188. The Catfish Killer 47:13

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Download Arnott today spelled E-A-R-N-I-N in the Google Play or Apple App Store. When you download the Arnott app, type in murder with my husband under podcast. When you sign up, it'll really just help the show. It lets them know we sent you again. Type in murder with my husband under podcast.

Earnin is a financial technology company, not a bank. Subject to your available earnings, daily max, pay period max, and location. See earnin.com slash TOS for details. Bank products are issued by Evolve Bank & Trust, member FDIC. It's that time of the year. Your vacation is coming up. You can already hear the beach waves, feel the warm breeze, relax, and think about...

Work. You really, really want it all to work out while you're away. Monday.com gives you and the team that peace of mind. When all work is on one platform and everyone's in sync, things just flow. Wherever you are, tap the banner to go to Monday.com. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to our podcast. This is Murder With My Husband. I'm Peyton Moreland. And I'm Garrett Moreland. And he's the husband. I'm the husband. Hello, everyone. We hope you had a perfect Halloween.

I hope everyone has the hauntiest, spookiest, creepiest Halloween ever. And if you're watching on YouTube, Peyton and I are matching. Yeah. Couple updates. I dyed my hair. I'm slowly becoming Morticia Adams over here.

And that's the goal. Garrett keeps waiting for me to go back blonde and I keep coming back with darker hair. This is true. I think now I need to reverse psychology this a little bit and tell her that I love her dark hair. And then we'll slowly get a transition back into a blonde. And we've had our live show on that note.

Well, we're recording this a couple of days before our live show. But when you're listening to this, we've done the live show and it went amazing. Thank you to everyone who came. We'll probably have more to say about it next week since we haven't done it yet. But thank you to everyone who came and supported us. And.

If you are a subscriber on Apple or Patreon, we are going to release the video and audio for the live show. And hopefully we do another one soon. Maybe we're talking about this right now. Maybe it went really bad and we'll never do it again. Yep. I guess you never know. All right, everyone. Good old 10 seconds. Big update. I'm okay. I mean, not surgery. Had a procedure.

um for for anyone who wants to know it was a colonoscopy for anyone doesn't want to know sorry too late yeah i went good um went in there did my thing came out strong feeling good looks like everything was good got a healthy colon i also get so high when they give me those drugs like i was on a

Not even on a kite. I was in space, just on a different dimension. We were driving back. He was being kind of quiet. Next thing I know, he's rolling the window down. He puts both hands out the window, starts flipping off, double bird, out the window. I say, what are you doing? He says, this is for all the haters. I said, haters where? We're literally driving down the road. There's no one outside.

haters wear he says all the world and what's crazy is i don't remember any of this nothing i don't remember any of this first thing i remember is i woke up and there was a sandwich in front of me and i was eating the sandwich like i just don't remember any of this so i don't know what they're giving me they might be slipping an extra couple drops of whatever's in there because i was gone but i'm healthy i'm feeling good stomach's a little strange here and there

But thanks everyone who cared about me, wanted an update, and I'm still on murder with my husband. You know, if I wasn't on murder with my husband, we'd have to change it to murder with my, there'd be no husband. It'd be no H. I don't know.

All right, let's hop into today's case. All right, our episode sources are Too Pretty to Live, The Catfishing Murders of East Tennessee by Dennis Brooks, The Midas Crime Files.com, WJHL News, ABC News, News 24, OriginalNewsBreak.com, Court Transcripts from the Court of Criminal Appeals of Tennessee, Oxygen.com, and Medium.com. So I think it's fair to say that there's a part of our job that's kind of crappy, and it's having to navigate the more critical comments in the comment section or...

in our DMs, like no matter how loving or not loving some of the feedback is, you can't help but take it a little personally. And I don't think you need to have a podcast to relate to this because social media has become a major part of everyone's lives. Some of us spend more time existing in the online space than we do interacting in the real world.

Which means once you look away from that device, the things that happened online don't just go away. They can stay with you. They can torment you. And they can make you act a certain way in the real world. So today's story is a cautionary tale.

One that proves what happens on the internet doesn't necessarily stay on the internet. Okay. And if you aren't careful, actions in the online world can have major consequences in our day-to-day lives. Short note, screw all the haters. All the haters in the world. So today we're traveling to a tiny town nestled in the mountains of Tennessee, close to the borders of both North Carolina and Virginia. Okay.

Fittingly, it's called Mountain City. Home to about 2,500 people with its cute little main street, Mountain City would be the perfect setting for some fall hallmark movie. It's the kind of place where most people are guided by their Christian faith, where outsiders are welcomed with open arms, where everyone looks out for everyone. Mountain City has good etiquette, but it's also slow-paced.

Not a lot happens in Mountain City unless you make it happen. But that's what Bill Payne liked about the small Tennessee town. Bill was born in 1975 in North Carolina, but after his parents had his younger sister Tracy, they moved the family to Mountain City, Tennessee.

If Bill ever had big dreams for himself, he never set out to pursue them. As he grew older, he was fine with the idea of getting a routine job at the textile factory in town, making an honest living just getting by. So once he graduated high school, Bill joined the factory ranks, working hard during the day and partying well into the night.

Bill was known around town as being a charmer with the ladies. He was often caught flirting up the occasional out-of-towner in one of the local bars. But it wasn't just alcohol and women that Bill took an interest in. He also dabbled with and exchanged various painkillers amongst friends. Okay.

But Bill knew that abusing prescription drugs was not the direction he wanted his life to go. After reaching his 30s, Bill sought treatment for his opioid usage and got a prescription for a drug that is designed to curb someone's addiction to other drugs. Which seems kind of ironic. Then in 2009, Bill met someone who would really inspire him to stay on the right track in his life.

a new employee at the factory he worked, a woman 13 years his junior, named Billie Jean Hayworth.

A work romance blossomed between the 34-year-old Bill and 21-year-old Billie Jean. They bonded over their love of yard sales, antiques, and flea markets. Before long, Bill was telling his friends that he was head over heels in love with Billie. Which is kind of cute, Bill and Billie. So he also told friends that despite his flirtatious past, she was the one he wanted to spend forever with.

The couple got serious quickly, and before long, Billie Jean was moving into Bill's house, which he still shared with his father, Bill Sr. Okay, so we now have three Bill-billies. We have Bill Sr., we have Bill, and we have Billie Jean, the girlfriend, the young girlfriend. We've got a lot of Billies going on here right now. Well, Bill Sr. was known around town as Pa Bill, so we'll call him Pa Bill. All right.

Then in 2011, the couple welcomed a child into their lives, a boy named... Garrett. Bill. Bill? Tyler. You're so dumb. His name's Tyler. Okay. Around that time, Bill proposed to Billie Jean, and for the most part, fatherhood looked good on Bill. He had stopped drinking to excess, partied less, and focused his time and energy on his new little family.

But money was tight for the young couple who were eager to get out from under Pa Bill's roof.

On a small scale, they supposedly sold some of Bill's prescription drug that he got to get off other drugs, as well as other painkillers to friends in the area. And most of that money went to buying baby Tyler's supplies. But Bill and Billie Jean were always careful. They never wanted to do anything that could jeopardize their future or their son's future. So they're like, we need a little money to move out of dad's house. So we're just going to sell some drugs on the side, some painkillers.

But nothing crazy. Okay, whatever that means.

Although come January 2012, the couple found themselves in a completely unexpected situation. On January 31st, sometime before 6 a.m., Pa Bill got up early to drive to his job in Boone, Tennessee, about an hour away. He said good morning to Billie Jean, his daughter-in-law, who was already awake warming a bottle for the seven-month-old Tyler. Then he took off for work.

At around 6.30 a.m., Bill Jr.'s friend Brad showed up at the house to pick up Bill for work, like usual. Brad honked the horn and waited in the car for a few minutes, noticing the light in the couple's bedroom was on. They had to be awake and home. I mean, he's picking up Bill for work. So when Bill didn't come out, his friend Brad got out of his car and went around to the side sliding glass door, which the family typically left unlocked.

He let himself in, called around for Bill, but didn't get an answer. Brad went over to their landline and called Bill's cell phone to see if maybe he'd gone out that morning. But Brad didn't get an answer. After a few minutes and no sign of Bill or Billie Jean, Brad got back into his car and drove to work without Bill. I guess he's like, okay, my friend's just not here and apparently not going to work.

Then a few hours went by. Around 10 a.m., a friend of the family's named Roy Stevens swung by the house to pick up some mail of his they'd received. Roy parked his car out front, told his wife he'd just be a minute, and left her there with the engine running. Roy, like most of the Payne's friends, knew to go around to that sliding glass door on the side of the house and let himself in.

When Roy came in, he announced himself as not to startle anyone. But like Brad, he found the house eerily silent. He expected at the very least for Billie Jean to be milling about or Tyler to be cooing or crying. Plus, the couple's car was still in the driveway. They should have been home. So Roy started scanning the house. He peered into the couple's bedroom, and that's when he noticed Bill lying on their bed.

At first, Roy figured Bill had just overslept until he got closer and saw that Bill had been shot in the head and his throat had been slashed from ear to ear. Oh my gosh. It's like, okay, Joker status. Bill Payne was obviously dead. So Roy rushed out to the car and grabbed his wife, who was a nurse, to come in and help.

She came into the home and dialed 911 from the family's landline while Roy went tearing through the house looking for Billie Jean and baby Tyler.

That's when he saw Billie Jean in their second bedroom lying on the floor. Tyler was still clutched in her arms and he was breathing. He was asleep but seemingly unharmed. Although the same couldn't be said for his mother, Billie Jean, who was holding him. She'd died from one precise gunshot through the skull. Okay. So this is really heartbreaking. The mom is dead on the floor still clutching

Baby Tyler, who's asleep. Who's asleep in her arms, not knowing any different at this point. I'm glad the baby's alive, though. I'm glad, but he probably cried himself to sleep. That's all I could think. Lost his mom, too. Roy and his dad. Yeah, and yep. So Roy didn't know what else to do but to grab baby Tyler, who seemed to have cried himself out at that point, like I said, because he hardly made a sound until the police arrived minutes later.

Now, a crime like this was unheard of in Mountain City at the time. Immediately, people started looking for an explanation behind this heinous act. A couple murdered and the baby left alive at the house. Who could be so cruel, so sadistic to kill a mother while she's holding her own child alive?

and then leave the baby at the crime scene. When those close to the couple were questioned, the only thing they could think of was the possibility that this was tied to those painkillers they had been selling on the side. Perhaps this was some sort of exchange gone bad. While detectives did find some drugs sitting on the counter in the room where Billie Jean had died, this made even less sense knowing they were left behind. If this was a drug deal gone wrong, those would have been the first things stolen from the house.

Likely along with other valuable pieces of property like their TV, their cash, their credit cards, but nothing seemed to be missing from the home. Not to mention, neither of the couple's autopsies showed drugs in their system when they died. It didn't seem like that was the cause or the motive of this crime. But there was one other name that came up when questioning friends and family. Someone in the community who was...

said to have a bit of an online feud with the now dead couple. It didn't seem like much from the outside, but it was worth at least a follow-up. Look into this, this online feud this couple has been having with this person, which was how detectives found their way to the home of 30-year-old Janelle Potter on the afternoon of February 2nd.

Janelle still lived with her parents, Barbara and Buddy, about five miles down the road from Bill and Billie Jean. On that winter afternoon, they welcomed the detectives in and explained how they knew nothing of the murders, but they did have issues with the couple and some of their friends in the past. Janelle claimed that over the last few years, they'd, quote, harassed the living crap out of her.

So she's telling detectives, yeah, that dead couple, I know nothing about how they died or the murders, but they have been harassing me online. They'd bullied her, hacked into her social media, created fake accounts using her identity, verbally accosted her in the local grocery store. They'd even come by the family's home in the middle of the night to throw rocks at it. And more than once, they had supposedly threatened Janelle's life. Okay.

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What's the reason? In 2004, they moved to Mountain City from their small Pennsylvania town. This is Janelle, who says she was harassed.

But even before that, Buddy Potter, this is Janelle's father, had quite the interesting life. He was a Marine who'd fought in the Vietnam War, and if you went to their home, he'd happily show you all of his military pictures and medals he'd received over the years. He was pretty decorated and claimed at one point he was even recruited by the CIA for a top-secret operation during the war.

But since then, Buddy had suffered a terrible back injury from a fall at work and had been on disability, which was probably why the family decided to even move to Mountain City in the first place, just to take things a little bit slower. Now, Janelle wasn't the couple's only daughter. She also had an older sister named Christy.

Over the years, Christy grew up and moved out of her parents' house, becoming somewhat estranged from the family. While Janelle was the polar opposite of her sister, she clung to her parents and happily moved with them down to Tennessee when the time came.

And Janelle was a unique young woman. From a young age, she was challenged with learning, speech, and hearing difficulties. She also lived with type 1 diabetes. On top of that, Janelle stood out physically. She was 6 feet tall, had a lanky, awkward gait, and a high-pitched voice that could be picked out of any crowd.

All of this meant she struggled socially and had a hard time making friends. And it probably didn't help her that her parents were severely overprotective of her. Janelle rarely left the house without one of them accompanying her, which was why Janelle often turned to the internet and social media to make connections. All right, so I'm just thinking back because we're in 2009 here.

um we have facebook obviously um myspace is still a thing you know what i'm saying but i feel like everything at this point is transitioning to facebook we don't have instagram at least it's not mainstream yet yeah as far as i can remember so i assume that all this is going to be done on facebook we'll get there all right it's 2009 she's living at home she's very sheltered um

Struggles socially, living a very prominent life online, just very deep in the online world. And then Janelle makes one of her first in real life friends in Mountain City where her family has moved. After frequenting the local pharmacy, Janelle gets to know the young female clerk named Tracy Greenwell. Here's the thing. Tracy Greenwell happens to be the sister of Bill Greenwell.

So Janelle becomes friends with Bill's sister. Over time, Tracy began inviting Janelle out with her friends or to parties at her brother and pa Bill's place. And that's where Janelle was probably first introduced to Bill Payne, our murder victim or one of them.

Over time, however, Janelle developed a crush on her new friend's brother, Bill. After all, he was kind of that bad boy flirt, and Janelle, despite being nearly 30, wasn't allowed to date. The forbidden fruit aspect of Bill was probably tantalizing to Janelle. Wait, this is a whole nother subject. When I say sheltered, her parents were protective. There was a reason she was living at home at 30, 30.

She couldn't date and she was 30. Yes. Yikes. Okay. And it's not like any type of religious belief or anything. It's just they're controlling her. Just controlling her. Okay.

But she's been going to these parties, she meets Bill, and she starts to develop a crush on Bill. So when she found out Bill had begun dating a girl he worked with, Janelle told Tracy that she was hurt by it. Even though Bill and her weren't dating, they had flirted a bit, and she's now hurt that Bill has a girlfriend.

But Tracy, Bill's sister, had a solution. Janelle, her friend, didn't need to be hurt by Bill. She had a cousin named Jamie Curd who was in his mid-30s and the two might be good together. So she's like, sorry, my brother got a girlfriend, but I have a cousin who you might want to meet. So Tracy introduced Janelle and Jamie and they really did seem to hit it off.

But Janelle knew her parents would never approve of him. He was a high school dropout and it wouldn't matter that he'd made the choice to take care of his sick parents. Ultimately, the Potters probably wouldn't have approved of anyone Janelle wanted to date.

So the two figured it would be best to keep their simmering romance a secret from Buddy and Barbara, Janelle's parents. Jamie, who was great with computers, would say he was coming over to make a repair and then quietly spend some alone time with Janelle. He gave her a secret cell phone so they could speak without her parents listening in on the landline. Then, after a whirlwind six-month romance, Jamie and Janelle even spoke about running away and eloping.

I was going to say, like, she's 30. Like, she can... Well, she's, like, 28 at this point, but yeah. She can do what she wants. Like, she can leave. She can go play. Like, she's an adult. Yeah.

So over time, though, Buddy and Barbara started to warm up to Jamie. After his mother died in May of 2011, Barbara invited Jamie over for dinner, which turned into most holidays spent with the Potters. So it's now 2011. They've been seeing each other for quite a while, and her parents actually warm up to him and invite him over. Do they know that they're seeing each other? Do you know? They know they're hanging out and seeing each other,

But they think he's more just a friend who would come by from time to time to reinstall their Microsoft Windows on their computer. Over and over and over again. Yes. All right. They have no idea that their daughter, Janelle, has been sending him nudes on the burner phone she was hiding in the bushes outside of their home.

Gotta do what you gotta do. So yeah, the future was starting to look up for Janelle, but she was secretly having problems in other areas of her life. On the internet, she claimed she was suddenly being harassed by Bill and his new girlfriend, Billie Jean. Janelle told her mother that Billie Jean had hacked into her Facebook page and was leaving disparaging comments on her wall. She was also stealing her profile pictures and creating fake accounts using her name to torment her.

her when barbara asked janelle why she thought billy jean would do such a thing janelle said it was jealousy she was just too pretty well over the next year this turned into an all-out feud between janelle billy jean and bill much of it was happening on facebook but also on a community forum called topics which was kind of like an older version of the next door app

And weirdly, the Topics Forum had a bunch of people who apparently heard about the bullying, and they'd taken to the boards to defend the poor, helpless Janelle. Seemingly, other people in the community said Janelle was a pretty, sweet, and nice girl who didn't deserve to be tormented online. But some of those messages left by a Matt Potter, a supposed relative of Janelle's, are rather dark and threatening. So...

On this app, people come to her defense, and one of them is Matt Potter, one of her supposed relatives. I won't go into detail, but essentially he calls Billie Jean and her two friends some pretty choice words over the course of several long-winded posts.

So it almost seems like there's several people involved who have come to Janelle's rescue on this website. But the harassment on these forms against Bill and Billie Jean got so bad that Bill actually started compiling binders worth of these hateful conversations. So essentially, they're both attacking each other online. Okay. I'm just trying to figure out. I mean, obviously something started it. So who started it?

Yeah, who started this? How did this happen? Because it just happened out of nowhere. And I mean, Janelle told her mom, well, it was jealousy. Billie Jean was jealous of Janelle. But as we know, Janelle, I think, was a little jealous of Billie Jean. Yes, because she originally liked Bill. Yes, and was hurt by their relationship. Correct.

Which is interesting, though, because, I mean, she's basically, she has a new boyfriend now, though. So what's going on? So Bill prints all of the harassing messages out, brought them to Tracy, and had her confront Janelle to get these people off his back. So he prints out the messages, brings them to his sister, and says, go talk to your friend. This needs to stop.

Except, after this, things with Janelle only seemed to escalate. When Billie Jean's friend Tara messaged Janelle to try and smooth things over, Janelle sent back an apologetic message for everything that was happening online. But then the conversations turned dark and she began spouting hate about the couple once more. From there, she continued messaging Tara over and over and over, to the point where Tara actually unfriended Janelle, but the messages didn't stop. In

Instead, they turned into constant harassing phone calls. So now Tara is getting harassed. It got so bad that Tara actually tried to file for a restraining order against Janelle in 2011, but she was denied one. When another friend of Billie Jean's named Lindsay Thomas stood up for her friend, Janelle refocused the harassment on her messaging and calling her house up to 27 times a day. Holy crap. I don't understand what this is about.

There's no reason right now to me why this is going on. So at this point, this feud has been online. Multiple people have gotten involved. Multiple people in the community know about this online feud. And...

any person who comes to the defense of Bill and Billie Jean, she starts harassing them as well. Then things started to happen face to face. That same year in 2011, Billie Jean, who'd just given birth to baby Tyler, was pumping gas when Janelle and Barbara spotted her. Remember, Barbara's her mother. They pulled up beside Billie Jean and started screaming at her about the online bullying against Janelle. They called her trash, told her she didn't deserve to be a mother before threatening her and then driving off.

But everything came to a head when a large rock bearing Bill and Billie Jean's name was found in the front yard of the Potter's home. Janelle claimed that these were outright threats from the couple targeted at the Potter household, and that's when Barbara finally called the cops and filed a report.

Afterwards, Bill and Billie Jean unfriended Janelle on Facebook and things started to quiet down slightly. It's also hard because you have to look at the early days of social media. You have to realize all this bullying, harassment. Actually, there wasn't a lot of history around it. There wasn't a lot of procedures around it, the correct way to handle all of this. We've learned over the years, right? I mean, because it's gotten so big and there's so much bullying online.

But this is the early days where like, do you take it seriously? Do not take it seriously. What do you do as law enforcement? I feel like it's kind of up in the air. And I just remember every weekend there was a new Facebook fight from someone I knew at school that I was like, did you see so-and-so fighting on Facebook? So funny. It was just so common. Sophia. I mean, I feel like I didn't run into those for some reason. Oh, all the time in my hometown. Good old days.

Small town. Yeah. It's funny. But now that the police were involved, like now the police have been called in this online feud that's now turned physical or in real life a couple times. Yeah.

That should have been the end of the online feud, except things got even stranger when the Potter family was contacted by a member of the CIA. All right. Around the time Bill and Billie Jean got engaged sometime in late 2010, early 2011, Janelle began receiving emails from an old friend. His name was Chris. Apparently the two had gone to high school together.

but now chris was working for the cia he told janelle he'd been assigned their case since he knew the potter family his job was to protect them from bill billy jean and their friends apparently they were a dangerous group of people that the cia had been keeping tabs on for some time is this real like is he actually from the cia i don't believe this and it seemed they were plotting to kill janelle so her friend chris tells her this

Additionally, Chris said he'd been tasked with getting Janelle's father, Buddy, reinstated in the CIA. Remember, he'd allegedly been recruited by them as a Marine during his time in the Vietnam War. Going everywhere. The more the family spoke with Chris, the more they were certain this was the truth. They needed to work with Chris to stop these people from endangering their daughter.

And by the way, it's not just Janelle who Chris was emailing. He had regular correspondence with her mother, Barbara, as well. And while the messages were strictly over email and Facebook, Barbara's relationship with Chris escalated. She told him nearly every detail of her life, the updates on the bullying, her marriage to Buddy. As their correspondence continued, Barbara told Chris she now thought of him like a son. Remember, Chris and her daughter Janelle went to high school together. And

And I don't know if you have this information. Does it say what the email address is that they were coming from? Do you have that in front of you? I don't have that information. Because I'm sure it's some, I don't believe this. I'm sure it's some spam email and it's not really obviously from this. CA is not going to email you. Give me a break. Nah. And neither is Facebook going to email you people out there saying you need to verify your password from an email account that says mgm.to. Okay.

It's true. So Chris opened up to Barbara as well. He told her he was a widower who had several dogs. He traveled the world working assignments for the CIA. But this assignment, protecting Janelle and the Potter family, had to be one of the most personal to him. Chris claimed he'd been making trips to the area to observe the comings and goings of Bill and Billie Jean, that they were, without a doubt, a physical threat to the Potter family. They needed to be stopped before they did something rash.

and in due time, Chris would likely need to kill Bill and Billie Jean. Not only did these messages terrify Barbara and Buddy Potter, they got them fired up. In almost all of her emails, Barbara began asking if Chris had gotten Buddy's paperwork through. She wanted to know when they could meet up for Buddy to collect his badge and his CIA-issued gun. He was prepared to help Chris with his mission no matter what it took.

Chris told her this was helpful and that Buddy would be cleared of any charges now that he was at least back in the CIA database. But he always had an excuse for why he couldn't meet up in person to hand over the badge and CIA issued gun. What a surprise.

And the exchange continued this way for months. By the end of 2011, the emails Barbara was sending to Chris seemed near delusional. She mentioned that Janelle had a black belt and was trained in Philippine killing karate, implying that she could help Chris out as well, need be. But as the mission drew closer, Chris wrote to Barbara with some unfortunate news. His superiors weren't going to allow him to participate in the hit after all.

Instead, he needed Buddy to get rid of Bill and Billie Jean alone or the CIA. And he could even bring an accomplice who would also be protected if they were ever caught. That's when they turned to Janelle's friend, her secret boyfriend, Jamie. How do you believe this? Like...

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So the night before Bill and Billie Jean's murder, Barbara invited Jamie over to the house claiming to have another issue with their computer. While Jamie was there, Buddy, the father, came in and asked if he would help him with a favor. Buddy needed Jamie to go with him the following morning to Bill Payne's house. Eager to win over Janelle's parents, Jamie didn't ask too many questions. He just simply agreed to help.

It was a little before 6 a.m. the following morning when Buddy pulled up to Jamie's house in his Ford Explorer. Jamie hopped in, they drove the three minutes to the panes and parked in a church parking lot nearby. Oh, even worse. They sat there watching and waiting as Pa Bill, Bill Sr.,

Pulled out of the driveway and headed for work. And then Buddy got out of the car and told Jamie to follow him. As they walked up to the Payne's property, Buddy handed Jamie a gun. He told him to watch the door while he went inside. Now, Jamie had no idea what he was in for that day. He had no idea what was going on. He'd heard of the CIA agent Chris and the deadly plans to get rid of his cousin Bill. Remember, it's his cousin.

Bill and his wife, Billie Jean. But he had no idea it was happening today or that he would be involved. Well, moments after Buddy entered the house, Jamie heard Bill scream and a gunshot rang out from inside. He then saw Billie Jean dart down the hallway with the baby in tow. When Buddy came back to the door, Jamie just pointed in Billie Jean's direction. It was a terrified reaction from Jamie, but one that ultimately cost Billie Jean her life. So Buddy comes back out and he...

Jamie points to where Billie Jean ran. Buddy went after the 23-year-old mother and shot her point-blank through the skull, sending her to the floor with the crying infant still in her arms. Horrible. As they left there that morning, Buddy and Jamie were certain they were not going to get in trouble for this crime because the CIA had issued it. Considering Jamie's so good with computers and technology too, you'd think he would know that this is all not real. You'd think. How are they all belie...

I don't understand. Delusion. Yeah, a huge delusion. Jamie and Buddy were going to be the heroes in this story, according to them. All right. The crime was so unexpected, so irrational, that most people didn't even think to point fingers in the Potter's direction when they heard about Bill and Billie Jean's death. Even after police questioned Janelle and her parents two days later, they weren't sure whether an online feud was enough to cast blame.

It wasn't until February 6th, almost a week later, when police brought Jamie Curd in for questioning that things started to take shape. Hooked up to a polygraph machine, interrogators tried to bait the hook. They asked Jamie was it even possible that Buddy had done the deed. Maybe pressured him or even threatened him to be involved. That's when Jamie cracked. Yes, Buddy had shot the couple and had asked Jamie to be his accomplice, although he never actually pulled the trigger.

Still, it was enough of a confession for the police. They had Jamie sign a sworn statement, and after he signed the statement, he looked up to police and asked, Quote,

Is the CIA here? It was such a bizarre question for Jamie to ask, but for now, the police had to keep their eyes on the prize, getting Buddy Potter to corroborate Jamie's statement. After his statement, police had Jamie call the Potter household while they recorded the conversation. Jamie asked Buddy point blank, had he gotten rid of everything from bills? Buddy gave him a swift, mm-hmm.

It was barely a grunt, but it would implicate Buddy in the murders. Immediately after, police obtained an arrest and search warrant for Buddy Potter's car and home, and they uncovered a gold mine of evidence.

dozens of printed photos of bill and billy jean with expletives written across their faces three bags of shredded emails between barbara janelle and chris 32 firearms and while they didn't find the actual guns used to kill the couple they did find bullets with unique markings identical to the ones found at the crime scene so i wanted i want to know about this chris guy

Well, down at the station, Buddy initially denied having any involvement in the murders despite Jamie's confession. It wasn't until police pressed him further saying things like, look, we get it. You did it because you were scared for the well-being of your family. This was most likely self-defense. He's like, no, the CIA, Chris told me to do it. Well, and that's when Buddy caved. The floodgates opened and Buddy, doing his best to hold back tears, said he didn't have a choice. These people were threatening to rape and kill his daughter at least twice.

That's what Chris from the CIA had been telling him. Now with two confessions under their belt, the police were eager to figure out, okay,

What does the CIA have to do with this? Who is this CIA agent that this family's been corresponding with? This person was clearly instrumental in understanding the motives for this crime. So investigators spent countless hours pasting together strips of those shredded emails, as well as combing through a bottomless pit of Facebook messages, emails, and other online correspondence between family members and this alleged Chris. And here's what they find that's incredibly strange. All right, let's hear it.

The family seemed to trust Chris implicitly. Like they trusted him with their life. They had never met him face to face. Yeah.

This was a person who was supposed to be highly educated, employed by the federal government. And yet, Chris's correspondence sounded like the ramblings of someone who was unhinged. Not to mention, he constantly spelt words wrong, forgetting to drop the E when adding ING, that sort of thing. Which, I mean, who can blame him? Okay, grammar's hard. In fact, it was almost identical to the way Janelle, their daughter, spoke.

would misspell her words. No freaking way, dude. There is no way. Plus, most of the time, Chris said he needed to use Janelle's email and Facebook accounts to correspond discreetly, which meant most of the messages from Chris came directly from their daughter Janelle's account. Oh my gosh, how...

How do the parents not... There's so much I have to say. Well, the final straw was analyzing where all of those emails from Chris had come from physically. And when police located the IP address, it was obvious. Their house. Chris was emailing from the family's computer, which meant there was no Chris at all. The Potters...

had been catfished by their own freaking daughter janelle had been catfishing her entire family and her boyfriend she'd convinced them all to do her bidding what's more chris seemed to be based on a real life high school acquaintance of janelle's a man named chris jordan chris had gone to school with janelle but admitted they were never really friends in fact they rarely crossed paths

The real Chris had since moved to Delaware and become a police officer. He never worked in the CIA. Yet that didn't stop Janelle from pulling his profile pictures and using them to manipulate her whole family. And if you hadn't figured it out by now, Chris wasn't the only online character Janelle had made up in her countless hours spent on the computer.

She'd also created the accounts of those advocating for her on topics. Holy crap. The relative, Matt Potter, and several more. And the more police dug into the details of the harassment, they found that Janelle was never actually a victim of harassment. She was always the bully, the instigator, the original harasser. She had created a fake persona and manipulated her parents into believing her fantasy world was a reality.

and that Bill and Billie Jean needed to pay the price. All because... Jealousy. They were flirting and... He got a different girlfriend. What? She had started it all. Oh, I'm sorry. She's nuts.

Jamie eventually agreed to testify against the Potter family in exchange for a 25-year sentence. When police asked him why he bought into such an extravagant lie from someone he'd never met before, Jamie had some pretty decent reasons. He claimed that one afternoon he went around town alone running errands, but when he got back, he'd received an email from Chris detailing every single step of his day. He found it shocking and believed that the only way someone would have known those things was if they worked for a government agency.

When in reality, his girlfriend was just stalking him. I'm surprised he still got a 25 year sentence.

Plus, he'd heard stories about Buddy's past in the CIA, so it all added up to him. Not to mention, Jamie was head over heels for Janelle. He believed her because he wanted to believe her. As for the rest of her family, well, Janelle's older sister, Christy, wasn't totally surprised to hear about how things had played out for her family. She believed Janelle had been faking things her entire life, including the severity of her condition, just so she could keep getting coddled by her own parents.

Christy said her sister would often feign illness as a child to manipulate her parents into doing things for her. For example, she believed Janelle likely caused a lot of her diabetic incidents by overeating and creating a blood sugar spike. And whenever Janelle was confronted in a lie, she would just throw a temper tantrum that seemed never ending. So this sort of catfishing manipulation wasn't something new in Christy's eyes. It was just a different technique. And honestly, think about how

how common catfishing is. Like it happens a lot. I don't think this is that common.

you know, surprising of someone to do. In August 2013, police finally had enough evidence to arrest Janelle and Barbara for their involvement in the crime. In October of that year, Buddy was found guilty and is currently serving two life sentences for the murders of Bill and Billie Jean. I think that, what he did is wrong, 100%, and they should have figured it out. But it also sucks. Your own daughter is the reason you're here. Is the reason you're here. Yeah.

Wow.

However, Barbara was granted a new trial on the grounds that her original attorney posed a conflict of interest by representing both her and her husband. Yet instead of returning to court for another full-length trial, Barbara accepted a deal. Her sentence was reduced to 25 years. As for Janelle, she maintains her innocence to this day. She insists that her accounts were hacked, that she was actually cyberbullied by the couple and their friends, and that she wasn't mentally mature enough to orchestrate such a sophisticated plan. Oh, she crazy.

Luckily, the jury saw right through Janelle. It was a lot more likely that she was a master manipulator. Oh, 100%. That Janelle had fallen in love with Bill Payne and had been heartbroken by his rejection, taking her frustrations out on his young fiancée, the mother of his child, that she was someone who was so severely catered to by her parents that she thought she could literally get away with murder.

And that is the story of Bill Payne and Billie Jean Hayworth. Holy crap. That's a lot to unpack. That's pretty insane. I'm surprised you didn't see it coming earlier. I mean, I kind of did. I guess I just didn't know who it was going to be. I was just wondering who the catfish was going to be. I thought it was going to be Jamie.

Oh, the boyfriend. Yes. I thought it was going to be the boyfriend. Like he wanted them out of the picture. How did Jamie get 25 years? Because he pointed to where she was. He didn't tell anybody. Yeah, I guess that's true. I guess I'm surprised. I mean, not saying what he did wasn't wrong. It is hard when you feel like people are manipulated into these decisions. I know. Because that's kind of how it feels. I don't know how I feel about it because should you have killed them? No, you killed two innocent people. Sorry. What the?

Yeah, but if he was truly manipulated, he would have come forward to police right after he got safely out of the situation and said, oh my gosh, my girlfriend's dad just shot these people while I was there. Yeah, this one's confusing. I don't even know what you do. I also think we're working with a pretty, I mean, nobody's normal. I think this was a very dysfunctional family. Oh, yes. I agree. So, and I also...

I just feel awful for Bill and Billie Jean. They were like 100% innocent victims. They didn't bully anyone. They were just living their life. They weren't doing anything. Someone's coming at them on Facebook. I'm sure they shared words with her, but I mean, they didn't start this. And they got killed. And now that baby has to grow up without a family. Yeah. So...

Screw that. I guess screw that. Yeah, I don't feel bad. All right, you guys, that is our case for this week, and we will see you next time with another episode. I love it. I hate it. Goodbye.