PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Wood on Monday said the evidence against Hupp is “extremely compelling” and “very difficult to deny. “Yet prosecutors and investigators denied it all the same,” he said. “Sadly, all of these facts were available to prosecutors at the beginning, even while Betsy’s husband was twice prosecuted for her death.” He said that his office would be opening investigations of the police and prosecutors who originally investigated Faria’s death, looking for possible criminal misconduct that led to a wrongful conviction and allowed Hupp to walk free for years. “This is one of the poorest examples of investigative work that I, as well as my team, have ever encountered, driven largely by ego working toward an agenda rather than truth,” Wood said."
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PHOTO CAPTION: “Pamela Hupp was sentenced to life in prison in 2019 for the murder of a disabled man, which prosecutors have alleged she committed to redirect the growing suspicion against her for Betsy Faria’s death back to Faria's husband.
STORY: “An innocent man spent years in prison for his wife’s murder. Now prosecutor’s say her close friend framed him,” by Reporter Katie Shepherd, published by The Washington Post on July 13, 2021.
SUB-HEADING: "Pamela Hupp, who became the sole beneficiary of Betsy Faria's life insurance policy four days before her death, is serving life in prison for another murder case."
GIST: “After Pamela Hupp drove her close friend Betsy Faria home from chemotherapy treatment on Dec. 27, 2011, police identified her as the last person to see Faria alive. Later that evening, someone repeatedly stabbed Faria in her home in Troy, Mo., as she rested on the sofa, leaving the knife lodged in her throat.
Police and prosecutors initially suspected that Faria’s husband had killed her. Hupp told investigators that Faria’s husband had a violent temper and urged them to check her friend’s computer, where police discovered a document claiming that she feared her husband might kill her. Russell Faria was ultimately convicted in his wife’s death — and spent three years in prison. Now, prosecutors say that the case was badly mishandled — and that it was Hupp who committed first-degree murder.
“I came to the conclusion that, beyond a reasonable doubt, Pamela Hupp killed Betsy Faria,” Lincoln County prosecutor Mike Wood said at a news conference Monday. “And I believe her motivation was simple: for greed.”
The charges come as Hupp, who became the sole beneficiary of Faria’s $150,000 life insurance policy four days before the murder, is serving a life sentence for another murder that prosecutors say she orchestrated to shield her from being considered a suspect in Faria’s death. Prosecutors will seek the death penalty for the new murder charge against Hupp.
Wood’s office is also investigating whether officials may have broken the law while building a misguided case against Faria’s husband. He said on Monday that three sources had separately come forward with information that prosecutors had urged witnesses to lie during Russell Faria’s trial.
Faria called 911 on Dec. 27, 2011, when he came home after a night out with friends to find that his wife had been repeatedly stabbed, a crimson trail smeared throughout the house by her blood-soaked socks.
Police aggressively pursued a case against him despite glaring holes in the evidence.
“He had four alibi witnesses, no blood on him despite a gruesome murder scene, cellphone towers along with video evidence at two separate locations put him elsewhere at the time of her death,” Wood said on Monday.
Despite those gaps, Faria was convicted in November 2013. That conviction was overturned on appeal in 2015. Prosecutors attempted to convict him a second time, but the jury acquitted Faria on all charges as new evidence that implicated Hupp was introduced. Faria sued Lincoln County for violating his civil rights after he spent three years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, and settled the case for $2 million last year.
As the case against Faria fell apart, the evidence against Hupp piled up.
Cellphone records showed that Hupp was at or near Betsy Faria’s home at the time of her death, Wood said. She allegedly lied to investigators about her whereabouts that night and other details related to the case.
“And lastly, she murdered an innocent man in cold blood to prevent herself from being considered a suspect,” Wood said.
Prosecutors have alleged that Hupp concocted a false home invasion on Aug. 16, 2016, to redirect the growing suspicion against her for Faria’s death back to her husband.
Police say Hupp lured Louis Royse Gumpenberger to her home, then shot him five times while she called 911, feigning that the disabled man had held her at knifepoint, KSDK reported.
Police found a suspicious note planted on Gumpenberger’s body, which claimed he was targeting Hupp in a plot to get “Russ’s money.” Hupp allegedly planted the incriminating note on Gumpenberger to make it look as though Russell Faria had hired him to attack her, in order to reignite suspicion against him.
Hupp entered an Alford plea in the case, admitting that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict her but not admitting her guilt, and was sentenced to life in prison in 2019, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
On Monday, prosecutors alleged that Hupp killed Betsy Faria while the woman was weak from chemotherapy treatment she received earlier in the day. Hupp allegedly stabbed Faria multiple times while she was lying on her sofa “completely caught off guard,” leaving the knife in Faria’s throat, KSDK reported.
Then, Hupp allegedly removed Faria’s socks, soaked them in her blood, and placed the socks over her own hands to make the scene look like the woman had been killed in a domestic assault.
“Blood stains on the socks resemble impressions of fingers and not toes,” according to court documents reported by KSDK. “Investigators believe the killer placed the socks on his/her hands after the murder occurred to plant evidence onto the crime scene and then put the socks back on the victim after accomplishing his/her goal.”
Wood on Monday said the evidence against Hupp is “extremely compelling” and “very difficult to deny.” “Yet prosecutors and investigators denied it all the same,” he said. “Sadly, all of these facts were available to prosecutors at the beginning, even while Betsy’s husband was twice prosecuted for her death.”
He said that his office would be opening investigations of the police and prosecutors who originally investigated Faria’s death, looking for possible criminal misconduct that led to a wrongful conviction and allowed Hupp to walk free for years.
“This is one of the poorest examples of investigative work that I, as well as my team, have ever encountered, driven largely by ego working toward an agenda rather than truth,” Wood said.""
The entire story can be read at:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/07/13/pam-hupp-betsy-faria-murder/
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Read the National Registry of Exonerations entry by Maurice Possley at the link below: At 9:40 p.m. on December 27, 2011, 41-year-old Russell Faria called 911 to report that he had found his 42-year-old wife, Elizabeth, stabbed to death in their home in Troy, Missouri. Screaming, he said she had committed suicide.
Police immediately suspected Faria because his wife’s death was clearly not a suicide—she had been stabbed more than 50 times and the knife was embedded her neck. Her body was cold to the touch, indicating that she had been dead for at least a couple of hours.
Faria told police that his wife was dying of breast and liver cancer and had spoken of suicide in the past, so he jumped to a conclusion when he saw her body. He said that he left their home at 5:30 p.m. that day, made a couple of purchases, and then drove about a half hour away to Lake Saint Louis, Missouri, to watch a movie with friends. He said he left about 9 p.m., bought a sandwich’s at an Arby’s restaurant (he had a receipt and was seen on a surveillance video) and then drove the 25 miles to their home where he discovered the body and called police.
Pamela Hupp, a friend of the victim, told police that at about 6:30 p.m. she picked up Elizabeth “Betsy” Faria in O’Fallon, Missouri, and drove her home. She said she dropped her off around 7 p.m. Cell telephone records later showed that Hupp made a call to her husband at 7:04 p.m. from a location near the Faria home.
Police found Russell Faria’s bedroom slippers, smeared with his wife’s blood, in his closet.
On January 4, 2012, after his wife’s funeral, police arrested Faria and charged him with first-degree murder and armed criminal action.
Faria went to trial in November 2013 in Lincoln County Circuit Court. A detective testified that the victim’s blood was found on Faria’s slippers. The prosecution played the tape of Faria’s 911 call and a supervisor of the 911 operator who took the call testified that it was unusual because Faria was going in and out of hysteria, suggesting that his demeanor was staged.
Hupp testified that she dropped off the victim and immediately left. She also testified that three days before the murder, the victim had named her the beneficiary of a $150,000 life insurance policy and that she had later put $100,000 into a trust for the victim’s daughters. Faria had remained the beneficiary on a separate $100,000 policy.
The defense presented evidence of Faria’s trip to see friends in Lake Saint Louis, his purchase at the Arby’s and the time and distance required to go back and forth to show that he could not have killed his wife. There was no blood on Faria’s clothing on the day of the crime and the clothing he was wearing when police arrived matched the clothing he was wearing when seen on the video surveillance on his way home. The defense argued the bloody slippers had been planted in Faria’s closet by the killer.
The trial judge refused to allow the defense to present cell telephone evidence that showed that the victim’s friend, Hupp, appeared to have remained near the Faria home for as long as 30 minutes past the time she originally said she left after dropping the victim off.
The prosecution contended that Faria and his friends lied about his whereabouts and that after Hupp dropped the victim off at home, Faria killed her, drove to the Arby’s to establish an alibi, then returned home to claim he had discovered the body. Any hysteria displayed by Faria on the 911 call was play-acting, according to the prosecution.
In closing argument, Lincoln County prosecutor Leah Askey suggested that Faria might have killed his wife while naked and then showered—although there was no evidence to support the claim. Police found no blood in any drain and there was no evidence that the shower had been used after the stabbing.
On November 21, 2013, the jury convicted Faria of first-degree murder and armed criminal action. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
In February 2014, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a lengthy article on the case, the result of a joint investigation with KTVI Fox 2 television. The article disclosed that Hupp had been sued by the victim’s daughters, and in that in a deposition in that lawsuit she had revealed that she had not actually put $100,000 of the life insurance proceeds into a trust but instead had kept all of the money herself.
The Post-Dispatch article also disclosed that the reporters received an anonymous letter saying that the prosecutor had a sexual relationship with one of the police officers in the case.
The article noted that Hupp made contradictory statements to police. She initially told investigators that she did not enter the Faria house on the night of the murder, then later said she did enter the house but only as far as the living room, and later yet said that she went into the victim’s bedroom. The newspaper reported that Hupp initially said that she called her husband when she arrived at the Faria home, and again when she left. But she later amended that and said that the second call was to tell Betsy Faria she had arrived home in O’Fallon, Mo. None of the calls were picked up.
Moreover, the reporters found the 911 operator who actually took the call from Faria on the day he found his wife’s body. The operator, Tammy Vaughn, told the reporters that she had no doubt that Faria was genuinely distraught. Vaughn said that 911 operators are trained to deal with hysterical callers by attempting to redirect them. “It’s a technique that communicators use to try to redirect, calm them down. Ask him the question and then whenever they have to focus back on the victim…then they do what’s called a ‘re-freak.’”
Vaughn said, “You can't fake that. You can't fake that emotion. In my personal opinion, you can’t.”
The defense filed a motion for a new trial, based on allegations that the prosecutor, Askey, was having an inappropriate relationship with a police officer in the case, and on the deposition of Hupp in the lawsuit filed by Faria’s daughters, indicating that Hupp had failed to turn over the insurance money she was supposed to put in trust for those daughters.
At a hearing on the motion, the investigator denied he was having an affair with the prosecutor. In June 2015, Circuit Court Judge Steven Ohmer granted the motion for a new trial based on the evidence relating to Hupp. Asked whether he found any evidence supporting the allegation that prosecutor Askey and the police officer were involved in a relationship, Judge Ohmer said, “I did not.”
Faria was released on bond on June 15, 2015 and went to trial a second time in November 2015, electing to have his case decided by a judge instead of a jury.
At Faria’s first trial, a detective testified that the home appeared to have been cleaned of blood, but said that there were no photographs of the crime scene because the police camera had malfunctioned.
Before the retrial, however, the defense discovered more than 100 photographs of the crime scene that had been taken by police but had not been disclosed to the defense. Those photographs showed no evidence that the home had been cleaned of blood.
Hupp, who had denied any involvement in the murder in out-of-court statements, was not called as a witness by the prosecution. The defense, however, elicited testimony from detectives that Hupp had made numerous contradictory statements about her activity on the day of the murder. In addition, the detectives testified, three years after the murder Hupp had disclosed for the first time that she had had a sexual relationship with the victim and that Russell Faria learned of it before the murder and was angry about it.
On November 6, 2015, Judge Ohmer acquitted Faria on both charges. In July 2016, Faria filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Lincoln County. The lawsuit was settled in March 2020 for $2 million.
In August 2016, Hupp was charged with murdering a 33-year-old mentally-disabled man she claimed broke into her home and tried to attack her. Authorities said they believed Hupp lured the man to her home, killed him and planted money and a note on him in an attempt to make it appear that the man had been hired by Faria to kill her.
In June 2019, Hupp entered an Alford plea--admitting the prosecution had evidence sufficient to convict her without conceding guilt. She was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
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