Witness of 'Facebook murders' testifies in fifth day of trial

Jamie Curd told the court Friday he never could have imagined he'd find himself inside his cousin's Mountain City house, acting as lookout with a gun in his hand three years ago, while another man gunned down that cousin and his girlfriend.Curd's testimony came during the fifth day of the double first-degree murder trial for Barbara Mae Potter, 64, and her daughter, Jenelle Leigh Potter, 35, also of Mountain City. They are on trial on charges of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and two counts of first-degree murder.The Potter women are accused of planning the Jan. 31, 2012, shooting deaths of Bill Payne, 36, and Billie Jean Hayworth, 23, inside that couple's Johnson County home. The family patriarch, Marvin Potter, is already serving two life sentences after being convicted of the murders in October 2013. The murders happened in Mountain City, but the case is being tried in Jonesborough because of the pre-trial publicity and hype that surrounded the so-called "Facebook murders."Curd said he thought he was simply doing Marvin Potter a favor in the early morning hours that day by dropping him off near Bill Payne's home in Mountain City, but he ended up accompanying Potter into Payne's house, where he said Potter handed him a gun and told him to be his lookout.The men entered the residence and Curd stood by the door while Potter walked down the hallway, Curd testified."I heard Bill say, 'What the hell,' and Billie Jean came out of the bedroom, went down the hall. I heard a gunshot," Curd testified. He walked down the hall and looked into the first bedroom and saw his second cousin — Payne — lying on the bed.Potter, he said, had followed Hayworth to another bedroom. When Curd heard a second gunshot, he said reality set in and "I had to get out of there," so he ran out of the house and across a field to where Potter had parked his vehicle.As Curd testified about the details of Payne and Hayworth's deaths, Payne's mother sat in the audience, her head bowed in her hands, and sobbed quietly. She's been emotional at different times during the trial — particularly when the forensic pathologist testified about the gunshot wound and neck slash that killed her son. He was shot at point-blank range in the face while Hayworth was shot in the right side of her head just behind her ear.Curd said he felt "bad, horrible," about the killings and that he threw up after Potter dropped him off at home.Before describing the murders, Curd spent about an hour testifying about his relationship with the Potter family and how it progressed from nothing to him visiting about once a month and having a secret phone and text relationship with Jenelle Potter. He said he had loved Jenelle and she was his girlfriend. Brooks showed jurors a "selfie" photo retrieved from Curd's phone that depicts Curd giving Jenelle a kiss on the cheek.Curd said they sneaked the kiss because Marvin and Barbara Potter didn't approve of the two having a relationship. He said he believed Jenelle when she told him she was being tormented and harassed by Hayworth and a woman named Lindsay Thomas. And he also believed that a person named "Chris" — who Jenelle said was a friend in the CIA — was real after getting text messages that made him believe Chris had followed him."He said, 'I seen you today at the store,'" and gave Curd exact details about everything he'd done. Curd became acquainted with Chris only through text messages that Chris sent to Curd's cell phone from Jenelle's email. Curd said Chris told him he "just always used Jenelle's."The messages from Chris started coming to him about the same time that Payne and Hayworth met and started dating, Curd said.Chris' texts spouted hate-filled statements about Payne, Hayworth and Thomas, Curd said, but Jenelle did not talk that way to him about the three. Curd said Jenelle told him her phone was "spoofed" and someone made calls to Thomas from Jenelle's phone number. But later, he said Jenelle "let it slip" that she guess she needed to start calling Thomas again. When Curd questioned her about that, Jenelle got angry, he said, so he dropped it.But even though Curd believed Chris existed, prosecutors say it wasn't true — at least in the form Barbara and Jenelle Potter portrayed to him. Prosecutors presented hundreds of emails between Barbara and "Chris" in which they call each other "mom" and "son".Hours before Curd's testimony, the state sprung somewhat of a surprise witness mid-morning when they called Chris Tjaden (pronounced Jaden), a Wilmington, Del., police officer and high school acquaintance of Jenelle Potter's, to the stand. Tjaden was apparently located by investigators after they found information on some of the photos in the Potter's emails that linked back to him — photos that were accessible on his Facebook profile, he said.Tjaden testified he didn't write any of the emails from the mysterious "Chris" with whom Barbara and Jenelle Potter communicated, nor did he send any photographs to the Potters by email. Tjaden didn't recognize most of the photos purported to be of him, which were attached to some of those emails that were not from him. Some of the photos, he said, were taken from the publicly accessible portion of his Facebook profile.Throughout Tjaden's testimony, he seemed amused by the whole affair. As Assistant District Attorney Matt Roark showed Tjaden photo after photo on emails supposedly from him and asked if it was him, Tjaden answered, "Nope. Not me."Testimony will resume at 9 a.m. today with Curd still on the stand. The trial will also continue on Monday.Follow Becky Campbell on Twitter @CampbellinCourt. Like her on Facebook: www.facebook.com/BeckyCampbellJCPress.