5 Real Life Murder Plots Too Weird Even For Hollywood

It turned out that both Curd and Potter's mother Barbara had been contacted by the Facebook CIA buddy, who told them Potter's life was in grave danger from the couple and they needed to be taken out first. So Curd, Barbara, and Marvin did precisely that. But the police had a hard time believing some CIA operative gave the OK to execute two people simply because he was concerned about his Facebook friend. So when they dug a little deeper, they discovered the true identity of Chris: Jenelle Potter.

Some cyber snooping revealed that not only had Chris' emails all come from Jenelle's computer, but so did all of her Facebook wall messages. All the online harassment, all the messages of support, Chris the CIA guy -- it was all Jenelle creating a pathetic high school drama to catfish her loved ones into murder. Perhaps the most shocking thing is that this stupid, stupid plan (sort of) worked. The entire Potter family was found guilty and they are now serving life sentences, while Curd took a plea deal and is serving 25 years. Hopefully they're locked up somewhere without an internet connection.

So when de Padua's story started crumbling, he recanted his confession and then claimed that his (by then ex-) wife killed Perez in a fit of jealous rage. It seems stabbing women in the back was this guy's go-to move. But investigators were having none of it. Both de Padua and Thomaz were convicted for the murder. But here's the real twist: Back then, Brazil was very lenient on first-time offenders. So despite being an accomplice to the brutal stabbing of an innocent woman, Thomaz was eligible for work release barely a year after her trial. And Padua, the black magic murderer, was out of prison after six years, and is now a pastor. If that's real life in Brazil, we're really curious how crazy the soap operas are.

Of course, like with everything else, Christopher fucked it up. Not only did he botch the hit, but his ex-wife's life insurance policy had lapsed years ago. Which was quite irresponsible. Even Christopher still had his own $70,000 life insurance policy paid in full.

Uh-oh.

On the night of January 9, 1990, Coconut Creek police found the bound and bullet-riddled body of Christopher Morris in the trunk of his own car. John Wood, a mentally ill drifter, immediately confessed, but the cops didn't buy his story. They suspected Rector, and they were right. During questioning, two of Rector's accomplices confessed to the whole thing. They were ... Theron and Leila Morris.

Turns out all of the Morrises were weird scumbags, and the botched hit was enough for Rector to convince Ma and Pa that their little boy was worth more dead than alive. After the filicide, Rector went out and talked the emotionally unstable Wood into believing he had killed Christopher, while the Morrises promised to give Rector an alibi for the night they killed their own son. He also moved into the Morris home. (They did have an unexpected vacancy.) All three killers were arrested and given long sentences, with Rector getting 25 to life.

But the scheme backfired with victim #3, Scott Davis, whom Beasley only winged, at which point Davis ran to the police. The jig was up, but that was probably of little solace to their fourth victim, Timothy Kern, whom Beasley killed as a quickie. He only had $5 on him. Eventually the police traced this "Craigslist killer" (one of unsurprisingly many) to a small house in Akron, where the landlord knew the suspect as Ralph Geiger -- the identity Beasley had stolen from his first victim.

After being caught, Rafferty, then a teenager, received pity from the judge. He was sentenced to life without parole. Beasley received the death penalty in 2013, and is still on death row. In the meantime, he has a nice racket selling his old paintings to serial killer fans. Not on Craigslist, though.

This is where the story could have ended, but no. After Cinnamon's trial, investigator Jay Newell still didn't buy that a timid teenage girl like her could be such a cold-blooded killer. Newell's hunch told him that David Brown was involved in the murder somehow. Why? Maybe because he was making it rain with Linda's $835,000 life insurance payout. Or maybe because he had married Patti, Linda's 17-year-old sister, before her body was even cold.

But what Newell needed was a confession. So when he visited Cinnamon in prison, he made her very aware that her daddy was living like a king (complete with a child bride) while she was rotting inside. This finally made Cinnamon angry enough to tell the truth. It had indeed been Brown who had plotted the murder of his wife. The sick manipulator convinced both Cinnamon and Patti that Linda was going to kill him and had to be stopped, but that he couldn't do it himself because he was feeling too ill, adding "If you loved me, you'd do this for me."

Cinnamon agreed, mostly because Brown had convinced her that as a minor, she'd only get sentenced to some light therapy, not a lifetime in prison. He had even given her pills for a fake overdose to make it seem like mad desperation. Except prosecutors later established that if Cinnamon hadn't vomited the pills back up, Dad's little cocktail would have straight up killed her.

When Cinnamon finally confessed, Patti quickly followed. She then made police aware that David was the sociopathic scumbag to end all sociopathic scumbags. Years before, he had lured the underage Bailey sisters into his home by pretending to have colon cancer and being in need of assistance. Then, when Linda turned 17, he forced her into becoming his (fifth!) wife. But David was the kind of ghoul who liked 'em even younger, so he had also started molesting his future sister-in-wife, Patti, who was only 11 at the time.

Of course, when Brown found out that his disturbingly young sixth wife was testifying against him, he decided to opt for a quickie separation -- i.e. he tried to have her and two members of the prosecution killed, offering what he believed to be a fellow inmate a hefty sum to make it happen. Unfortunately for him, that inmate was in fact an undercover cop. #1 Dad died in prison.

Zanandi likes to make fun of reality on her blog. Most of the time she just yells about it on Twitter.

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