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
We found messages between Chris and Barbara, but because Marvin never used a computer, there was never any direct communication between Chris and Marvin. But there were messages that were intended to be delivered to Marvin, such as, do what you got to do. CIA has your back. I can't be there to help you. but I can provide support from the CIA.
Law enforcement was very interested in finding Chris, but honestly, early on, I don't know how else to say it, but to say it, it was pretty obvious Chris didn't exist.
What a twist. During the investigation, search warrants, subpoenas were done. subscriber records from the internet service providers, subscriber records from the cell phones. Once we determined that all of these accounts, you know, that the IP address matched the Potter household, we did search warrants for Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo email, AOL email, Topics.net.
And through these search warrants, it was determined that all of this correspondence was coming from the Potter house.
Samples were taken from Janelle and Barbara, writing samples, both handwritten and typed, and those samples were used to compare to the returns on the search warrants for the messages, the emails, the posts on the social media sites. We looked at word choice, we looked at spelling mistakes, we looked at punctuation, and lo and behold,
Chris had the same grammatical syntax, punctuation, word choice, very, I mean, identical to Janelle.
Janelle used this fictitious Chris character as a way to corroborate what she was claiming was happening to her online. Chris would and could say things that Janelle never would. Janelle was very, very concerned with being seen as this good little Christian girl who would never say anything mean about anybody, very meek, very easy to get along with.
But Chris could say all the things that Janelle wouldn't.
The night that Marvin Potter was arrested, he was interviewed at the Johnson County Sheriff's Department for hours, hours. He was there for a while, and it took him a long time to come off of it and to admit that he was involved.
He basically said that, yeah, he was involved, that he and Jamie Curd had went there, that he was afraid for Janelle's life, and he felt like it was something he needed to do to protect his daughter and his family.
Marvin makes a recorded phone call to Barbara, and he wants to be the first person to tell her. And he calls her and immediately says, Barbara, I was involved. I did it.
Barbara?
Instead of weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth, Barbara Potter says, oh no, you couldn't have done it. You were sitting right here with me. You must not have your oxygen. You don't know what you're talking about.
There was no reaction that you might expect from someone whose husband just told him that he committed two murders.
We didn't get into... digital evidence we didn't get into the emails we didn't get into the text messages any of that really in Marvin's trial we didn't really have to get into all that other stuff because we were really concerned that we would lose a jury they would just get lost in the weeds
That's something I've always struggled with, whether Janelle completely, completely intended for the murders to occur. Now, we know that she had a very, very limited social circle. She was starved for attention. And she's one of these people that any attention, even negative attention, At least it's attention. And she would stir it up.
I mean, she would stir up the drama just so that people would pay attention to her and so that she could play the victim.
There was testimony at the trial that she was operating on basically a middle school level, but that she was absolutely competent and was not insane at the time. You've got this grown woman who is acting like middle schoolers do online, thriving off this negative attention and all of this asinine arguing and name-calling back and forth that... It got out of hand.
I think that Janelle pushed it so far that Barbara bought into it. And they together convinced Marvin that these threats were real and that he had to do something about it. And he did.
We put on the same evidence that we did in the first trial, but we also had to convince the jury and make it understandable. This big, crazy story.
Showing 61–80 of 93 · page 4 of 5
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