Harlen Coben's Final Twist: Episode 1 (CBS-TV, aired January 7, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, January 7) I watched a rather grim opening episode of the new true-crime series on CBS, Harlan Coben’s Final Twist, in which the well-known writer of mystery fiction will be telling true-crime stories every week. Of course there was the usual hype around Coben’s name – he was hailed as the best crime fiction writer in the world today, which he isn’t (I’d rate Jonathan Kellerman, Michael Connelly, and Lee Child ahead of him; I think Kellerman and Connelly are the best modern writers at keeping the noir fiction world alive, though I lost a lot of respect for Child when he agreed to let Tom Cruise star in the Jack Reacher movies even though Reacher was described as overpoweringly tall and Cruise, of course, is not). It was also ironic that the story Coben and his staff, including director Jeff Zimbalist, chose to tell for their first episode was already one that ABC’s 20/20 had done virtually two years ago (April 5, 2024). Nonetheless, it was a pretty grim tale: the murder in January 2012 of two young Tennessee lovebirds, Billy Payne, Jr. and Billie Jean Hayworth, in the small town of Mountain View, where the crime rate is so low people routinely leave their front doors unlocked. The 37-year-old Payne and the 23-year-old Hayworth had met when they both worked for the same employer, and they moved in together and had a son named Tyler. The mastermind of their murder was a young woman named Janelle Potter, who had been in love with Payne and had never reconciled herself to losing him to Hayworth, especially once Payne and Hayworth proved the seriousness of their relationship by having a child together. CBS’s hype (as well as ABC’s two years ago) stressed the fact that Janelle Potter set up the whole thing through a series of increasingly hateful posts on social media, including ones she posted herself under the stolen identity of a mystery man named “Chris” who claimed to work for the CIA. “Chris” turned out to be Chris Tjaden, a man from out of town who’d worked as a local police officer but had never been with the CIA. He was an old high-school classmate of Janelle’s and that seems to have been how she chose his identity to steal and use to “catfish” her own parents, Marvin “Buddy” and Barbara Potter, into killing Payne and Hayworth. She also impersonated Hayworth on line and posted mock threats to her own life in Hayworth’s name.

This was presented as a story about the unique dangers of social media, yet I can readily imagine how the great noir writers of old could have told similar stories in a pre-social media age through anonymous letters or phone calls assuming someone else’s identities. One of the things that fascinated me about the show was its inclusion of actual interrogation footage, featuring an African-American Tennessee state investigator who for some reason looked a lot skinner and scrawnier in the interview footage shot by Coben’s crew in which he recounted the case than he did in the actual interrogation videos. Either he had a catastrophic health issue that drastically lowered his weight, or (as I suspect) the camera really did add 10 pounds (more than 10 pounds, judging by the looks of things) to his apparent weight. Also the Potters recruited Payne’s cousin Jamie Curd, whom Payne and Hayworth had tried to set up as an alternate boyfriend for Janelle, as a lookout and to help with the murder in case Buddy Potter, a Marine veteran who’d suffered from mobility issues, couldn’t do it all himself. Jamie eventually turned state’s evidence and got a sweetheart plea deal, while the three Potters were ultimately convicted and given double life sentences (though Barbara’s was later reversed on appeal and he agreed to plead guilty to “facilitation of murder” and have her sentence reduced to 15 years). To me the story was an object lesson in the evils of jealousy and the true tragedy lay in Janelle Potter’s inability to come to terms with having been rejected. There was also a twist in that the Potters were originally from Pennsylvania and had just moved to Mountain View, Tennessee two years before (though, oddly, Janelle in her interrogations had just as thick a Southern accent as anyone else in the case; she must have picked it up really quickly and thoroughly), and another twist in that Janelle Potter’s IQ was only 72, though given what she was able to do (to steal other people’s identities and mount this elaborate catfishing plot to get her parents and a young man who was genuinely in love with her to kill her rejected ex and his new partner while sparing their baby, who’s now being raised by a grandmother) it’s hard to believe she’s that unintelligent.