Matthew Rourke
speaker
93 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Matthew Rourke’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
My name is Matthew Rourke. In January of 2012, I was an assistant district attorney in Johnson County, Tennessee, and I was the only prosecutor in the county. I did everything from speeding tickets to first-degree murders.
His friend came normal time as he was supposed to and called Billy from the driveway. Usually Billy was ready, but he wasn't. So his friend called him, didn't get him. So he stepped in through the sliding glass door on the side of the house. And it was pretty well known among everybody that knew Billy Payne that, you know, that door was rarely locked.
The first witness went in and heard an alarm clock going on and called out for Billy Payne, but Billy didn't answer. So he just assumed he was sick or that something was going on, so he left.
He thought it odd that both Billy Payne and Billy Jean Hayworth's vehicles were there in the driveway. So he went in the same sliding glass door that everybody goes in and out of and walked through the house.
He walked into the first room and saw Billy Payne laying there on the bed. He approached Billy Payne just to see if he was responsive and saw that blood going through the room and then saw the pool of blood on the bed and saw that Billy Payne's throat had been slit and he'd been shot.
They found Billy Gene Hayworth in the second bedroom, which was the baby's room. They had a seven-month-old at the time. And they found Billie Jean laying on her side in the floor holding the baby. The baby was covered in blood, but the baby was quiet at the time. Apparently, he had just cried himself out.
I was actually in court that morning in Johnson County. I was notified that two bodies had been found. And as soon as I got out of court, I went down to the scene.
There just wasn't a lot to go on. Nothing was disturbed. There was no forced entry. There were no obvious fingerprints, no bloody footprints.
Yes, this was not the typical homicide that you have in Johnson County. Most of the homicides in Johnson County are people that are familiar with each other. There's usually a lot more to work with at the scene, a little bit easier to put together. But because this crime scene was evidence-wise was actually pretty clean, that was what really piqued everyone's interest.
By all accounts, it looked like a hit. It looked like something that had been pre-planned and carried out.
Everybody was freaking out, thinking that there's a killer out there, that they might be next, and a lot of outpouring and a lot of concern to find out exactly what had happened.
Parts of Johnson County are very rural and houses are very far apart in most of the county. But where this happened, there was plenty of houses nearby. There's a church across the hill. They had neighbors that were close by and none of them heard anything.
Both bullets were recovered. Both bullets did enter the bodies and exit the bodies. The bullet for Billie Payne was found in a pillowcase, and the bullet for Billie Jean was found in a little bouncy seat that belonged to the baby.
Further through ballistics, it was found that the bullets that were used had markings on them where whoever fired them had taken the time to sit down beforehand and carve X's into the tip of of each bullet, which basically creates almost a hollow point so that whenever they penetrate, they break up and cause more damage than an unaltered bullet would fired from the same weapon.
The medical examiner did say that he was shot before he was cut, but the cut didn't come very long after the gunshot.
In the days following the killings, it was very much an open question, and it caused a lot of panic in the community because there just nothing seemed to be blatantly obvious or no leads that they could really put their fingers on in the beginning.
In the very beginning, law enforcement, they were just interviewing anybody and everybody that had any contact with Billy Payne and Billie Jean Hayworth. They spoke to friends, they spoke to family members, they spoke to neighbors, talking to everybody just to find out who might have animosity towards the couple.
Billie Payne was several years older than Billie Jean, but they got along really well by all accounts. Everybody that knew them said that they were just very jovial people, very welcoming, easy to get along with.
It kept being mentioned that Billy Payne and Billie Jean Hayworth had some animosity with people online, specifically Janelle Potter and the Potter family.
They had moved to Johnson County in the early 2000s from up in Pennsylvania. Marvin Potter, he had worked in construction early on and suffered, by all accounts, a horrendous fall. So he was 100% disabled. And
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