Pam Hupp

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Pam Hupp's first recorded words to police after a fatal shooting in her own home were a question about cameras. At the O'Fallon Police Department in August 2016, she asked, "Is this going to be filmed? Because I always appear on the news with Chris Hayes." Hayes was a reporter for the St. Louis station KTVI, and she blamed his coverage for drawing threatening people toward her.

  Pamela Marie Neumann was born in 1958 and is now a convicted murderer serving a life sentence in Missouri. Her name is tied to three deaths, to a husband sent to prison for a killing he did not commit, and to a run of television coverage that few small-town cases ever receive.

  How did a woman who spent her working life around insurance paperwork come to sit at the center of all of this? Why did warnings about her go unheeded for years? And what happens to a case when the people who handled it first are later accused of getting it wrong?

  94644166

• 2. The Policy and the Ride Home

  ›

  Riverview Gardens High School, in the St. Louis suburb of Dellwood, was where Pamela Neumann studied. In young adulthood she held several jobs in the life insurance industry, and on two occasions she was fired for forging signatures. By 2001 she and her husband had settled in O'Fallon, Missouri. There she worked as an administrator for State Farm and flipped houses on the side through a company called H2 Partners LLC. By 2010 she had stopped working and was claiming disability benefits for pain in her back, leg and neck.

  A charity collection in 2011 shows how she moved among the people she would later be tied to. Hupp and her friend Betsy Faria, who was terminally ill with cancer, reportedly gathered money for a family also affected by the disease. Years later KTVI found that the family knew nothing about it. Information reached Lincoln County authorities in 2014 and was not pursued. Nothing suggested Betsy doubted the drive. Her friend Kathleen Meyer recalled, "This was going to be a legacy for her, to leave something like this behind in her memory."

  Elizabeth Kay Meyer Faria, known as Betsy, lived on Sumac Drive in Troy, Missouri, with her husband Russ and two daughters from an earlier relationship. She had worked alongside Hupp at State Farm. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010. In October 2011 she learned that it had spread to her liver and could not be cured.

  On the 22nd of December 2011, without telling her family, Betsy replaced her husband with Hupp as the sole beneficiary of her $150,000 State Farm life insurance policy. Hupp first said Betsy wanted the money to go to her daughters when they were older. Later she said Betsy meant her to keep it. Hupp eventually admitted she had lied about what she planned to do with the proceeds. Russ remained the beneficiary of a separate $100,000 policy.

  Five days later, on the 27th of December, Betsy had chemotherapy at the Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center in St. Louis and then visited her mother. Russ was supposed to drive her home, or she would stay with her mother. Hupp unexpectedly arrived at the mother's house and insisted on taking Betsy herself. Hupp said she dropped Betsy at home at about 7 p.m. At 7:21 p.m., a call from one of Betsy's daughters went unanswered.

  Russ spent the evening watching movies at the home of his friend Michael Corbin, from 6 p.m. until 9 p.m. He then drove to an Arby's in Lake St. Louis. At 9:40 p.m. he called 9-1-1 and said he had found that his wife had killed herself.

  Betsy lay on her right side on the floor in front of the couch. She had been stabbed more than 55 times, her wrists were cut to the bone, and a serrated kitchen knife was lodged in her neck. A second knife was under a pillow on the couch. First responders arrived within ten minutes and judged that she had been dead for an hour or more. No blood was found in any sink or shower, and no blood trails led out of the house. Her time of death was later given as between 7:20 p.m. and 9:41 p.m.

  Betsy's daughters would file their own legal challenge over the policy in 2014, and it was dismissed in 2016.

  6980587649

• 3. A Case Built on Suspicion

  ›

  A bloodstained pair of slippers in Russ Faria's closet became an early centerpiece for police. Russ was arrested the day after his wife died. First responders who had seen her body called his suggestion of suicide "ludicrous." Officers read his agitated state as "suspicious," and he ostensibly failed a polygraph test.

  Hupp told police that Russ had a "violent temper," drank heavily and had threatened Betsy, who had considered leaving him. At Hupp's urging, officers searched Betsy's laptop and found a document in which Betsy seemed to fear her husband would kill her. The file proved to be written in Microsoft Word 97, software that had never been installed on the laptop. It was the only document on the machine with an "unknown" author.

  Russ was charged with first-degree murder and armed criminal action on the 4th of January 2012, the day after Betsy's funeral. He could not make $250,000 bail, so he waited in Lincoln County jail until his trial opened on the 18th of November 2013.

  His defense attorney, Joel Schwartz, argued that the timeline made the killing impossible. Four friends accounted for Russ's evening. Cellphone records put him at Corbin's house, twenty miles from the scene. Records of purchases at different stores filled in the rest of the night. No blood was found on his body or clothes.

  Prosecuting attorney Leah Askey replied that the friends were giving a false alibi. She said they had conspired with Russ, holding his cellphone and posing as him to buy food at Arby's in what she called an "ultimate role play."

  Judge Christina Mennemeyer would not let Schwartz steer the jury toward Hupp. She barred cellphone records showing Hupp near the Faria house for up to thirty minutes after the time she said she had left Betsy. She also barred the fact that Betsy had made Hupp the sole beneficiary of her policy shortly before dying.

  Detective Mike Merkel of the Lincoln County Sheriff's Office told the court that a crime scene camera had broken and its photographs had failed to develop. Schwartz later obtained copies of those photographs. In a secret hearing, Hupp said she had placed $100,000 of the insurance money in a trust for Betsy's daughters. In a July 2014 civil deposition, she admitted she had not. In August 2016 it emerged that her company, H2 Partners LLC, had loaned $122,574.84 to her son Travis.

  On the 21st of November 2013, the jury convicted Russ on both counts. A month later he was sentenced to life plus thirty years without possibility of parole and sent to the Jefferson City Correctional Center. The prosecution's theory required his four friends to be accomplices, yet none was ever charged. They learned that Askey had implicated them in her closing arguments only when the media told them.

  Betsy's family welcomed the sentence. Her sister Julie then made claims the trial had never heard. She said Russ had been angered by the removal of his name from a separate insurance policy. She also said he once held a pillow over Betsy's face and told her, "this is what it feels like to die." Schwartz noted that the pillow story had first been told by Hupp.

  Betsy's daughters would eventually apologize to Russ, in July 2021.

  9773404281

• 4. The Case Comes Apart

  ›

  In December 2013, Judge Mennemeyer rejected a first motion for a new trial. The following month, KTVI teamed up with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to review the case. By February the newspaper reported that Hupp had kept the $150,000 rather than putting it into a trust. It also showed that she contradicted herself in police interviews. She first said she had not entered the Faria house after driving Betsy home, then revised that account twice. The 9-1-1 operator who took Russ's call believed his shock was genuine.

  The article also alleged that Askey had been in a relationship with Mike Lang, captain of investigations at the Lincoln County Sheriff's Office. Lang was one of the investigating officers and a prosecution witness. Two members of Russ's jury told the media that this had been kept from them.

  In February 2015, the Missouri Court of Appeals sent the case back to the 45th Circuit Court for a hearing on a retrial. Mennemeyer recused herself in June. Judge Steven Ohmer of the 22nd Circuit then granted a new bench trial, and Russ was released on bond to wait for it. That August, Robin Taylor of Le Mars, Iowa, was charged with misdemeanor harassment for phoning Hupp to accuse her of killing Betsy.

  At the retrial, Schwartz was finally allowed to present evidence pointing to Hupp. CSI agent Amy Buettner, who had examined the scene, testified that she believed the slippers in Russ's closet had not been bloodied by stepping in blood. Police officers disclosed that Hupp, who was not called to testify, had lately claimed she and Betsy had been in a sexual relationship. She had also told police she now "remembered" seeing Russ and another man in a car parked on a side street as she drove Betsy home.

  On the 7th of November 2015, Russ's conviction was overturned. He walked out of prison after almost four years.

  Accountability came slowly. In 2016, Schwartz filed a bar complaint against Askey, and the Office of the Chief Disciplinary Counsel eventually dismissed it. In July 2016, Russ sued Askey and three deputy sheriffs, alleging they had "fabricated evidence, ignored exonerating evidence and failed to investigate the other obvious suspect." The next month, Askey and the sheriff's office said they were cooperating with the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri in a review of the case. In 2017, Askey asked Lincoln County commissioners for an independent investigation of her conduct. It found no wrongdoing.

  In January 2017, the Supreme Court of Missouri suspended Mennemeyer for misconduct unrelated to the Faria case. Higher courts had also overturned her several times in a short career on the bench. In August 2018, voters removed both her and Askey, by then known as Leah Wommack Chaney. The result was attributed at least in part to the handling of the Faria case. In September 2019, federal district judge John Andrew Ross dismissed Russ's suit against Chaney on grounds of prosecutorial immunity.

  In January 2018, attorneys for Russ questioned Hupp under oath as part of his lawsuit against Lincoln County. She declined to answer 92 questions about the killing of Betsy Faria, and his lawyers sought a court order to force her to respond. In March 2020, Russ received a settlement of $2,050,000 in his civil rights case.

  In June 2025, former sheriff's deputy Michael Merkel was charged with two counts of perjury over his testimony at Russ's trial. At a hearing in January 2026, Merkel, represented by Chaney, was accused of falsely testifying that the crime scene photographs had failed to develop.

  The decision not to investigate Hupp was widely criticized. A former employee of the prosecutor's office said, "There were several of us that kept thinking, why are we not pursuing Pam Hupp?" The employee added that colleagues "were just locked down on Russ." In a 2021 interview, Chaney said she had believed Hupp would have been physically incapable of inflicting Betsy's wounds. Betsy's daughters said that former Lincoln County investigators gave them the same answer when they asked about Hupp. They were told, "she physically could not do that."

  9795621723

• 5. Little Brave Drive

  ›

  Louis Royse Gumpenberger was 33 and lived in Union, Missouri. A car crash in 2005 had left him with mental and physical disabilities. Shortly after noon on the 16th of August 2016, Hupp shot him five times in the hallway of her home at 1260 Little Brave Drive in O'Fallon, and he died there.

  On his body police found $900 and a note. It told the reader to "kidnap Hupp, get Russ's money from Hupp at her bank, and kill Hupp." It continued, "Take Hupp back to house and get rid of her. Make it look like Russ' wife. Make sure knife sticking out of neck." The reward was $10,000. Hupp had placed two 9-1-1 calls shortly before the shooting to report a burglary in progress, so the audio of the incident was recorded.

  Her account was that Gumpenberger jumped out of a car driven by someone else. She said he brandished a knife while she sat in her SUV in the garage and demanded that she drive to a bank to retrieve "Russ' money." She said she knocked the knife from his hand with a "karate chop" and fled into the house. There, she said, she shot him in self-defense with a Ruger LCR from her nightstand after he pursued her.

  The St. Charles County prosecuting attorney and the O'Fallon chief of police concluded otherwise. They theorized that Hupp had lured him by presenting herself as "Cathy," a producer for the television program Dateline NBC. She was believed to have offered him money to reenact a 9-1-1 call. Then, they said, she shot him to implicate Russ in an attempt on her life and "take heat off her," afterward planting the knife, the note and the money. They believed Gumpenberger was chosen at random.

  Several pieces of evidence supported that theory. Cellphone records showed Hupp in Gumpenberger's neighborhood "right at the supposed attacker's front door" less than an hour before the shooting. That cast doubt on her claim that she had never met him.

  On the 10th of August 2016, a police report was filed with the St. Charles County police by O'Fallon resident Carol Alford, also known as Carol McAfee. She said a woman matching Hupp's description, posing as a Dateline NBC producer, had offered her $1,000 to reenact a 9-1-1 call. Home security footage showed the woman driving Hupp's car. A second witness, Brent Charlton, said Hupp had made him a similar offer.

  Nine one-hundred-dollar bills were in Gumpenberger's pocket. A tenth, found on Hupp's dresser, had a serial number sequential to four of the nine. The knife in Hupp's car was wedged between the passenger seat and the center console. Knives in her kitchen were stored the same way, wedged between the stove and the countertop.

  Investigators suggested the knife came from the Dollar Tree in O'Fallon, along with several other items in Hupp's house. They believed she had also bought the paper used for the note. A carpet swatch in her home appeared to have been placed to protect a rug from Gumpenberger's blood. Investigators doubted that a man with his disabilities could have done what Hupp described.

  On the 23rd of August 2016, Hupp was arrested and charged with first-degree murder and armed criminal action. She asked to use a bathroom and there stabbed her neck and wrists with a ballpoint pen in an apparent suicide attempt. Assistant prosecutor Phil Groenweghe called the act "consciousness of guilt." Her bail was set at $2,000,000. A grand jury indicted her on the 16th of December, and she pleaded not guilty on the 31st of January 2017.

  In March 2017, prosecutors said they would seek the death penalty, citing the apparently arbitrary choice of Gumpenberger as the victim. In May 2018, Judge Jon Cunningham ruled that prosecutors could not present evidence about the death of Hupp's mother. The next month he ruled they could present evidence about the killing of Betsy Faria. A trial date was set for June 2019.

  Hupp instead entered an Alford plea, in which a defendant does not admit guilt but accepts that the evidence could convict. She waived a jury trial, and as a condition she did not face the death penalty. In August 2019 she was sentenced to life without parole. In a phone call to her then-husband, she claimed she had pleaded so her family would not have to "witness an ugly trial."

  In October 2019, Gumpenberger's mother, Margaret Burch, sued Hupp for wrongful death, fraud and misrepresentation. In July 2020 she was awarded a judgment of $3,000,000. Her attorney, Gary K. Burger, moved to garnish Hupp's prison trust account, where her $1,200 COVID-19 CARES Act relief payment had been deposited. By February 2022, the family had not received "any significant money." In June 2022, Burger's firm secured a first payment of $783, garnished from earnings Hupp made as a tutor in prison. In 2025, her public defender filed a motion saying 100 percent of her wages were being garnished instead of the 25 percent allowed.

  In September 2020, her husband Mark filed for divorce, calling the marriage "irretrievably broken," and the couple were divorced by March 2022. That same September, Hupp moved to vacate her conviction, claiming she had been pressured into the plea. The motion was denied the following March as untimely.

  9893632716

• 6. A Balcony in Fenton

  ›

  Shirley Mae Neumann, Hupp's widowed mother, lived alone in a third-floor apartment at the Lakeview Park Independent Senior Living Community in Fenton. She had dementia and arthritis. After a hospital visit she spent the night of the 29th of October 2013 with Hupp. At about 5 p.m. on the 30th, Hupp dropped her at the apartment and told staff not to expect her at dinner that evening or at breakfast the next morning.

  At 2:30 the following afternoon, a housekeeper found Neumann dead beneath her balcony. The aluminum railing was broken. After a police investigation, assistant medical examiner Raj Nanduri concluded that she died of blunt trauma to the chest from an accidental fall. An autopsy found 0.84 mcg of the sedative zolpidem in her blood, over eight times the concentration expected from a normal dose.

  The next month, the Lincoln County Sheriff's Office received an anonymous note. It suggested that Hupp, the last person known to have seen Neumann alive, had killed her mother for the life insurance. Hupp and her siblings each received about $120,000 of investments held by Neumann, and they shared a $10,000 life insurance payout. Earlier that year, Hupp had been videotaped saying, "My mom's worth half a million that I get when she dies." On the same recording she said, "if I really wanted money, there was an easier way than trying to combat somebody that's physically stronger than me."

  Police reopened the investigation. They interviewed the housekeeper who found the body and Neumann's son Michael, and both said Neumann had been "unsteady." Police again concluded the death was accidental. They did not interview Hupp.

  After Hupp was charged in the Gumpenberger killing, the St. Louis County Police Department reopened the case. Michael repeated his belief that the fall was accidental. Detective Matthew Levy tried and failed to obtain a subpoena for the location of Hupp's cellphone at the time of her mother's death. He also tried to arrange forensic tests on the balcony railing at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. The Lakeview Park community refused to hand over the railing. A retired homicide detective told KTVI that one of the vertical bars looked "kicked out."

  After KTVI reporter Chris Hayes interviewed Hupp about Neumann's death, he received an anonymous letter. It said it was "getting a little silly" to keep accusing someone of killing a parent when it was not true.

  In November 2017, Mary Case, the chief medical examiner for St. Louis County, changed the manner of Neumann's death from accidental to "undetermined." She explained, "since Neumann's death, many things have happened that involved the daughter." She said the investigations in Lincoln County and St. Charles had become pertinent, and that she "was no longer willing to say it could be an accident." The investigation into Neumann's death was not reopened afterward.

  725104594

• 7. The Third Case

  ›

  In June 2019, after Hupp's Alford plea in the Gumpenberger killing, Lincoln County prosecuting attorney Mike Wood announced he would reopen the Betsy Faria homicide investigation. In October 2019, he asked the Major Case Squad of Greater St. Louis to review it. In August 2020, newly elected Sheriff Rick Harrell said the Faria case had inspired him to run for the job. In February 2021, Wood said the COVID-19 pandemic had slowed the work but promised "significant announcements" in the summer or fall. On the 8th of July 2021, Hupp was interviewed about Betsy's murder for the first time.

  Four days later, on the 12th of July 2021, Wood charged her with first-degree murder and armed criminal action. Court documents said she killed Betsy for financial gain, and Wood said he would seek the death penalty because of the "heinousness and depravity" of the crime. The prosecution alleged that Hupp stabbed Betsy repeatedly as she lay on her sofa, weakened by chemotherapy and asleep. It alleged that Hupp then removed Betsy's socks, used them to spread blood around the house to suggest domestic violence, and put them back on her feet.

  The filing added points the first trial never weighed. Hupp had claimed to be unfamiliar with the Troy area, yet insisted on driving Betsy home. The position of Betsy's body suggested she was killed by someone she trusted. And Hupp texted "home" to Betsy's phone at 7:20 p.m., while cellphone records still placed Hupp's phone near Betsy's home.

  Wood also said he would investigate possible prosecutorial misconduct in the original case. He called it "mismanaged from the beginning" and driven by confirmation bias against Russ. He suggested the conduct of investigators and prosecutors could amount to gross negligence or "calculated criminal behavior." By Russ's second trial, he said, Lincoln County prosecutors were acting to protect themselves from civil liability rather than seeking justice. A destruction order had been issued in November 2015, when Russ was acquitted, but never carried out. Had it been, physical evidence connected with the case would have been destroyed. Chaney denied any misconduct and said she had never seen the order. In May 2022, officers from the St. Charles Police Department suggested that "several" law enforcement personnel could face criminal charges.

  In July 2021, Hupp pleaded not guilty. On the 8th of September 2021, the armed criminal action charge was dismissed. A preliminary hearing set for February 2022 was delayed indefinitely when her public defender died of a heart attack. In August 2022, Hupp waived that hearing. In October 2022, the trial was moved to Greene County, in the 31st Judicial Circuit, to ensure a fair jury pool. In October 2023, prosecutors said they would refile the case to seek a venue closer to St. Louis, and they expected a trial of about one month in summer 2025.

  In February 2024, Wood filed a motion declaring the state's intent to seek death, citing a murder that was "outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible, or inhumane in that it involved depravity of the mind." In March 2024, Hupp pleaded not guilty to the refiled charges. In September 2024, her public defender won an order for prosecutors to hand over all DNA-related evidence. In January 2025, the trial was set for the 3rd of August 2026 in St. Charles, Missouri, and Wood said he would not accept an Alford plea.

  In March 2026, Hupp was moved to Lincoln County jail ahead of the trial. At a hearing on the 29th of March, Judge Christopher McDonough agreed to bring in an outside jury, which he said could push the trial to 2028. Her defense attorneys, Steven Lewis and Tony Davidson, said they had commissioned Y-STR testing of items from the scene, including the handle of the murder weapon. It found male DNA that did not match Russ Faria. McDonough sanctioned the prosecutor's office for delays in releasing DNA evidence.

  In April 2026, Wood asked for a new judge. McDonough vacated the August trial date and removed himself, and the Supreme Court of Missouri assigned Joseph Rathert. That month the prosecution agreed not to seek the death penalty in exchange for Hupp waiving her right to a jury trial. With the date pushed back to 2028, Rathert is set to hear the case without a jury.

  2451899154

• 8. Made for Television

  ›

  KTVI broke the Betsy Faria story and reported on it continuously from 2011 through 2022, producing more than fifty reports and investigations. Chris Hayes was the only reporter to attend Russ's first trial in November 2013. That same month he was the first to report questions about Hupp. When Russ was released from prison, he thanked Hayes for his coverage.

  Dateline NBC devoted six episodes to Betsy's murder. They were "The House on Sumac Drive" in 2014, "Game Night" in 2015, "Return to Game Night" and "Stranger Than Fiction" in 2016, "The Thing About Pam" in 2019 and "The Real Thing About Pam" in 2022. As of 2019, the murder had received more Dateline coverage than any subject except the O. J. Simpson murder case and the death of JonBenet Ramsey. In September 2019, the program released a true crime podcast about the Gumpenberger killing, which spent several weeks among the most popular on Apple Podcasts.

  In July 2019, filmmaker Daniel Blake Smith announced that he was writing and producing Proof, a feature film based on the stories of Russ and his attorney, Joel Schwartz. In October 2019, the Riverfront Times named Hupp St. Louis's "best local girl gone bad" of the year. The paper observed that "few stories are quite so made-for-TV" and that "the tale of Pam Hupp screams for serialization." In February 2020, the Gumpenberger killing was featured on the Oxygen True Crime series Snapped.

  In May 2020, NBC News Studios and Blumhouse Television announced a scripted series based on the murder of Betsy Faria. In February 2021 they revealed the six-episode series would be called The Thing About Pam. Renée Zellweger became interested in the case after becoming "obsessed" with the Dateline NBC podcast. She served as executive producer and portrayed Hupp using facial prosthetics and a fatsuit. Josh Duhamel played Schwartz, Judy Greer played Askey, and Katy Mixon played Betsy.

  Filming took place in New Orleans. Hurricane Ida delayed it, but it was underway by October 2021. Zellweger drew criticism for wearing the fatsuit. In February 2022, it was reported that Blumhouse and NBC News Studios had declined to share profits from the series with Gumpenberger's family. The series began airing on NBC in March 2022.

  Print followed. Rebecca F. Pittman published Countdown to Murder: Pam Hupp in 2021. In 2022, Schwartz and Charles Bosworth Jr. published Bone Deep: Untangling the Betsy Faria Murder Case. In August 2022, Betsy's daughter Mariah Day shared her story on the podcast Method & Madness. That same month, an episode of People Magazine Investigates on Investigation Discovery and discovery+ covered the case.

  In September 2024, the Tubi true crime docuseries Ms. Murder featured Hupp. It arrived while the charge over Betsy's death still awaited a trial.

  3599323621