What drove Pam Hupp to kill?
How did she get away with murder for so long?
And what's the truth behind NBC's new series, "The Thing About Pam"?
Pam Hupp was born as Pamela Neumann in Dellwood, Missouri.
She reportedly led a rather charmed youth nestled in the middle-class suburbs.
Her dad was a blue-collar worker at Union Electric, and her mom worked as a schoolteacher.
The family had four children, and Hupp was the third in the crew.
Classmates at Riverview Gardens High School remember her as easy-going, and popularity
seemed to come easy for her as a cheerleader.
She married her high school sweetheart in a shotgun wedding, which caused tensions with
her conservative parents.
From there, Pam found herself in the full-time monotony of domesticity while her friends
ventured off to college.
One daughter and six years of marriage later, Pam's first marriage dissolved.
Rebounding rapidly from divorce, she married Mark Hupp.
They moved to Naples, Florida, and had a son.
By 2001, they returned to Missouri, renovating homes on the side for a little extra cash.
The Hupps' suburban life looked ideal from the outside.
But Pam Hupp had a dark side that few people knew about.
Cultivating the image of a suburban, middle-class mother of two, Pam Hupp had tousled blond
hair, a plus-sized figure, and wore frumpy clothes.
She fit into the world she inhabited without a second glance.
According to her friends, Hupp's extreme frugality stood out.
You could say that money made her more than a coupon-cutter.
According to people that knew her, it went way deeper than that.
A source close to Hupp told the Toronto Sun,
"When it comes to money, she short-circuits."
But the leap from "short-circuiting" to stabbing a terminally ill friend more than 50 times
seems vast.
Yet, no one could deny that Hupp enjoyed sole beneficiary status on Betsy Faria's life insurance
policy.
The same went for Hupp's mother who died under suspicious circumstances.
Hupp also made strange comments about her husband's life insurance policy to investigators
and said, per St. Louis Magazine,
"Amazingly he's still alive, because it's a lot."
Per The Common Reader, editor and journalist Jeannette Cooperman has long questioned Hupp's
motives.
The mother of two didn't have debt, and her husband made a steady income.
As for why Hupp would risk it all for money, Cooperman suspects that there were additional
motives at play, citing attention-seeking, hunger for power and control, and complications
from an alleged brain injury.
But she concedes,
"The general consensus — shared by cops, neighbors, relatives, and true-crime addicts
— was that Pam Hupp was evil."
Pam Hupp gravitated towards life insurance, both as a vocation and as a motivation for
murder.
Over the years, she held clerical jobs at a couple of insurance companies, including
State Farm, where she first met Betsy Faria, per St. Louis Magazine.
Faria had a bubbly personality and liked to dance, which suited her as a part-time DJ.
Coworkers described her as gregarious and generous, and she boasted many devoted friends
who would do just about anything for her.
As for Hupp, State Farm Agent Mike Boschert told St. Louis Magazine,
"She had very good insights, human nature-wise.
A positive person, very level-headed — I never saw her mad."
He also remembered her getting to work between 10 and 15 minutes early each morning and said
she was adept at handling office politics.
Boschert appreciated her logical way of thinking, and even described her as "underemployed."
Nevertheless, he couldn't deny that something strange lurked beneath the squeaky-clean façade
Hupp cultivated as a model employee.
Despite Mike Boschert's glowing reports, he also noticed a troubling tendency in Pam Hupp.
Sometimes she burst out with strange and outlandish stories that made no sense.
Boschert recalled to St. Louis Magazine,
"She always told me she was involved somewhere like the FBI, something with security clearance,
kind of in the past but maybe still."
He also noted that she seemed to let these lies drip out in small snippets, revealing
just enough to raise curiosity before cutting off the story.
These were the types of inaccuracies and fallacies that would tip off Russ Faria's defense attorney,
Joel Schwartz, years later.
When confronted about her contradictions, Hupp fell back on the excuse of a head injury
sustained at work in 2009, which she claimed made her memory fuzzy.
She also conveniently said the injury meant she couldn't take a lie detector test during
the investigation into Betsy Faria's murder.
But the medical records needed to back up such claims have yet to surface.
What's more, a deep dive into Hupp's past revealed two terminations from insurance companies
for signature forgery.
Bizarre events followed Pam Hupp wherever she went, although few people put two and
two together at the time.
According to St. Louis Magazine, Mike Boschert remembers an instance where a communication
went out on his letterhead with his signature, seemingly without his involvement.
And around the same time, he also recalled a rash of employees' cars getting keyed in
the parking lot.
A spate of random keyings also took place in the neighborhood where Hupp's family lived,
and some other inexplicable things occurred.
One set of neighbors found a bloody pile of animal bones in their yard.
And a handful of caustic anonymous letters would make the rounds in Hupp's otherwise
idyllic neighborhood.
Although she didn't socialize much with those living around her, Hupp didn't appear unhinged.
Mousy and inconsequential, she looked like the last person most would suspect of such
nefarious and immature activity.
Pam Hupp and Betsy Faria worked in insurance offices together for a decade, before falling
out of contact, per Charles Henry Bosworth and Joel Schwartz's "Bone Deep: Untangling
the Betsy Faria Murder Case."
But news of Betsy's breast cancer diagnosis in 2010 drew the two women back together.
Soon, Hupp became a regular presence in Betsy's life, shuttling her to and from chemotherapy
appointments.
It's unclear exactly how close Hupp and Betsy became.
For example, Hupp didn't attend the "Celebration of Life" cruise that Betsy and her family
took in November 2011.
Originally planned as a party to mark cancer remission, it became her last hurrah after
Betsy found out the month before that doctors had detected tumors on her liver.
During the trip, she fulfilled a lifelong dream of swimming with dolphins thanks to
her husband.
After returning from the cruise, Hupp became an almost daily companion.
Five days before the murder, Betsy went to the library with Hupp, seeking assistance
from a librarian to witness Betsy's signature on a life insurance change-of-beneficiary
form.
This event sealed the terminally ill woman's fate, although she likely never saw it coming.
As for Betsy's husband Russ Faria, Hupp wasn't even a blip on his radar when it came to potential
threats.
In police interviews, he stated,
"I only met Pam maybe a half dozen times, at the most."
Pam Hupp had a conundrum in late 2011.
Since convincing Betsy Faria to change the beneficiary on her life insurance policy,
Hupp had tracked Betsy's every move, according to NBC News.
The alleged killer searched for the perfect moment to strike when Betsy would feel weakest
and most alone.
Hupp reportedly wanted chemo-induced lethargy on her side when she attacked Betsy, coupled
with a night she knew Russ Faria would be away from home.
His Tuesday game nights presented the ideal opportunity, according to St. Louis Magazine.
She honed in on December 27, 2011, insisting on taking Betsy to her chemotherapy appointment.
But text records show her plan hit a snag.
Betsy already had a ride, with another friend planning on taking her back to her mother's
house, where she'd wait for her husband to pick her up after game night.
Hupp had to find a way to insinuate herself into the evening's events.
So, she showed up unexpectedly at Betsy's chemo appointment and then convinced the sick
woman that she would give her a ride home from her mom's house.
Betsy sent an ominous text to her husband reading,
"Pam Hupp wants to bring me home to bed."
Her words proved fateful.
Hupp was the last person to see Betsy alive.
Later, she claimed she left Betsy on the couch, wrapped up snuggly in a blanket, per St. Louis
Magazine.
"Pamela Hupp was the last person to see Betsy alive."
Perhaps the most disturbing part of the case remains the gross miscarriage of justice that
sent Russ to prison for life without parole before his retrial and acquittal in 2015.
Russ had a solid alibi backed by four witnesses, cell phone records, and video evidence from
two different locations.
He also testified so consistently over the years that his defense attorney, Joel Schwartz,
didn't even attend interviews with major media outlets like Dateline, which is unprecedented.
Nevertheless, the prosecution maintained a negligent and narrow focus on him, following
the trail of breadcrumbs Hupp started leaving even before the murder.
Hupp allegedly staged a domestic violence crime scene, planning everything from the
mode of murder to where she sprinkled blood.
Days later, she testified against Russ, conveniently providing the state with its case.
Leah Askey Chaney, prosecutor for Lincoln County, Missouri, took the bait hook, line,
and sinker.
In 2016, Russ sued Askey and the investigators involved in the case, alleging that they fabricated
evidence in the case, ignored evidence that would have exonerated him, and failed to investigate
the most obvious suspect.
He received a $2 million settlement.
You could poke a hole a mile wide in Pam Hupp's contradictory statements.
Details as basic as whether or not she entered Betsy Faria's home on the night of the murder
inspired conflicting stories.
Yet, investigators overlooked these inconsistencies as prosecutors focused on Russ Faria and a
supposed history of domestic violence.
Conveniently, Hupp provided the testimony they needed to build their case, per Dateline's
"The Thing About Pam" podcast.
Officials inexplicably disregarded the more significant motive present in the case, which
was Betsy's $150,000 life insurance policy.
As Rolling Stone points out, Hupp lacked an alibi, was the last person to see the victim
alive, and was the last person at the scene of the crime before it occurred.
Yet, Prosecutor Leah Askey and investigators refused to entertain her as a suspect.
Hupp's chatty, relaxed, homey mannerisms seemingly disarmed them.
Since men perpetrate three-quarters of all homicides in America, Hupp could also hide
behind statistics.
In 2013, 77-year-old Shirley Neumann plunged to her death from the balcony of her third-story
apartment at Lakeview Park, a senior facility where she lived, according to St. Louis Magazine.
Investigators initially ruled the death accidental, believing the balcony's railing failed.
The last person to see Neumann alive was her daughter, Pam Hupp.
Incidentally, Hupp acted as the sole beneficiary on her mom's life insurance policy.
The circumstances of Neumann's death bring to mind an off-the-cuff statement Hupp made
to investigators while being questioned about Betsy Faria's death in 2011.
Hupp said,
"If I really — I hate to say it — wanted money, my mom's worth half a million that
I get when she dies [...] If I really wanted money, there was an easier way."
Before her death, Neumann had manifested signs of dementia.
Hupp would even claim in a conversation with Russ Faria's defense attorney, Joel Schwartz,
that her mother died of Alzheimer's.
Obviously, the three-story fall had killed her.
Post-mortem tests revealed Neumann had eight times the recommended dosage of Ambien in
her system.
And the fall left an almost three-foot square opening in the metal railing.
Inexplicably the top guardrail remained intact, however.
In 2017, the medical examiner changed her death from "accidental" to "undetermined"
in the wake of new information and evidence.
While talking to detectives, Hupp once commented, per St. Louis Magazine,
"Money is — makes people do crazy, crazy things."
And matricide wouldn't be the end of the "crazy" when it came to Pam Hupp.
By 2015, officials remanded Russ Faria's case, releasing him pending a new trial that began
in June of that year.
With a new trial starting up, Pam Hupp started to feel the heat of reinvestigations.
This time around, videos of her interviews with law enforcement proved less carefree
and more tense.
Then, she dropped a bombshell on investigators, claiming she and Betsy Faria's friendship
had evolved into a sexual relationship.
But she also added that neither she nor Betsy was attracted to women or one another, according
to Dateline.
No evidence existed to verify the relationship claim.
But it did provide Hupp with a solid reason to act as the sole beneficiary on Betsy's
insurance policy.
It also supported the crime of passion theory, which suggested that Russ had snapped and
stabbed his wife to death.
Hupp took it a step further, claiming Betsy had chosen that night to tell her husband
she wanted to leave him.
But the friend who took Betsy to her chemo appointment that fateful day, Bobbi Wann,
contradicted these statements calling them untrue.
Others would soon speak up, including Hupp's friends.
One reportedly commented,
"Pam was the most homophobic person I'd ever met.
She'd say, 'That's not normal.
That's not right.'"
Of those closest to Hupp and Betsy, none believed this new development.
Pam Hupp wasn't finished with the lying or the killing.
To throw the police off her trail, she masterminded a convoluted plot to make Russ Faria look
like a killer yet again.
It required a senseless killing, which meant finding her next unwitting victim.
This time around, there would be no life insurance policy or beneficiary forms.
Instead of killing for money, this would be an act of desperation.
According to NBC News, to lure her next victim, Hupp claimed to work as a Dateline producer.
She reportedly drove through low-income neighborhoods for days looking for potential victims as
data pulled from her phone would later show.
Hupp initially approached Carol Alford.
But, thankfully, Alford got cold feet, and listening to her gut instinct saved her life.
Later, Alford provided valuable testimony against Hupp.
But Louis Gumpenberger didn't prove as lucky.
He took up Hupp's offer to reenact a 911 call for money, falling for her story about working
for Dateline.
She provided him with a script to read before staging a fake kidnapping in real-time.
Her audience for the event would be a 911 operator.
During the call, she shot him five times, killing an innocent, disabled man in cold
blood.
She would then claim self-defence, but investigators weren't buying it.
On August 23, 2016, officers arrested her for the murder of Gumpenberger.
When Pam Hupp previously sat in interrogation rooms with investigators, she'd generally
appeared chatty and carefree, per Dateline.
But after her arrest for the murder of Louis Gumpenberger, that changed.
Finding herself in handcuffs and on the wrong side of suspicion, Hupp grew wildly desperate.
If murder didn't solve her problems, she would have to try something else.
She needed a final way out, which came to her in the form of an innocuous ballpoint
pen.
After police officers briefly left the room, Hupp smuggled the writing implement from the
table and into her waistband, per Fox 2 St. Louis.
Then, she stroked both sides of her neck repeatedly, feeling for the pulse of her carotid arteries.
"Hupp touches her neck, slowly, feeling both sides."
Next, she asked to use the bathroom, and was escorted into the facility by a female officer.
Once in a stall, Hupp used the pen to puncture her wrists and throat countless times.
After police officers rushed into the bathroom, preventing further harm, she stood for a mugshot,
thick bandages covering the self-inflicted holes in her neck.
Hupp would later accept an Alford plea, admitting that there was a preponderance of evidence
against her without confessing.
She received a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
In 2019, Margaret Burch, Louis Gumpenberger's mom, sued Pam Hupp for wrongful death.
A judge in St. Charles County awarded Burch $3 million.
Burch and her attorney, Gary Burger, knew Hupp didn't have enough money to even make
a dent in this sum.
But through this legal action, they hope to thwart all chances for Hupp to make a profit
by selling her story.
A decade after the murder of Betsy Faria, prosecutors also announced they will make
Hupp stand trial.
As reported by NBC News, they're seeking the death penalty.
Prosecutors reportedly came to the death penalty decision after weighing how Hupp allegedly
stabbed the terminally ill Betsy 55 times.
Then, Hupp provided false testimony on numerous occasions, strategically designed to frame
Betsy's husband.
And when these actions still didn't take the heat off her, she murdered an innocent man,
and attempted to frame Russ in a convoluted murder-for-hire plot.
On top of all of this, Hupp was the last person to see her mother alive.
Prosecutorial and police misconduct led to Russ Faria's conviction for the murder of
his wife.
Fortunately, Russ's attorney, Joel Schwartz, never gave up on his client.
"Obviously, it's still emotional for me."
He reviewed thousands of pages of documents and hours upon hours of witness testimony,
picking apart Pam Hupp's stories and the work done by investigators and prosecutors.
Former prosecutor Leah Askey was replaced by Michael Wood in 2018, and a rigorous new
standard reportedly came to Lincoln County's investigations.
Coupled with a new sheriff, Wood decided not only to prosecute Hupp for Betsy's murder
but also to go after this rampant misconduct.
According to Wood,
"To me it felt as if [Betsy Faria's murder investigation] was confirmation bias in it
purest form.
Once they'd made their decision, I can confidently say they weren't interested in finding any
other evidence that pointed anywhere else."
Fox 2 Now reports that the former sheriff's office had even drafted an order prior to
Russ' acquittal to destroy all physical evidence associated with the case.
Fortunately, this order was thwarted.
KSDK reported that, during his ordeal,
"[Russ] compared [investigators] to the Three Stooges and at one time a bunch of incompetent
monkeys."
"Even the people we depend on and think of as good guys, are not always good guys."
Their incompetence meant Hupp came within a hair's breadth of getting away with what
she thought looked like the perfect crime.
And it also enabled her to subsequently kill two more innocent people.
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