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Pam Hupp was charged with first degree murder and armed criminal action for the murder of Betsy Faria in December 2011, Lincoln County District Attorney Mike Wood said at a press conference on Monday.
The accusations are the final chapter in a long and twisted case.
Pam Hupp was the last known person to see Betsy Faria alive before being stabbed to death in her home in Troy, Missouri, just after Christmas 2011. Betsy’s husband Russ discovered her body on his return from her night out. weekly game with friends.
According to court documents obtained by Dateline this week, Pam Hupp followed her friend’s every move on Tuesday, December 27, 2011, while waiting for her to be weak and lethargic from the chemotherapy that day, and brought her home. her, knowing that Betsy’s husband, Russ, wouldn’t. Be there.
Betsy was stabbed multiple times, and court documents allege Hupp then soaked Betsy’s socks in her own blood and sprinkled them around the house to make it look like her husband killed her in an assault domesticated.
The court document goes on to describe what Lincoln County District Attorney Mike Wood describes as a “compelling circumstantial murder case, very hard to deny.” Yet the facts of the case have been ignored, he added, announcing that there will be a new investigation into “potential misconduct by prosecutors and police in the Betsy Faria case”.
“To me, it felt like it was confirmation – bias in its purest form, largely ego-driven,” he said. “I can confidently say that they weren’t interested in finding evidence that pointed elsewhere.”
At Monday’s press conference, Wood also announced that they would seek the death penalty, saying: “I do not take the decision to pursue the death penalty lightly, but this case is unique in its horror and its depravity, so that it shocks the conscience. “
“One of the aggravating factors that we can obviously count on with the death penalty was that she murdered for the insurance money, but I will specifically say that this case has touched our souls and our conscience very deeply with it. a level of depravity not regularly seen, ”Wood said Monday. “What I can say is we have a person who not only murdered her friend, then mutilated the body, staged the scene, testified against an innocent man, then when acquitted went to murder someone one in St. Charles County to keep myself from being seen as a suspect I can’t choose a more depraved case than this.
Four days before the murder, Betsy, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer, had made her friend Pam the beneficiary of a $ 150,000 life insurance policy in place of her husband. It was a change that Betsy’s other friends and family, including Russ, said they knew nothing about.
Russ was charged with Betsy’s murder in 2012 after an investigation in which Hupp singled out Russ. Hupp then testified against him during his trial in November 2013. He was found guilty by a jury and sentenced to life in prison.
Russ Faria’s conviction was then quashed.
During his retrial before another judge in November 2015, Faria’s defense attorney, Joel Schwartz, named Hupp as the person with the motive and opportunity to kill Betsy. Hupp was not called by either party to testify. This time, Faria was found not guilty. The Lincoln County District Attorney at the time, who led the state’s case against Russ in both trials, continued to maintain that Russ was Betsy’s killer.
Then, in August 2016, Hupp shot dead a man she said accosted her in the driveway of her O’Fallon, Missouri home, demanding “Russ money” and threatening to kill her. Investigators determined that the man, Louis Gumpenberger, was not an intruder but rather an unwitting participant in a scheme Hupp devised to trick Russ Faria into portraying him as a violent person.
According to investigators, Gumpenberger, who suffered a brain injury, was approached by Hupp posing as a producer of Dateline. Investigators believe Hupp lured Gumpenberger into his car with a bogus promise of money to replenish a 911 call for an upcoming episode, which Dateline would never do.
A week after the incident, Hupp was charged with the murder of Gumpenberger. In a courtroom in St. Charles County, Missouri, in the summer of 2019, Hupp pleaded Alford in the case allowing him to avoid a death penalty trial. Without admitting her guilt, Hupp admitted that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict her of Gumpenberger’s murder. She was sentenced to life imprisonment.
This case prompted newly elected Lincoln County District Attorney Mike Wood to reopen the Betsy Faria murder case, which ultimately led to today’s charges.
Pam Hupp has repeatedly denied any involvement in the murder of Betsy Faria.
Listen to Dateline’s “The Thing About Pam”, Keith Morrison’s 2019 podcast on this case.
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