Original subtitles

Harlan, over here!

Ladies and gentlemen, Harlan Coben.

He's the greatest thriller writer.

Oh.

Coben's written over 30 New York Times Best Sellers.

With over a dozen hit TV shows and movies.

In all our stories, the same question:

What made the killer cross that line?

I'm Harlan Coben.

Ideas for my mystery novels can come from anywhere--

a conversation with a friend, eavesdropping in a coffee shop,

a story in the news-- anything, really.

Now, when I hear about a true crime, I get obsessed.

I have to follow the trail no matter where it takes me,

like the mind-bending double homicide

of two people named Billy.

Terrible crimes often blossom out of something small--

in this case, just a routine friend request on social media.

And that's where our mystery begins.

How the hell did it get on?

Oh.

I'm just trying to figure out this camera.

Billie Jean laughed at absolutely

anything and everything.

She found the joy in the little things.

He's going down.

Billy and Billie Jean met where they worked.

Billy was always a lot of fun to be around.

Say hi, honey.

They just clicked together.

Bill and Billie Jean had the same name.

It was always a tongue-tie when we talked about them together.

It was like, well, you guys were meant for each other.

She then found out that she was pregnant,

and that's all that they ever wanted.

Say cheese, Mommy.

Billie Jean, she was always holding her baby.

She liked being a mom.

Roll over.

There you go.

Billy was a good dad.

Their baby was starting just to hit babbles.

I just remember him making noises.

Baby.

They would have been such great parents.

Mwah!

Excuse me.

Shut up! Shut up!

Blood on his--

A crime happened here.

The past isn't what it seemed.

The story told turns out to be deception.

And just when you're sure you have the answer--

911, what is the address of your emergency?

Hello? Anyone there?

there's one final twist.

Investigators describe it as a quiet neighborhood.

The Johnson County community is the center

of a double-murder investigation.

Inside that home, deputies discovered

Billy Payne Jr. with a gunshot wound to the head,

and a cut on his throat.

They also found Payne's girlfriend, Billie Hayworth,

with a gunshot wound to the head,

and found the couple's six-month-old baby uninjured

in his dead mother's arms.

Who could hurt someone holding a child

at point-blank range?

Please come forward and confess to this,

because this ain't fair.

This ain't right.

This ain't fair to him,

to lose his mom and dad.

The person who did this crime

was a cold-blooded killer.

My initial motivation was

we're fighting for this little kid.

The police was mainly asking,

who do you think would have done this?

Or why would somebody do this?

And I didn't know what to tell them 'cause I had no clue.

We thought it might be a professional hit.

There was not a lot of physical evidence left behind,

and not a lot of clues.

Investigators have no real leads

as they search for the person who murdered

a couple near Mountain City.

We come from a town that leaves

their doors unlocked at night,

so someone doing this was unfathomable.

Investigators interviewed more than 150 people

in the last seven days.

- Have a seat there. - Have a seat there.

Right.

Nobody has a problem with this boy.

Everybody liked him. Everybody got along.

It's so common now that we live behind pictures.

We live behind a persona

online or on social media.

There's a phrase that says

a picture is worth a thousand words,

but I believe that a picture can hide thousand words.

Breaking news today--

Detectives reveal evidence of a social media conflict.

online war that may have led to murder.

Every house holds its own secrets.

We can look at the facade and guess what's going on inside.

But the truth is, no one really knows

what's going on behind our front door,

and we don't know what's going on behind theirs.

We learned there was somewhat of a feud

going on between the victims and this person

called Jenelle Potter.

At that time, you had an internet website,

called Topix, where people could just trash each other.

Just hateful, nasty things being written,

and there was a lot of them against Jenelle Potter.

Yeah.

When I first met Jenelle, I worked at the pharmacy.

And they were coming in,

her and her mom and dad, to get her medicine,

and I started talking to her.

Jenelle Potter was very engaging, very endearing.

But she didn't have many friends,

since she had just moved from Pennsylvania to Mountain City

with her parents, Barbara and Marvin Potter.

Jenelle was different.

You can tell she hadn't been out hardly any at all.

We started talking on the phone.

I asked her if she wanted to go to my dad's with me

because Dad always had a lot of people hanging out.

I said, we gotta find her a boyfriend

to get her out of the house.

So Billy said, well, let's get her hooked up

with our cousin Jamie.

She was real excited,

and Jamie was head over heels for her.

I mean, they weren't dating two or three weeks,

and they was wanting to get married.

Jamie was not considered good enough to Jenelle's parents

to be associated as a boyfriend.

So that prompted the two to doing it underground,

away from the prying eyes of Jenelle's parents.

Being lied to is like

an everyday thing for police officers,

and one of the biggest reasons to lie

is to protect people you care about.

We're raised being told loyalty is everything.

But as we get older, the real question is,

who gets our loyalty and why?

They say family comes first,

until that special someone comes along

and changes everything.

Jenelle's friendship toward Bill

seemed to have taken a turn once Bill

became involved with Billie Jean

in a romantic relationship.

That's when Billie Jean started going online,

saying mean things about Jenelle.

We heard Billie Jean was bullying Jenelle

and wouldn't leave her alone.

Marvin Potter had actually visited the sheriff's

department to complain about the online harassment

of his daughter, Jenelle.

The sheriff told him, the best thing you can do

is take that computer of hers and throw it out the window.

I felt bad for Jenelle.

Jamie and Billy totally quit talking.

I mean, they wasn't even looking at each other.

I figured Jamie and Billy would get over it.

You know, it was just over a girl.

They'd get over it.

What Jamie didn't know

was that investigators had gotten a tip.

The more you study human behavior,

the more you start to see patterns in the evidence.

There's the person who did the deed

and another person who put them up to it.

Usually, one is more criminally minded,

and the other is, well, more gullible,

impressionable, easier to manipulate.

That's usually the one who breaks first.

Mike Hannon conducted the interrogation.

His calm country demeanor is just

devastating to someone who's got something to hide.

We stayed persistent with that

and didn't back off of Jamie Curd.

When we asked him that question,

he was closed in his body language.

I mean, you could almost see that he was hiding something.

When Jamie asked me that question,

he said, the CIA is involved in this case?

I was totally shocked.

When a suspect deflects,

our first instinct is to assume deception.

They're trying to hide something.

We see it as a sign of guilt.

But what if it's blind loyalty that's driving them--

the primitive desire to protect someone else?

And maybe even the one pulling your strings?

Jamie told us that he and the CIA agent

they were sending emails back and forth.

Chris would write what he was learning

through his CIA methods--

that Bill and Billie Jean were plotting to harm Jenelle.

The correspondence from Chris

was that he was prepared,

ready, willing, and able to, "take care" of these people

who were bullying Jenelle.

At that point, Jamie wound up getting

thrown off balance in the interrogation.

The investigators could tell they were on to something

and kept pressing him.

Buddy is the nickname they call Marvin Potter,

Jenelle Potter's father.

When the world throws you off balance, there's always family.

They're the safe harbor,

the ones who have your back.

They'll protect you from the dangerous world outside--

sometimes so much so that you get sealed off

from that world entirely.

The problem is, without outside perspective,

you might never notice when that very protection,

that supposed safety,

becomes the most dangerous thing of all.

Whew!

Marvin Potter had served his country as a Marine.

But at this point, he's on disability.

He has mobility issues.

He was on oxygen.

While Buddy's mobility issues were a concern

for investigators, Buddy had a very strong motivation

for killing the victims, because he believed

his daughter was in danger.

It was several hours.

He denied, he denied, he denied.

And really, he had nowhere else to go, but denial.

On a recording.

Investigators coached Jamie into getting

a statement from Marvin to show that he had

involvement with the crime.

When we were playing the phone call to Buddy,

you could almost see the color drain out of his face.

He was seriously concerned.

At this point, he knows we're not bluffing.

Yeah, let's see what you got to give.

Mike Hannon finally found an angle with Buddy,

that you're the protector of your family

and trying to touch on the Marine background,

because he's very proud of his service to his country.

Johnson County investigators arrested Jamie Lynn Curd

and Marvin Potter Jr. overnight,

their charges, two counts of first-degree murder each

in the shooting deaths of Billie Jean Hayworth

and Curd's cousin, Billy Payne.

But the investigation is not over yet.

Both Jamie and Buddy were repeating information

to the investigators that they had gotten

from Chris, the CIA agent.

They wanted to murder her,

and they wanted to rape her because she's a virgin.

Determining who Chris was, was very important

to determining who was responsible for

trying to propel this crime forward.

So while Marvin was being interrogated,

the sheriff's department was conducting their own search

of the Potter residence, which ultimately led

to finding thousands of shredded emails

from the CIA agent named Chris.

It was obvious from the emails that Chris

was very invested in the potential deaths

of Bill and Billie Jean.

And then in one message,

I found a last name that popped out.

It was Tjaden.

We found him.

Trial begins this morning for the 2012 killings

of Billy Payne and Billie Jean Hayworth.

My name is Christopher Tjaden.

Have you ever been employed by the CIA?

Never employed by the CIA.

Have you ever emailed Jamie Curd?

Never.

I don't even know who Jamie Curd is.

At that point, we knew this was a catfishing case.

Often the more outlandish the story,

the more effective the con.

Would you rather be part of a Hollywood

cloak-and-dagger conspiracy

or an amateur hit job?

Chris Tjaden, the real Chris Tjaden,

was a guy that had had his identity stolen

in the course of this double homicide.

He had been a cop,

but he was not in the CIA.

All these pictures of himself had been

pulled off of his public Facebook profile.

Investigators did an IP address search

for where these Chris emails were coming from.

In every instance,

it was coming from the Potter household.

We then had to prove who was Chris

among the three people that were living there,

so I got an expert in forensic linguistics

to examine known writing samples

from the Potter family.

It was found that Jenelle would misspell

certain words consistently.

Like when she's supposed to take the E out before the -ing,

she wouldn't do that.

Then Chris, the CIA agent, would do the same thing.

At that point, I felt, OK, I'm on to something.

As I spent more and more time with Jenelle,

it became apparent to me that she had

a little crush on Billy Payne.

Billy Payne was a dynamic and charismatic individual,

and Jenelle was taken by him.

Bill knew Jenelle had a crush on him.

But he didn't feel the same,

so he tried to set her up with his cousin Jamie

to take the pressure off.

Jenelle ran with it and used Jamie to stay close to Bill.

But when Billy Payne got with Billie Jean Hayworth,

Jenelle became jealous.

Jenelle was in love with Billy

and knew that she couldn't have him,

so she didn't want Billie Jean to have him either.

Star-crossed lovers, you know,

something she can't have, she's upset about it.

Jenelle's anger was palpable,

and it all came out online.

We discovered that Jenelle had this regular habit

of going on anonymous internet chat boards on Topix,

and now she was posing as Billie Jean online,

attacking herself.

And then Jenelle would pose as other people defending her.

Really weird. Really weird.

Jenelle had a very unassuming demeanor about herself,

but when her fingers were on a keyboard

pretending to be other people,

she would be a lot meaner,

a lot nastier than anything you'd ever see visually.

At the beginning, Bill and Billie Jean

tried to completely stay out of it.

They were just trying to start a life together.

But it got real bad when Billie Jean got pregnant.

It's like Jenelle turned into somebody else.

Billy had tried multiple times to get Jenelle

to leave him and Billie Jean alone, but it's just like

the more he tried, the worse it got.

The need for attention can become a toxic addiction.

It needs to be fed constantly.

And like any addiction, eventually, over time,

we need higher and higher doses to get our fix.

Jenelle Potter craved attention and love.

By creating this drama and pretending to be a victim,

it brought loving attention from her parents,

and eventually it spiraled into something else.

Jenelle was sending her mother emails as Chris,

the CIA agent.

Jenelle, posing as Chris,

would tell Barbara

that Bill and Billie Jean

were plotting to kill Jenelle,

and Barbara Potter believed her.

It was clear through the voluminous amount

of electronic evidence that Barbara Potter was the one

that directed Marvin and Jamie

to put the hit on these two victims.

Barbara believed Jenelle was endangered.

And that triggers in Barbara the mama bear.

Barbara confided in Chris.

She trusted him. She would want to see him.

Of course, he'd be busy. He couldn't meet.

In reality, it was Jenelle behind those emails.

Jenelle is the one convincing Barbara

to bring in Buddy, her father.

When it came down to it,

Marvin did what Barbara told him to do.

But Marvin was a disabled vet who had limited mobility,

and he'd be entering that home trying to kill people

who were much younger and more mobile than him,

and he needed help.

Barbara did not approve of Jamie for her daughter.

But then once Jenelle, in the guise of Chris,

convinces her that Jamie is a potential help to Marvin,

she then takes a different tact with Jamie

and starts being loving and motherly towards him.

Jamie wanted Barbara's approval because he wanted

a relationship with Jenelle.

Jenelle Potter and Barbara Potter were both

charged with conspiracy to commit

premeditated first-degree murder.

There is nothing in your lives

that has prepared you

to understand the Potter family.

You have never seen anyone like them.

This wasn't a clear-cut criminal case.

In all those TV shows, it's always just one person

catfishing one person.

Here I had one person conning two.

Both Jamie and Barbara were catfished

by Jenelle posing as Chris.

Did you go to high school with Jenelle Potter?

I did.

I can't remember the last time I talked to her.

She was, uh, you know, one of those kids that--

just very strange.

Chris wasn't just a name

that she came up with at random.

This was a person that she knew back in school,

probably had a crush on at some point.

He tried to be friendly to her,

and she probably took it the wrong way.

Jenelle was always kind of a loner.

She was peculiar, like somebody

that wasn't in their right mind, fully.

Social media to Jenelle was her lifeline.

It's attention-seeking.

It's fantasyland.

Jenelle operated as a child.

We had experts come in and test her.

Although she was in her early 30s,

she operated at the level of someone

who was in their early teens.

Her IQ was 72.

She was incapable of masterminding these crimes.

This mastermind, the general that

draws up the battle plans--

no, that's not her.

She has no idea how to effectuate a hit on a person.

That was Barbara.

If mastermind means going in and killing two people,

that's probably Marvin Potter.

Marvin was the shooter and Jamie was the watchman.

Today, we've learned Jamie Curd has reached a plea deal

in exchange for his testimony.

Looking back on it, do you feel like

you've been manipulated in any way by the Potter family?

Yes.

With Buddy, we had the confession,

so he was found guilty of killing Bill and Billie Jean.

The involvement of Barbara and Jenelle Potter in this,

you're criminally responsible if you aided a crime

committed by someone else.

You can't imagine this case without these two women.

They didn't have guns. They didn't do it.

But it wouldn't have happened without them.

I told the jury, I want you to close your eyes

and imagine this crime happening

without Barbara Potter.

Do the same for Jenelle Potter.

If you can't imagine it, you know what your verdict is.

They just kept making that snowball

get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger

until men acted on their behalf.

Are you going to hell?

Yeah, you're going to hell.

And if I have to forgive any

of you'uns, stay out of hell,

I'll see you there.

It is all up to the jury.

They will now decide the fate of a mother and daughter

accused in a double murder.

Bring the jury in, please.

We, the jury, find the defendant, Barbara Mae Potter,

guilty of first-degree murder.

We, the jury, find the defendant,

Jenelle L. Potter, guilty of first-degree murder.

Jenelle and Barbara were both given two life sentences.

I burst into tears.

I've tried a lot of murder cases.

It's the only time I've ever had that kind of reaction.

It was finally over,

and we'd gotten justice for Bill and Billie Jean.

It was awesome.

But then, it still don't bring them back.

I felt like if I had never wanted to be her friend,

then it wouldn't have happened.

OK. Now sing, Bill.

♪ Well, it's not-- ♪

There's not a day that don't go by

that I don't think about him.

It was a relief that Tyler came out alive,

but now he doesn't get to grow up with a mother or father.

I'm gonna get you!

I just hope that he knows that they loved him.

They would have supported him.

And, uh, I wish that, you know,

we would have gotten to see how beautiful

their family would have become.

Telling Billie Jean and Bill's story,

it's keeping them alive.

That's what Bill and Billie Jean would have wanted.

There was never a spy in this town,

no deep-state conspiracy,

just a family with an internet signal

and a few too many secrets.

In a world where digital deception

moves faster than fact, doesn't take a novel

for fiction to become the motive for murder.

I'm Harlan Coben. Good night.