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Hey, weirdos, I'm Ash. And I'm Elena. And this is Morbid.
From the sounds of it, it's morbid. Yeah, we were talking about this earlier.
It's fucking crazy. This case is berserk.
Berserk. Berserk. This case, as Caleb would say, goes crazy.
I love when Caleb says that something goes crazy.
He's like, that's the way he says it. That's fine.
It's like a face that he makes when he says it.
He's like, that goes crazy. But it's better.
It's way better, actually. It's a way. It's a way.
It's a vibe. It's a feeling. It's an emotion.
It is. It's what it is. It's snowing here.
It is. It's like... It's like sleeting. It's like fat snowing.
Fat snowing. Like big fat snow coming down from the... Like fluffy snow.
It's flowing. It's phoen. It's phoen. What was the last one?
It's phoen. No, you slowly lost it. Well, because I added an L where one couldn't be.
Yeah, no. You know, phoen sounded good, but snow and that does not have an L in it.
Is it phoen? It would be phoen, if anything.
Yeah. Yeah. Guys, we're a little tired today.
It's Friday? It's Fri-yay. It's Fri-yizzle.
There you go. You're like, I'm not saying that.
It's all that. It's all that. And a bag of chips.
Okay, yeah, but we got to get into this.
My coffee has weaned the fuck off. Yeah, it's just one of those days, you know, it's after the holidays, getting back into it.
It's a lot of recordings. I'm going to use.
You're getting the like crazy punchy us.
Yeah, I'm going to start using like, you know, it's after the holidays.
I'm going to start saying that in like July.
Because 100% it's still after the holidays.
I'm just going to say that to fuck with people.
Or you could say it's almost the holidays.
You know, it's almost the holidays, so I'm stressed the fuck out.
Because it's always either after the holidays or almost the holidays at some point.
Pretty much. So I think it's valid. I like it.
I think it's pretty valid. I am into it.
Do it. I don't have anything else. All right.
So my case. My case is, like I said, it's pretty fucking out there.
We are heading over to Mountain City, Tennessee, which is one of my favorite states to spell.
It's actually my favorite state to spell.
Really? Spell. And smell, I bet. I've never smelled it.
I've never been to Tennessee. I would assume it would smell really good there.
Yeah, probably. And the whiskey. Yeah. Nashville's got to smell great.
Yeah, I want to go to Nashville. Me too.
I think everybody does at some point. We should do that.
Yeah, totally. Let's just go to Nashville.
I think I've said this on the podcast before, but I got to do a project about Tennessee once and it made me happy.
Like in school. Remember the state project?
I do remember that. Mine was Tennessee and ever since then I was like, I like Tennessee.
Mine was Wisconsin. Boring. Sure was. Loses entire Wisconsin listener base.
I love you guys. I did you proud. I'm just kidding.
No, Wisconsin, is there like cheese in Wisconsin?
Yeah, cheese is a very big part of it. Not boring at all.
Yeah, I love cheese. Yeah. Worked out for me.
I love it there. All right. Well, yeah. So we're going to talk about a case that became known as the Facebook murders.
Oh. Yes. I don't know if I know this. I don't know if you will, but I think you'll start, if you do know it, I think you'll know pretty early on that you know it.
If you know, you know. Ick, ick. There you go.
So this case has like a little bit of everything.
It's a little smorgasbord, if you will. There's a family murder plot.
Oh. A CIA agent. Oh. Facebook. Facebook.
Manipulation. Catfishing and conspiracy theories galore.
Wow. Everything after Facebook is all describing Facebook.
Yeah, of course. Manipulation, catfish, and conspiracy theories.
Yeah, totally. That's just like, what will I find on Facebook?
I think I still have a Facebook. I got to get rid of that.
Mine's gone. Mine is gone. I want to like download my pics.
Yeah, smart. And then yeet it into oblivion.
And then get out of there. Yeah, but sadly, this case, back to it.
Sadly, in January of 2012, two bodies were found in Mountain City, Tennessee.
They were the bodies of 36-year-old Billy Bill Payne and his 23-year-old girlfriend, Billie Jean Hayworth.
Jesus. For the sake of the story, I'm going to refer to Billy Payne more as Bill and Billie Jean as Billie Jean.
Okay. So Bill Payne's throat had been cut and the couple had both been shot in the face.
Wow. Mm-hmm. When they were found, their seven-month-old son was still in his mother's arms, luckily found alive and unharmed.
Oh, my God. That's awful. But found sleeping in his mom's arms still.
Oh. Horrible. That's the worst part of this entire thing.
Oh, my God. Now, it only took the police a week to arrest the men responsible for these murders.
They were Jamie Curd, Bill Payne's second cousin.
What? And Marvin, better known as Buddy, Porter.
The latter man's daughter, Janelle, had originally been friends with the couple, but more recently, they had become her mortal enemies.
Ooh. Oof. Now, the case seemed pretty simple at first.
It seemed like a father seeking revenge for his daughter who claimed that the murdered couple had been behind a string of online bullying and threats directed at her.
But this case would turn out to be incredibly more convoluted and so much more bizarre than anyone could have ever expected.
By the time the detectives got to the truth, an entire family would be behind bars and the small, serene town of Mountain City would be absolutely gobsmacked.
Whoa. You really set that up. I did. Damn.
I feel like I felt like I was entering into a Dateline episode.
Well, Keith is over there. And you know what?
He's looking at me all proud. He is. Keith is standing next to us with his hands in his pockets.
Keith Morrison is standing next to us. Yeah, Converse on.
He's just here in the pod lab all the time.
Yeah, always. And he's standing there in his Converses with his hands in his pockets.
And he's looking at you like, good job. Gobsmacked.
Nice use of it. Yeah. Yeah. I like it. Well, at the center of this case is a young woman named Janelle Potter.
Excuse me. She was in her late 20s to early 30s during the time that we're going to talk about today.
But there are a lot of different ideas and arguments about if Janelle was really operating with a 30-year-old's brain.
According to her mother, she had the brain of an elementary school child, but obviously looked to be a grown woman.
Janelle was born to parents Barbara and Marvin, like I said, better known as Buddy Potter.
And she was born in Pennsylvania in 1981.
According to her sister, Christine, Janelle was, quote, a little bit slower in learning and in developmental capacity, meaning she struggled academically.
She had some uncomfortable moments with her peers throughout teenage years, especially.
Yeah. And she was also managing type 1 diabetes.
She had been diagnosed when she was younger.
And it was something that really affected her self-confidence.
Yeah. Okay. Okay. So, yeah. Yeah. Since she had her fair share of struggles, she wasn't always comfortable in social situations.
And she spent a lot of time either by herself or just hanging out with her parents.
Her sister, Christine, said that Janelle was very coddled.
She used the word coddled by her parents.
And said that the parents never really taught Janelle how to deal with her problems directly.
And instead, most of the time, they would resolve issues that she was having for her.
Instead of showing her, like, this is how you can take care of that.
Yeah. She felt like her mother, Christine felt like her mother in particular, emphasized Janelle's social, physical, and intellectual disabilities.
And it seemed like this really fed Janelle's negative self-image and exacerbated her inability to develop any kind of healthy relationship or any kind of really social skills.
Yeah. Now, at the same time, Janelle's sister wasn't solely placing the blame on their mother.
She also felt like Janelle knew how to manipulate her parents as well as other people into doing what she wanted them to do.
And because Christine didn't really agree with most of what was going on and how it was being handled, it put a strain on her relationship with her family, especially Janelle.
These two sisters did not get along at all.
Okay. Now, in late 2004, their father, Buddy, decided that it would be a good idea to relocate the family from Philadelphia to Mountain City, Tennessee.
Christine and Janelle's relationship at this point had become so deteriorated that Christine actually decided not to go with her family.
She ended up moving in with her grandmother, and at this time, she actually took out a restraining order on her sister due to her sister's harassing and threatening behavior.
What? Yeah. Yeah. This was really also like around the boom of social media.
So that became Janelle's like cocoon, if you will.
Instead of having to go out and make friends and make connections face to face, she could log into the internet, craft any persona she wanted and communicate to anybody anywhere from the comfort of her own home.
Yeah. And that is the first step into why social media is terrible.
Is a farce. Yeah. I like that word. So that was pretty much the only way Janelle communicated with the outside world until, like, 2009.
Wow. Now, at some point in 2009, she ran out to the local Food Lion to pick up a prescription, and a woman named Tracy Greenwell was working there.
And she could kind of recognize that Janelle was a bit awkward and didn't necessarily have fantastic social skills.
But instead of avoiding Janelle, she decided, like, why don't I try and befriend her?
She doesn't seem like she has a lot of friends.
And she's kind of not new here, but she's been here a while and hasn't made friends with anybody.
Tracy went out of her way to call Janelle.
She would invite her out with her own friends so that she wouldn't be cooped up at home all the time with just her parents as companions.
I say, in a world full of assholes, be a Tracy.
Oh, there you go. So Janelle's parents, who have been described many, many times over as very overprotective, they wanted Tracy to come over to the house for a couple times before they allowed Janelle to go out with her.
Okay. Now remember, she's in her 20s, 30s, so...
Yeah, so that's like a different scenario.
Because at first I was like, I get that.
But then she's not a teenager. She's not a child.
Yeah. According to her mother, she is a child.
Yeah. So it's very convoluted. Yeah, exactly.
So once they were confident, though, that Tracy was good company, they did allow Janelle to go out with her.
And it wasn't long before Janelle bonded with Tracy's group of friends.
She was regularly hanging out with them.
They took her rock climbing. There's like pictures of them hanging out together.
It looked like they all had a great time.
Yeah. Now, part of the friend group was Tracy's brother, Billy Payne.
Janelle immediately took a liking to Billy, who, like I said, was also referred to as Bill.
Whenever the group would go out, both Tracy and Bill would also, Bill too, went out of his way to include Janelle.
He was like a good guy, just like his sister.
The district attorney who would later become involved in this case, Dennis Brooks, felt like it was during this time that Janelle developed feelings for Bill Payne.
He, quote, included her in social occasions, like I said, going rock climbing or just hanging out.
To someone like Janelle, who led such a boring and sheltered life, that must have seemed like something special.
Yeah. That's what he said. Well, and he's just a nice, he's a nice guy.
Exactly. Sounds like he's just like a very, very decent, very nice guy.
The way he was described was a nice guy who had time for anyone.
Oh, well, I, of course, I'm looking at pictures and he just has like a very kind face.
He does. And both Billy's do. I was going to say Billy Jean and Billy Payne.
And so cute. So the thing was, it wasn't long before Janelle's feelings turned into an obsession with Bill.
Oh, no. Even though she kind of seemed to be able to hide it from her friend group for a little while, things would not remain that way.
Eek. Now, like I said, even though Janelle was in her late 20s by this point in time, she'd never had any kind of romantic relationship or relationship at all with anybody before.
And since she wasn't upfront about how she felt about Bill Payne, he didn't know, and neither did Tracy.
Yeah. So instead, the brother-sister duo thought it would be a great idea actually to set Janelle up with a great guy that they knew.
Yeah. Their second cousin, Jamie Curd. Okay.
Jamie had grown up in Mountain City, just like his cousins, and shared a lot of the same friends.
He was a part of the larger friend group that Janelle was now in at this time.
Okay. And Jamie and Bill also worked together at the Parkdale Mills.
Okay. Okay. Jamie and Janelle hit it off instantly.
But like I said, Janelle's parents were very overprotective.
So Janelle thought it would be a better idea if she kept this relationship a secret from them.
At first, her and Jamie would just have, quote, 30 to 45 second phone calls with each other.
And on one of those phone calls, Janelle mentioned to Jamie that her computer seemed to be having some kind of issue lately, like she couldn't get it to work.
So he offered to come by and fix it. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, so they were, you know... It sounds like a meet-cute.
Like a very cute, like, you know? Yeah, it's a cute meet-cute.
Yeah, good meeting. Exactly. Now, once the computer was finally fixed, though, Janelle and Jamie needed a new way to keep in regular contact without being caught by Janelle's parents.
So, Jamie came up with the idea to get Janelle a separate, prepaid cell phone that she would only use for calls to him.
Janelle agreed. She was like, this is a great idea.
And to add to the thrill of the secret, she quote, instructed Jamie to hide the cell phone in a bush at the corner of her front yard where she could retrieve it.
See, that just sounds like a girl, like a young woman who has been sheltered her whole life.
This is very exciting. Yeah. And she's like, I'm going to live out my, like, you know, book fantasy.
Totally. By, like, leave it in the bush in the corner of the yard and I'll go get it.
She was, and she ends up being described as very, like, very into fantasy.
It makes sense. Yeah. Like, I see that. Like, that excited her that she was like, ooh, I get to do this, like, little mission to go get it.
I love that you caught that. Yeah, it's like, it's exactly what I thought of.
Yeah. Because it's like this, like... clandestine thing like I get to go get it from the bush in the corner of the you leave it for me you know what I mean and I'm sure she's seen like a million fucking movies at this point and a million tv shows and she's like all that I have to do it like this who doesn't want to be a book character I who doesn't me I want to be a book character all the time yeah you know you know The town of Agde in France is famous for sun, sand, sea and sex.
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So the couple's plan worked for a few weeks, but eventually Janelle's mother, Barbara, which I'm just now realizing is very teen mom-esque.
Oh yeah, Janelle and Barbara. I forgot about that.
She found out about the phone and she got rid of it.
No more making calls with your boyfriend.
God, I love that show. Or it did, at least.
Wow. So she found the phone and she was like, goodbye.
But Jamie actually just ended up getting Janelle another phone, which he again hid in the front bushes.
They didn't come up with a better idea. I was going to say, you got to move it.
She didn't find it in the bushes. I think she just found Janelle using it and was like, what the fuck is that?
But I'm like, you had a second opportunity to do something even cooler.
Yeah, put it somewhere else. Yeah, you know?
But anyway, she continued to use that phone strictly to calls to Jamie.
So things went on like this for about six months with Janelle and Jamie sneaking around behind her parents' back.
But by early 2010, a lot of Janelle's friends kind of noticed a shift in her behavior.
It was a pretty big change in her personality.
And her personality seemed to shift right around the time that Bill Payne started dating Billie Jean Hayworth.
She was a local girl who he and Jamie actually both worked with at the Mills.
Jamie said that Bill and Billie Jean, quote, hit it right off and Bill just fell head over heels in love with her.
Oh, and they look like they love each other so much.
Like all their pictures. Yeah. I want to take like a little time to talk about the two of them before we get back to the story.
They seem to be meant for each other. Yeah.
The two of them had a lot in common, and they, like I said, seemed to bring out the best in each other.
Billie Jean Hayworth had been born in Mountain City, Tennessee, on March 19, 1988.
Her parents were Carl and Martha Hayworth.
She had two sisters, Janie and Beverly, and two brothers, Greg and Daryl.
And when she was growing up, she really loved to be outside.
She loved to play volleyball. And the older and older she got, especially when she was a young adult and kind of making her own money, one of the things that she loved to do was go to different flea markets, yard sales, auctions, and just see what treasure she could find.
Oh, I loved that. She loved a good flea market flip.
Oh, hell yeah. Which is one of my favorite shows.
Now, Bill Payne had been born in Boone, North Carolina on July 10th, 1975 to parents Billy Ray Payne.
He was named after his father. I love all the Billys here.
I do too. I love it. And Beverly Duggar.
His wife, just like Billy, or excuse me, his life, just like Billy Jeans, was average.
He got along with his parents, got along with his siblings.
He had the sister Tracy that we know about and also a brother named Josh.
Okay. And just like Billie Jean, he also grew up loving to go to the flea markets, the auctions, the yard sales.
Only he had a thing for rare coins. Oh, that's like a really cute niche thing to love.
Like how fucking cute is that? Like that's just like...
I like rare coins. Yeah, I loved collecting a rare coin.
I loved that. Or even just like looking at them.
Yeah. Oh, actually, you know what? My brother used to, JP used to collect rare coins.
Yeah, I forgot about that actually. They're very niche things, but they're funny.
That's adorable, JP. That's adorable, JP.
Now, as he got older, Bill, he unfortunately suffered with an addiction to opioids.
And he was also known at this time to sell drugs when things were bad.
But at the time of his death, he was getting treatment at a local clinic, and he was working hard to become sober.
Good for him. He wanted to be the best father that he could be to his kids.
Because in addition to the young son that he had with Billie Jean, he actually also had a son, Justin, that lived in Florida with his mother.
Okay. Unfortunately, he couldn't really see Justin very often because he lived in Florida.
Yeah. But he was trying for his sons. Yeah.
And for Billie Jean. And by all accounts, Billie Jean was one of the best things to happen to Bill Payne, and she was a really good influence on him.
Since she'd come into his life, his friends started to notice he was drinking less, he was showing up to parties less, he wanted to get off drugs and completely away from them for good.
He wanted to make a life with this girl.
I love that. But remember... Bill wasn't the only person in a state of change.
Janelle was too, but hers was not for the good.
Tracy Greenwell noticed the shift and said that Janelle seemed to become mean around the time that Bill and Billie Jean got together.
She'd make comments about Billie Jean and how much she disliked her.
When Jamie would tell Janelle that she shouldn't be so hard on this girl because Bill Payne was really in love, Janelle would just make comments about their relationship not lasting.
She was like, I give it this amount of time.
Okay. Or, like, it's not going to last, like, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, why are you being a hater? Yeah, that's bad energy.
It is. Yeah. And she got even nastier when Billie Jean became pregnant with her and Bill's baby.
Janelle would comment that neither of them deserved the baby.
Oh. And she would say things that I'm not even going to repeat about the baby.
Oh, my God. She was horrible. Ew. Horrible.
You can look it up. Ugh. Her comments became worse and worse and worse over time.
But her mean spirit wasn't just directed toward Bill and Billie Jean.
A lot of it was, but not entirely. It was even directed at her own boyfriend, Jamie.
On one occasion in February, Jamie had gone to a party at Bill Payne's house, and he had too much to drink, so he ended up passing out there.
He woke up at some point to his phone ringing off the hook.
It had been ringing all night. I don't know if, like, the phone woke him up or if somebody there was like, Jesus Christ, answer your fucking phone.
Yeah. But when he answered it, it was Janelle's father, Buddy, on the other line.
Oh. And he told Jamie, quote, Janelle had left the house and they found her in a ditch.
What? He went on to say that Janelle didn't love Jamie and he needed to stay away from Janelle from that point forward.
And then Janelle got on the phone and told Jamie for herself that she didn't love him and she never wanted to see him again.
What the fuck? Out of fucking nowhere. But then, three days later, Jamie got a call from Janelle telling him that she did love him and she did want to continue on with their relationship, and it was her dad that made her say those awful things to him.
From that point forward, she told him that she should be the one to initiate phone calls.
I don't know what that was about. I think, like, you initiated that phone call.
Yeah, like, I don't know. But anyways, I think what happened the night of that party, in my personal opinion, I think Janelle was upset for a number of reasons.
I think one of the main ones was that she couldn't go to parties like that.
Her parents wouldn't allow her to, even though she was a grown-ass woman.
And I think the other thing that she was pissed off about was that this was Bill Payne's party.
She wouldn't have wanted to miss that. And I think since she was so angry at him now, she felt like Jamie going to that party was him going against her betrayal in some way by being cordial with his own cousin.
And because of that, I think she wanted to punish him and make him feel like something terrible had happened to her because she was so upset over this, which is why her parents found her in a ditch.
Yep. I also don't know if they like actually did find her in a ditch or if they just made that up.
Or did you just completely make that up?
I could see it being the latter. Yeah. Honestly, I could see it being the former two, actually.
Truly. This family's wild. This is a wild family.
Yeah. Like, I'm a little scared to see what's happening next year.
You absolutely should be. I just, honestly, overall, I think this was like a weird, strange ploy for attention.
But Jamie, of course, didn't realize that.
He liked Janelle. I think she kind of stroked his ego.
He was a bit older than she was. Yeah. and she was kind of infatuated with him and vice versa so they continued dating even though their conversations were limited to really odd hours of the day and night because janelle didn't want to be caught by her mom talking on the phone with him that's wild and they weren't able to go on dates because her parents disapproved of him Now, over time, Jamie's feelings toward his cousin Bill and Billie Jean also shifted, most likely due to Janelle's manipulation.
Bill and Jamie had worked together, like I said, at the Mills for years, and they had always been close.
They'd always gotten along. Remember, Bill was the one to set Jamie and Janelle up in the first place.
Yeah. But now Jamie was suddenly pulling back from his cousin and was becoming distant and actually went as far as to request a change in his work schedule so that his hours wouldn't line up with Bill's or Billie Jean's.
What? Because she also worked at the Mills.
Now, since Janelle wasn't able to see Jamie very often, and by this point her parents had pretty much forbidden her from seeing any of the rest of the friend group, she poured herself even further into social media.
Now it was late in 2010, and it was around this time that Janelle started to mention a man named Chris to Jamie and a lot of her other friends.
She told Jamie that Chris was a family friend and neighbor back in Pennsylvania.
She said he grew up in the house next to hers.
He was really more like a brother to her all throughout high school, and he always watched out for her.
And now he worked for the CIA. And she was super, super excited because he was actually going to be transferred to Tennessee soon.
And he would actually be buying a house in Mountain City.
Oh, boy. And she was super, super stoked about it.
And like I said, Jamie wasn't the only one to hear about this Chris character.
One of Janelle's friends online, strictly online, they never met in person.
Bob Meehan also remembered that right around mid to late 2010, Janelle kept bringing up Chris more and more frequently.
Bob also lived in Pennsylvania, where she was from, and though he'd never met Janelle in person, he actually thought that they were in a long-distance relationship.
Oh. Mm-hmm. They texted. They exchanged emails.
They were social media friends. Oh, boy.
He thought they were in a relationship. Okay.
I don't know what she thought. That's that.
But that's that about that. And that's the tea on that.
Now, other friends of hers online remembered her bringing up Chris, too.
And most of them remembered that she described him as a family friend, not like a love interest or anything like that, just an old friend who now worked for the CIA.
Okay. Which, we all have one of those. Aren't you, like, not supposed to tell people if you work for the CIA?
I'm pretty sure. Like, can you tell people that you do?
I don't know what the protocol is. I'm pretty sure, like, the whole point of the CIA is to be pretty secretive.
I always thought that too. And pretty secretive about your whereabouts.
Yeah, right? But sure. It's like men in black.
He's moving. Tell everybody. Tell everybody the CIA agent is moving in.
Yeah, via Facebook too. Via Facebook. Via Facebook Messenger.
I don't see this happening. Seems legit.
Chris is real, guys. This seems real. He is.
He is. He is. He's a real character. Yeah.
Emphasis on the character. Exactly. So this sudden mention of Chris seemed to happen right around the time that Janelle found out Billie Jean was pregnant.
And also right around the time that Janelle started complaining to Jamie that she was being bullied and harassed on all of her social media platforms.
All of a sudden, these anonymous users started posting all these terrible things about her and on her wall and messaging her.
All anonymous users on Facebook. I was just going to say on Facebook.
I thought that was hard. And also another social media platform she used was Topics.
The fuck is that? I've never heard of that in my life.
Neither had I. I don't know if it just like didn't get big over here.
Like what it was. You don't know if it didn't get big over here?
Like do any of you use Topics? I don't know if it's around anymore.
Did you use Topics? Guys? Answer. It's Topics with an X too.
Topics me. Let me know. Like it gave you... uh news based on like where you were and you could also interact with people in your area i guess okay i've literally never heard of kind of sounds like fascinating the neighbor app i don't know what oh yeah it's called but the neighbor app i know what you mean you know you know what i'm talking about the one where you can be like hey did you see that person driving down the street i never interact in there but i'm always reading i love a neighbor app we love We do be loving.
Those are my social media apps, the neighbor apps where we can all spy on each other.
You know what my favorite social media app is?
DoorDash. Hell yeah. I communicate with one person and one person only and they always bring me food.
I shouldn't say always, actually. Sometimes they steal it.
I was going to say sometimes they steal it.
Not very frequently. But anyways, at the same time that Janelle was getting harassed and bullied and la-di-da-do, Jamie started getting texts from Chris.
So he is real. Oh, he's getting texts from him.
Yeah, obviously. Yeah, you can't fake that.
He's like, no, not at all. He's like, Janelle is getting bullied mercilessly and it needed to stop.
I'd be like, you're the CIA. Can you fix it?
That's what he's saying. Yeah. So eventually, Chris started emailing Jamie, telling him more and more about the relentless online bullying and how he needed to put an end to it being her boyfriend.
But strangely, the emails were coming from Janelle's email account.
They're coming from inside the house. They literally are coming from inside the house.
And when Jamie asked why that was, Chris told him that he had a phobia of phones and didn't like using them.
Apparently, he was also against having his own email address as well.
He has a phobia of phones? Like, sir, you work for the Central Intelligence Agency.
I don't like answering a phone call. Like, a cold call is pretty... Don't ever fucking cold call me.
It's a severe violation in my book. If we're friends and you cold call me, we're not friends anymore.
Yeah, that's going to be a problem. But I would definitely not classify it as a phobia.
Yeah. I don't even know if there is a phobia.
I don't know. I think you might have a phobia.
I know. I really don't like texting. But even I don't say.
Yeah. Does anyone else get like, sorry, I'm going to take you off track just really quick because I just need to know.
Does anyone else get severe anxiety about texting?
And does anybody else prefer to answer text messages on their laptops?
Yeah, I don't like typing on my phone. And then I get anxious when I get text messages and then I don't answer them right away because I am who I am.
And then I keep thinking about it and days go by and I go, oh no, I'm a week past this text message that I didn't answer.
And then I get more anxiety. And then I just, whoo.
It's so, I hate it. It's the one thing that I get a lot of anxiety about.
You're waiting on a text back from Elena.
It's coming. It's coming. I'm just real anxious about it, okay?
It's coming up. Yeah. She's just really anxious.
She'll get back to you soon. Oh. Yeah, that's my theme song.
So they're like, is this a Listener Tales episode?
What the fuck? But yeah, I just had to throw that out there.
No, I feel that. So if you feel that way as well, you're not alone.
No, Chris felt that way. He said, no phones.
Chris feels that way. Yep. The CIA doesn't make us use them.
Nope. It's also like, okay, you're going to have a phobia of phones, but where the fuck is your email address?
Well, that's the thing. Can you have one?
You have not explained all of this, sir.
I have no idea. But Jamie would later say that he could tell the difference between an email or a text that came from Chris because Chris was way more intense than Janelle.
Janelle, quote, never cursed, never called people names, or spoke hatefully to people.
What a kind soul. Yeah. But Jamie said that Chris's communications were full of obscenities, ranting, and harmful wishes toward others, specifically Billie Jean and Bill Payne.
And he's a CIA agent. Okay. I'm just putting together the pieces here.
That's probably great qualities to have in a CIA agent.
Wouldn't you also think, like, in my opinion, I would think that, like, even somebody's monitoring the CIA's communications.
Yeah. I mean, this is adding up. This is legit.
I feel pretty comfortable with this. You know.
Anyways. But when Chris wasn't going off about the couple, he would give Jamie advice on how to better his relationship with Janelle.
You know, because like the CIA also doubles as your own personal therapist.
Absolutely. Yeah. So when Jamie asked Janelle about what was going on online, she told him that this harassment really came out of nowhere.
And like I said, I said like I said so many times during this.
Like I said. Sorry, I will come up with something else.
But was a slew of anonymous comments to her Facebook page telling her she was a bad person, and this is intense, that they were going to have her raped.
Oh my God. Yeah. That's horrific. The comments had escalated so much over the course of a couple of weeks that Janelle's mother, Barbara, actually ended up posting her own comment to Janelle's wall, begging the anonymous commentators to stop and not, please not do this to her daughter.
That's awful. Like, Barbara was really distraught over this.
Yeah, of course. But just delete your Facebook.
Exactly. Yeah, if that was happening, you gotta get out of there.
Or just, like, make a new one with, like, a different name or something.
Get out of there. But so Barbara was really, really concerned.
But this was interesting because Janelle's friends didn't really seem to be too concerned about this.
They felt like there was something really suspicious about all of this.
Yeah. And they didn't really seem to think any of it was real.
Tracy Greenwald. Yeah. Tracy Greenwald later said, quote, Janelle was always saying that somebody was mad at her.
Somebody hated her. Somebody wanted to kill her.
She was paranoid about it. Ah. So Janelle was frustrated that her friends didn't believe her, and she insisted that the danger she was facing was very real.
And over weeks, the tension was building and building, and Janelle was starting to point the finger at four people within her very own friend group.
Hmm. a girl named Lindsay Thomas, the first girl who had ever befriended her in this town, Tracy Greenwell, Tracy's brother Bill Payne, and Bill Payne's girlfriend, Billie Jean.
Aw, come on. Now, within this same time period, Janelle called the police to her home and reported that a rock had been thrown into her front yard, and it had the names Billie Payne and Billie Jean painted on it, and she felt like this was proof that they were the ones behind all the harassment.
Okay. So to retaliate, she started posting on Facebook calling Lindsay Thomas and Billie Jean mean girls and sharing screenshots that were clearly doctored and manipulated to seem like these girls were harassing her.
Wow. Doesn't seem like they were. Wow. But because of this sudden shift in her behavior and resulting turmoil, pretty much everybody in the friend group ended up unfriending her.
Yeah, of course. And they all removed themselves from her orbit to kind of save themselves from the drama of it all.
And the rest of them were like, Jesus Christ, when is she going to turn on me?
Of course. Yeah. So Janelle just kept on posting about them, though.
Lindsay Thomas actually called Janelle on the phone on one occasion when she found out that Janelle was writing about her on Facebook.
And she was like, please, can you just, like, stop this?
Like, you gotta stop, girlfriend. What a terrible era we live in.
Oh, my God, I know. Where these things are like, this person wrote this about me on Facebook.
Oh, God. High school. The pendulum has to swing the other way eventually.
Seriously. And mind you, these are people in their, like, 20s and 30s.
Yeah. It's like, what are you doing? It's still happening.
I mean, they're being, these other people are being dragged into this.
Yeah, of course. It's crazy. But some of them kind of start to partake a little bit.
I think they start getting pissed off that they've been.
Of course. People get sucked into that stuff.
Exactly. Now, anyways, according to Lindsay, Janelle told her when she called her that she had no idea what she was talking about.
And she said she wasn't posting anything about Lindsay or Billie or Billie Jean.
Nobody. Yet right after this exchange, Lindsay started getting calls from the Potter's home line where the caller would just breathe heavily.
But other than that, say nothing at all.
Like, girly, star 69 it. Seriously. Come on.
But there were a couple of instances, though, where a man got on the phone.
Lindsay said she believed this man was Janelle's father, Buddy, and he would demand that Lindsay and her friends leave his daughter alone, stop calling his house, like, end the nonsense, even though she was the one getting the phone calls.
She did not call them. Wow. Like, what?
Wow. So in May 2011, shifting gears a little bit, Jamie Curd's mother passed away.
And it was around this time that Janelle's family actually started being more welcoming toward him.
They still didn't want Jamie and Janelle to have a relationship with each other, but they were like, you know, you fix our computer, you're decent enough.
You can be Janelle's friend, but, like, you can't date her.
You can be around her. You can be around.
Now he got an invite for family dinners, holiday celebrations.
And strangely enough, actually, in no time at all, he and Janelle's father, Buddy, were like thick as thieves.
They really hit it off. Now, that same month, May of 2011, Lindsay Thomas ended up filing a telephone harassment or multiple telephone harassment charges against Janelle, who still seemed to be calling ever so frequently.
Oh, my God. Give it up. Even though Lindsay knew that it was Janelle who was responsible for the calls, since there were two other adults that lived in the home, she couldn't prove it.
And because of that, there really wasn't a lot that law enforcement could do.
And because she wasn't being stopped by anybody, Janelle continued her social media escapades.
And now she was trying to bring more and more of this group of friends and even people outside of this group of friends into her feud with Lindsay, Billie Jean, Bill Payne, and Tracy.
Jeez. One acquaintance of all these people, including Janelle, Tara Osborne, would later end up testifying that when she tried to remove herself from the drama, she got an email from a Facebook account linked to Janelle.
She answered the email saying that she wasn't interested in having any part of this.
She was like, please, God, just leave me alone.
Yeah. And she was like, Janelle, please don't contact me again.
And then she blocked the user. Okay. She then started getting phone calls similar to the ones that Lindsay Thomas was getting, and these calls were also from the Potter household, except this caller, quote, tried to make noises from a horror movie and had an insanity laugh. tried to make noises from a horror movie unfortunately no further elaboration on that damn it what do you i really want to know what that entails what would those like do you think she just been heavy breathing maybe like i always noises from a horror movie make me think of those like really like like the strings that are like like you know maybe some some heavy piano oh oh maybe she did like a Maybe that'd be fun.
Or she was like, one, two, Freddy's coming for you.
Three, four, you better shut the door. What's your favorite scary movie?
That kind of thing. Oh, my God. Yeah. I wish that I was like a real person in the 90s and I could have prank called people and been like, what's your favorite scary movie?
That was literally the most amazing thing to do.
Yeah, fun. For years to come. Fun. I love it.
But yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know.
Also an insanity laugh. I don't really know what that is either.
Yeah, I don't know. I just hear the wicked witch.
Yeah. Yeah, like a cackle. Yeah. Well, anyways, Osborne also tried to file telephone harassment charges against Janelle, but a clerical error caused her case to be dismissed.
Okay. Love those clerical errors. Yeah, I don't know.
Now, while everybody was getting more and more concerned about the situation that Janelle was creating for them, Janelle's CIA buddy, Chris, he was getting pissed the fuck off about the way she was being treated.
And now Janelle's parents were hearing about Chris, too.
And anytime Jamie Curd would come over, he and Janelle's parents would talk about the latest ongoings in the feud and how concerned they were about their sweet, precious Janelle-y.
Janelle's mother, Barbara, commented to Jamie that Chris was, quote, angry and firing back at Thomas and Hayworth with emails, and it was like a war.
Hmm. Yeah. Neither of Janelle's parents really understood what was going on, probably because they were getting skewed information from Janelle.
Yeah. And really, they just wanted all of this to stop.
They were like, what the fuck is going on?
And like, where did this come from? Seriously.
The drama was affecting Janelle's behavior with them, too.
And it just felt like a constant barrage of negativity coming at them from all angles.
Yeah. So this seems to be the tipping point in the story.
According to Jamie, Buddy Potter talked a lot about his, quote, missions in other countries.
During his time in the CIA. Yes, you heard that right.
Chris was not the only secret agent in this town, baby.
What? Buddy Potter also claimed to have worked for the agency.
Huh. Uh-huh. Huh. Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah. Okay.
That's that really. That's the that on that.
That's the that, that, that. There you go.
But Jamie knew that Buddy Potter was also an avid gun collector.
Not only were there tons and tons and tons of guns in the home, but Buddy Potter kept two strapped to him at all times.
Okay. He would have one in a shoulder harness and another in a holster that he kept strapped around his ankle.
There's actually a picture that I saw of him and Barbara gardening together.
And he has a gun strapped on him and a sling of ammunition.
Oh, yeah. I saw that. And they're gardening.
They're just gardening. I saw that picture.
And he is fucking packed? Stacked? Stacked.
Yeah, he's packing. He's packing. Yeah, that's what it is.
Stacked? Packed? Stacked? I don't know. Packed?
Whacked? Like, what's going on? I am but a little innocent girl.
Don't know how to say it? I'm like, he has guns.
Don't know how to say it. There was guns everywhere in this house.
He actually had to carry, like, an oxygen tank around with him.
He had, like, some medical problems of his own.
And there was ammunition slung around his oxygen tank.
Wow. Okay. Like a choice and a half. A bold choice.
Bold move. But Buddy and Barbara both seem to be getting more and more aggressive about the situation with Janelle and eager, Jamie felt, to do whatever they needed to end it themselves.
And I think he was kind of starting to get a little bit freaked out by this.
Hmm. But at the same time, Jamie would later say that when Buddy and Barbara were getting aggressive, Janelle would just stay quiet.
And he was like, I was really confused by this because whenever we talked about it, Janelle had no problem sharing her opinions freely, discussing the whole entire feud at length with me.
But around her parents, he put it that she, quote, acted like a needy kid to a parent.
Manipulation. At its finest. As the situation intensified, Barbara actually started getting messages directly to her email account from CIA agent Chris.
With no last name. Chris. Just Chris. Agent number 0001.
He seemed to be really serious when it came to the threats being made against Janelle.
And he emphasized to Barbara that everybody should take them seriously.
But also noted that he was monitoring this situation very closely and he was ready to jump in and take care of things whenever it became necessary.
Wow. Oh, thank goodness we have Chris. I'm saying.
Oh, man. It's never been made clear whether or not Barbara was diagnosed with any kind of mental illness or if she struggled cognitively.
But there are more than a handful of instances where family, friends, and authorities have referenced her as being delusional and needing functional assistance.
Okay. So I think that's important to keep in mind.
Well, that's sad. It is, exactly. And I wanted to say that part of it because you might be sitting there being like, Jesus Christ, how does she believe this?
But like... We don't know for sure, but it's been implied.
There's possibly more at play. Exactly. Now, even before Janelle had moved to Mountain City and gone through this falling out with her friends, Barbara was almost overprotective to a fault.
Remember what Christine said. She was like, she was always going out of her way to solve things for Janelle.
Like, it wasn't good. But once this whole debacle intensified, it kind of seemed to reach a point where Barbara was paranoid, like really intensely paranoid.
And the emails from Chris were only feeding that paranoia more and more.
Yeah. And unfortunately, in the summer of 2011, Janelle actually needed to be hospitalized.
This was due to poor management of her diabetes, but I think her family felt like it was brought on by what was going on.
This actually wasn't uncommon for her to end up in the hospital because of the way she managed her diabetes.
But the timelines. But the timelines worked, exactly.
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Now, while Janelle was hospitalized, the number of emails from CIA agent Chris to Jamie and Barbara reached a new level.
There were tons and tons of emails being received daily, almost like he got like a week off from work or something.
Wow. About the online issues and Janelle's current situation with being hospitalized.
Again, all of these emails were coming from Janelle's account, but they knew that they were from Chris.
Yeah. One from Chris to Jamie read, quote, I hope Janelle doesn't... Excuse me.
I hope Janelle don't think about killing herself.
And Jamie responded saying, I think that if it wasn't for us, she might have thought about it.
Didn't say it, but I can tell she has just took all she can from these motherfuckers.
They won't let up and they're crazy. Hell, I don't know why they have to do this.
I don't know... I don't know. Their life has to such at the point that they see this as a sick joke or something.
Dumb bastards. And here's the thing. If, like...
Like, just stop being on social media. The end.
Like, you're grown adults. Yeah. Just interact in life and cut those people out of your life if you want.
Just, like, go play a video game if you really have to.
That's the thing. Go on Club Penguin. Like, you don't, nobody needs to, like, because even if she was being bullied, it's like, you don't need to stand for that.
You can just go, whoop, delete. Turn it off.
Yeah, exactly. Bye. Unplug the computer.
Get a fucking Neopet. Like, what the fuck?
I'm saying. Well, anyways, Chris wrote back seemingly trying to comfort Jamie and telling him that he wasn't alone in the fight against Janelle's bullies.
Chris was here for Jamie. And he even said that he had Lindsay Thomas under 24-7 surveillance at this time and that he had shot her back glass out of her car.
Which, like, I don't know if the CIA, like, shoots people's cars for you if you're being bullied online.
I've never had that experience. I've never had a friend who had that experience.
This is an interesting use of the CIA's time and resources.
That's what I'll say. Interesting. Now, I don't think that actually happened, to be honest.
I don't either. I don't know if anybody followed up on that, if anybody drove by her car or if they just took Chris's word for it.
They took Chris's word many, many times over.
It seems like they lived for Chris's word.
They did. His word and his word alone. They lived and died by Chris's word.
But to be honest, even though there were pending telephone harassment charges and from time to time rebuttal posts on Facebook from the people that Janelle was pointing the finger at, they were all just going on with their lives and doing the best they could to avoid the drama and avoid Jamie and Janelle.
They were like, I can't. This would be so scary that someone had focused on you like that and you're like, I just want to live my life without you in it.
Like, please just go away. Especially when you never bullied them in the first place.
As we all know at this point, I'm thinking, this came from pure jealousy on Janelle's part to Billie Jean.
Yeah. Because Janelle had feelings for Bill Payne.
She never did anything about it, but... Because she liked him, she felt like Billie Jean was in the wrong for dating him.
And it's like he's allowed to not like you, to not be attracted to you.
He might have even been at some point in time, but she never expressed those feelings.
But also, he's allowed to not be attracted to you.
Yeah, exactly. You can just be friends. That's a thing.
He doesn't have to like you just because you're a woman.
Right. Jesus. Not everyone is attracted to everyone.
Exactly. You find people hot that I'm like, I don't think so, and vice versa.
Yeah. You know, it's like everybody has a different type.
Exactly. It's ridiculous. It's freaking ridiculous.
It's freaking ridiculous. But everybody's trying to move on with this.
And Tracy Greenwell, Bill Payne, Billie Jean, and Lindsay Thomas were really specifically trying to rid themselves of this situation.
But at that same time, Chris was making sure that Jamie Curd, Buddy, and Barbara Potter were heavily immersed in this.
It was consuming their lives at this point.
What a way to live. Consuming their lives.
That sounds like a fucking nightmare. It is.
Now, in late October of 2011, Lindsay Thomas actually, her telephone harassment case against Janelle went to court and unfortunately was dismissed pretty quickly because, again, there wasn't a lot of proof.
I was going to say, those things are so hard to prove.
Exactly. Exactly. Now, this dismissal, though, seemed to embolden not only Janelle, but Barbara Potter.
In the weeks that followed, they stepped up their harassment.
And actually, just a few days after the court appearance, Billie Jean Hayworth was at a local gas station filling up her car with her baby in the backseat.
Oh, God. And Janelle and Barbara were in the car behind Billie's, and so they followed her into this gas station.
And they started screaming at her that she was white trash and that she didn't deserve her son.
Oh. Oh, my God. And like a slew of other threats.
Ew. According to her close friend, Linda, who was actually working inside in the gas station at the time, Billie raced into the store with her baby and she was, quote, crying, trembling and shaking.
Oh, my God. She was terrified of these people.
Holding her baby. Just filling up her car.
Yeah. Going about her day, living her life.
And there was also tension between Jamie, Kurt, and Bill Payne at this time.
The cousins. Like, remember, they're family.
Though they didn't have to work together very often at the mill anymore, since Jamie had requested not to be scheduled at the same time as either person, the couple, there were instances where it was inevitable.
They were like, you gotta fucking work together because that's a schedule.
Yeah, that's a schedule. Yeah. So during some of those... This is work.
Yeah, exactly. During some of those instances, there were arguments between the cousins, especially over the fact that Jamie had blindly taken Janelle's side without even hearing his own cousin's account of what was really going on here.
And Bill also knew that Jamie was going back to Janelle and telling her everything that had been said during these arguments, because then Janelle would take to social media and air everything out.
Oh, my God. So he's like... I'm trying to talk to you like human to human, man to man.
Yeah. This is so pathetic. Yeah, exactly.
Exactly. Now, finally, there was one night where Bill actually called his cousin Jamie in an attempt to end the feud once and for all.
He was like, me and Billie Jean started keeping a record of emails and social media posts and comments directed at us by Janelle and Barbara.
And he told them the file was now more than two inches thick.
Jesus. They have that much. But agreed that it wasn't just Janelle and Barbara involved in this fight.
He said there were hurtful remarks made on both sides now that they were in the thick of this.
But this had all started with Janelle. And now they were reaching a point of being threatened and it needed to stop.
He was like, you gotta do something, dude.
As my cousin, like, you gotta stop this.
Yeah. And he also told Jamie that there was no way an actual CIA agent was involved in this.
And that Chris was clearly Janelle. Yeah.
I mean, the emails were literally coming from her email account, guys.
They're coming from inside the house. But Jamie did not believe that Janelle was capable of doing something like that.
And so it seems like the call really ended with no resolution between the cousins.
Wow. And as the virtual feud was making its way into the real world, the tone of Chris's emails to Barbara Potter was getting graphic and dire.
He kept urging her that if she didn't stop all of this soon, then, quote, all of this crap might kill her daughter.
He told Barbara that he was ready and willing to kill Billie Jean Hayworth and Phil Payne and anybody else who posed a serious threat to Janelle.
And Chris also kept mentioning that he wished Buddy Potter still had his ID from his days in the CIA because then they would be able to work together to, quote, neutralize this threat.
Wow. As if the CIA wouldn't have a record of everyone who ever worked for them.
Yeah. Like, what? Yeah. So as Barbara, Buddy, and Jamie were dragged further and further into this strange fantasy-turned-conspiracy that Janelle and this Chris character had created, Janelle was still posting under fake names across several social media platforms.
Yes. She was constantly calling Lindsay Thomas and Billie Jean Hayworth mean whores, saying that they should be punished, and making vaguely threatening comments toward the entire group that she considered to be her bullies.
Chris actually started using Janelle's Facebook account during this time as well, and really amped up in the last months of 2011.
In a post from December 14, 2011, quote, Chris posted a status on Janelle's account saying...
To Bill Payne, Billie Jean Hayworth, Lindsay Thomas, and Tara, and Brad Osborne, and etc., please leave, L-E-V-E, Janelle alone and stop with the harassment and stop trying to run her life.
Look at your own lives and work on that.
BC, you are all just a bunch of white trash, no good, ugly people that love to hurt others.
Well, you need to think of this. Take care of your kids, Billy and Billie Jean.
And Lindy, get off your meth drugs and stop going after my sister and my family.
Thank you. Or you can just go jump off a mountain, MTN, for all I care.
You all need to get out of my sister's life.
You know, CIA things. That's very CIA. Very much CIA.
Every CIA. Very professional. Yes. So these posts were commented on over and over again by Barbara, who started calling Chris her son at this point.
Chris had started calling Janelle his sister.
So she was like, all right, well, he's my son then.
Ooh, there's a lot going on here. There's a lot of untreated mental illness in my own personal opinion.
Yeah. But pretty much all of these posts just had a slew of comments from Barbara, Chris, and Janelle.
They were all talking to each other back and forth.
And now Chris was saying that there were not only Janelle, excuse me, not only threats to Janelle's life, but to Buddy and Barbara's as well.
He had found evidence that people were after them now.
I don't even know what's happening right now.
Like, this is wild. Wild.com. Now, by the new year, 2012, Buddy believed that Janelle's former friends were working on plans to, quote, take Janelle and cut her head off and then kill him and his wife.
Because that's what Chris had said he found.
He found these threats. So on the evening of January 30th, 2012, Barbara called Jamie Curd and asked if he would stop by the house to take a look at their computer.
While Jamie was alone with Buddy, Buddy asked if Jamie would quote, do him a favor.
He wanted Jamie to take him down to Bill Payne's house and quote, let him out and go down the road and come pick him up.
Okay. Jamie would later say that Buddy wasn't being very specific about why he wanted to go out to Bill's house that night.
So he left and went back to his own home.
He was like, I don't know about this. But very early the next morning, like first couple hours of the morning of January 31st, 2012, Jamie missed a call from the Potter household.
And then he got a text from Janelle saying that Buddy was on his way to his house.
Jamie's house. When Buddy got there, they drove in Buddy's car to a church parking lot near the Payne house.
And Bill shared the house with not only Billie Jean and their son, but his father as well.
Now, Jamie and Buddy waited in the car until they saw Pa Bill, which is Bill Payne's senior, until they saw him leave for work.
Then they got out of the car and... walked through a small field that was adjacent to the Payne household.
Jamie later said that he explicitly told Buddy as they were crossing this field that he couldn't kill anybody, but Buddy told him all he needed to do was stand at the door while Buddy himself went in.
But if that was the case, then why did Buddy provide Jamie with a gun?
Now when they reached the front door, they found it unlocked, and both men entered the home.
Jamie stood by the front door. He said, this is Jamie's account, and waited while Buddy Potter went to the first bedroom.
Jamie would later testify that he heard Bill Payne yell, what the hell?
And then he saw Billie Jean run out of the room down the hall.
Jamie then heard a gunshot and saw Buddy Porter exit the room where he had clearly just shot Bill Payne.
Oh my god. He was now looking for Billie Jean, and he looked to Jamie to find out which direction she'd gone in.
Jamie said he pointed in the direction where he saw Billie Jean run, and while Buddy went in that direction, Jamie looked into the first bedroom and saw his cousin lying dead.
Fuck. As he looked, he heard another gunshot.
And at that point, he said he ran from the house, which I don't buy, back across the field and into Buddy Porter's truck.
Or excuse me, Potter's truck. Fucking autocorrect.
Buddy returned to the car several moments later, Jamie said, and Jamie gave him his gun back and they silently drove back to Jamie's house where Buddy dropped him off at the end of his driveway.
Jamie said he vomited in the street before going inside, and once he was inside, he received a text from Chris saying that the problem was now over.
Wow. That's horrific. Yeah. It's insane.
Was Billie Jean, was she holding her son when she was shot?
Yeah. That's why he was still in her arms.
It seemed like she was taking him out of his crib.
To run with him. To run with him. She was standing in front of his crib, or when she was shot and fell in front of the crib.
And luckily, somehow, the baby wasn't harmed.
And he was just sleeping? Just sleeping when they found him.
Oh, that breaks my heart. Yeah. And that she was going to save her baby.
I think she probably was going to run out the back, but obviously was taking the baby first.
Yeah. Oh, so at 630 that same morning, Brad Osborne, who I think was like a bigger part of the friend group, because I don't know if he was related to the woman from earlier who had gotten involved in all of this or if he was dating her or married to her.
But he had been involved in this whole saga.
He knew what this what was going on. Yeah.
He arrived at the pain house to pick Bill up for work.
When Bill didn't come outside after a few minutes, Brad tried to give him a call, but due to a quote-unquote disruption in his cell service, he wasn't able to connect the call.
Okay. He either didn't have service or his phone had been turned off for some reason.
He didn't want to leave without Bill, though.
He was like, let me go in and see what's up.
And he decided to go inside and check on his friend.
So he entered the home through a sliding glass door at the rear of the house because he knew that door was usually left unlocked.
And once he got inside, he said he heard an alarm clock going off over and over again.
But when he called out to Bill, he got no response.
He used the house phone to call Bill's cell phone again, but he couldn't hear it ringing.
So he was like, I don't really know what to do here.
I don't think he wanted to venture more into the home because I think maybe he felt like he was doing something wrong by being there.
So he called a couple more times, didn't hear anything, so he decided to leave.
Now, around 10 a.m., just a few hours later, the Payne's old neighbor, Roy Stevens, stopped by the house to pick up some mail that they'd been holding for him.
And he noticed that both cars were still in the driveway.
And he was like, that's kind of weird. Like, they should be at work, or at least one of them should be.
And he knocked on the door and got no response, though.
And he's like, all right, well, that's even weirder.
Both cars are here. Why is nobody answering the door?
Yeah. And he also knew that the panes usually left that back sliding glass door unlocked, so he went around back to get in that way.
Once he was inside, he called out telling whoever was home that he was there, but he got no response.
He thought this was weird, so he walked down the hall to the front bedroom.
He poked his head inside, and he saw Bill lying on the bed.
There was blood pooling around his head, and his throat had actually been cut open.
Oh, my God. Mm-hmm. Roy ran out of the house and told his wife, who had come along for the ride, what was going on and urged her to call 911.
But his wife Linda was CPR certified, and he wasn't sure whether Bill was still alive or not.
He couldn't tell. How would you know? Exactly.
So Linda tried to perform CPR, or she was going to, but she found Bill to be, quote, very stiff and ice cold.
So she knew CPR wasn't going to do anything, and she picked up the house phone to call 911.
As Linda was on the phone with the 911 operator, Roy heard a noise coming from the end of the hall.
I think it was the baby. He followed the noise and found Billie Jean lying on the floor in front of her son's crib with the baby still in her arms.
Oh, that just kills me. Luckily, like I said, unharmed.
When he found Bill Payne's body, like I said, he thought there was a chance he was still alive.
But when he saw Billie Jean, he knew she was not alive.
He said that he saw the hole in her head, a pool of blood around men, and he saw, quote, fragments of Billie Jean's hair and stuff on the carpet.
Oh, God. Like, I can't imagine finding somebody you love like that.
No. Now, once the bodies were taken into custody, it was obvious that this was a homicide, and thus an autopsy was required by law.
So the coroner was able to determine that even though Bill had that deep gash in his throat, in both cases, the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head from a .38 caliber revolver.
Okay. So the case was assigned to Johnson County Sheriff's Chief Deputy Joe Woodward, and he was to get assistance from a real special agent, Special Agent Scott Lott of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations, or the TBI.
I also love that his name is Scott Lott.
Scott Lott. That's fucking awesome. Agent Scott Lott.
Agent Scott Lott is on the case. So the duo started off by questioning friends and family of the murdered couple.
And pretty instantly, they heard about the social media war going on between them and a few other people in town and Janelle Porter.
I keep wanting to say Porter. I know. They did, however, learn that Bill Payne had been using and dealing drugs at the time of his death through interviews.
And they also had found a small amount of meth within the home and a pipe.
Okay. So they were like, oh. Like this could be a lot of things.
Exactly. Complicated things for just a minute, really.
Yeah. Investigators were like, is there some kind of connection between these deaths here and a local drug scene?
But they were quickly able to learn that Bill was not a major player in the scene at all.
He was a small-time dealer. He really only dealt to his friends.
And none of those people had any reason to want him or Billie Jean dead.
So that kind of fizzled out pretty quickly.
And the only other lead that they had to follow up on was the ongoing social media feud.
Yeah. So on February 1st, the day after the couple had been murdered, Woodward and Lott went out to the Potter household to interview the family about their relationship with the murdered couple.
They acted like they were in shock and told both investigators that they had just heard about the murders on the news that morning.
And when the investigators asked about the issues that Janelle had been having with the murdered couple and the other former friends, she told them that Lindsay Thomas and Billie Jean Hayworth had been unhappy about telephone harassment cases having been dismissed.
But since then, there hadn't been any further problems between them.
Okay. Lies. Yeah. She did say, though, that both women had hacked her Facebook account and created a ton of fake profiles online.
And for months they harassed Janelle and other friends that she'd made virtually.
They just went out and harassed everybody she ever knew on her friends list.
It's like weird that that happened on your IP address if it was them.
That's wild. Woodward and Law asked why the other members of the group would say that actually she was the one doing the harassing.
And she told them, quote, no, no, I'm not that mean.
I just tell people to leave me alone. And she said she thought the woman were jealous of her because she was too pretty.
Janelle said this? About herself. Okay. Which is, like, that's great that you have a good self-image.
Like, you've got confidence, but... But that's not it.
Also, like, we're talking about a murdered woman here, and you think she was jealous of you because you're too pretty.
Like, let's come back down to earth. I was just gonna say, come on down to earth, friend.
Exactly. Like, sure, you're pretty, but okay.
Like, what... So she said she also felt like they didn't accept her because she hadn't been born and raised in Mountain City and they didn't like outsiders.
That was her excuse for everything that had ever happened to her in Mountain City.
It was everybody else in Mountain City's fault, not hers.
Yeah, of course. Because they didn't like outsiders.
Meanwhile, they seemed to be pretty fucking welcoming.
Yeah, it seemed like it. Tracy went out of her way to introduce Janelle to her entire friend group.
Yeah, they introduced her to her boyfriend.
Yeah, exactly. Jeez. But she explained that no matter how much she begged them to stop, they just wouldn't.
They terrorized her. They told her they were going to kill her, kill her parents.
They said they were going to rape her. And they repeatedly told her that they hoped she would die.
On these fake accounts. And Buddy and Barbara sat alongside their daughter and confirmed everything she'd told them.
They added that there had been people shooting at the house recently, throwing rocks in the yard with weird names printed on them.
And that one day when Janelle was home alone, somebody had come by and kicked in the garage door.
Oh. Yeah. Crazy. Look at that. Crazy. Crazy.
You're a crazy girl. You're a crazy girl.
The more and more they heard, the stranger this all sounded.
This is an agent for the Bureau of Investigation.
And he's like, what the fuck? He's like, I don't think so.
And what stood out as particularly strange to Agent Law in particular was that Janelle seemed to be minimizing Jamie Curd's involvement.
He was like, I thought he was a bigger part of this whole friend group.
And he didn't know that Jamie Curd was Janelle's boyfriend, but he suspected it.
Because Janelle actually, remember, her parents still didn't know they were dating.
Oh, yeah, because they're just supposed to be friends.
She denied that she and Jamie were romantically involved.
Yeah. And she seemed to be stirring any questions they had about him in the opposite direction.
Like anytime they asked about Jamie, she danced around it.
Okay. And it's like, why are you trying so hard not to talk about Jamie?
She was like, no, we're just friends. And sometimes he comes by to help the computer.
The end. Okay. She was going out of her way to talk about anything and anyone other than Jamie, which only made investigators want to talk to him even more.
Yeah, of course. It was a horrible idea.
So the first interview they had with Jamie was two days after this.
It was a pretty unproductive meeting other than the fact that he agreed to take a polygraph test.
Other than that, he claimed he knew nothing about the murders.
He really didn't have anything to say. But then he was picked up again for an interview on February 6th, and this time investigators would get the break in the case that they'd been hoping for.
In his previous interview, Jamie had failed that polygraph test miserably.
Of course he did. Miserably. Not one part of me believed he was going to pass that or even slightly pass that.
Which, like, again, who knows if they're even fucking real or not, but, like, woof.
This one works. Yeah, I'm for this one.
He specifically got like really bad reviews, I guess.
I don't know how to put it. He got bad reviews when he responded no to whether or not he knew the identity of Payne and Hayworth's killer.
He got bad reviews. He really flunked that question.
Like a whole group of people, a whole group of internet trolls came in and were like, once, I wish I could give this zero stars.
I would give this zero stars. This answer, I would give it zero stars if I could.
We were all rooting for you. It's not funny, but it is.
But that part's funny. That part's funny, exactly.
But he did really bad on that question. And he got bad reviews.
He got bad reviews overall. Now, when the investigators told him this, that he had gotten such bad reviews, he finally said that he did play some role in the murders.
Oh, he confessed. He was just like, you know what?
He's like, you know what? Yeah. But that it was Buddy Porter.
God damn it, Potter. Jesus. Potter. Auto-correct messed me up once, and then, like, the rest is history.
Buddy Potter had pulled the trigger both times, Jamie said.
He also asked, while he was in his interview, if anybody from the CIA was there, which greatly confused the detectives.
They were like... They're like, no, we're local detectives.
They don't usually come around for this type of thing.
No. But like, why do you ask? Yeah. And he was like, no, no, no.
I'm just wondering. Nobody from the CIA is here.
Chris? Secret stuff. Chris, are you there?
Yeah. They were like, no. Also, it's like, fuck you, Jamie.
You pointed in the direction. Of a mother.
Going to save her child. A 23-year-old mother.
You piece of shit. You're all pieces of shit.
And your cousin's probably soon-to-be wife.
Yeah. What is wrong with you? The mother of his child.
Exactly. The mother of your... Third cousin?
Is that how that works? I don't know how that works.
But yeah. Family. Yeah, the mother of your family and your family.
But anyway, the detectives asked Jamie after he confessed to call up Buddy Porter and see if he could get him to talk about what had happened.
That way they could try to get a taped confession.
So Jamie called the house that same night, February 6th.
And there was some small talk between him and Barbara at first because she was the one to answer the phone.
During this little small talk, Barbara said that she'd gotten an email from Chris telling her that Jamie had been arrested.
And she asked him point blank, have you taken a lie detector test?
And if you did, did you pass it? He lied to Barbara and he said, I did, but I passed it.
No. No. And he was like, can I talk to Buddy?
So she puts him on the phone. Buddy gets on the phone and immediately asks Jamie if he, quote, got rid of everything from bills.
Wow. Jamie responded, telling Buddy that he had.
And Buddy said, OK, that makes me feel a lot better.
I'm so happy that he's a fucking idiot. That's great.
I'm really glad he's a fucking idiot. Same Z's.
So now investigators were able to get an arrest warrant for Buddy Potter based on Jamie's confession and that phone conversation, and they were also able to get a warrant to search the Potter home for evidence.
Good. Yeah, we're winning. Buddy was taken into custody without incident, and the authorities who searched the home were able to seize a shit ton of potential evidence, including, but not limited to, the family computer, a spiral notebook containing the passwords to a large amount of social media accounts.
Bah! two guns which i'm like that's it one of which was a 38 caliber pistol and as one investigator approached a stack of papers next to the couch where barbara and janelle were sitting barbara started grabbing the papers and ripping them in half are you shitting me as if there weren't multiple officers and agents sitting there right in front of her they're like gal ma'am can't do that you've Pressed an incorrect key.
Wow. So Agent Woodward was like, what the fuck are you doing?
Like, stop and give me those. So she had to hand them over.
She had no choice. And what those papers were, were a large number of printed emails and screenshots from social media, which included several photos printed out of Billie Jean Hayworth, one of which had been labeled Billie Whore.
Oh, my God. Like, they're just living in this house with fucking printed out screenshots of social media.
Yes. The most pathetic group of human beings I have ever heard of.
Like, this is... Wow. And it's just, like, twisted.
This 23-year-old woman. This 23-year-old mother.
Yeah. You're sitting there writing Billy whore.
Like, oh, go fuck yourselves. Like, what is wrong with you?
It's giving, like, if the Firefly family was, like, really invested in Facebook.
Honestly, the Firefly family is so much fucking cooler than this.
Absolutely. Way cooler than these assholes.
You know what I'm saying? It's just, like... is yucky.
It's dirty. Honestly, they're like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre family.
Yes. To be quite honest. Like just sitting in a house.
Like the fireflies are at least fun. Filled with guns and ammunition and social media printouts and pictures of victims.
Yeah, instead of like raw meat, like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre family, they have social media printouts everywhere.
In the original one, it was all real. Yeah, they had to sit in that For like a long ass time.
Listen to Scream. But yeah, that's their that family.
Yeah, for realsies. So during Buddy's interrogation, he decided, excuse me, he denied having any involvement in the murders and said that Jamie was just throwing him under the bus.
Oh, shut up. He reiterated that Janelle was being harassed by these people, and he actually added his own account into the mix, telling both of the investigators that one time he had been in a public bathroom and he heard people, quote, talking about kidnapping Janelle from this bathroom, taking her to a field, raping her because she was a virgin, and murdering her.
And they were like, wow. Yeah, that sounds legit.
Wow. Like, what? No, that didn't happen.
Yeah, no, that didn't. Yeah, no. So Woodward and Lott then shifted the conversation because they were like, I don't really know where to go from here.
I guess we'll turn all the lights down now.
Wow, look at you. But anyways, they switched the topic of conversation to Janelle's relationship with Jamie.
But Buddy insisted that they were just friends and that any feelings either of them had toward the other had been, quote, straightened out a long time ago.
Ew. Like, what? Like, what are you? Why can't she just have feelings for this man?
You're just like, you're so gross. He said that Jamie would never have been capable of taking care of his daughter, and that was why he and Barbara wouldn't allow the relationship.
Man. Weird. So Buddy's interview went on for hours.
He repeatedly denied having any involvement in the murders.
He said he knew Bill Payne was a drug dealer and that this whole thing was probably a drug deal gone bad.
But this all changed when the agents brought his wife Barbara into the equation.
They were like, well, does Barbara know that you did this?
Does Janelle know that you did this? And he broke down.
Whoa. Bringing his wife and his daughter into it somehow broke him.
Wow. And as- They knew. They did. They always know.
So as they saw that he was breaking down, they were like, why don't you call Barbara?
You got to let her know. Like- Wow. They were playing like- That's high level interrogation shit.
Give her a call. Wow. You know? So he gets Barbara on the phone and he confesses, telling her that he killed Billie Jean and Bill, quote, because of what they tried to do to her and Janelle.
Wow. And Barbara kept trying to save face, though, and she said on the phone multiple times, no, you couldn't have been involved, quote, you were here on the night of the murders.
I saw you. You're not guilty because you were here.
You have to say that. See, to me, that sounds like there's something going on there.
Wait, what do you mean? The way she said that seems like she's, like we said, there seems to be some undiagnosed mental illness happening here.
And that response to me is like, no, you told me that I was supposed to say this.
Yeah, like you have to say that. You know what I mean?
Like, no. Like, this is the story. I was like, wait, you mean you don't think he did it?
Oh, no, I do. I was like, what? No, he definitely did it.
But, like, I think her response is very telling of where her head was at.
I agree. Totally. It's also like, ma'am, this is a recorded line.
Don't say you have to say that. Yeah. Like, don't know.
That's why. But Buddy wouldn't and he'd already confessed anyway.
Of course. And this phone call was even more damning.
Yep. So remember how I said that Jamie had asked about the CIA in his second interview and the cops were like, what?
Yeah. He explained to them then that there was this CIA agent named Chris that was a family friend of the Potters and that it was his duty, his assignment to keep Janelle safe.
Wow. And they were like, I think this is all random nonsense.
Like, I don't know what you're talking about, but like, I don't have time to deal with that right now.
But as they continued to search the Potter household, they would find out just how serious Jamie was being and just how scared he was.
They took into custody multiple trash bags of shredded paper that had been found in the back of Buddy's truck.
It took them about a month, but they were able to reassemble the over 100 pages that had been shredded.
What? Like, imagine. Holy shit. And when they did, they realized that this entire case was a very strange conspiracy theory involving someone who claimed to be a CIA agent that had been, quote, "...corresponding with Barbara and warning her about threats to her daughter's life."
That was like the theme of those emails that they were able to put together.
So they tried and tried and tried to locate a CIA agent with the description of Chris.
But they were never able to find anybody who slightly resembled that description in the CIA.
Yeah. What? I know. I really buried the lead.
Holy shit. Talk about a plot twist. They couldn't find him.
It was like he didn't even work there. It's like he doesn't even exist.
It's like that. Oh my goodness. So the deeper and deeper.
You said gracious. That they dug, they realized, and I'm sure you'll be shocked to hear, that Chris was just one of Janelle's online personas.
It was her all along. Oh, I had no idea.
But to Barbara, Chris was very, very real.
They had exchanged a myriad of emails and texts, and Barbara even shared pictures of him on social media, saying, Chris, our son.
Oh, that is, that's very sick. What's even sicker, what's even more fucked up, is that those pictures were of a man named Chris.
A guy that Janelle had gone to high school with.
Oh my. They weren't friends. This random guy named Chris who she went to high school with?
Yes. Can you imagine being Chris? He ended up being called to testify in this case.
Oh my God, poor Chris. I know. Oh, that sucks.
I would be so fucking angry. I would be pissed.
I'd be raging. And that's why everybody should go delete Facebook right now.
Yeah, go delete your Facebook. Fuck that.
Can you imagine? She just took them off of his account.
Oh my God. I would be irate. I would be on that stand being like, I'm going to fucking kill everybody.
Are you kidding me? And then they're like, okay, do you have any connection to her?
And he was like, no, we went to high school together.
Oh, that sucks. It doesn't even seem like they were friends in high school.
Oh, that sucks. Yeah. Poor Chris. Poor Chris.
Wow. So once investigators reassembled the shredded communications and looked at them with more context, DA Dennis Brooks developed his own theory about the origins of this Chris character.
He said, quote, Yep. And Chris had entered the picture right around the time that Billie Jean and, excuse me, Bill Payne started dating.
And it was clear reading through the communications that this man was not a CIA agent.
He focused on how pretty and sweet Janelle was, not at all your typical behavior.
And then they realized that all of the communications from Chris and anyone he spoke with, whether it be through mail, social media, or text, all came from Janelle's accounts.
Yeah. The fact that that was just overlooked.
Even her phone number. Come on. Like when she was, when these people were getting texts from Chris, it was coming from Janelle's phone.
Yeah. Her phone number. The call's coming from within the house.
It always is. Also, when they compared Chris's writing with Janelle's, it was identical.
She had a very specific style of writing.
She often made spelling mistakes and grammar mistakes.
And coincidentally, Chris made those exact same ones.
Particularly, um... Like, she spelled worry, W-O-R-R-I-E.
Oh, yeah. And so did Chris. Those are very specific.
Like, there's a few others that I didn't end up writing down.
Just that one. It's very specific. But, like, they're all very specific.
Yeah. And it's very specific words. There's a few more.
I wish I had written them down. But, yeah.
Yeah, so Buddy Porter and Jamie Curd were indicted for the murders, and while some Mountain City citizens were shocked, many who worked in law enforcement or law administration were not at all shocked by this.
Really? They had become familiar with Janelle and her parents throughout the years that they'd lived in Mountain City.
The mayor, Mike Reese, put it this way to the press...
Once you've crossed Janelle, you've crossed her father, too.
Ooh. Even the stranger aspects of the case actually sounded familiar to anybody who had a quote-unquote run-in with Janelle.
The mayor. Like, this girl was on the mayor's radar.
Yeah, that's pretty big. He actually said—this is wicked bizarre—
I said that on purpose. He said that a year or so earlier, the Potters were upset.
Specifically, Buddy had called him and said that, quote, the 911 director had taken Janelle off his list.
What? The mayor literally had no idea what this meant, but knew that Janelle Potter was always up to some kind of scheming and telling her mom and dad that she was the one being schemed.
So Janelle is just like, oh, just manipulating her parents.
She's stirring shit up. It's just like her sister said.
Her sister was like, she manipulates you guys into doing whatever she wants you to do, including fucking murder.
Holy shit. So Buddy's trial began in October of 2013, and there was obviously a shit ton of evidence and taped confessions going against him.
Although the motives and the events leading up to the murders were kind of complicated, I guess, the prosecutor's argument was pretty straightforward.
They put it like this, quote, Barbara, Buddy and Jamie are not sophisticated people.
They were easily misled by Janelle, who knew which buttons to press.
Jamie was lonely and vulnerable to a younger woman stroking his ego.
He'd never been out of Mountain City, never been popular.
Barbara also had some kind of mental disorder in which there always has to be a controversy or conspiracy going on.
She was fixated on conflicts. Buddy liked to think of himself as a government operative.
Most people figured Janelle out, that she was a bit of a fantasist.
That's why she struggled to make and keep friends.
But not these three. It was the perfect storm.
Jeez. So Janelle, that's why I was so excited when you said like, oh, it's like the fantasy of it all.
I was like, mm-mm. Yeah, no. I was like, you got it.
You got it. Janelle knew that her parents were incredibly overprotective and also knew that they didn't really understand social media.
So she used Chris to amplify fake threats against her and eventually threats to everybody else in the family, making them feel like they were unsafe.
Yeah. She was manipulating everybody around her to murder these people that she perceived to be her enemies for some reason or another.
She also knew what Jamie's weaknesses were, and she exploited him.
She knew he was in love with her and that he was desperate to be accepted by her family, so she inserted him right into the drama, had him get buddy-buddy with her dad, and figured out a way for the two of them to want to protect her and be willing to murder to protect her.
Wow. And when he asked why he, why would he believe that he was talking to a CIA agent without any evidence of it at all, Jamie answered, well, I mean, I thought Chris was real.
I mean, I thought there was a, you know, someone that I was talking to there and that Janelle, the way she would talk to me, it was like bonding, like a family.
Wow. Like I think... She just manipulated the shit out of these people.
This is wild how she was able to manipulate these people.
I think that they... just blindly believed her.
Like, I don't know what it was about her story.
I don't know what it was about their relationship with her.
Wow. This is, like, really sick. Yeah. All the way around.
It is. So needless to say, in October of 2013, Buddy was found guilty on two counts of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to two life sentences.
Oh, damn. Mm-hmm. Good. Jamie Curd pled guilty, but since he agreed to testify against Buddy Potter, he was given a lesser sentence, and he got 25 years in prison.
Damn. Yeah. I'm actually surprised he got that.
I was hoping he would get that. I am too.
You know how these things usually shake out.
Because, well, they weren't able to prove who had really done the killing.
That's the thing. You know, like still to this day, nobody knows.
That's the story, but. That's the story.
And still to this day, nobody knows who was the one to slash Bill Payne's throat.
I was going to ask that because I didn't hear that come up.
So it's like. No. What the hell happened?
It's just, it's Buddy's word against Jamie's.
Nobody else was there. Are they, are both of them saying that the other one did it?
Yeah. Buddy says that... I'll get there.
Okay. But Jamie said that Buddy did everything.
Okay. He said he was just the lookout, basically.
He was there, the lookout. Mm-hmm. Now, obviously, there was no doubt that Jamie and Buddy had been the ones to go out there and kill Bill and Billie Jean, regardless of who pulled the trigger.
Yeah. But investigators also at the same time knew that Barbara and Janelle played a key role in orchestrating this entire thing.
Yeah. If it weren't for them... This wouldn't have happened.
Absolutely. But the problem was that it was going to be kind of difficult to prosecute a person for murder if they weren't actually present for the killings.
Yeah, of course. But this DA was willing to try.
And just a few months after Buddy's conviction, a grand jury did end up indicting both Janelle and Barbara Potter for murder and for tampering with evidence.
Good. There was a lot of holdup going into trial.
I think so many technicalities and like this is a very unprecedented thing to try two women who, for a murder who weren't actually at the murder site.
But eventually they got there and the double trial began May 2015.
They were being tried at the same time. Okay.
DA Dennis Brooks was facing multiple hurdles, but made pretty much the same case to the jury that he had in Buddy's trial.
Even though neither women before the jury had pulled the trigger, the murders, just like I said a minute ago, would not have happened if it weren't for them.
The way that the DA put it to ABC News, Janelle kind of spurred it, and Barbara got it to happen.
Yeah. Now, the evidence presented to the jury was damning to say the least.
It showed them exactly who Janelle was, a woman caught up in some kind of fantasy-turned-conspiracy that eventually ended up in murder.
And it never seemed like either woman was unaware that their implications could have led to murder, and it really didn't seem like they gave a shit about the consequences of those implications.
Yeah. They both wanted these people dead and knew they would get there.
So it took about a week to get through testimony and all the evidence.
And at the end of the trial, both of them were found guilty on all counts.
Damn. And both were sentenced to life in prison.
Holy shit, really? Janelle will be 80 years old before she's eligible for parole.
And if Barbara and Buddy were to serve their full sentences, they'll die in prison.
Wow. But after being sentenced, Buddy started claiming he was innocent.
And then in a 2021 appeal, he told the court, right now, Barbara and my daughter both know that I did this.
So first he was maintaining his innocence.
Then he said that they knew he did it. They know I did it.
But like I was saying earlier, he alluded that it was Jamie Curd who had killed Billie Jean.
He said, I killed Billie Payne. He killed Billie Jean.
Okay. And Jamie Curd said, I didn't kill either of them.
I was just the lookout. Yeah. Now, this 2021 appeal case was actually an attempt by Barbara and Janelle's lawyers to get both women a new case.
These lawyers argued that the court had denied them crucial information that would have aided them in the defense.
Okay. But the appeal ended up being dismissed and the verdict was upheld because neither lawyer could actually produce any evidence of that crucial information.
Yeah. I fucking love when people can't back up their arguments.
That's my favorite thing ever. Unfortunately... My favorite thing is when somebody's like, no, no, no, like, this.
You did this. You did this. And then you're like, okay, can you just, like, show me a piece of thing that says that?
And they're like, no. No. I can't. No. It's like, why'd you even bring that up?
Exactly. Because before... You were dumb, but, like, now you look dumb.
Right. So, like, now I've proved that you're dumb.
Now I've proved you're dumb. So that's what's not good for you.
That's what's proven here. Ridonkulous. So, unfortunately, though, the court did find evidence supporting a claim made by Barbara that since she was tried in the same trial as her daughter, there was a conflict of interest that may have impacted her sole case.
So because of this, she was granted her own new trial.
Right. But the DA didn't want to go through with another trial.
And I think they probably thought like it wasn't going to happen two times that they found her guilty when she wasn't there.
Yeah. So instead they offered her a plea deal.
If she pleaded guilty to two counts of facilitation of first degree murder, she would get a lesser sentence.
Okay. She took the deal and she was resentenced to 25 years in prison.
Wow. With a requirement that 30% of the time be served before she's eligible for parole.
Wow. Wow. Since she had already served eight years at this point, she will be eligible for parole this year, 2023.
Oh, shit. And that is the story, the tragic story, of the Facebook murders.
Wow. That is so sad on every level. And just so senseless.
So senseless. This young couple, he seemed like he was really trying to get his life together, trying to get on a good track.
They have a little baby. How old was the baby again?
Seven months old. Seven months old. We'll never know his parents.
No. And finding out later the trauma of what happened.
Oh, my God. And that you were asleep in her arms.
That's like Dexter. Literally. Literally.
That's literally the storyline of Dexter.
That's actually crazy that you said that.
Holy shit. They found him covered in his mother's blood.
Oh, that's awful. That's awful. And thank gosh he was unharmed.
I know. If that baby had been harmed, I honestly don't think I would have been able to tell the story.
But holy shit. But all because this girl had feelings for Bill that she never even voiced.
Yeah, that's, I mean... wow so uh like we always say i'm like speechless social media is the root of all evil it really is proves it it's just become a thing where it's like what's the fucking point why are we here honestly what's the point legit get an email address get an email address that's it don't even get an email address just have a phobia of phones it just happens Have a phobia of phones like Chris.
Like CIA agent no one. Just Chris. Just Chris.
It's like Madonna. It's just Chris. Everybody knows me.
CIA agent Chris. So hot right now. Wow. Well, guys, we hope you keep listening.
And we hope you keep it weird. But not so weird that you catfish your own parents and that this happens because, wow, that would be so tragic and you shouldn't ever do that.
Don't lie to people. It's rude. Don't. It's horrible.
It's horrible. If you like Morbid, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
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