July 14, 2021 • 58 mins
Poor Pam Hupp and her bad luck. First her best friend Betsy gets stabbed 55 times. Then her mother falls off a balcony. Then she gets KIDNAPPED. And now Pam, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, is in prison for life?! Some people just can’t catch a break, no matter how hard they lie.
Read Jeanette Cooperman’s longform piece on Pam: https://www.stlmag.com/longform/pam-hupp/
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Music: Matthew Noble and Stereodog Productions (Dan Pierson & Peter Manheim). Intro and conclusion: “Sisters” by Irving Berlin, sung by Anna Telfer. Ad break: “The Great One Step” by Victor Dance Orchestra, via Free Music Archive, licensed under Public Domain Mark 1.0.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Is it a sin? Is it a crime? Loving you
dear like I do. If it's a crime, then I'm guilty,
guilty of loving you. Hi, Welcome to Criminal Broad's a
(00:22):
true crime in history podcast about wild women on the
wrong side of the law. I'm Tory Telfer, your host,
and today we have the type of story that's gonna
make you want to punch a hole in your wall.
So buckle up before I tell you about it. I
actually have another sister anecdote to read to you. Remember
how we did Sister Month and we learned all about
(00:43):
different types of sisters, ranging from heroic to spooky, And
I asked for sister anecdotes. Well, I received one from
Carrie Anne, who has an anecdote about her half sister,
though she says she doesn't even consider herself half sisters
with her sister, but she just wants to throw that
in there to show how deep their connection is. Okay,
(01:04):
So here's what Carrie Anne says. She says, we grew
up in a house with a long row of Forsythia
bushes lining along our property line. When I was about
nine or ten years old, my neighbors brought over a
Oiji board and we huddled under the bushes, which formed
a long tunnel while playing. We asked if any of
us would be hurt that summer. It moved to yes,
(01:27):
And at that very second my sister ran out of
the house screaming that she had just sliced open her leg.
She was not playing with us, was nowhere near us,
and no one would have had any idea she was
just injured. I never played with a wigi again. oOoOO, sisters, sisters,
(01:50):
something spooky's going on with sisters? Am I right? Guys?
All right? If you have any more spooky sister anecdotes,
you can always email them. I feel like I will
throw them in whenever I get them, because sisters, Am
I right? Oh? One more thing I keep me need
to tell you when I keep forgetting. If you've been
here listening from the beginning, or if you've listened to
(02:10):
my whole back catalog, do you remember Tilly Divine were
sort of obsessed with her. She was a crime queen
in Sydney, Australia in the nineteen thirties, nineteen twenties through
forties basically, and she had this arch nemesis and they
were rivals and tried to see who could own the
most Pomeranians. Anyway, I received an Instagram message from Tilly,
(02:31):
Divine's relative. Isn't that cool? I just want to share
that with you. It was really cool to hear from her,
and I'm glad she reached out. And if you don't
know what I'm talking about, go listen to episode twelve
because it's a pretty rollicking one, unlike the one we're
going to talk about today. Okay, today's episode was requested
by my nearest and dearest, my cousin Molly, who lives
(02:54):
in Saint Louis, which is where some of this are.
This action takes place around that part of the country. Mollie,
I love you. Molly's getting engaged and is getting married
in October, and I can't wait to go to that wedding.
It's gonna be my first post pandemic wedding and I
cannot wait to eat appetizers and dance. Anyway, we're gonna
(03:16):
talk about the story of Pam Hup. Now. You probably
sense if you've read my books or listened to my podcast,
I can usually find something to empathize with in these women.
Sometimes you might say I find too much to empathize
with I find that the deeper you go into these
stories and the more information you find, these women turn
(03:36):
from sort of monstrous caricatures into real people, and you
kind of see how they tick and you kind of
understand why they did what they did, even if you
disagree with it strongly, And I can usually locate some empathy,
some humanity for these people. I'm gonna be honest with you, guys.
Pam Hup just makes me furious, Just makes me furious. Oh,
(03:57):
what an incorrigible person a case. I kind of hope
you have no idea what I'm talking about and are
coming to this fresh, because if you're coming to this fresh,
the top of your head's about to just like pop off.
Even if you're not, I think there'll be some details
in here that maybe you haven't heard. So, yes, we
are going to get into the case of Pam hop
(04:19):
from Missouri, who her let's see her quote unquote active years.
I guess we're twenty eleven to twenty sixteen, so this
is all very recent, very fresh, and some stuff is
still ongoing. All right, should we get into it. Let's go.
(04:56):
It was a lovely spring day in twenty nineteen and
Hupp was complaining to her husband Mark on the phone.
The world was against her, she said, everyone misunderstood her.
We've all had phone calls like that right times, where
we call up our partner and force them to listen
to us grumble and groan. But this wasn't your average,
(05:19):
oh honey, nobody understands me. Can we get takeout tonight?
Type of call. This call was being recorded because Pam
was calling Mark on a prison phone. Mark wanted to
know why Pam wasn't pushing for a trial. She was
clearly innocent. He knew that she had told him that
(05:40):
she was innocent over and over and over. So why
wouldn't an innocent woman want to go to trial? Why
had his sweet innocent wife taken a plea deal that
put her in prison for the rest of her life.
Pam had an answer for him, of course. She said
that she couldn't have gone to trial because everyone was
(06:02):
spreading lies about her. It didn't matter that she was
one hundred percent innocent of literally everything. People were lying
about her because they just wanted their fifteen minutes of fame.
I can present whatever I want, and they can present
it in a way that they want, she said, and
throw in all the other stuff too, and it looks like,
(06:24):
holy shit, who is this person? That's what it looks
like right now. It's so messed up and tainted that
it looks like, you know, I'm Ted Bundy. To be
perfectly fair, no one in the press was calling Pam
the latest Ted Bundy. Ted Bundy got a whole lot
(06:45):
of compliments in the press, but Pam was getting skewered.
She was being called a blonde, middle aged midwesterner and
a suburban woman with no criminal record. No one was
glamorizing her the way they glamorized Teddy. But Pam did
have one thing in common with Bundy. When his crimes
(07:06):
were discovered, people called him a serial killer, and now
people were calling blonde, middle aged Pam Hop a serial
killer too. When serial killers enter the conversation, people can't
(07:31):
help turning to the old nature versus nurture debate. Are
you born a serial killer? Or does a terrible life
turn you into a serial killer? I usually fall on
the side of nurture. Ish So many serial killers have
horrible childhoods, histories of abuse, head injuries. But Pam Hop, honestly,
(07:52):
she seems like more of a nature gal born this way,
so to speak, her childhood was, at least on the surface,
absolutely fine. She was born in nineteen fifty eight, two
years after Catherine Peleggi from the last episode. A white
Catholic kid from Dellwood, Missouri, which is about twenty minutes
north of Saint Louis. She had two older siblings one
(08:15):
younger sibling. Her mom was a teacher, her dad worked
at Union Electric. Pam had friends. She was a high
school cheerleader. She was always up for a good time,
was boy crazy her friends. Remember that she never got
involved in any drama, which is honestly pretty impressive for
a high school girl. If we go over her childhood
with a fine toothcomb, we can find one thing that
(08:38):
might qualify as hardship. Apparently Pam's mom wasn't always super
nice to her. She could be a bit cold. People
remember sometimes she made little digs at Pam to try
and improve her. And surely this devout Catholic mother wasn't
happy when Pam got pregnant after her senior prom. But
(08:58):
as far as deep dark child secrets that warp a
person's soul into the soul of a killer, that's about
all we've got in the case of Pam hop So,
like I said, Pam got pregnant at the end of
high school, and so instead of going to college like
the rest of her friends, Pam and her high school
boyfriend got married. They got an apartment, and they had
(09:19):
their little girl, Sarah. Pam's high school friends kind of
felt like Pam resented them just a bit for partying
and studying and living the college life while she had
to stay at home with a new baby. Pam's marriage
to her high school boyfriend lasted six years and then
they got divorced, and then soon after Pam married again.
(09:40):
Her second husband was a baseball player turned carpenter named
Mark Up. He was quiet, He let Pam call the shots,
and he tended to accept whatever she said as truth,
even if she was saying it over a prison phone.
Pam and Mark had a son together, Travis. They move
moved to Naples, Florida, and then Pam's father died and
(10:03):
they moved back to Missouri to be closer to Pam's mother.
People who knew Pam remember that when she moved back home,
she was kind of a loner. She didn't make many
new friends or really get back in touch with her
old friends. It seemed like maybe she had found something
to replace socialization. Money. Pam really valued money. She thought
(10:26):
about money, She cared about money. She wasn't the sort
of flashy, money obsessed abroad that we've seen in previous episodes,
like in the stories of Rosemarks or Griselda Blanco, women
who drove fancy cars and dripped in diamonds. Pam was
extremely cheap. She lived debt free, She never went on vacation.
(10:47):
She drove an old car. But frugal people can be
just as obsessed with money as big spenders. As one
of Pam's friends later said, when it comes to money,
she short circuits. In order to make more money, Pam
and Mark started flipping houses as a sort of side hustle.
Apparently they were good at it. Years later, when Pam's
(11:09):
daughter Sarah was all grown up and had gotten married,
Sarah found a house, a fixer upper that she really
wanted to buy. She was so excited, and she told
her mother all about it, and Pam moved fast. She
put in a low bid on her daughter's dream house,
bought it right underneath Sarah's nose, flipped it and turned
a profit. That's cold, right. Prioritizing money over your own kid,
(11:37):
that's ice cold. And this wouldn't be the only time
that Pam prioritized profit over someone's shall we say, well being. Now,
perhaps it's not surprising that a woman with money on
the brain kept getting jobs at insurance offices. Her boss
at a state farm office was very impressed with Pam.
(11:57):
He noticed, as others did, that Pam never got involved
in any drama. How refreshing. She had very good insights
human nature wise, he said, a positive person, very level headed.
I never saw her mad. She saw a bigger picture,
and she was very adept at office politics. Pam probably
would have agreed with this assessment. She saw herself as
(12:20):
someone who is good at reading her fellow humans. As
she told a detective later, I just like to get
a feeling of what people are like, to be perfectly honest.
Though no drama, Pam did have certain weird things that
kind of swirled around her, like wisps of smoke. She
(12:41):
hinted to her boss that she was involved with the FBI.
She got fired from two separate insurance jobs for forging signatures.
She claimed that she'd been in several accidents and had
chronic pain, and she actually received disability checks every month.
But even though she said she could hardly walk, she
took zumba classes and walked around like it was nothing.
(13:04):
When she was nearby, people sometimes found that their cars
were keyed. Someone who lived in her neighborhood found a
pile of bloody animal bones in their yard. A few
other neighbors received cruel anonymous letters. If these were swirls
of suspicious smoke, it was unclear where the source of
the fire was. Was it Pam or were these all
(13:27):
just coincidences. Though Pam didn't have a ton of friends,
she made one at that state farm job, a bubbly
younger woman named Betsy Farrhea. The two of them eventually
fell out of touch, but Pam seemed to keep tabs
on Betsy from afar, because when Betsy got bad news,
(13:50):
Pam was suddenly right there. Let's take a quick break
(14:19):
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In early twenty ten, Betsy received the devastating news that
she had breast cancer. Enter Pam. It was kind of
weird how quickly and thoroughly Pam re entered Betsy's life. See,
Betsy had tons of friends, everybody loved her, but Pam
ingratiated herself into Betsy's life as though they'd been best
(17:47):
friends forever. She drove Betsy to every single one of
her chemo sessions, which meant that if anyone else was
hoping to have a private conversation with Betsy during those sessions,
they couldn't. Pam would be right there listening. Not even
Betsy's own father could get a private audience with her.
(18:07):
When Betsy learned that the cancer had spread to her liver,
Pam started coming over almost every day. Even when Betsy
told her not to show up, Pam was there. One day,
Betsy texted Pam saying that she had an old friend
in town who was going to take her to chemo
for a change, and that she wanted to spend some
one on one time with this old friend, so she
(18:28):
didn't need Pam to drive her. Pam texted back bummer
and then drove to the treatment center anyway and sat
with Betsy and her old friend for the entire visit. Later,
she pretended that she'd never even received Betsy's text. Betsy
had a husband. His name was Russ. He liked to fish,
(18:51):
ride motorcycles, and play slightly nerdy role playing games with
a little group of friends. He did his best to
help Betsy deal with her diagnose. In November of twenty eleven,
he took Betsy on a cruise, and he made plans
for her to swim with the dolphins, which had always
been a dream of hers, and he watched her friendship
with Pam develop. Once she was diagnosed with cancer, a
(19:14):
lot of people wanted to be with her. Russ said,
I never had a problem with Pam personally. She was
easy to talk to, but I could name half a
dozen other people Betsy was closer to. For example, Betsy
had invited her close friends on that cruise, and Pam
wasn't one of them, so it was a little odd
that Pam was hanging out with her every single day.
(19:36):
Right Still, as Russ said, she was easy to talk to,
she seemed nice, she was being helpful. And then Betsy
did something shocking. She suddenly changed her life insurance plan.
She and Pam went to a library to get the
librarian to act as a witness, and this librarian watched
(19:56):
as Betsy signed a document making Pam her soul officiary.
In other words, if Betsy died, God forbid, Pam would
get a whole lot of money. Five days later, Betsy
was dead and Pam knew exactly who had done it.
(20:20):
It was her evil husband, Russ, that terrible, abusive man
who made plans for his sick wife to swim with
the dolphins. It was him, and Pam was happy to
tell the police all about it. Russ Faria's life changed
(20:51):
forever on December twenty seventh, twenty eleven. That day was
a Tuesday, which was the day of his weekly game
night with his friends. Russ and his buddies liked to
play role playing games like Role Master or Talisman, and
their nights together were pretty innocent. Let's just say that
that night, Russ brought over two bottles of Snapple, so
(21:14):
Betsy texted her husband that evening that he didn't need
to pick her up because Pam was going to drive
her home, and so Russ stayed at his friends until
nine pm. One of their usual gameplayer friends was away
that night, so instead of playing their usual games, they
watched movies and smoked a bit of pot. Around nine pm,
Russ left. He grabbed some food at Arby's, and he
(21:36):
drove home, expecting to find his wife asleep. He walked
into their house. Betsy was on the living room floor.
She was quiet, but she wasn't asleep. Her wrists had
been slashed, her tongue was hanging out of her mouth.
(21:57):
She had been stabbed fifty five times, and one of
her own kitchen knives was stuck in her throat. Russ
called nine one one and told them that his wife
had killed herself. When the first responders arrived, they knew
immediately that this wasn't a suicide, but Russ had seen
(22:19):
the bloody wrists and in a panic, he jumped to
a wild conclusion. And Betsy had slashed her wrists once before,
so Russ thought maybe she couldn't take the latest news
about her cancer and had ended her own life. One
of the officers who arrived on the scene noted that
Russ was displaying all sorts of different emotions. Russell appeared
(22:40):
to be going into a state of panic by having
a hard time breathing and talking, the officer wrote, Fearing
that Russ might pass out, this officer asked a paramedic
to wrap him in a blanket. Eventually, he put Russ
in the backseat of his cop car to keep him warm,
and Russ calmed down there, and as the cop talked
to him, asking him question, Russ answered calmly and even laughed.
(23:03):
At points. He smoked two cigarettes as the cop watched
him closely. Was this the behavior of a murderer? At
another point, Russ teared up, saying he didn't know how
he was going to tell his daughters. The cops took
him into the station to interview him. When he was
alone in the interview room, the camera caught him crying, praying,
(23:24):
and saying, Betsy, Betsy. Was this the behavior of a murderer? Probably,
the cops thought. Just over a week later, he was
charged with first degree murder. As detectives pulled together the
case against Russ, they couldn't have asked for a better
witness than that nice, middle aged blonde lady named Pam Hup.
(23:48):
She had plenty to say about the case, plenty to
say about Russ and what a horrible man he was.
According to Pam, Betsy had been trapped in an extremely
abusive marriage with this dark, violent person who played games.
The two of them had separated, oh at least six
or seven times in the time that Pam had known them.
(24:10):
Betsy was actually sleeping with her ex, that's how much
she hated her husband. And Russ was always making comments
about how much money he'd get from Betsy's life insurance
once she was dead. He was pompous, Pam insisted, pompous,
and Betsy was thinking about leaving him. But also she
(24:31):
was thinking about moving them both into her mother's house
to save her mother's house from being foreclosed. Oh and
she was afraid that Russ wasn't going to like that plan,
but she was going to tell him that very night,
and she was terrified that Russ might respond with fury.
Who knows what Russ might have done. Oh and also
(24:52):
Pam remembered one last story right before her interview ended. Also,
once Russ had tried to poison one of Betsy's sees, gatorades.
If Russ cried and prayed on camera when he was
alone in the interview room, Pam was the exact opposite.
She just sat there, confident and quiet, no sign of emotion,
(25:16):
all business, just trying to help. She told cops again
and again what she'd done that night, how she'd dropped
Betsy off and then driven home. The problem was that
her stories were pretty inconsistent. First, she said that when
she dropped Betsy off, she didn't go inside the house.
Never mind, she did go inside, but she left Betsy
tucked on the couch. No, Betsy walked her to the door.
(25:38):
And then she called Betsy when she got home. No,
she called when she was almost home. Oh, No, she
called when she got to the highway. No. Actually she
called even earlier than that, just because she was afraid
she couldn't find her way home, even though she'd made
the drive dozens of times. But never mind those details.
Wasn't it so awful how Russ definitely killed his wife.
(25:59):
The way authority handled Betsy's murder was quite frankly absurd.
Journalist Jeanette Cooperman wrote the definitive account of Pam hup
for Saint Louis Magazine back in twenty seventeen, and she
unpacks their stunning incompetence. Well, here's just one example. When
detectives questioned Mark Hupp, Pam's husband, to verify Pam's story,
(26:22):
they allowed Pam to be in the room with them.
She did most of the talking, typical Pam. Here's another example.
Detectives gave Russ a polygraph. Test or said that they did,
but Russ's defense lawyer was never able to see the
raw data of this supposed polygraph that Russ supposedly failed.
Here's a third example. The prosecutor and the lead investigator
(26:45):
might have been sleeping together, which would mean that the
lead investigator had a very personal reason to help the
prosecutor get the result she wanted. It was pretty clear
that the cops and the prosecutor had decided quickly that
the Huzzle did it, and from then on they looked
only at the husband. Never Mind that Russ had a
(27:06):
fantastic alibi that night, he had four friends who'd been
with him all night, and he even had a receipt
from the Arby's that he stopped at on the way home.
Never Mind that Pam Hupp was the new beneficiary for
Betsy's life insurance, and that she didn't have an alibi
at all. The cops refused to look at Pam. They
(27:26):
only had eyes for Russ. Russ's defense lawyer was looking
at Pam, though he thought she was suspicious, as I'll
get out. It wasn't just the life insurance and the
inconsistencies in her story and the lack of alibi. There
were other things. She said she'd be happy to take
a polygraph test, and then she got a doctor to
(27:48):
write her a note saying she had a quote medical
condition and couldn't do it. Then she lied about ever
asking her doctor to write that note, and she blamed
all inconsistencies and contrads on that vague medical condition. At
one point, the defense lawyer deposed her and asked, what's
your head injury? And she responded, I have no idea.
(28:11):
Come on, thought the defense lawyer. No one else thinks
this woman is acting extremely shady. But still Russ was
the one on trial for Betsy's brutal murder, not Pam.
His trial began in the late fall of twenty thirteen.
His prosecutor painted an ominous picture of premeditated murder saying
(28:33):
that Russ had suggested the murder months or even years
earlier to his nerdy little role playing game buddies, because
murdering Betsy would be and I quote, the ultimate role play.
The prosecutor argued that Russ's friends were all aware of
the plot, and that they even helped him carry it out.
(28:55):
That receipt from Arby's, one of his friends brought it
to Russ the murder was complete. Oh and why didn't
Russ have a single spot of blood on his clothes.
The murderer would have been drenched in blood after all
those fifty five stab wounds. But Russ had been wearing
the same clothes all night. He was wearing them earlier,
according to security camera footage, and he was wearing them
(29:17):
when the first responders arrived. Never fear, because the prosecutor
had an explanation. Like the old rumor about Lizzie Borden,
Russ had killed Betsy while he was naked. The defense
poked what holes they could into this mad theory, but
(29:38):
their hands were tied because they weren't allowed to bring
up Pam. They couldn't mention that she was the one
who got all of Betsy's life insurance money. They couldn't
paint her as a suspect, and so Russ's lawyer talked
about how Russ's game nights were innocent and nerdy, and
how this hadn't actually been a crime of passion. The
(29:59):
stab wound wounds in poor Betsy's body were very, very clean.
They had probably been made after she was dead. These
were not stab wounds made by a furious husband who
had turned on his wife. These were very careful stab
wounds made by someone who was trying to make it
look like a furious husband had turned on his wife.
(30:25):
It didn't work. The jury found Russ guilty. The judge
gave him life without parole. Pam Hupp was sitting pretty.
(30:55):
She'd gotten one hundred and fifty thousand dollars from her
poor murdered friend Betsy's life insurance policy. She bought a
new house, she sold it for a profit. She bought
another one. Okay, so things weren't all fun in games
in Pam's world. Not only had she lost her dear
beloved best friend Betsy because someone had stabbed her fifty
five times, which was quite frankly just rude, but Pam's
(31:18):
life had been touched by another tragedy. Her mother, Shirley,
had died. Pam told people that she died of Alzheimer's,
but that wasn't technically true. Shirley had died by falling
off a balcony. Shirley had an apartment on the third
floor of an assisted living facility. The apartment had a
(31:41):
little balcony with flowers and a couple of garden gnomes
on it. Shirley was starting to show signs of dementia,
but the caretakers at the facility kept an eye on her.
Of course. On October thirtieth, twenty thirteen, while Russ's trial
was still going on, Pam brought her dear old mother
back to the apartartment and told those caretakers not to
(32:02):
expect her for dinner or breakfast the next day. Around
lunchtime the next day, a housekeeper discovered that Shirley's balcony
railings were broken, but they were broken in a really
odd way. Two of them had fallen off completely, but
the others were just bent outward and the top part
(32:22):
of the rail the guardrail was fine. So the balcony
railing basically had a little hole in it, a hole
just big enough for a frail, elderly woman to fall through.
Below the whole Shirley's body lay on the grass. She
had eight times the normal amount of ambient in her system.
(32:46):
Inside on the wall of Shirley's apartment, there were photos
of her relatives and a decal above them that read
family is a gift that lives forever. Or Pam to
lose her mother like that? So suddenly, of course, there
(33:07):
was her mother's life insurance pay out to collect, but
Pam was busy with other things. It's unclear how much
money Pam actually got from her mother's death, though she
once said that she got one hundred thousand dollars. In
another time, she referred to it as half a million.
Betsy's daughters had decided to sue Pam since she'd collected
(33:28):
their mother's life insurance money, and as the lawsuit for
this civil trial moved forward, Pam was deposed, and during
this deposition she said something that shocked that lawyer so
much that he told Russ's defense lawyer about it. Here's
what she said. For a long time, Pam had insisted
that she had put the money from Betsy's life insurance
(33:49):
into a trust fund for Betsy's daughters so that it
would be given to them if they behaved, if they
didn't drink or party, et cetera. But now, in this deposition,
Pam admitted that she had taken all of the money
back out of that trust. She never gave the daughters
a dime. When Russ's defense lawyer heard this, he thought, Aha,
(34:10):
it was so obvious that Pam had really wanted that
life insurance money. She wasn't just hanging on to it
to help the children of a dear deceased friend. She
wanted that money. If you didn't know any better, you
might call that money a motive. With this fresh evidence,
(34:44):
Russ was able to get a new trial. But Pam
wasn't about to let him get off that easy. She
showed up guns blazing with two wild news stories to tell. First,
she told detectives that she hadn't just been friends with Bet,
they had been lovers. Pam explained that Betsy was so
(35:06):
traumatized by Russ that she'd turned to Pam, and Pam
had quote replaced what a husband would be someone who knew.
Pam let out a snort when journalist Jeanette Cooperman told
them this anecdote, Pam was the most homophobic person I'd
ever met. I said, she'd say, that's not normal, that's
(35:27):
not right. Now. Not only was Pam implying that Betsy
had wanted her to have all that money because they
were basically soulmates, she was hinting that Russ had killed
Betsy because he'd discovered their torrid affair. And that wasn't
Pam's only new development. She also claimed to have recovered
a memory from that night. Oh yes, she was now
(35:50):
remembering that she had seen Russ at the crime scene.
Never mind that she'd said numerous times that she didn't
see him that night. Now she was saying she had
to totally see him. And it didn't matter that she
was contradicting herself, because remember, she had a brain injury.
How could she be expected to keep her story straight?
As Pam herself said she had the brain of a boxer,
(36:13):
quote severe head injuries, three accidents in a row, plus
the ambion all those years, because you can't sleep with
a head injury. As Russ's new trial loomed, his defense
lawyer found a bit of new evidence. For years, Pam
had been telling authorities that Betsy sent her an email
saying that she was terribly afraid of Russ. But Pam
(36:36):
had never received the email, but Betsy had told her
about the email, and so the police should definitely look
on Betsy's computer because the email was totally there. And
how did Pam know all this because Betsy told her so.
Two weeks before Russ's new trial, the supposed email was
finally located as a word document on Betsy's computer. Here's
(36:56):
what it said. I know we talked about this yesterday,
but I feel I really need you to believe me.
I really do feel that Russ is going to do
something to me. He continued to tell me how much
money he would make after I die. Last night was
the worst. I fell asleep on the couch while watching TV.
(37:17):
I woke up to Russ holding a pillow over my face.
He said that he wanted me to know what dying
feels like. I need to change my life insurance. Do
you think I could put it in your name and
you could help my daughters when they need it if
something happens to me. Would you please show this to
(37:38):
the police. Wow? What an email? Right? How convenient that
it clearly points to Russ as the murderer and to
innocent Pam as the friend who's just trying to help.
Unfortunately for Pam, when friends at computer experts looked at
this Microsoft word document, they found all sorts of suspicious things.
(38:00):
The author was listed as unknown, not as Betsy. Someone
had tried to open Microsoft Outlook to email the document,
but Betsy didn't use Microsoft Outlook, and that same person
had performed a search on the computer for Betsy's signature,
perhaps to try and attach it to the bottom of
the document, you know, to make it look like Betsy
(38:21):
had actually written it. Huh, wonder who that could have been.
Russ's new trial started in the fall of twenty fifteen.
By then, Russ had served two years of his life sentence. Finally,
his defense lawyer was allowed to bring in evidence that
implicated Pam Hup as a suspect. The judge referred to
(38:42):
the past investigation as rather disturbing, and he acquitted Russ.
Four years after he walked in on his wife's body
lying on their living room floor with a knife in
her throat that had been put there by someone else.
(39:16):
Russ had been officially declared innocent, but the prosecutor said
she wasn't going to charge anyone else for Betsy's murder.
This made Russ's defense lawyer nervous. He didn't trust Pam Hup.
He hadn't trusted her for years. He was totally convinced
that she had killed Betsy Fariha and what she was
(39:36):
just going to get away with it. In fact, he
was so worried about what might happen if Pam walked
free that he actually called the US Attorney's Office for
the Eastern District of Missouri and told them they needed
to look into the case again because if they didn't,
he said, somebody else is going to die. And he
(39:57):
was right. Pam must have known that her head was
getting close to the chopping block, so to speak. People
were sniffing around Betsy's murder again. Dateline kept airing episodes
on the case, which meant that more and more people
knew the name Pam Hop, which wasn't what Pam Hop wanted.
The US Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Missouri
(40:20):
had indeed started to review the case, and Russ was
suing three of the detectives who worked on the original case,
saying that, among other things, they quote failed to investigate
the other obvious suspect, so Pam needed to make herself
look extra innocent and fast. Thankfully, she had a plan.
(40:41):
You know, the old design principle keep it simple stupid.
Apparently Pam had never heard that, because this plan was
as complicated as they come, but she probably thought it
was genius. On August tenth, twenty sixteen, Pam drove by
the house of a woman named Carol McAfee and said,
(41:01):
do you babysit? Carol thought that was a bizarre question.
Who went around looking for a babysitter that way? She responded,
and these are her own words. Nah, bitch, I don't babysit.
So Bam quickly abandoned the babysitter storyline and said that, uh,
she was a producer for Dateline and she needed someone
(41:21):
to do a bit of acting for her. They were
going to reenact a nine to one one call. It
paid one thousand dollars cash under the table. She said
she was from Chicago and that she'd drive Carol to
the place where they were filming, but that Carol couldn't
bring her cell phone, her wallet, or her keys because quote,
the producers don't like clutter. Now Carol knew that something
(41:47):
was up. Pam didn't have a Chicago accent, her car
had Missouri plates, and she was acting incredibly sketchy. What
sort of dateline producer opens the conversation by saying, do
you babysit? But Carol decided to go along with it.
I knew she was up to something, Carol said later.
My thought was, if you're going to hurt somebody, I'm
(42:07):
going to make damn sure it's not a kid. So
she said, sure, I'll come with you. She popped back
into her house to put away her dog. She put
a kitchen knife in her pocket and slipped a pocket
knife up one of her sleeves, and she got into
Pam's car. They drove off, but when Pam started driving
(42:27):
her towards a different area of town than the one
she'd initially described, Carol got the he beegebes this woman
was up to something weird. She told Pam that she
needed to go back home to lock up the house.
Pam drove her back home. There, Carol said that actually
she couldn't do the nine to one one call reenactment
because her son had just gotten sick. Pam protested, but
(42:50):
then Pam noticed something. Carol's house had a surveillance camera
and it was pointing right at her. She drove away
and she looked for someone else. She tried the same
story on a man named Brent Charlton, who told her
he was busy. Pam replied, are you sure it's only
(43:10):
going to take a minute, But Brent was on the
clock and there was no way he was going to
skip work for this dateline producer with no business card.
Six days later, Pam tried her dateline story for a
third time, and this time horribly it worked. Her new
target was a thirty three year old man named Louis Gumpenberger.
(43:34):
Lewis had been in a terrible car crash years earlier,
and now he had limited mental and physical capabilities. His
pastor described him as eager to please and completely gullible.
He lived with his mom and he kept to himself.
He had a son. First, Pam drove to a dollar
tree and bought a knife. Then she drove by Lewis's
(43:57):
house and gave him the old dateline story he believed her.
Lewis drove with Pam back to her house. She lured
him inside, and she took out a gun. She must
have explained to him that this was all part of
the reenactment. She called nine one one twice, hanging up
without saying anything, and then she called a third time
(44:20):
and began what Lewis must have thought was the reenactment call.
On this call, she tells the dispatcher that someone has
broken into her house. She yells very fakely, help help
You can hear Leuis talking as though he's reading a script.
She yells at one point that she's not going to
(44:41):
get inside his vehicle, and so then as the dispatcher
listened to all of this, Pam shot poor Louis five times.
He had been standing there thinking that the whole thing
was an act. But it wasn't an act at all.
The gun was real and the bullets found their mark.
(45:05):
Before police arrived, Pam planted nine hundred dollars and a
note on Lewis's body. The note was a list of
instructions for killing Pam. She had designed it to sort
of make it look like Russ or one of his friends,
was trying to get Betsy's life insurance money back. Yeah,
the whole thing was that convoluted. The note had lines
like kidnap, hup, get Russ's money from Hup at her
(45:28):
bank and kill Hup and take Up back to house
and get rid of her. Make it look like Russ's wife.
Make sure knife's sticking out of neck, you know, because
all criminals leave extensive written instructions when they're hiring a
hit man. When police asked Pam who Russ was, she
pretended that she didn't know anyone named Russ. She had
(45:52):
left the dollar tree knife in her car, saying that
Lewis had used it to threaten her, and detectives noticed
a weird detail. She left it blade down in the
little gap beside her car seat, which is exactly how
she stored her knives at home. She stored them blade
down in the gap between her stove and her counter,
(46:13):
like a psychopath. Anyway, Pam's wacky tail about how Louis
had kidnapped her fell apart like an oreo and a
glass of milk. Since she'd called nine one one three times,
the dispatchers were listening extra closely to that third call,
and they noticed that the call started with a few
(46:33):
seconds of silence, which didn't make any sense if a
live break in had actually been happening. The prosecutor later
said that the nine one one call itself was like
something cooked up by a middle school student. Isn't it ironic?
The call was like a bad dateline script. A week
(46:56):
after slaughtering Lewis, Pam was arrested and charged with his murder.
Police read her her rights and then left the room
to contact her lawyers. Pam waited alone in the room
for a few minutes. Then she pretended to reach for
a water bottle on the table, but instead she grabbed
a pen that was sort of behind the water bottle
(47:17):
and quickly hid it in her jeans. A few minutes later,
she was escorted to the bathroom, where she whipped out
the pen and stabbed herself multiple times in the wrist
and neck. The suicide attempt didn't work. Instead, Pam got
her mugshot taken with huge white bandages stuck to either
side of her neck. Her expression is almost a grin.
(48:01):
The media coverage of Pam hop was intense as her
trial loomed. People were already interested in her because of
the dateline episodes about Betsy's death, and when news of
this latest killing broke, well, let's just say tensions were
running so high that the judge decided Pam's jurors needed
to be shipped in from the other side of the state.
(48:21):
There was no impartial juror to be found in Pam's
neck of the woods. Things heated up even further when
police changed the manner of death for Pam's mother surely
from accidental to undetermined, but those who hoped for a
juicy trial full of revelations were disappointed. In June of
twenty nineteen, Pam pled guilty so that the prosecutors would
(48:44):
drop the death penalty. She used the Alford plea, that
unusual little maneuver where the defendant admits that there is
enough evidence against them to probably find them guilty, but
at the same time they still maintained that they're innocent.
Why didn't she just take a traditional guilty plea. Her
prosecutor thinks she didn't have the courage to say she
(49:06):
did it. Pam claims she took the Alfred plea to
spare her family the indignity of an ugly trial. She
was sentenced to life in prison with that parole, the
same sentence originally given to Russ In twenty twenty, Louis
Gumpenberger's mother sued Pam and won. She didn't want Pam
(49:29):
to profit off her fame. She said. She took the
stand and she shook so hard that the podium itself
shook two. She talked about Louis's son, who was fifteen,
and how he still had nightmares. Four years later, the
judge awarded her three million dollars. As far as the
(49:50):
other lawsuits went, Russ reached a two point o five
million dollar settlement with the police who arrested him and
who never looked twice at Pam. And from prison, Pam
complained on the phone to her husband that people were
calling her Ted Bundy. Was Pam like Bundy a serial killer?
(50:10):
She certainly fits the FBI's definition if you believe that
she killed Betsy, then her mother, then Lewis, and people
definitely thought that, like Bundy, she was evil. A lot
of people thought that, from the cops, to her neighbors,
to people on Reddit who called her a monster and
wrote things like Pam hup is a vile creature who
(50:32):
preys upon the weak and vulnerable. Jeanette Cooperman, the journalist
who wrote the long article about Pam in twenty seventeen,
kept getting asked if she was going to write a
book about this case, a book about the twisted mind
of this blonde midwesterner. But Jeannette said she didn't want
to because even after all that research, she found Pam boring, Yes, boring.
(50:58):
Jeannette wrote in another article that she thought Pam was evil,
but that evil has an empty core. As she wrote,
that empty core is utterly uninteresting. I like people who
are at war with the dark parts of themselves, who
are complicated tangles of saint and sinner. In all those
(51:18):
months of research, I found nothing redeeming in Hup's personality,
except perhaps a cheerful ability to steer clear of petty drama.
She did not need to snipe or stew. She could
stage far more compelling dramas inside her head. In that
(51:39):
same article, Jeanette poses an interesting theory about why exactly
Pam was evil nature nurture. My favorite theory, she wrote,
was the slim but wonderfully paradoxical possibility that the head
injuries Hup used as an excuse for her fuzzy memory
and countless self contradictions had actually, unbeknownst to her, damaged
(52:03):
her brain. A few zaps to the frontal cortex could
conceivably remove not only inhibition, but the ability to empathize
and therefore to recognize a moral wrong. Today, Pam is
in prison at Chillicothee Correctional Institution and will be for
the rest of her life. Last fall, her long suffering
(52:27):
husband finally filed for divorce. The marriage is irretrievably broken,
said the divorce filing. The case of Betsy's murder has
been reopened and investigators have been finding new evidence as
recently as last week. The new prosecutor, who took over
in twenty nineteen, says that this investigation will correct a
(52:49):
lot of wrongs from the previous investigation. During that previous one,
he says, quote, there were leads that came in that
were credible, leads that were largely a ignored if they
didn't fit an investigative narrative. Investigators would go to meet
with witnesses. Those witnesses would say, hey, we also tried
to say we had additional information, and it was largely
(53:11):
ignored by law enforcement at the time and prosecutors. The
story of Pam hop is a story with a lot
of unbelievable twists, and there may be more to come.
But for now, here's one final twist, and this one's
kind of satisfying. Russ Faria, who'd walked in to see
(53:32):
his wife dead on the floor, who'd been tried twice
for her murder, and who at one point had been
in prison thinking he might just spend the rest of
his life there, Russ Faria has found love again. His
girlfriend is none other than Carol McAfee, the woman who
Pam tried to lure into her car with her fake
(53:53):
dateline producer story, the woman who Pam tried to kill.
Out of all this bad and this bad, bad, evil person,
I mean, she's evil incarnate, says Russ. If it weren't
for her, I wouldn't have met this lovely lady here now.
If everything had gone according to Pam's plans, Carol would
(54:15):
be six feet underground with five bullet holes in her body,
and Russ would be rotting in prison for life, and
Pam would be free, free to spend her life insurance
money on whatever her narrow, diabolical, boring little mind could
dream up. But things didn't go according to Pam's plan.
(54:40):
As Carol said, I think for Christmas we ought to
send her a thank you card with our picture the
(55:11):
end Goodbye, Pam. Wow. Pretty irritating, to put it mildly,
to think that if cops and prosecutors hadn't been so
convinced that the husband did it in the case of
Betsy's murder, that several lives could have been saved. As
Russ's defense lawyer said, someone else is gonna die, and
(55:32):
what do you know someone did. Pam hop is was,
as we see, a dangerous woman, someone who was so
determined to get what she wanted that she was not
afraid to kill. Okay, I guess you know, technically she's
only been imprisoned for one murder, but I think it's
pretty obvious from the episode that I strongly suspect her
(55:53):
of the other two. And can we talk about how
different each of the murders was. I mean, it definitely
puts her in a different catgory than these famous serial
killers like Bundy or johnmn Gacy who had their technique.
Pamhop I think is something different, not killing for gratification,
but just truly like killing as a solution to problems
(56:13):
or like a way to get ahead in the world,
which is chilling in a totally different way. Whoa I
didn't think I had any more thoughts on Pamhop after
writing like six six hundred words on her, and look
at me going off on her. Now. Email me criminal
Brods at gmail dot com. What are your thoughts on
Pamhop if you live in Saint Louis, Molly, tell me
what the vibe on the street is. Are people still
(56:34):
talking about her? Have people moved on to something else? Anyway?
Thanks for listening. I'd like to thank this week's patron,
The Mysterious the Evocative Jay. Thank you for supporting the podcast. Jay.
Everyone else you can go to patreon dot com slash
criminal Broads to support the pod and run don't walk
to Instagram dot com slash criminal Brods because you know
(56:57):
you need to see Pamhup smugshot. Don't pretend like you
don't need to see it. If you're not on Instagram,
just google Pam Hup mugshot and you'll see what I mean.
It's like, there are certain details about this case that
like are funny, Like they make me on a laugh
because they're so ridiculous, you know, and then you realize
and this mugshot is one of those. I mean, she
just looks so silly. She just looks so silly, and
(57:20):
she looks so like other than the bandages on her
neck and the fact that it's a mugshot, she just
looks like someone you would run into in the aisles
of jewel Osco. I feel like she'd be getting a
really sweet white wine that's like a little bit blended
with juice, and that's on sale, which is fine, like
(57:41):
people are allowed to drink that, but I just feel
like that's what I like, I would see Pam Hup
getting And so anyway, that's like funny when I see
the mugshot, that vibe is hilarious to me. And then
of course it all comes rushing back like this is
a dangerous woman. It doesn't matter that she has everyone's
mom's haircut. This is a dangerous woman who killed one, two,
(58:02):
three people. Anyway, you'll see the mugshot and other photos
of her and her various victims on Instagram, dot com
slash criminal brods. All right, thank you all so much.
Next week's case is TBD, but you'll hear it next
week and then the week after that, we're gonna do
a really twisty case. Okay, do I call every episode
(58:23):
twisty okay, but this one's extra twisty okay. It's gonna
take a lot of research, so I need a couple
weeks to gear up for it. Thank you all for listening,
and I hope you're having a great summer. Talk to
you next time. Bye. Maybe I'm right, Maybe i'm wrong.
Loving youd like guid If it's a crime, then I'm guilty,
(58:50):
guilty of loving
Is it a sin? Is it a crime? Loving you
dear like I do. If it's a crime, then I'm guilty,
guilty of loving you. Hi, Welcome to Criminal Broad's a
(00:22):
true crime in history podcast about wild women on the
wrong side of the law. I'm Tory Telfer, your host,
and today we have the type of story that's gonna
make you want to punch a hole in your wall.
So buckle up before I tell you about it. I
actually have another sister anecdote to read to you. Remember
how we did Sister Month and we learned all about
(00:43):
different types of sisters, ranging from heroic to spooky, And
I asked for sister anecdotes. Well, I received one from
Carrie Anne, who has an anecdote about her half sister,
though she says she doesn't even consider herself half sisters
with her sister, but she just wants to throw that
in there to show how deep their connection is. Okay,
(01:04):
So here's what Carrie Anne says. She says, we grew
up in a house with a long row of Forsythia
bushes lining along our property line. When I was about
nine or ten years old, my neighbors brought over a
Oiji board and we huddled under the bushes, which formed
a long tunnel while playing. We asked if any of
us would be hurt that summer. It moved to yes,
(01:27):
And at that very second my sister ran out of
the house screaming that she had just sliced open her leg.
She was not playing with us, was nowhere near us,
and no one would have had any idea she was
just injured. I never played with a wigi again. oOoOO, sisters, sisters,
(01:50):
something spooky's going on with sisters? Am I right? Guys?
All right? If you have any more spooky sister anecdotes,
you can always email them. I feel like I will
throw them in whenever I get them, because sisters, Am
I right? Oh? One more thing I keep me need
to tell you when I keep forgetting. If you've been
here listening from the beginning, or if you've listened to
(02:10):
my whole back catalog, do you remember Tilly Divine were
sort of obsessed with her. She was a crime queen
in Sydney, Australia in the nineteen thirties, nineteen twenties through
forties basically, and she had this arch nemesis and they
were rivals and tried to see who could own the
most Pomeranians. Anyway, I received an Instagram message from Tilly,
(02:31):
Divine's relative. Isn't that cool? I just want to share
that with you. It was really cool to hear from her,
and I'm glad she reached out. And if you don't
know what I'm talking about, go listen to episode twelve
because it's a pretty rollicking one, unlike the one we're
going to talk about today. Okay, today's episode was requested
by my nearest and dearest, my cousin Molly, who lives
(02:54):
in Saint Louis, which is where some of this are.
This action takes place around that part of the country. Mollie,
I love you. Molly's getting engaged and is getting married
in October, and I can't wait to go to that wedding.
It's gonna be my first post pandemic wedding and I
cannot wait to eat appetizers and dance. Anyway, we're gonna
(03:16):
talk about the story of Pam Hup. Now. You probably
sense if you've read my books or listened to my podcast,
I can usually find something to empathize with in these women.
Sometimes you might say I find too much to empathize
with I find that the deeper you go into these
stories and the more information you find, these women turn
(03:36):
from sort of monstrous caricatures into real people, and you
kind of see how they tick and you kind of
understand why they did what they did, even if you
disagree with it strongly, And I can usually locate some empathy,
some humanity for these people. I'm gonna be honest with you, guys.
Pam Hup just makes me furious, Just makes me furious. Oh,
(03:57):
what an incorrigible person a case. I kind of hope
you have no idea what I'm talking about and are
coming to this fresh, because if you're coming to this fresh,
the top of your head's about to just like pop off.
Even if you're not, I think there'll be some details
in here that maybe you haven't heard. So, yes, we
are going to get into the case of Pam hop
(04:19):
from Missouri, who her let's see her quote unquote active years.
I guess we're twenty eleven to twenty sixteen, so this
is all very recent, very fresh, and some stuff is
still ongoing. All right, should we get into it. Let's go.
(04:56):
It was a lovely spring day in twenty nineteen and
Hupp was complaining to her husband Mark on the phone.
The world was against her, she said, everyone misunderstood her.
We've all had phone calls like that right times, where
we call up our partner and force them to listen
to us grumble and groan. But this wasn't your average,
(05:19):
oh honey, nobody understands me. Can we get takeout tonight?
Type of call. This call was being recorded because Pam
was calling Mark on a prison phone. Mark wanted to
know why Pam wasn't pushing for a trial. She was
clearly innocent. He knew that she had told him that
(05:40):
she was innocent over and over and over. So why
wouldn't an innocent woman want to go to trial? Why
had his sweet innocent wife taken a plea deal that
put her in prison for the rest of her life.
Pam had an answer for him, of course. She said
that she couldn't have gone to trial because everyone was
(06:02):
spreading lies about her. It didn't matter that she was
one hundred percent innocent of literally everything. People were lying
about her because they just wanted their fifteen minutes of fame.
I can present whatever I want, and they can present
it in a way that they want, she said, and
throw in all the other stuff too, and it looks like,
(06:24):
holy shit, who is this person? That's what it looks
like right now. It's so messed up and tainted that
it looks like, you know, I'm Ted Bundy. To be
perfectly fair, no one in the press was calling Pam
the latest Ted Bundy. Ted Bundy got a whole lot
(06:45):
of compliments in the press, but Pam was getting skewered.
She was being called a blonde, middle aged midwesterner and
a suburban woman with no criminal record. No one was
glamorizing her the way they glamorized Teddy. But Pam did
have one thing in common with Bundy. When his crimes
(07:06):
were discovered, people called him a serial killer, and now
people were calling blonde, middle aged Pam Hop a serial
killer too. When serial killers enter the conversation, people can't
(07:31):
help turning to the old nature versus nurture debate. Are
you born a serial killer? Or does a terrible life
turn you into a serial killer? I usually fall on
the side of nurture. Ish So many serial killers have
horrible childhoods, histories of abuse, head injuries. But Pam Hop, honestly,
(07:52):
she seems like more of a nature gal born this way,
so to speak, her childhood was, at least on the surface,
absolutely fine. She was born in nineteen fifty eight, two
years after Catherine Peleggi from the last episode. A white
Catholic kid from Dellwood, Missouri, which is about twenty minutes
north of Saint Louis. She had two older siblings one
(08:15):
younger sibling. Her mom was a teacher, her dad worked
at Union Electric. Pam had friends. She was a high
school cheerleader. She was always up for a good time,
was boy crazy her friends. Remember that she never got
involved in any drama, which is honestly pretty impressive for
a high school girl. If we go over her childhood
with a fine toothcomb, we can find one thing that
(08:38):
might qualify as hardship. Apparently Pam's mom wasn't always super
nice to her. She could be a bit cold. People
remember sometimes she made little digs at Pam to try
and improve her. And surely this devout Catholic mother wasn't
happy when Pam got pregnant after her senior prom. But
(08:58):
as far as deep dark child secrets that warp a
person's soul into the soul of a killer, that's about
all we've got in the case of Pam hop So,
like I said, Pam got pregnant at the end of
high school, and so instead of going to college like
the rest of her friends, Pam and her high school
boyfriend got married. They got an apartment, and they had
(09:19):
their little girl, Sarah. Pam's high school friends kind of
felt like Pam resented them just a bit for partying
and studying and living the college life while she had
to stay at home with a new baby. Pam's marriage
to her high school boyfriend lasted six years and then
they got divorced, and then soon after Pam married again.
(09:40):
Her second husband was a baseball player turned carpenter named
Mark Up. He was quiet, He let Pam call the shots,
and he tended to accept whatever she said as truth,
even if she was saying it over a prison phone.
Pam and Mark had a son together, Travis. They move
moved to Naples, Florida, and then Pam's father died and
(10:03):
they moved back to Missouri to be closer to Pam's mother.
People who knew Pam remember that when she moved back home,
she was kind of a loner. She didn't make many
new friends or really get back in touch with her
old friends. It seemed like maybe she had found something
to replace socialization. Money. Pam really valued money. She thought
(10:26):
about money, She cared about money. She wasn't the sort
of flashy, money obsessed abroad that we've seen in previous episodes,
like in the stories of Rosemarks or Griselda Blanco, women
who drove fancy cars and dripped in diamonds. Pam was
extremely cheap. She lived debt free, She never went on vacation.
(10:47):
She drove an old car. But frugal people can be
just as obsessed with money as big spenders. As one
of Pam's friends later said, when it comes to money,
she short circuits. In order to make more money, Pam
and Mark started flipping houses as a sort of side hustle.
Apparently they were good at it. Years later, when Pam's
(11:09):
daughter Sarah was all grown up and had gotten married,
Sarah found a house, a fixer upper that she really
wanted to buy. She was so excited, and she told
her mother all about it, and Pam moved fast. She
put in a low bid on her daughter's dream house,
bought it right underneath Sarah's nose, flipped it and turned
a profit. That's cold, right. Prioritizing money over your own kid,
(11:37):
that's ice cold. And this wouldn't be the only time
that Pam prioritized profit over someone's shall we say, well being. Now,
perhaps it's not surprising that a woman with money on
the brain kept getting jobs at insurance offices. Her boss
at a state farm office was very impressed with Pam.
(11:57):
He noticed, as others did, that Pam never got involved
in any drama. How refreshing. She had very good insights
human nature wise, he said, a positive person, very level headed.
I never saw her mad. She saw a bigger picture,
and she was very adept at office politics. Pam probably
would have agreed with this assessment. She saw herself as
(12:20):
someone who is good at reading her fellow humans. As
she told a detective later, I just like to get
a feeling of what people are like, to be perfectly honest.
Though no drama, Pam did have certain weird things that
kind of swirled around her, like wisps of smoke. She
(12:41):
hinted to her boss that she was involved with the FBI.
She got fired from two separate insurance jobs for forging signatures.
She claimed that she'd been in several accidents and had
chronic pain, and she actually received disability checks every month.
But even though she said she could hardly walk, she
took zumba classes and walked around like it was nothing.
(13:04):
When she was nearby, people sometimes found that their cars
were keyed. Someone who lived in her neighborhood found a
pile of bloody animal bones in their yard. A few
other neighbors received cruel anonymous letters. If these were swirls
of suspicious smoke, it was unclear where the source of
the fire was. Was it Pam or were these all
(13:27):
just coincidences. Though Pam didn't have a ton of friends,
she made one at that state farm job, a bubbly
younger woman named Betsy Farrhea. The two of them eventually
fell out of touch, but Pam seemed to keep tabs
on Betsy from afar, because when Betsy got bad news,
(13:50):
Pam was suddenly right there. Let's take a quick break
(14:19):
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(17:25):
In early twenty ten, Betsy received the devastating news that
she had breast cancer. Enter Pam. It was kind of
weird how quickly and thoroughly Pam re entered Betsy's life. See,
Betsy had tons of friends, everybody loved her, but Pam
ingratiated herself into Betsy's life as though they'd been best
(17:47):
friends forever. She drove Betsy to every single one of
her chemo sessions, which meant that if anyone else was
hoping to have a private conversation with Betsy during those sessions,
they couldn't. Pam would be right there listening. Not even
Betsy's own father could get a private audience with her.
(18:07):
When Betsy learned that the cancer had spread to her liver,
Pam started coming over almost every day. Even when Betsy
told her not to show up, Pam was there. One day,
Betsy texted Pam saying that she had an old friend
in town who was going to take her to chemo
for a change, and that she wanted to spend some
one on one time with this old friend, so she
(18:28):
didn't need Pam to drive her. Pam texted back bummer
and then drove to the treatment center anyway and sat
with Betsy and her old friend for the entire visit. Later,
she pretended that she'd never even received Betsy's text. Betsy
had a husband. His name was Russ. He liked to fish,
(18:51):
ride motorcycles, and play slightly nerdy role playing games with
a little group of friends. He did his best to
help Betsy deal with her diagnose. In November of twenty eleven,
he took Betsy on a cruise, and he made plans
for her to swim with the dolphins, which had always
been a dream of hers, and he watched her friendship
with Pam develop. Once she was diagnosed with cancer, a
(19:14):
lot of people wanted to be with her. Russ said,
I never had a problem with Pam personally. She was
easy to talk to, but I could name half a
dozen other people Betsy was closer to. For example, Betsy
had invited her close friends on that cruise, and Pam
wasn't one of them, so it was a little odd
that Pam was hanging out with her every single day.
(19:36):
Right Still, as Russ said, she was easy to talk to,
she seemed nice, she was being helpful. And then Betsy
did something shocking. She suddenly changed her life insurance plan.
She and Pam went to a library to get the
librarian to act as a witness, and this librarian watched
(19:56):
as Betsy signed a document making Pam her soul officiary.
In other words, if Betsy died, God forbid, Pam would
get a whole lot of money. Five days later, Betsy
was dead and Pam knew exactly who had done it.
(20:20):
It was her evil husband, Russ, that terrible, abusive man
who made plans for his sick wife to swim with
the dolphins. It was him, and Pam was happy to
tell the police all about it. Russ Faria's life changed
(20:51):
forever on December twenty seventh, twenty eleven. That day was
a Tuesday, which was the day of his weekly game
night with his friends. Russ and his buddies liked to
play role playing games like Role Master or Talisman, and
their nights together were pretty innocent. Let's just say that
that night, Russ brought over two bottles of Snapple, so
(21:14):
Betsy texted her husband that evening that he didn't need
to pick her up because Pam was going to drive
her home, and so Russ stayed at his friends until
nine pm. One of their usual gameplayer friends was away
that night, so instead of playing their usual games, they
watched movies and smoked a bit of pot. Around nine pm,
Russ left. He grabbed some food at Arby's, and he
(21:36):
drove home, expecting to find his wife asleep. He walked
into their house. Betsy was on the living room floor.
She was quiet, but she wasn't asleep. Her wrists had
been slashed, her tongue was hanging out of her mouth.
(21:57):
She had been stabbed fifty five times, and one of
her own kitchen knives was stuck in her throat. Russ
called nine one one and told them that his wife
had killed herself. When the first responders arrived, they knew
immediately that this wasn't a suicide, but Russ had seen
(22:19):
the bloody wrists and in a panic, he jumped to
a wild conclusion. And Betsy had slashed her wrists once before,
so Russ thought maybe she couldn't take the latest news
about her cancer and had ended her own life. One
of the officers who arrived on the scene noted that
Russ was displaying all sorts of different emotions. Russell appeared
(22:40):
to be going into a state of panic by having
a hard time breathing and talking, the officer wrote, Fearing
that Russ might pass out, this officer asked a paramedic
to wrap him in a blanket. Eventually, he put Russ
in the backseat of his cop car to keep him warm,
and Russ calmed down there, and as the cop talked
to him, asking him question, Russ answered calmly and even laughed.
(23:03):
At points. He smoked two cigarettes as the cop watched
him closely. Was this the behavior of a murderer? At
another point, Russ teared up, saying he didn't know how
he was going to tell his daughters. The cops took
him into the station to interview him. When he was
alone in the interview room, the camera caught him crying, praying,
(23:24):
and saying, Betsy, Betsy. Was this the behavior of a murderer? Probably,
the cops thought. Just over a week later, he was
charged with first degree murder. As detectives pulled together the
case against Russ, they couldn't have asked for a better
witness than that nice, middle aged blonde lady named Pam Hup.
(23:48):
She had plenty to say about the case, plenty to
say about Russ and what a horrible man he was.
According to Pam, Betsy had been trapped in an extremely
abusive marriage with this dark, violent person who played games.
The two of them had separated, oh at least six
or seven times in the time that Pam had known them.
(24:10):
Betsy was actually sleeping with her ex, that's how much
she hated her husband. And Russ was always making comments
about how much money he'd get from Betsy's life insurance
once she was dead. He was pompous, Pam insisted, pompous,
and Betsy was thinking about leaving him. But also she
(24:31):
was thinking about moving them both into her mother's house
to save her mother's house from being foreclosed. Oh and
she was afraid that Russ wasn't going to like that plan,
but she was going to tell him that very night,
and she was terrified that Russ might respond with fury.
Who knows what Russ might have done. Oh and also
(24:52):
Pam remembered one last story right before her interview ended. Also,
once Russ had tried to poison one of Betsy's sees, gatorades.
If Russ cried and prayed on camera when he was
alone in the interview room, Pam was the exact opposite.
She just sat there, confident and quiet, no sign of emotion,
(25:16):
all business, just trying to help. She told cops again
and again what she'd done that night, how she'd dropped
Betsy off and then driven home. The problem was that
her stories were pretty inconsistent. First, she said that when
she dropped Betsy off, she didn't go inside the house.
Never mind, she did go inside, but she left Betsy
tucked on the couch. No, Betsy walked her to the door.
(25:38):
And then she called Betsy when she got home. No,
she called when she was almost home. Oh, No, she
called when she got to the highway. No. Actually she
called even earlier than that, just because she was afraid
she couldn't find her way home, even though she'd made
the drive dozens of times. But never mind those details.
Wasn't it so awful how Russ definitely killed his wife.
(25:59):
The way authority handled Betsy's murder was quite frankly absurd.
Journalist Jeanette Cooperman wrote the definitive account of Pam hup
for Saint Louis Magazine back in twenty seventeen, and she
unpacks their stunning incompetence. Well, here's just one example. When
detectives questioned Mark Hupp, Pam's husband, to verify Pam's story,
(26:22):
they allowed Pam to be in the room with them.
She did most of the talking, typical Pam. Here's another example.
Detectives gave Russ a polygraph. Test or said that they did,
but Russ's defense lawyer was never able to see the
raw data of this supposed polygraph that Russ supposedly failed.
Here's a third example. The prosecutor and the lead investigator
(26:45):
might have been sleeping together, which would mean that the
lead investigator had a very personal reason to help the
prosecutor get the result she wanted. It was pretty clear
that the cops and the prosecutor had decided quickly that
the Huzzle did it, and from then on they looked
only at the husband. Never Mind that Russ had a
(27:06):
fantastic alibi that night, he had four friends who'd been
with him all night, and he even had a receipt
from the Arby's that he stopped at on the way home.
Never Mind that Pam Hupp was the new beneficiary for
Betsy's life insurance, and that she didn't have an alibi
at all. The cops refused to look at Pam. They
(27:26):
only had eyes for Russ. Russ's defense lawyer was looking
at Pam, though he thought she was suspicious, as I'll
get out. It wasn't just the life insurance and the
inconsistencies in her story and the lack of alibi. There
were other things. She said she'd be happy to take
a polygraph test, and then she got a doctor to
(27:48):
write her a note saying she had a quote medical
condition and couldn't do it. Then she lied about ever
asking her doctor to write that note, and she blamed
all inconsistencies and contrads on that vague medical condition. At
one point, the defense lawyer deposed her and asked, what's
your head injury? And she responded, I have no idea.
(28:11):
Come on, thought the defense lawyer. No one else thinks
this woman is acting extremely shady. But still Russ was
the one on trial for Betsy's brutal murder, not Pam.
His trial began in the late fall of twenty thirteen.
His prosecutor painted an ominous picture of premeditated murder saying
(28:33):
that Russ had suggested the murder months or even years
earlier to his nerdy little role playing game buddies, because
murdering Betsy would be and I quote, the ultimate role play.
The prosecutor argued that Russ's friends were all aware of
the plot, and that they even helped him carry it out.
(28:55):
That receipt from Arby's, one of his friends brought it
to Russ the murder was complete. Oh and why didn't
Russ have a single spot of blood on his clothes.
The murderer would have been drenched in blood after all
those fifty five stab wounds. But Russ had been wearing
the same clothes all night. He was wearing them earlier,
according to security camera footage, and he was wearing them
(29:17):
when the first responders arrived. Never fear, because the prosecutor
had an explanation. Like the old rumor about Lizzie Borden,
Russ had killed Betsy while he was naked. The defense
poked what holes they could into this mad theory, but
(29:38):
their hands were tied because they weren't allowed to bring
up Pam. They couldn't mention that she was the one
who got all of Betsy's life insurance money. They couldn't
paint her as a suspect, and so Russ's lawyer talked
about how Russ's game nights were innocent and nerdy, and
how this hadn't actually been a crime of passion. The
(29:59):
stab wound wounds in poor Betsy's body were very, very clean.
They had probably been made after she was dead. These
were not stab wounds made by a furious husband who
had turned on his wife. These were very careful stab
wounds made by someone who was trying to make it
look like a furious husband had turned on his wife.
(30:25):
It didn't work. The jury found Russ guilty. The judge
gave him life without parole. Pam Hupp was sitting pretty.
(30:55):
She'd gotten one hundred and fifty thousand dollars from her
poor murdered friend Betsy's life insurance policy. She bought a
new house, she sold it for a profit. She bought
another one. Okay, so things weren't all fun in games
in Pam's world. Not only had she lost her dear
beloved best friend Betsy because someone had stabbed her fifty
five times, which was quite frankly just rude, but Pam's
(31:18):
life had been touched by another tragedy. Her mother, Shirley,
had died. Pam told people that she died of Alzheimer's,
but that wasn't technically true. Shirley had died by falling
off a balcony. Shirley had an apartment on the third
floor of an assisted living facility. The apartment had a
(31:41):
little balcony with flowers and a couple of garden gnomes
on it. Shirley was starting to show signs of dementia,
but the caretakers at the facility kept an eye on her.
Of course. On October thirtieth, twenty thirteen, while Russ's trial
was still going on, Pam brought her dear old mother
back to the apartartment and told those caretakers not to
(32:02):
expect her for dinner or breakfast the next day. Around
lunchtime the next day, a housekeeper discovered that Shirley's balcony
railings were broken, but they were broken in a really
odd way. Two of them had fallen off completely, but
the others were just bent outward and the top part
(32:22):
of the rail the guardrail was fine. So the balcony
railing basically had a little hole in it, a hole
just big enough for a frail, elderly woman to fall through.
Below the whole Shirley's body lay on the grass. She
had eight times the normal amount of ambient in her system.
(32:46):
Inside on the wall of Shirley's apartment, there were photos
of her relatives and a decal above them that read
family is a gift that lives forever. Or Pam to
lose her mother like that? So suddenly, of course, there
(33:07):
was her mother's life insurance pay out to collect, but
Pam was busy with other things. It's unclear how much
money Pam actually got from her mother's death, though she
once said that she got one hundred thousand dollars. In
another time, she referred to it as half a million.
Betsy's daughters had decided to sue Pam since she'd collected
(33:28):
their mother's life insurance money, and as the lawsuit for
this civil trial moved forward, Pam was deposed, and during
this deposition she said something that shocked that lawyer so
much that he told Russ's defense lawyer about it. Here's
what she said. For a long time, Pam had insisted
that she had put the money from Betsy's life insurance
(33:49):
into a trust fund for Betsy's daughters so that it
would be given to them if they behaved, if they
didn't drink or party, et cetera. But now, in this deposition,
Pam admitted that she had taken all of the money
back out of that trust. She never gave the daughters
a dime. When Russ's defense lawyer heard this, he thought, Aha,
(34:10):
it was so obvious that Pam had really wanted that
life insurance money. She wasn't just hanging on to it
to help the children of a dear deceased friend. She
wanted that money. If you didn't know any better, you
might call that money a motive. With this fresh evidence,
(34:44):
Russ was able to get a new trial. But Pam
wasn't about to let him get off that easy. She
showed up guns blazing with two wild news stories to tell. First,
she told detectives that she hadn't just been friends with Bet,
they had been lovers. Pam explained that Betsy was so
(35:06):
traumatized by Russ that she'd turned to Pam, and Pam
had quote replaced what a husband would be someone who knew.
Pam let out a snort when journalist Jeanette Cooperman told
them this anecdote, Pam was the most homophobic person I'd
ever met. I said, she'd say, that's not normal, that's
(35:27):
not right. Now. Not only was Pam implying that Betsy
had wanted her to have all that money because they
were basically soulmates, she was hinting that Russ had killed
Betsy because he'd discovered their torrid affair. And that wasn't
Pam's only new development. She also claimed to have recovered
a memory from that night. Oh yes, she was now
(35:50):
remembering that she had seen Russ at the crime scene.
Never mind that she'd said numerous times that she didn't
see him that night. Now she was saying she had
to totally see him. And it didn't matter that she
was contradicting herself, because remember, she had a brain injury.
How could she be expected to keep her story straight?
As Pam herself said she had the brain of a boxer,
(36:13):
quote severe head injuries, three accidents in a row, plus
the ambion all those years, because you can't sleep with
a head injury. As Russ's new trial loomed, his defense
lawyer found a bit of new evidence. For years, Pam
had been telling authorities that Betsy sent her an email
saying that she was terribly afraid of Russ. But Pam
(36:36):
had never received the email, but Betsy had told her
about the email, and so the police should definitely look
on Betsy's computer because the email was totally there. And
how did Pam know all this because Betsy told her so.
Two weeks before Russ's new trial, the supposed email was
finally located as a word document on Betsy's computer. Here's
(36:56):
what it said. I know we talked about this yesterday,
but I feel I really need you to believe me.
I really do feel that Russ is going to do
something to me. He continued to tell me how much
money he would make after I die. Last night was
the worst. I fell asleep on the couch while watching TV.
(37:17):
I woke up to Russ holding a pillow over my face.
He said that he wanted me to know what dying
feels like. I need to change my life insurance. Do
you think I could put it in your name and
you could help my daughters when they need it if
something happens to me. Would you please show this to
(37:38):
the police. Wow? What an email? Right? How convenient that
it clearly points to Russ as the murderer and to
innocent Pam as the friend who's just trying to help.
Unfortunately for Pam, when friends at computer experts looked at
this Microsoft word document, they found all sorts of suspicious things.
(38:00):
The author was listed as unknown, not as Betsy. Someone
had tried to open Microsoft Outlook to email the document,
but Betsy didn't use Microsoft Outlook, and that same person
had performed a search on the computer for Betsy's signature,
perhaps to try and attach it to the bottom of
the document, you know, to make it look like Betsy
(38:21):
had actually written it. Huh, wonder who that could have been.
Russ's new trial started in the fall of twenty fifteen.
By then, Russ had served two years of his life sentence. Finally,
his defense lawyer was allowed to bring in evidence that
implicated Pam Hup as a suspect. The judge referred to
(38:42):
the past investigation as rather disturbing, and he acquitted Russ.
Four years after he walked in on his wife's body
lying on their living room floor with a knife in
her throat that had been put there by someone else.
(39:16):
Russ had been officially declared innocent, but the prosecutor said
she wasn't going to charge anyone else for Betsy's murder.
This made Russ's defense lawyer nervous. He didn't trust Pam Hup.
He hadn't trusted her for years. He was totally convinced
that she had killed Betsy Fariha and what she was
(39:36):
just going to get away with it. In fact, he
was so worried about what might happen if Pam walked
free that he actually called the US Attorney's Office for
the Eastern District of Missouri and told them they needed
to look into the case again because if they didn't,
he said, somebody else is going to die. And he
(39:57):
was right. Pam must have known that her head was
getting close to the chopping block, so to speak. People
were sniffing around Betsy's murder again. Dateline kept airing episodes
on the case, which meant that more and more people
knew the name Pam Hop, which wasn't what Pam Hop wanted.
The US Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Missouri
(40:20):
had indeed started to review the case, and Russ was
suing three of the detectives who worked on the original case,
saying that, among other things, they quote failed to investigate
the other obvious suspect, so Pam needed to make herself
look extra innocent and fast. Thankfully, she had a plan.
(40:41):
You know, the old design principle keep it simple stupid.
Apparently Pam had never heard that, because this plan was
as complicated as they come, but she probably thought it
was genius. On August tenth, twenty sixteen, Pam drove by
the house of a woman named Carol McAfee and said,
(41:01):
do you babysit? Carol thought that was a bizarre question.
Who went around looking for a babysitter that way? She responded,
and these are her own words. Nah, bitch, I don't babysit.
So Bam quickly abandoned the babysitter storyline and said that, uh,
she was a producer for Dateline and she needed someone
(41:21):
to do a bit of acting for her. They were
going to reenact a nine to one one call. It
paid one thousand dollars cash under the table. She said
she was from Chicago and that she'd drive Carol to
the place where they were filming, but that Carol couldn't
bring her cell phone, her wallet, or her keys because quote,
the producers don't like clutter. Now Carol knew that something
(41:47):
was up. Pam didn't have a Chicago accent, her car
had Missouri plates, and she was acting incredibly sketchy. What
sort of dateline producer opens the conversation by saying, do
you babysit? But Carol decided to go along with it.
I knew she was up to something, Carol said later.
My thought was, if you're going to hurt somebody, I'm
(42:07):
going to make damn sure it's not a kid. So
she said, sure, I'll come with you. She popped back
into her house to put away her dog. She put
a kitchen knife in her pocket and slipped a pocket
knife up one of her sleeves, and she got into
Pam's car. They drove off, but when Pam started driving
(42:27):
her towards a different area of town than the one
she'd initially described, Carol got the he beegebes this woman
was up to something weird. She told Pam that she
needed to go back home to lock up the house.
Pam drove her back home. There, Carol said that actually
she couldn't do the nine to one one call reenactment
because her son had just gotten sick. Pam protested, but
(42:50):
then Pam noticed something. Carol's house had a surveillance camera
and it was pointing right at her. She drove away
and she looked for someone else. She tried the same
story on a man named Brent Charlton, who told her
he was busy. Pam replied, are you sure it's only
(43:10):
going to take a minute, But Brent was on the
clock and there was no way he was going to
skip work for this dateline producer with no business card.
Six days later, Pam tried her dateline story for a
third time, and this time horribly it worked. Her new
target was a thirty three year old man named Louis Gumpenberger.
(43:34):
Lewis had been in a terrible car crash years earlier,
and now he had limited mental and physical capabilities. His
pastor described him as eager to please and completely gullible.
He lived with his mom and he kept to himself.
He had a son. First, Pam drove to a dollar
tree and bought a knife. Then she drove by Lewis's
(43:57):
house and gave him the old dateline story he believed her.
Lewis drove with Pam back to her house. She lured
him inside, and she took out a gun. She must
have explained to him that this was all part of
the reenactment. She called nine one one twice, hanging up
without saying anything, and then she called a third time
(44:20):
and began what Lewis must have thought was the reenactment call.
On this call, she tells the dispatcher that someone has
broken into her house. She yells very fakely, help help
You can hear Leuis talking as though he's reading a script.
She yells at one point that she's not going to
(44:41):
get inside his vehicle, and so then as the dispatcher
listened to all of this, Pam shot poor Louis five times.
He had been standing there thinking that the whole thing
was an act. But it wasn't an act at all.
The gun was real and the bullets found their mark.
(45:05):
Before police arrived, Pam planted nine hundred dollars and a
note on Lewis's body. The note was a list of
instructions for killing Pam. She had designed it to sort
of make it look like Russ or one of his friends,
was trying to get Betsy's life insurance money back. Yeah,
the whole thing was that convoluted. The note had lines
like kidnap, hup, get Russ's money from Hup at her
(45:28):
bank and kill Hup and take Up back to house
and get rid of her. Make it look like Russ's wife.
Make sure knife's sticking out of neck, you know, because
all criminals leave extensive written instructions when they're hiring a
hit man. When police asked Pam who Russ was, she
pretended that she didn't know anyone named Russ. She had
(45:52):
left the dollar tree knife in her car, saying that
Lewis had used it to threaten her, and detectives noticed
a weird detail. She left it blade down in the
little gap beside her car seat, which is exactly how
she stored her knives at home. She stored them blade
down in the gap between her stove and her counter,
(46:13):
like a psychopath. Anyway, Pam's wacky tail about how Louis
had kidnapped her fell apart like an oreo and a
glass of milk. Since she'd called nine one one three times,
the dispatchers were listening extra closely to that third call,
and they noticed that the call started with a few
(46:33):
seconds of silence, which didn't make any sense if a
live break in had actually been happening. The prosecutor later
said that the nine one one call itself was like
something cooked up by a middle school student. Isn't it ironic?
The call was like a bad dateline script. A week
(46:56):
after slaughtering Lewis, Pam was arrested and charged with his murder.
Police read her her rights and then left the room
to contact her lawyers. Pam waited alone in the room
for a few minutes. Then she pretended to reach for
a water bottle on the table, but instead she grabbed
a pen that was sort of behind the water bottle
(47:17):
and quickly hid it in her jeans. A few minutes later,
she was escorted to the bathroom, where she whipped out
the pen and stabbed herself multiple times in the wrist
and neck. The suicide attempt didn't work. Instead, Pam got
her mugshot taken with huge white bandages stuck to either
side of her neck. Her expression is almost a grin.
(48:01):
The media coverage of Pam hop was intense as her
trial loomed. People were already interested in her because of
the dateline episodes about Betsy's death, and when news of
this latest killing broke, well, let's just say tensions were
running so high that the judge decided Pam's jurors needed
to be shipped in from the other side of the state.
(48:21):
There was no impartial juror to be found in Pam's
neck of the woods. Things heated up even further when
police changed the manner of death for Pam's mother surely
from accidental to undetermined, but those who hoped for a
juicy trial full of revelations were disappointed. In June of
twenty nineteen, Pam pled guilty so that the prosecutors would
(48:44):
drop the death penalty. She used the Alford plea, that
unusual little maneuver where the defendant admits that there is
enough evidence against them to probably find them guilty, but
at the same time they still maintained that they're innocent.
Why didn't she just take a traditional guilty plea. Her
prosecutor thinks she didn't have the courage to say she
(49:06):
did it. Pam claims she took the Alfred plea to
spare her family the indignity of an ugly trial. She
was sentenced to life in prison with that parole, the
same sentence originally given to Russ In twenty twenty, Louis
Gumpenberger's mother sued Pam and won. She didn't want Pam
(49:29):
to profit off her fame. She said. She took the
stand and she shook so hard that the podium itself
shook two. She talked about Louis's son, who was fifteen,
and how he still had nightmares. Four years later, the
judge awarded her three million dollars. As far as the
(49:50):
other lawsuits went, Russ reached a two point o five
million dollar settlement with the police who arrested him and
who never looked twice at Pam. And from prison, Pam
complained on the phone to her husband that people were
calling her Ted Bundy. Was Pam like Bundy a serial killer?
(50:10):
She certainly fits the FBI's definition if you believe that
she killed Betsy, then her mother, then Lewis, and people
definitely thought that, like Bundy, she was evil. A lot
of people thought that, from the cops, to her neighbors,
to people on Reddit who called her a monster and
wrote things like Pam hup is a vile creature who
(50:32):
preys upon the weak and vulnerable. Jeanette Cooperman, the journalist
who wrote the long article about Pam in twenty seventeen,
kept getting asked if she was going to write a
book about this case, a book about the twisted mind
of this blonde midwesterner. But Jeannette said she didn't want
to because even after all that research, she found Pam boring, Yes, boring.
(50:58):
Jeannette wrote in another article that she thought Pam was evil,
but that evil has an empty core. As she wrote,
that empty core is utterly uninteresting. I like people who
are at war with the dark parts of themselves, who
are complicated tangles of saint and sinner. In all those
(51:18):
months of research, I found nothing redeeming in Hup's personality,
except perhaps a cheerful ability to steer clear of petty drama.
She did not need to snipe or stew. She could
stage far more compelling dramas inside her head. In that
(51:39):
same article, Jeanette poses an interesting theory about why exactly
Pam was evil nature nurture. My favorite theory, she wrote,
was the slim but wonderfully paradoxical possibility that the head
injuries Hup used as an excuse for her fuzzy memory
and countless self contradictions had actually, unbeknownst to her, damaged
(52:03):
her brain. A few zaps to the frontal cortex could
conceivably remove not only inhibition, but the ability to empathize
and therefore to recognize a moral wrong. Today, Pam is
in prison at Chillicothee Correctional Institution and will be for
the rest of her life. Last fall, her long suffering
(52:27):
husband finally filed for divorce. The marriage is irretrievably broken,
said the divorce filing. The case of Betsy's murder has
been reopened and investigators have been finding new evidence as
recently as last week. The new prosecutor, who took over
in twenty nineteen, says that this investigation will correct a
(52:49):
lot of wrongs from the previous investigation. During that previous one,
he says, quote, there were leads that came in that
were credible, leads that were largely a ignored if they
didn't fit an investigative narrative. Investigators would go to meet
with witnesses. Those witnesses would say, hey, we also tried
to say we had additional information, and it was largely
(53:11):
ignored by law enforcement at the time and prosecutors. The
story of Pam hop is a story with a lot
of unbelievable twists, and there may be more to come.
But for now, here's one final twist, and this one's
kind of satisfying. Russ Faria, who'd walked in to see
(53:32):
his wife dead on the floor, who'd been tried twice
for her murder, and who at one point had been
in prison thinking he might just spend the rest of
his life there, Russ Faria has found love again. His
girlfriend is none other than Carol McAfee, the woman who
Pam tried to lure into her car with her fake
(53:53):
dateline producer story, the woman who Pam tried to kill.
Out of all this bad and this bad, bad, evil person,
I mean, she's evil incarnate, says Russ. If it weren't
for her, I wouldn't have met this lovely lady here now.
If everything had gone according to Pam's plans, Carol would
(54:15):
be six feet underground with five bullet holes in her body,
and Russ would be rotting in prison for life, and
Pam would be free, free to spend her life insurance
money on whatever her narrow, diabolical, boring little mind could
dream up. But things didn't go according to Pam's plan.
(54:40):
As Carol said, I think for Christmas we ought to
send her a thank you card with our picture the
(55:11):
end Goodbye, Pam. Wow. Pretty irritating, to put it mildly,
to think that if cops and prosecutors hadn't been so
convinced that the husband did it in the case of
Betsy's murder, that several lives could have been saved. As
Russ's defense lawyer said, someone else is gonna die, and
(55:32):
what do you know someone did. Pam hop is was,
as we see, a dangerous woman, someone who was so
determined to get what she wanted that she was not
afraid to kill. Okay, I guess you know, technically she's
only been imprisoned for one murder, but I think it's
pretty obvious from the episode that I strongly suspect her
(55:53):
of the other two. And can we talk about how
different each of the murders was. I mean, it definitely
puts her in a different catgory than these famous serial
killers like Bundy or johnmn Gacy who had their technique.
Pamhop I think is something different, not killing for gratification,
but just truly like killing as a solution to problems
(56:13):
or like a way to get ahead in the world,
which is chilling in a totally different way. Whoa I
didn't think I had any more thoughts on Pamhop after
writing like six six hundred words on her, and look
at me going off on her. Now. Email me criminal
Brods at gmail dot com. What are your thoughts on
Pamhop if you live in Saint Louis, Molly, tell me
what the vibe on the street is. Are people still
(56:34):
talking about her? Have people moved on to something else? Anyway?
Thanks for listening. I'd like to thank this week's patron,
The Mysterious the Evocative Jay. Thank you for supporting the podcast. Jay.
Everyone else you can go to patreon dot com slash
criminal Broads to support the pod and run don't walk
to Instagram dot com slash criminal Brods because you know
(56:57):
you need to see Pamhup smugshot. Don't pretend like you
don't need to see it. If you're not on Instagram,
just google Pam Hup mugshot and you'll see what I mean.
It's like, there are certain details about this case that
like are funny, Like they make me on a laugh
because they're so ridiculous, you know, and then you realize
and this mugshot is one of those. I mean, she
just looks so silly. She just looks so silly, and
(57:20):
she looks so like other than the bandages on her
neck and the fact that it's a mugshot, she just
looks like someone you would run into in the aisles
of jewel Osco. I feel like she'd be getting a
really sweet white wine that's like a little bit blended
with juice, and that's on sale, which is fine, like
(57:41):
people are allowed to drink that, but I just feel
like that's what I like, I would see Pam Hup
getting And so anyway, that's like funny when I see
the mugshot, that vibe is hilarious to me. And then
of course it all comes rushing back like this is
a dangerous woman. It doesn't matter that she has everyone's
mom's haircut. This is a dangerous woman who killed one, two,
(58:02):
three people. Anyway, you'll see the mugshot and other photos
of her and her various victims on Instagram, dot com
slash criminal brods. All right, thank you all so much.
Next week's case is TBD, but you'll hear it next
week and then the week after that, we're gonna do
a really twisty case. Okay, do I call every episode
(58:23):
twisty okay, but this one's extra twisty okay. It's gonna
take a lot of research, so I need a couple
weeks to gear up for it. Thank you all for listening,
and I hope you're having a great summer. Talk to
you next time. Bye. Maybe I'm right, Maybe i'm wrong.
Loving youd like guid If it's a crime, then I'm guilty,
(58:50):
guilty of loving
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