show that Barbara passed
the messages on to her husband. He was up to
date on the conversations. And let me tell you, they
are a trip. They span about a year, starting in
(21:24):
late twenty ten, right around the time that Billy Jean
Hayworth got pregnant and moved in with Bill Payne, and
they continue right up until the time of Bill and
Billy Jean's murders. Chris introduces himself as a CIA operative
(21:44):
from the same area of Pennsylvania the Potters moved from.
He was actually born in the same hospital on the
same day as Janelle and attended school with her. But
in twenty ten, Chris is getting in touch with the
(22:04):
Potters in a professional capacity because he has been following
events in Mountain City and sees that Janelle is in
danger from people like Billy Jean Hayworth, Bill Payne, and
Lindsay Thomas. These people are scary and dangerous. They are
(22:24):
tied up in serious drug dealing, and they hate Janelle.
In fact, they have violent intentions towards her. He knows
what they say about her behind closed doors. They want
to rape her, they want to murder her. Eventually, Chris
(22:50):
tells them that Mountain Cities local drug dealing gangsters have
put a bounty on the heads of all the Potters.
But Chris knows that Janelle is a sweet, good person.
These people are after her because of that, and because
she is so pretty prettier than them. Chris is here
(23:16):
to protect her. That's why he keeps the Potters and
Jamie updated on what's happening at the pain residence. That's
why he writes posts as Matt Potter on Topics defending Janelle.
That's why he wants to kill all Janelle's enemies before
(23:38):
they kill her. No wonder the Potters were so scared.
Chris also tells both Jamie and Barbara that Jamie is
a victim of the gang's hatred as well. He's in
it too. That seems to be why in the spring
(24:00):
of twenty eleven, when Jamie's mom died, the Potter parents
decided to reach out to him, and they invited him
into their home as a family friend. Although Janelle and
Jamie still keep their romantic relationship a secret, now they
(24:20):
can see each other much more frequently. So that's the
content of these messages. Pretty terrifying stuff. But I need
to read some of them aloud for you guys. I'm
not going to preface it before I read this time.
But remember Chris says that he's the one writing the
(24:45):
Matt Potter posts, and if you remember those from the
last episode, well this should sound familiar. May twenty eleven,
Lindsey will back off fast and stop things. But that's
(25:08):
if I let her live. I choose that for her
boyfriend and Bill and Billy and that damn baby, I
will see when I want to kill them. Then I'm
getting some of the cops. No one would ever miss them.
I'm going up to Bulldog Road now and I'm also
(25:28):
going to run into horrorpans slept face ugly as a
mudface bitch and her fucker of a BF. I'm getting
on where they are going and what they do, and
getting a lot of sense about what they do daily.
So I have been on them. They are calling from bills,
go to a payphone and say something. They are playing games,
(25:54):
so me, Chris, government agent, give by the FEDS with
guns and as he tells Barbara and Jamie, licensed to kill.
And yet his grammar is terrible, he can't spell. He
sounds less like a government employee and more like, I
(26:16):
honestly don't know, like maybe a very angry teenager. But
somehow Jamie and Barbara seem to buy into this. And
this gets back to that initial sort of paranoia and
suspicion that was a part of Barbara all the time,
(26:37):
that expectation that people were out to get her and
her family, and that disliking someone translated into wanting to
harm them. Jamie, meanwhile, I wonder if maybe he was
so desperate to get closer to Janelle, and Chris kind
of brought them closer, not just by getting Barbara to
(26:59):
warm up to him him, but also by giving them
this common enemy and something to talk about. Janelle talked
to Jamie about Chris a lot. He was like a
brother to her, she told him. Meanwhile, investigators honed in
on some other factors here. First, this so called CIA
(27:25):
agent was so interested in Janelle. In fact, she seemed
like his main interest. He was constantly tracking her enemies
and he couldn't stop praising her. Second, while Janelle's language
was a lot less violent, she never cursed. Even Chris's
(27:47):
writing style, including consistent spelling quirks, matched hers very closely.
A linguist forensics expert confirmed this. Third, all Chris's emails
came from the Potter family IP address, and they all
came from Janelle's accounts. Let me repeat that every single
(28:13):
message Chris sends, whether it was an email, a text,
or a Facebook message, came from Janelle's accounts or phone number.
The explanation for this was that Chris was hacking into
Janelle's accounts to communicate, because of course, as a CIA agent,
(28:35):
you could do things like that, and in fact had
to do things like that to keep a low profile.
This explanation is so absurd that it would be funny
if two people hadn't been murdered. And then there's the
fact that, as twenty eleven wears on and Jamie and
the Potter parents get more paranoid about the gang that
(28:58):
was out to kill them, Chris keeps upping the ante
and stoking their fear, but he never actually materializes to
quote unquote get rid of their enemies. No one has
ever actually seen Chris in real life.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
Ever.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
None of this seems to raise Barbara, Jamie, or Buddy's suspicions,
but it does prompt Barbara to start pushing for something.
She wants Chris to get Buddy a CIA badge so
he has license to kill like Chris apparently has. She
sends messages like this one and another heads up. She
(29:42):
has her own unhinged writing style quote, Bud is so
mad and I'm one hundred percent behind whatever happens. You
guys meet when you are ready, Chris. Maybe Bud will
have ID by then and can use CIA go et
cetera for his protection. Get the jobs done. You know,
(30:06):
they all need to go, and the ones left need
to be given a big scare as they watch and
wonder am I next? In late November twenty eleven, Barbara
also sends this message to Jamie. By the way, if
you talk slash text with Chris, ask him if he
(30:30):
thinks the CIA will back up Buddy if he takes
it into his own hands. He is worried he will
get locked up for doing nothing or you know what
a worry. They are trying to kill Janelle little by little.
It seems that they are going to keep going after
(30:50):
all of us until we're dead slash gone not right,
and the cops are behind them per Chris. By the
end of twenty eleven, Barbara and Buddy no longer expect
Chris to kill their enemies for them.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
That much.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
They've come to terms with, so they are ready to
take things into their own hands and kill Bill Payne
and Billy Jean Hayworth themselves, hopefully with the approval of
the CIA, all because of the hatred Chris had been
spewing at them for the past year. Now, I should
(31:33):
point out, in case you had any doubts, there's no
evidence that anything Chris said was true regarding gangs, bounties,
or violent plans to hurt the Potter family. In fact,
there's evidence that a lot of the things Chris was
saying were untrue. He created this terrifying danger out of nothing.
(31:56):
He created the hatred and effect caused the murders for
no reason. Barbara contributed by spreading the hate, by believing
in it without a second thought, and by helping plan
the murder. Buddy and Jamie actually committed the crime, but
(32:22):
none of it would have happened without Chris, his lies
and the hatred He had planned it in the fertile
soil of the Potter Home. Investigators and eventually Dennis Brooks,
the Tennessee prosecutor tasked with litigating the case, were convinced
of that, and after looking at the mountains of evidence,
(32:42):
they were convinced that they knew exactly who Chris really was.
(33:03):
Chris gave Barbara and Jamie his full name a few times.
Chris Jaden spelled with a T that's tjad n. He
also attached photos of himself to some of his messages,
lots in law enforcement uniforms, wanted a Phillies game. Always
a handsome young man, Investigators were startled to find that
(33:28):
he was, in fact a real person, had actually gone
to school with Janelle back in Pennsylvania. Now he lived
in Delaware, where he did work in law enforcement. Are
you as confounded as I was when I heard this information?
(33:49):
Then the police contacted him, Chris sounded genuinely surprised to
get the call, really shocked at questions about Mountain City, Tennessee,
the CIA, and Janelle. He didn't know anything about Mountain City,
much less anyone who lived there. He worked in law enforcement, yes,
(34:12):
but as a constable at a local hospital, not for
Central Intelligence. He did remember Janelle, although he didn't really
know her. They'd gone to high school together. She had
acted like she had a crush on him, and he
had tried to be nice to her, but he never
gave it much thought. He was handsome and popular, she
(34:36):
was a little odd. After graduation, he never thought about
her ever again, not once until now. Obviously. Those photos
of him, some of them were profile pictures from his Facebook,
accessible to the public, including people he wasn't friends with
(34:59):
on the platform, like Janelle. Some of them weren't actually him.
They were photos of very similar looking guys. He pointed
out a picture of a man in a uniform one
officers had assumed was him. The likeness was so good,
(35:20):
but Chris said he'd never warned that kind of uniform
maybe the photos of him available on the internet weren't
enough for whoever had stolen his identity, as Dennis Brooks
points out, and too pretty to live. Who knows how
long the real culprit spent scraping through the Internet looking
(35:42):
for photos of men who were a match. Because whoever
these investigators from Tennessee were looking for, they believed Chris Jaden.
It wasn't him. It was And I think you've probably
come to the same conclusion as the cop at this point,
Janelle all along, sitting up on that computer that had
(36:08):
been her lifeline for so long. It was Janelle posing
as Chris, turning him into a creature of her own, making,
someone obsessed with her safety and her enemies, someone who
would kill for her, someone who would get the real
(36:28):
people in her life to kill for her. It's a
really hard thing to wrap your head around, or at
least it was hard for me. I get jealousy, which
it seems pretty clear Janelle felt towards Billy Jean and
by extension, her friends. I get rejection, poisoning what was
(36:53):
once a crush for Bill. I even get trash talking
all of these people. But Janelle did some thing so
much more extreme. I mean, she catfished her parents and
her boyfriend, and she manipulated them into committing murder. I
keep thinking about that auditory disorder she had. I wonder
(37:17):
if maybe she misunderstood some of her social interactions with
the mountain city locals. And I know how it feels
in those small towns. I said it at the top
of the last episode for our reason. Those are the
kinds of places where everyone will do anything for the
people they know and love, but they can be hard
on outsiders. Maybe Janelle did get made fun of or
(37:44):
feel left out, and that stings. Maybe for Janelle, because
of her disorder, it did more than just sting. But
the fact of the matter is, whatever she thought she heard,
she went on to make up blatant lies, and no
matter how mean a comment might be murder in response.
(38:06):
That's obviously not okay, that's obviously wrong. We may never
totally understand what went on in Janelle's head. She's never
admitted to her role in these crimes, not to being
Chris or any of it. But Dennis Brooks and his
team got her convicted. They got Barbara convicted, they got
(38:28):
Buddy convicted, all on two counts. Of first degree murder
and conspiracy to commit murder, all sentenced to life in prison.
All three of them have appealed their convictions. Janelle and
Buddies were upheld in court. Barbara was eventually granted a
(38:50):
new trial on the grounds that her original attorney presented
a conflict of interest because he had previously represented Buddy,
But the case actually made it back to trial. Barbara
pled guilty to two counts of facilitating first degree murder
in exchange for a reduced sentence twenty five years. For
(39:11):
the first time ever, she admitted some amount of guilt
at least, even if we're still waiting on Janelle. Jamie
Kurd cooperated with the prosecution from the start, not only
admitting guilt but doing extensive interviews with the prosecution. So
during the original trial he received the same plea deal
(39:32):
that Barbara eventually got from the get go, twenty five
years in prison for two counts of facilitating first degree murder.
None of it brings back the parents of that baby.
He's going to spend his whole life without the parents
who loved him, who would have cherished him and supported him.
(39:56):
Nothing can change that. But has been served, and that's
in no small part thanks to the tenacity of Dennis
Brooks and navigating the wild ins and outs of this
crazy case. His book Too Pretty to Live breaks down
his account of the madness, and I'm lucky enough to
(40:17):
have spoken to him about the case myself that's coming
up after the break Stay with us, Dennis. It is
(40:50):
so nice to meet you, and thank you so much
for coming to talk to me. I just wanted to
jump right in and ask, because this is so compelling
to me, talk a little more about the part of
family dynamics, because I just feel like there have to
have been some conditions that made Janelle into the kind
of person who would do what she did, and then
(41:10):
there were probably some things that made her parents into
the kind of people who would respond to what she
did with murder.
Speaker 1 (41:17):
My conclusion was they had all sort of victimized one another.
That Janelle grew up with some disabilities. I think she
was in special education. I had a high school diploma
that was specially had related. She wasn't totally unable to
do things, but she had some limitations, some challenges, and
(41:42):
I took it from her history and from talking to
her older sister, Christie, who did not have those types
of limitations that she had. Janelle had led a sheltered
upbringing even into adulthood, staying there at the family's home,
being cared for as a child, still even into her
(42:03):
late twenties, and not really having the ability or the
freedom to grow and spread her own wings. And I
think that manifested itself in a loneliness that was natural
for her, and she took that in directions that were unhealthy.
Now likewise, her ability to manipulate her parents and get
(42:28):
them to believe things that weren't necessarily true, you know,
she victimized them in turn. And I think it's just
sort of a perfect storm of a sort of dysfunction
that breeds something that's unimaginably horrible for people who were
(42:48):
probably totally unsuspecting of what was going on.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
So, as we are moving into, like deeper into the
Internet age, are there any other cases that remind you
of this woman?
Speaker 1 (43:02):
You know, the Potter family, they committed one of the
worst things that's ever happened in our four county district.
And it's it's it's it's surprising. You know, it's not typical.
I don't think it's typical here or probably anywhere else.
But obviously the Internet plays its way into cases now
where it didn't before. Our murder files are now voluminous
(43:24):
because we're getting phone dumps, phone extraction reports and uh
Facebook messenger search warrant returns, and you know, they're a
whole lot more convoluted, and you've got a whole lot
more information, and you know, sometimes a lot of that
electronic communications become really imperative in your cases.
Speaker 2 (43:45):
Does the advance in technology make the justice system better
or worse? Or is it easier or harder?
Speaker 1 (43:55):
What do you think? Well, you have the limitations of time.
You've only got so much time in today to be
able to to devote to a case. And you know,
the Potter case was pretty much my work life for
a significant amount of time, which means all those aggravated
burglaries and rapes and DUI's that were also on my
(44:15):
docket didn't get my attention as much. And that's that's
a cost people don't understand. When it's a complicated case,
then that becomes the only thing you've got to do
because when when you walk in there in front of
the jury, you've got to present the case, which means
not only just I'm going to give them information, but
(44:36):
I've got to call out the information that they need
to hear. You know, the Potter Case, we put in
two hundred and six pages. I still remember two hundred
and six pages of emails total, but that wasn't even
ten percent of what I had to go through, and
I had to go through them over and over and
over and keep calling them out. When I wrote the book,
I had to do the same thing, because you know,
(44:57):
I felt like I had to show the insanity to
the reader.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
What does your workday look like when you're doing something
like that.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
Typically I'll go in early to work and I've got
two or three things I really want to accomplish. I'm
lucky if i can get half of one of them accomplished,
because I'm always interrupted by victims calling in, or you know,
somebody on the staff asking questions about something, or officers
having search warrants for me to look at, and so
(45:27):
it's really hard to focus on something that is convoluted
and complex. And I remember on the on the Potter Case,
I would actually take my laptop and go over to
the local park and just sit out there without my
phone for hours, where I could concentrate on it. There
was one time me and my wife went to Las
(45:48):
Vegas and during the four hour flight out there, I
had my laptop out reading Janelle's emails and categorizing them
because you know, I'm not being bothered then. But you
can only devote so much time like that to so
many cases at one time in your in your career.
You can't do that with all of them doing that.
Speaker 2 (46:08):
So I guess, I mean, this is the book, So
this is one of the big two or three of
your career. So how do you celebrate when you get
a big victory like that?
Speaker 1 (46:17):
You just hug the families who are involved and you
go on. For me, I started writing a book because
it was the day after the verdict, and you know,
I took the day off and the case just wouldn't
shut off.
Speaker 3 (46:33):
In my head.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
I'm sitting there thinking, you know, somebody's going to write
a book about this, so I wonder if I could.
And I just opened up a computer and I started.
I wrote a whole chapter in a flash, it seemed like.
And I looked back at it, I thought, yeah, I
had sounds pretty good for me, I thought, and uh,
(46:55):
I just kept going and it was it was a
way to release the case from my brain.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Oh absolutely, what are the biggest lessons that you've carried
with you from this case or from writing about the case.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
One motivation I had for writing the book was that
hopefully someone out there who was a criminal investigator and
aspiring criminal investigator and aspiring or current prosecutor could have
a story where they see, you know, the sausage being
made on something that's that's complicated and important and and
(47:35):
maybe inspire them to go that extra length to pursue justice.
You know, it's it's real simple to prosecute some people,
but other people are also culpable, and but it's going
to take a little more work. And you know, you
hope that, you know, if it was your family member
(47:57):
that was affected, that as a victim, that someone would
take enough interest to go the extra mile and get
this done. And I thought this was a good example
of it having happened, you know, by co counsel Matt
Rourke and the TBI agent Scott lot Johnson Kinny Sheriff's Departments,
(48:21):
Joe Woodard. We we'd worked as a team on it
and put it together. And you know, one of my
favorite things about writing the book was I actually explained
how you know, and trying to prove Janelle and Barbara
were writing what they were writing doctor Lennard, who was
the forensic linguistic expert from Hofstra University. This was a
(48:43):
fun story. He's way up in New York and he
sounds like a Yankee. He doesn't sound like anything like us,
you know. But I'd found him on a Google search
on one of those nights where I'm like, how do
I prove that Janelle was writing? This is Chris And
I found him and I sent an email to him.
I didn't figure he would answer, but like the next
(49:04):
day he responds and he's like, yes, this is exactly
the kind of case I work on. And I send
him all our stuff and he's telling me, you know what,
we really need the gold standard for what I do.
I need a known sample that they write by typing it.
And you know, we had a lot of known handwriting samples.
(49:26):
You know, we had people to identify their handwriting as
being theirs. But he said, you know, there can be
some nuances in how they write handwriting versus how they
write on a computer. So you know where our question
samples are. Emails where they've typed on a computer. We
really need known samples that are typed on a computer.
(49:46):
And I positive that problem to Investigator Ward over at
Johnson K Sheriff's Department. I'm like, you know, we've got
this problem. He says, we need that, and he says, well,
it's funny. They've been coming around Janelle and Barbara wanting
to make complaints about all these people trashing their house
and vandalizing the property. I said, well that there you go.
(50:08):
Bring them in there to your office, put them at
the computer, tell them you want them to write everything
they can so that you can look into this. So
he's he's doing that one evening and he's texting to me.
You know, I'm two counties away and he's telling me
all they're there at the computer. I'm like, oh, it's great,
and we're like scheming here, and they finally get done.
He sends me the in the email what they had typed,
(50:31):
and then I afforded to uh doctor Leonard up at
Hofstra And by the end of the night, doctor Leonard
is examining their known writing samples. And you know, they
had no idea that we were doing that to them.
That was a good team exercise to get one piece
of the of the case, and it was an important
(50:52):
piece because that really helped our known samples when we
analyzed it against.
Speaker 2 (50:58):
The question was, Yeah, I love to hear about that teamwork.
I feel like we don't get to hear about that
a lot. So love it when it works out like that.
And that's so cool too that they were like, we
have a complaint and they're like, by all means, please,
I God, I love that. Okay, So I have one
more question. What do you hope people take away from this?
(51:19):
And what's the biggest takeaway for you? Like, what's the
most important thing?
Speaker 3 (51:22):
You know?
Speaker 1 (51:23):
And you see it when you watch the Catfish TV
show on MTV. You know, they keep showing and there's
no telling how many people are out there in America,
in the whole world that are getting duped online by
people that are pretending to be someone they're not. And
you know, I think people are, especially if you're more
(51:44):
of a lonely type person, you're very susceptible to being
induced to an emotional relationship with someone and having that exploited.
And you see that on those TV shows such as
that here in this case too, you know sometimes they're
just getting exploited of the their emotions, their love, their money.
(52:07):
But here there's actually two people that died as a
result of that kind of thing, and so it's something
that people need to.
Speaker 3 (52:18):
Be aware of.
Speaker 2 (52:26):
That's a great note to end on, and thank you
so much for talking to me. I loved every second
of it. Really grateful to have had this opportunity with you,
so thank you. Join me next week on the Greatest
(53:03):
true crime Stories Ever told for an episode on a
woman who played a crucial role in taking down one
of the biggest mob bosses in New York City, Lucky Luciano.
I'm talking about one of our first female African American
lawyers and prosecutors in the United States, Unice Hunting Carter.
(53:27):
I'd also like to shout out a few key sources
that made it possible for me to tell this story.
First of all, Dennis Brook's Too Pretty to Live the
Catfishing Murders of East Tennessee. You've heard me site from
it over the course of these past two episodes, and
now you've heard from the author Dennis Brooks as well,
but read it for yourself for even more detail. I
also want to shout out the court documents from the case,
(53:49):
which are available online and very informative. For information about
this case and others we cover on the show, visit
diversion Audio dot com. Sign up for Diversion's newsletter and
be 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
(54:11):
other exclusive tidbits you can't get anywhere else. That's Diversion
Audio dot Com to sign up for the newsletter. The
Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of
Diversion Audio. Your host is me Mary Kay mcbraer. This
episode was written by our editorial director, Nora Battel. Our
(54:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (55:01):
Diversion Audio
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. Clay Travis and Buck Sexton tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and current events with intelligence and humor. From the border crisis, to the madness of cancel culture and far-left missteps, Clay and Buck guide listeners through the latest headlines and hot topics with fun and entertaining conversations and opinions.