Brooks, Too Pretty to Live (2016)

Too Pretty To Live: The Catfishing Murders of East Tennessee by Dennis Brooks

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is an account, by the prosecutor, of the completely bonkers story of Jenelle Potter, who catfished her parents and her boyfriend into killing two people she had decided she hated. Brooks quotes extensively from her emails, both as herself and as Chris the CIA agent and as several other people, and the thing that's most unbelievable of all the unbelievable things is that anyone fell for it. Chris, an alleged CIA agent, has terrible grammar and spelling (exactly like Jenelle), is incredibly foul-mouthed, loves killing people (it's his job!), creates foul-mouthed trollish sockpuppets to go after people Jenelle doesn't like, and is focused solely on Jenelle and Jenelle's happiness and Jenelle's feud (which was almost 100% her own creation) with Billy Payne and Billie Jean Hayworth (and a third person who was lucky enough not to be there when Billy and Billie Jean were killed). Brooks delves deeper, picking apart the dysfunctional Potter family and finding the mother Barbara's paranoia and completely black-and-white view of the world and the father Buddy's self-aggrandizing lies (interestingly, he, too, claimed to work for the CIA), and the more Brooks shows, the clearer it becomes that Jenelle is the product of her parents' problems. Jenelle's dysfunctional, solipsistic worldview was largely created by her parents---but Jenelle herself retained agency and free will. She CHOSE to do the crazy things she did and bears her full share of the responsibility for what happened, especially considering that she used her parents' paranoia against them to get what she wanted, feeding them lies that they WANTED to believe. For all that she is intellectually disabled (and we never get a clear picture of just how much of a disability she has), Jenelle understands perfectly the first rule of conning people: show them what they want to see. And she seems to have had a very sophisticated understanding of what her parents wanted to see. "Chris" is utterly transparent (at least, if you're used to the idea of internet personas), a childish attempt at creating another identity, but the things he tells Barbara are carefully aimed and precisely calibrated to push her (and by extension Buddy) in the direction Jenelle wants. She knows how to push her parents' buttons and she does it like a pro.

Brooks is a competent writer and he explains things, like Jenelle's convoluted system of personas (e.g., the foul-mouthed hate-spewing dogpile sockpuppets are all created by her alter ego, Chris, because Jenelle herself would NEVER), extremely well. He also does a good job of presenting the real-world view of Jenelle (the people she was feuding with were mostly just baffled by and scared of her; none of them returned hate for hate---except in Jenelle's head, and by extension in her mother's and father's and boyfriend's). By quoting extensively from Jenelle/Chris's emails, and from Barbara's, he paints a vivid picture of how the murders came to happen.

There is a shadow center to this story, one Brooks can't reveal: the person who actually pulled the trigger. Jenelle's father Buddy did not use computers, so he left no (e)paper trail, and since he exercised his Miranda rights and refused to talk to the detectives who arrested him, and since he didn't testify at his own trial or at Jenelle and Barbara's, his voice is silent. We don't get a good sense of what the inside of his head looks like. We don't know how the gap from talk to action got bridged. It's entirely possible that Buddy couldn't explain it if he tried. Brooks also does a good job of showing Buddy's silence, of showing the fact that some answers are unfindable.



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