Billy Clay Payne and Billie Jean Hayworth were murdered in their Mountain City, Tennessee home on January 31, 2012. Their seven-month-old son, Tyler, was found alive at the scene.
Billy Payne was born on July 10, 1975. He was known as an outgoing person who loved the outdoors, collecting coins, and going to flea markets. Billie Jean Hayworth was born on March 19, 1988. She enjoyed hiking, camping, fishing, and volleyball.
The two met in 2010 at a local textile factory in Mountain City. Their friendship turned into a relationship, and they later got engaged and had a son named Tyler. People who knew Billy said he changed a lot after meeting Billie Jean.
He stopped drinking, quit partying, and got help for a drug dependency through a clinic. By most accounts, the couple was doing reasonably well and building a life together.
Their story, however, became tied to another family’s problems in a way nobody could have predicted. In 2009, Billy’s sister, Tracy Greenwell, met a woman named Jenelle Potter while working at a local pharmacy.
Tracy knew Jenelle had very few friends and rarely left her house, so she made an effort to include her. She introduced Jenelle to her brother Billy and their wider social circle. It seemed like a kind thing to do.
Jenelle had moved to Mountain City in 2004 with her parents, Marvin and Barbara Potter. Marvin went by the nickname Buddy. Even though Jenelle was nearly 30 years old, she lived with her parents full time.
She had several health conditions, including a pulmonary condition, diabetes, high blood pressure, and serious hearing loss that required hearing aids. Her cognitive function was described as being more in line with that of an adolescent.
She struggled to read social cues, often misread humor, and found it difficult to understand body language. Because of all this, living with her parents made sense. She spent a lot of time online, where most of her friendships existed, often with people in different states she had never met in person.
Tracy also introduced Jenelle to her cousin, Jamie Curd. Like Jenelle, Jamie was shy and somewhat awkward. He was in his mid-thirties and still lived at home with his mother. The two took an interest in each other quickly, and Jenelle asked Billy to pass along her phone number to Jamie.
Their relationship grew through short phone calls, sometimes only 30 to 40 seconds long, kept brief to avoid detection by her parents, who were very strict and controlling about who their daughter spent time with.
Jamie began visiting the Potter home under the cover of helping fix their family computer, which gave him a reason to be there without raising suspicion. He later bought Jenelle a prepaid phone so they could talk more freely.
When Marvin and Barbara eventually found the phone, they forced the two to break up. The split lasted only a few days before they were back in contact again, still keeping it secret.
Things shifted when Jamie’s mother passed away. Marvin and Barbara softened toward him during that time. Barbara told him she would be there for him if he needed anything.
While they still did not officially accept him as Jenelle’s boyfriend, he became a regular at the house and was treated more like a family friend. He grew deeply embedded in their daily lives, which would later place him at the center of a murder case.
Around the same time Jamie was becoming a fixture at the Potter home, Jenelle’s relationship with Billy Payne, Billie Jean, and their friends began falling apart.
After Billy and Billie Jean started dating in 2010 and had their son, Jenelle’s behavior toward the couple and their friends, including Lindsay Thomas and Tara Osborne, became increasingly hostile.
The group eventually stopped including her in social plans entirely. That exclusion set off what became a long and damaging conflict.
Jenelle claimed she was the one being harassed. She said Billie Jean and her friends created fake Facebook profiles to send her threatening messages.
She alleged they hacked her accounts, threw a rock through her bedroom window with their names written on it, scratched Marvin’s car, poured sugar into his gas tank, and broke their garage door. Marvin backed up these claims.
Billie Jean and her friends told a completely different story. They said Jenelle was the one creating fake profiles and posting threats about herself, doing it to make them look guilty while she played the victim.
Multiple anonymous accounts appeared on a gossip website called Topix. These accounts, going by names like Matt, Mike, Kelly, and Dan, posted extremely threatening and degrading content directed at Billy, Billie Jean, Lindsay, and Tara.
The posts included explicit death threats and vile language. None of these accounts ever said anything negative about Jenelle. The accounts would interact with each other, leaving comments and responses that made it look like separate people were involved.
Lindsay and Tara both filed harassment charges after Jenelle began calling them obsessively following an unfriending on Facebook. Some calls were silent, with just the sound of breathing.
Others featured a male voice demanding they stop harassing Jenelle. The caller ID showed Jenelle’s number each time, but she claimed the women were spoofing her number. Both cases were dismissed due to a lack of evidence.
The conflict also moved into public when Jenelle and Barbara confronted Billie Jean at a gas station, shouting that she was unfit to be a mother. The harassment stretched on for close to a year and kept getting worse.
During this same period, Barbara received an email from someone identifying himself as Chris. He claimed to be a longtime friend of Jenelle and a CIA operative who had been monitoring the situation online. He told Barbara he was there to protect Jenelle and that he had experience getting rid of people and that killing did not bother him.
Despite never meeting in person, the two developed a close and frequent correspondence. He began calling Barbara “Mom” and she called him her son. At one point, Barbara told Chris he was free to shoot her estranged daughter, Christie, as long as her body could be found afterward, mentioning an existing life insurance policy.
What made the Chris situation immediately suspicious, at least in hindsight, was where his emails were coming from. Every single message attributed to Chris was sent from Jenelle’s own email address. Chris claimed he did not have his own account.
To distinguish his messages from Jenelle’s, he would write his name at the top of each email. He also sent messages to Jenelle through the same address and received replies from her through it as well, meaning one email account was being used to conduct a conversation between two supposedly different people.
Chris told Barbara that Billy and Billie Jean were a serious danger to Jenelle. He claimed a three-thousand-dollar bounty had been placed on her life and that something had to be done.
He communicated the same message to Jamie separately, framing himself as a protective brother figure to Jenelle and insisting the threat was real and urgent.
He also told Marvin, through printed emails that Barbara shared with him, that he would arrange a CIA badge for Marvin that would legally protect him if he acted against the threat. Marvin, who had long claimed his own background in the CIA, accepted this without question.
Between the emails from Chris and the constant conversations at the Potter home, Jamie was being told repeatedly that Billy and Billie Jean posed a life-threatening danger to Jenelle.
Barbara would update him every time he visited, asking what was going to be done about it. The pressure was constant and came from multiple directions at once.
The night before the murders, Jenelle sent Jamie a text message telling him that her father needed his help with something and instructed him not to bring his phone when they went out.
In the early hours of January 31, 2012, she sent another message telling him that Marvin was already on his way to pick him up. Marvin and Jamie then went to the home of Billy Payne and Billie Jean Hayworth. They entered through the back sliding glass door.
Billy was shot and his throat was cut. Billie Jean was shot in a separate bedroom. Investigators later determined she was likely holding Tyler when she was shot. The baby was found alive but covered in blood.
No shell casings were found, pointing to a revolver-type weapon. Nothing in the home had been stolen or disturbed, and there was no sign of forced entry.
A neighbor named Roy Stephens discovered the scene that morning. He had stopped by to pick up mail. His wife waited in the car while he went around to the back of the house.
When neither Billy nor Billie Jean responded to his calls despite their car being in the driveway, he moved toward the bedroom and found Billy’s body. He ran out, told his wife, called 911, and then both of them went back inside, where Billie Jean was found.
Investigators initially considered a drug-related motive because paraphernalia was found in the home and Billy was known to sell drugs on a very small scale. That theory was quickly dropped.
The drugs were still there, nothing had been taken, and the overall condition of the home did not match a drug dispute. It was clear this was something personal.
Friends and family of the victims kept bringing up the same names during interviews: Jenelle Potter and Jamie Curd. Jamie had previously threatened to slit Billy’s throat during an argument, which matched one of the injuries Billy sustained.
He was brought in for questioning two days after the murders. He denied any involvement but agreed to take a polygraph. He failed it. Under continued questioning, he confessed. He said Marvin carried out the shootings while he cut Billy’s throat.
During questioning, Jamie asked investigators if the CIA was present, a reference that confused investigators at the time but would make sense later.
Investigators had Jamie call Marvin from the station. During the recorded call, Marvin confirmed he had gotten rid of everything from the murders. A search and arrest warrant was issued immediately.
When officers arrived at the Potter home, Marvin reached for a gun before being taken into custody without further incident. The search of the house uncovered dozens of firearms, hard drives, a notebook with passwords and names, and trash bags full of hundreds of shredded documents found in the back of Marvin’s truck.
Barbara was seen ripping up photographs of Billy, Billie Jean, and their friends as investigators searched the home.
One investigator spent an entire month piecing together the shredded documents. What they revealed was critical. The documents contained emails exchanged between Jenelle, Barbara, Jamie, and Chris.
The writing in Chris’s emails matched Jenelle’s writing samples. Every message attributed to Chris had originated from the Potter household’s IP address and from Jenelle’s personal email account.
Investigators concluded that Jenelle had created the Chris persona entirely on her own and had used it to manipulate her family into believing the victims were dangerous enough to justify killing them.
Jenelle and Barbara were arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree murder and one count of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. In October 2013, Marvin was convicted on both murder counts and sentenced to consecutive life sentences.
Jamie accepted a plea deal, pleading guilty to facilitation of first-degree murder in exchange for a 25-year sentence and an agreement to testify against Jenelle and Barbara.
Jenelle and Barbara went to trial together in 2015. The state used the text messages Jenelle sent to Jamie the night before and morning of the murders as key evidence, arguing they proved she knew exactly what was going to happen and helped coordinate it.
Jamie, despite his plea deal, was a poor witness and testified that neither woman had conspired with him. It did not matter. After eight days of trial and five hours of deliberation, both women were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
Barbara later appealed her conviction, arguing that because her attorney had also represented Marvin, there was a conflict of interest.
A judge agreed and granted her a new trial. Rather than face a jury again, she accepted a plea deal that reduced her sentence to 25 years, making her eligible for parole in 2028. Jenelle and Marvin remain in prison on life sentences.
Tyler was placed in the care of Billie Jean’s mother following the murders.
