SERIAL KILLER FOR CASH?
Did Pamela Hupp collect on an insurance policy—then begin to kill to cover her tracks?
Pamela Hupp seemed to be having a run of particularly tragic bad luck. Her friend Elizabeth “Betsy” Faria, 42, was murdered in 2011, fatally stabbed in her Lincoln County, Missouri, home. Next, Hupp’s 77-year-old mother, Shirley Neumann—whom Hupp had just visited—died falling off her third-floor balcony less than two years later in what was then deemed a tragic accident. And then on Aug. 16, 2016, Hupp called 911 to say she had been accosted in her O’fallon, Missouri, driveway by a man who put a knife to her throat and demanded she drive him to the bank. But after shots rang out on the call, responding officers found Louis Gumpenberger, 33, a disabled man with a traumatic brain injury, fatally shot—and Hupp’s story full of holes. “I was heartbroken for his family,” says Julie Swaney, Betsy’s sister. “I knew exactly what they were going to be going through, because we had gone through it.”
Authorities are now looking into suspicions that Hupp’s connection to three dead victims could be less of a sad coincidence and more of a tangled web of deceit and murder, with money as the motive. Hupp, 58, was arrested on Aug. 23, 2016, and charged with first-degree murder in the death of Gumpenberger. She remains in jail on $US2 million bond and has pleaded not guilty. “Ms Hupp has been the subject of a local barrage of innuendo,” says her lawyer Nicholas Williams.
But police say the truth is far more complicated. They allege Hupp killed Gumpenberger in a plot to frame Russell Faria, the husband of her murdered friend Betsy. Russell had been convicted of his wife’s murder in 2013—at a trial in which Hupp was a prominent witness—then acquitted of the killing in a second trial in 2015. “The evidence seems to indicate that she hatched a plot to find an innocent victim and murder this innocent victim in an apparent effort to frame someone else,” said the prosecutor, Tim Lohmar, who plans to seek the death penalty against Hupp when her case goes to trial in April 2018.
The one common thread in all three deaths is Hupp was the last to see each victim alive— and that she stood to benefit from their passing. Though Betsy and Russell’s marriage had its “ups and downs,” according to a lawsuit Russell filed against Lincoln County Prosecutor Leah Askey after his acquittal, the couple had taken a cruise with friends a month before Betsy’s murder and were “very happy.” Four days before her death, Betsy had changed the beneficiary of her $US150,000 life insurance policy to Hupp, whom she’d met while both worked in an insurance office. Testimony in a later civil case over the money revealed Betsy had been weighing divorce, had received a terminal cancer diagnosis and wanted someone to make sure her two daughters from a prior relationship received the death benefit. But the daughters say they have yet to receive any cash from Hupp. “[Hupp] was one of [Betsy’s] hundreds of friends—definitely not her closest,” says Swaney. “[Betsy] made a rash decision, and I think she made a wrong decision.” In the investigation into Betsy’s murder, says her daughter Mariah Day, “[police] didn’t look at Pam Hupp at all.”
That changed after Russell Faria’s acquittal, and police say Hupp killed Gumpenberger, who sustained a disabling brain injury in a car crash in 2005, in a scheme to divert attention from herself in the case. Authorities theorise that Hupp posed as a Dateline producer and randomly recruited Gumpenberger with an offer of cash to help her re-enact a 911 call. She then took him to her home and shot him while trying to make it appear Gumpenberger was acting on Russell Faria’s behalf to kidnap, rob and kill her. (A witness told police Hupp had unsuccessfully tried to hire her with a similar story.) In Gumpenberger’s pocket police found a handwritten note that included the name “Faria” with instructions to kidnap Hupp, get “Russ’s money” from her at her bank, then kill her to collect $US10,000. Police also say that a $100 bill in Hupp’s bedroom was a sequential match to four $100 bills in Gumpenberger’s pocket, “extremely uncommon for two people who reportedly do not know each other.”
Now as authorities re-examine the murder of Betsy Faria—and also look again at the death of Hupp’s mother—betsy’s sister Julie Swaney remains hopeful that justice will be done. “I hope it gets sorted out,” says Swaney. “I have faith that one day we will have all the answers.”
“I have faith that one day we will have answers” —Julie Swaney