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April 17, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:00:24
Edition 629 - The Pamela Hupp Case
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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for all of your nice emails.
Weather report from London.
It is spring-like and mild, but grey and dull.
And they're telling us that the temperatures are going to rise a bit.
So I think we have probably famous last words here, but I think we've probably thrown off the last vestiges of winter.
And nobody is more grateful for that than I am.
Now, as you will have noticed, I am not on the radio at the moment as we get prepared for what is to come, which I've discussed here before, and I will discuss again and give you full details nearer the time on my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
I'm not going to be sort of going away, not that I could afford to, but I will be more or less here doing things that have to be done, all of those things that I haven't been able to do in the last six years of doing a radio show every week and all of the production and coming up with guest ideas and all of the stuff and the stress in some cases, although, you know, it's a nice thing to do because it's my show that I devised.
So I'm not going to have that.
Once I've finished doing my podcasts for now, then I'm going to get to doing all of my domestic tasks that have been left and sorting myself out, as my mother used to say.
Just a couple of shout-outs here before we get to the guest.
Carolyn, nice to hear from you.
Stephen in Sheffield.
Alan in Scotland, thank you for the triangle photo taken near Campbell town.
And the bizarre story of how something or somebody wiped the files containing those pictures from your phone.
Let's see if we can do something more about that.
I don't know what you've been told about why that might have been, but that sounds intriguing.
Steve in Finland, always good to hear from you.
John in Wanstead, regular listener, John, nice to know that you're still there.
Louisa in California, thank you for listening.
And Jeff in the UK, thank you for your email about Dr. David Hall, recent guest on this show.
All points that you raise are duly noted, and thank you for them.
Guest on this edition, Rebecca F. Pittman.
She has written many, many books, some of them about hauntings and that kind of thing.
And in the book that we're going to talk about, in the case that we're going to talk about mainly, we're going to talk about what is the most famous, I think, tell me if I'm wrong about this, murder case currently in American culture, I guess you could call it.
This is the case of Pamela Hupp, a woman who is currently, as we say in the UK, at Her Majesty's pleasure, which means in prison.
I don't know what you call it in the United States.
So she's locked away at the moment, and this is a remarkable, deeply shocking murder case.
Or actually, couple of murder cases tied together and much more around that.
It's a case that's gripped the public attention in America, much less so in the United Kingdom, Australia and other countries, but certainly in America.
This story is absolutely huge.
One of the reasons for that is that they dramatized it into a mini-series, I think.
I don't think we've seen it in the UK yet, because it's only just aired in America recently.
Pamela Hupp's case has been made into a mini-series that I think it was NBC showed starring Granny Zellweger.
So this story that you're about to hear is chilling and shocking and thought-provoking and amazing in a whole ton of ways.
That's the story of Pamela Hupp with Rebecca F. Pittman coming very soon here on The Unexplained.
Don't forget, if you get in touch with me by email, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show that you're listening to.
Always good to hear from you.
And of course, your guest suggestions, gratefully received.
And especially now that I'm more or less booking my own podcasts, please, if you have contact details for a guest that you suggest, then please chuck them in your email.
And if your email requires a reply, please let me know.
And I will do my massive, enormous best to make sure that you get one.
All right, let's cross to the United States now.
Rebecca F. Pittman is there and we have a lot to talk about.
Rebecca, thank you for coming on my show.
Well, I'm thrilled to be here.
This is my first interview over the pond, across the pond.
I better try and make it good and polite, of course, as we Brits are supposed to be.
Now, Rebecca, before we talk about these cases, or this particular case, talk to me about you, because you seem to be an unusual blend of different things.
I mean, I mean that in a nice way, of course, but you've written books about ghosts, and this is a, as we would say in the United Kingdom, a celebrated murder case, or case is.
So talk to me about you and where you're coming to all of this from.
Well, my most popular series of books is called The History and Haunting of.
And one of those books was The History and Haunting of Lizzie Borden.
What I do is I write about very haunted landmarks, historic landmarks that just happen to be in the top 10 most haunted venues.
But while I was writing about the famous Lizzie Borden case from 1892, I found new evidence and got my detective thing going.
So when this Pam Hupp story hit hard, a friend of mine in St. Louis, where this is all going down, said, have you heard about it?
I said, no.
And when I looked into it, I had to do it, Howard.
I mean, I just had to do it.
It's one of the most bizarre cases I've ever seen.
Well, even though the Lizzie Borden house is famous, I know.
I think you can stay there now.
It's like a hotel.
But that case is a very, very famous case because it was extremely convoluted.
So I can understand why this case of Pam Hupp has spoken to you down the hundreds of years because this case is also convoluted.
It's the audacity, I think, of a case like this.
This was supposed to be your everyday, pardon the phrase, housewife.
You didn't expect this from her.
And it was the audacity of the crimes and the wanton display of just, she didn't care.
These people just, she left bodies in her wake.
And it's just, it's heinous, it's sad.
I'm friends now with a lot of the victims' families, and they're still suffering.
And this was 11 years ago that the first murder took place.
See, when we think of serial killers in America, we think of the Zodiac killer and Ted Bundy and all of those people.
And the Pam Hup story really is not on our radar here in the United Kingdom.
It has been in a couple of United Kingdom newspapers.
But I've got to say, I monitor the media all the time.
And unless I've really missed something significant, we don't seem to be talking about it over here.
Well, based on the book sales from the UK, somebody told somebody, because you guys are buying the books, and I want to thank you very much.
Actually, Renee Zellwiger is currently playing Pam Hub in an NBC mini-series here, and that's why it's going literally through the roof here.
I can imagine.
I think that started airing in the States.
I don't know when it comes here, but it started airing in the States, I think, on the 22nd of March or thereabouts.
Yeah, tonight's the last episode, and there were six, but it is going to be streaming on Hulu and Peacock for a long time.
Okay.
Now, I think we have to unpick who this person we're talking about is for our international audience, and also the details that make it, as you say, so eye-opening.
You know, the first thing that I thought when I started reading about this and getting myself up to speed with it was that although we're talking about a celebrity in completely, totally different circumstances, the notoriety of this in America reminded me very much of a case that I covered on air in the UK when I was doing Morning Drive News in London.
And that was the O.J. Simpson case.
You know, she's not a celebrity, and, you know, the circumstances are totally, completely different.
But that, too, was a case that shocked absolutely everybody and made people say, I don't believe it.
I don't know whether that similarity in terms of notoriety has ever occurred to you.
Oh, it has, because Dateline, who helped produce this mini-series, is the one that put Pam Hup on the radar and they compared her to popularity as far as their podcast to the OJ and Jean Bonnet Ramsey case.
They said they've done more podcasts on Pam Hup than on OJ or Jean Bonet Ramsey, and that's saying a lot.
We need to unpick, you know, I mean, she's currently, we have a phrase in the United Kingdom that I used in the introduction to this, at Her Majesty's pleasure, which means it's a British way of saying in prison.
I mean, she's in prison at this moment.
She is for one murder, and she's about to go on trial for the death penalty for another one.
Right.
And they're opening another one she's suspected of at this time.
So is she a suspected serial killer?
Yes, she's been classified as that now, which is rare because female serial killers only make up 5 to 7 percent of the serial killer population.
And I think that's another reason.
I read that statistic.
And we do tend to think of serial killers as being Ted Bundy, as being somebody who's just completely without a moral compass that we can identify and totally bloodthirsty.
And the idea that a woman could do these things.
Yes, you know, I guess my thinking here is old-fashioned, but the idea that a woman could be as, as you said, without feeling and commit such crimes is an astonishing thing.
But the way this story unfolded is what really grabs people's attention, isn't it?
Because there was one case connected to another.
So can we walk our way through this?
She first came to attention, didn't she, a decade ago, just over a decade ago, over a stabbing case.
It was a friend of hers, Elizabeth Faria.
Correct.
And she pleaded not guilty at the beginning to that?
She was not suspected.
She deliberately staged it to make it look like, and it's Elizabeth Faria, but her nickname was Betsy, and that's what everybody called her.
But the murder scene was staged to make it look like Betsy's husband killed her.
And he was the one that ultimately went to prison for it.
So Pam was not on the radar for quite a while.
Gee, okay.
Now, as I say, the amount of reporting in the UK, from what I can see, and my listeners are probably going to tell me they've been following this assiduously for a long time, but it hadn't been on my radar.
So there was a killing case involving a married couple.
The woman had, Betsy, had terminal cancer, didn't she?
She did.
She'd had two breasts removed.
They thought they'd caught it.
They'd planned a celebration cruise.
One month before the cruise, they found out not only was the cancer back, it had spread to her liver, and they gave her three years to live.
And one month, they did the cruise anyway, one month later, Betsy was found murdered with 56 stab wounds.
56.
Yep.
And Pam Hupp had become the beneficiary of Betsy's $150,000 life insurance policy only four days before Betsy was murdered.
And why you say that her husband carried the can for this, took the wrap for it.
Why did that fact about the insurance policy not pique the interest of detectives?
That's the golden question.
So basically, at the murder scene, Russ's slippers were found with blood on them in the closet.
There was bloody prints on the light switch leading into the closet.
And Pam buried him.
When the detectives came to see her the morning after, because she gave Betsy a ride home that night, she just buried him.
She goes, yeah, a week ago, he played this game of putting a pillow over her face saying this is what it's going to feel like when you die.
Betsy had some tainted Gatorade that she thought Russ was trying to do something.
And she just totally buried this guy.
So when you're at a crime scene where the knife is still Sticking out from the victim's neck.
Her wrists are slashed, 56 stab wounds, and you find a man's bloody slippers in the closet.
But you have to keep in mind, Howard Troy was a very small community.
It was the prosecuting attorney's first murder case and the judges.
And the detectives bought everything Pam said.
They didn't even glance at the fact she got $150,000 because Pam told them, look, Betsy's my best friend.
She was dying of cancer.
She wanted to make sure her two daughters would have money as they grew up.
And I said, look, make me the beneficiary and I'll divvy it out to them as they get older because you know if you leave it to them, they're just going to go through it.
They're only 17 and 21.
They're going to blow through it.
Gee, that's the perfect smoke screen, isn't it?
They bought it.
Now, that sounds to me like, you know, they weren't particularly as on the case as, I mean, they weren't, you know, they weren't Harry Callahan here.
They were not thinking laterally about this.
Because one of the things that you do if you're a, and my father was a police officer, one of the things that you do if you're a police officer, you look very carefully at everybody connected with a murder case, whether it's the person who says that they found the body, they chanced upon the scene, close friends here.
But if you've got a close friend or somebody who's connected with those people, that couple, and the close friend is set to benefit from the will to the tune of a lot of money and tells you, well, actually, the money's coming to me because I will know how to disseminate it properly to share it out.
That story, I mean, look, I know nothing about anything.
I disappointed my father because I didn't join the police because I'd have been rubbish at it.
But even I can see, this is not a laughing matter, but even I can see that was suspicious.
So there must have been something about those two people, the husband and Pam Hupp, that caused detectives who should have been thinking more laterally about this to make the decisions they made.
Well, to be honest, they fanned out.
They asked Betsy's family, how was the marriage dynamic?
They asked the daughters, and it didn't come back good.
Russ was known for an explosive temper.
It was never denied that he demeaned her verbally.
He was never physically aggressive to her.
So one of the daughters on the stand even said, well, we weren't the Brady bunch.
That's pretty dull.
All of that put together, right?
When you've got the family bringing up episodes of seeing his temper, you've got bloody slippers.
You've got this.
And I'll tell you this, Pam Hup was in insurance, and she bragged that she could sell anything to anybody, and she could.
When you watch the videos of her, I can see why they believed her.
She was amazing with her nonchalant conversation to make you think she was your buddy.
And they had their guy.
They thought, we've got a slam dunk here.
Oh, the most incriminating thing that hurt Russ was when he called 911, when he walked in and found his wife on the floor like that, he was in hysterics and he said, my wife killed herself.
That's partly what sunk him because the first detective that walked in and took one look at her said, this is not a suicide.
And it sunk him.
But in his defense, she was wearing dark clothing.
All he saw was the knife sticking out of her neck, the slashed wrist.
She had tried to kill herself before when she found out about the cancer with a knife.
He took the knife from her.
And that was what went, the shock of seeing her like that.
He thought she killed herself.
And you couldn't see all the stab wounds because of her dark clothing.
And so that hung him.
They're going, this lady did not kill herself.
Was there any attempt in the court case, in the trial, to try to get extenuating circumstances brought into play for him?
In other words, he watched her suffer, and maybe it could be argued by a smart, as we say, a smart brief, a smart attorney, that he was trying to save her from suffering.
Well, no, they did not bring in that point.
But what his attorney brought up, which I thought was very astute, was this is backwards.
What idiot, if they were trying to stage this, would say it's a suicide.
If he was really trying to stage this, he would say, I came home and found my wife murdered.
And I think that's a really important point.
If he knew she had that many stab wounds, there's no way he would have told 911 she committed suicide, but he didn't.
He couldn't see him.
He didn't know.
And I thought of all the things that they put up in his defense, I thought that was brilliant.
He wouldn't have said suicide.
He would have said murder, which to me actually pointed to his innocence.
So how come he went down for it?
Just everything that I pointed out.
And when the trial came on and they put Pam on the stand, Russ's attorney wanted to go after her and say, look, there's another person here that should be looked at.
She was the last person to see Betsy alive.
She benefited $150,000 four days after becoming the beneficiary.
And the judge and the prosecutor were friends.
Did she sell the insurance policy to them?
You said she worked in insurance.
No, she didn't.
Okay.
She and Betsy used to work together in insurance, but they hadn't for over 10 years.
Okay, but nevertheless.
The prosecution wouldn't let him question her.
And he's pulling his hair out.
And the judge is going, no, she's not on stand.
She's, you know, she's not a suspect.
You can't ask her those questions.
He wanted to ask about the money, and they wouldn't let him.
So he said, I want to do an offer of proof, which meant the jury was excused.
They couldn't hear any of it.
He went after her.
Even then, the prosecution shouted out objection over and over until he kept getting shut down.
And at one point, he said, I don't know if I have to strip naked and bang my head against the bar to get your attention to the judge.
And so the jury heard none of it.
Nothing that there was another suspect, which would have given them reasonable doubt.
It was a total miscarriage of justice.
He had every right to bring that in, and they didn't let him.
And where is Troy?
Troy is outside of St. Louis.
It's a very Missouri.
It's a very small community.
It's kind of rural.
Conservative?
Yes.
And it's just mainly, you know, it's out in kind of an agricultural feel.
It's out in the fields.
So this was not something this town was used to taking on.
And clearly not something the police were that adept at dealing with either by the sounds of it.
When I use the word conservative, by the way, for my listeners who are so steeped in politics these days, I mean conservative in terms of your outlook, not conservative in terms of your politics.
I'm not interested particularly in that.
Although sometimes those two things do go together, but that's not a discussion for you.
But just to clear things up for listeners, because you do have to clarify things these days.
Okay.
So an obvious suspect here was overlooked, and the jury didn't get to hear any of this, so their attention wasn't drawn to it either.
This is an astonishing situation.
But there must be, and this is the question that ordinarily I would have asked at the beginning, but actually fits in here because it's material, something about Pam Hupp.
As you said, she performed brilliantly when asked to give evidence and when questioned by police.
There's something about her that makes you not suspect her.
Now, when I looked at a photograph of her, what I saw was somebody who, you know, I could be on a plane with that person.
You know, I could be in a bus queue or at the supermarket.
They would raise no suspicion.
In fact, I might start a conversation with that person because they look so ordinary and, you know, in inverted commas, nice.
So, you know, let's start from that.
What was it, is it, about her that makes her so plausible?
And that's interesting that you chose that phrase.
That's what the NVC miniseries is called, The Thing About Pam.
What is it?
What is the thing about Pam that let her get by with so many things?
So, Howard, when I watched all the videos, including when she was depositions, when she's in the interrogation room with detectives, with prosecutors, she comes across as your best friend.
She can be a buddy to the male detectives.
She can play the help me, help me role to female people interviewing her.
And darn it, I believed her.
I mean, just watching her, and I noticed a trick she does.
When she's talking and she's getting to a point that's sticky, she'll speed up and then hurry and add a throwaway sentence right after it.
So that she's moved on quickly and gone into another area before you can ask, wait a minute, what you just said.
I noticed it three different times that she did that.
Her other trick was to make it sound plausible that what she was telling you happened.
For instance, with the pillow over the face, she'd say, Betsy said, and I don't know if she said that this is how you're going to feel like when you die.
So she made it sound like she was actually quoting someone.
And she was really good at it.
She used that twice.
I don't know if he said, and then she would say the quote.
It makes it very, sound very plausible because you're quoting someone.
And in each case, it was a blatant lie.
But she was just really, really good at it.
She was just a homemaker that stayed home.
She and her husband did have a house flipping business.
She just cared about her dog.
And nobody believed for a second this woman was capable of the awful things that she did.
Was there anything in your research then about her prior to all of this that would indicate there's something not right about this person?
Something happened.
She was married twice.
With her second marriage, she moved to Florida, to Naples, Florida.
And there are rumors that something happened while she was out there.
And that's what I'm looking into now, that there may be another victim out there.
People say when she moved back to Missouri, she was not the same person.
She didn't rekindle friendships.
She became reclusive.
I didn't find a single friend that she had.
She only befriended Betsy when she found out she had terminal cancer.
And suddenly she bounced back into Betsy's life after 10 years of absence and said, I'll take care of you and I'll take you to chemo.
But I've talked to people from her high school days.
She was a cheerleader.
She was athletic.
But the one lady that I talked to just yesterday said, but she wasn't particularly liked.
And I think what had she's always had money problems.
And I think something happened in Florida that she may have killed someone for the money.
And it started this roller coaster.
What about previous relationships, boyfriends?
Well, she actually ended up marrying the gentleman that took her to the senior prom because she got pregnant.
So that wasn't planned.
Three months after her senior prom, they got married and were living, you know, like somebody that's 17 and 18 would.
Pretty hard times.
And suddenly she's got a baby while all the other girls are out enjoying what you do at 18.
You're starting college, you're starting careers, and she was straddled with a baby.
That marriage lasted six years.
She found Mark Hupp, who had a booming baseball career ahead of him.
And she thought, yay, this will be better.
Here's more money.
Married him.
They moved to Naples, which has more millionaires per square mile than anywhere else in the nation.
And yet his baseball career didn't pan out.
And now she's back to hard times and struggling.
Sounds to me like there's something about her that means that she's angry at the world.
Actually she's annoyed because things have not panned out for her the way she might have wanted.
That's brilliant and it's right on point.
I think she felt entitled.
This should have happened for me.
It didn't and I'm going to take what I want.
But the brilliant thing about her, I say this in terms of evil genius, is that she is able to carry off a normal life, it seems, without giving any indication that there is that absence of empathy, whatever it is that makes somebody able to kill another, which most people in this world couldn't even contemplate no matter what that person had done to them.
But some people can contemplate that and do it.
There was nothing much to suggest, as far as you know, that she was capable of that.
No, except for people saying when she came back from Florida, she was different.
Different.
She had a contentious relationship with her mother.
She was closer to her father.
He died in 2000.
She moved back from Florida a year later, ostensibly to take care of her mother, whom she hated.
She didn't get along with her sister.
It seemed like all the females in Pam's life just didn't get along.
There were rumors that she keyed people's cars.
It seems like every neighborhood she moved into, strange things happened.
There was anonymous hate mail.
Someone found some bloody animal parts in their yard.
It just seems like wherever she went, it's like the drama, she had to have the drama.
And it's one of those mindsets, and I've actually run into them in real life.
They have to have that drama, that something's always going on.
And it's kind of scary.
So if you have a lot of hate in you and you feel that life has kind of left you behind, then you do things to, I mean, look, I'm no psychologist, but you do things to get noticed.
Oh, you do.
And it's like you can't just sit there and be bored.
And for them, the excitement, the adrenaline rush, I mean, usually these anonymous hate letters are, there's an adrenaline rush there.
You're picturing the person opening it and reading it and going, oh, you know, it's all of that.
And it just, wherever she went, something happened.
Her former boss at the insurance company thinks she was responsible for getting him fired.
And the day he packed up his stuff and left the building, the police showed up at his home and said, would you come back with us to the office?
Because 30 employees' cars got keyed in the parking lot.
And they found out Pam actually left early that day.
And not only were the cars in the parking lot keyed, they found cars keyed in her neighborhood.
And I don't know if she was trying to make it look like he was mad at her and came to her neighborhood and keyed cars too, but she practically buried him.
And I interviewed him for the book.
And he still sounds in shock.
And he's like one of the nicest people.
So it's just, I don't know, wherever she went, something bad happened.
So there was a scheming part of her.
She managed to stitch that guy up, as we say in the UK.
You know, she tied him up in knots and made sure that he was in a position where he lost his job.
But the difficulty with this, isn't it?
And you see this in so many cases.
I mean, this is not really analogous to it.
But, you know, we had a famous broadcaster in the UK here, a man who was a part of everybody's childhood, Jimmy Saville.
I'm sure his name has even reached America.
If it hasn't yet, it will soon.
This guy was a serial abuser of young people all his life, all his career, and yet he had the most prominent career in broadcasting on television and radio.
He was a fundraiser connected to the prime minister.
The royal family knew him.
He even had his own office in a hospital, and he was carrying out the most horrific abuse there.
But the problem was that people were not able to put the pieces together.
And you can't go to the police with your suspicion, with rumors and suspicion.
And most people won't want to get involved in that.
That's how he got away with it.
And he died until his disgusting crimes were revealed.
A lot of people had wanted this brought out, but nobody was powerful enough to do it.
So what I'm saying is that there will have been lots of people in the chain who would have had suspicions, who will have thoughts this person is not entirely right.
But once again, we have a situation where here is somebody who people might have doubts about, but you can't go to the police with doubts.
You can't talk to anybody else about doubts because they don't stand up anywhere.
Well, exactly.
And if you're the injured party like her boss was, it looks like sour grapes.
Again, there were anonymous letters.
And she was fired twice for forging signatures.
And he believes that she forged some things to make it look like he'd done things and got him fired.
Did the police, when they were investigating the murder, not investigate her past, look into her past if you're fired twice for forgery?
Nope.
In fact, it wasn't brought up until much later.
Like I said, they had their guy when they interviewed her.
They took her DNA.
They did a buckle swab from her mouth.
They took her clothes she'd worn the night before.
And Howard, they did nothing with them.
They didn't run the DNA tests.
They didn't do a test in her car to see if there was any blood in her car.
They did absolutely nothing.
They just did their due diligence.
Okay, we interviewed people.
We're happy with who we have.
And that was it.
So again, as we say, the UK, he was banged to rights.
In other words, it was an open and shut case for the cops, but not for the guy who's going into prison.
So he goes to jail.
And I don't know, did he protest his innocence?
Did he shout in court?
Was he trying to appeal constantly?
Oh, he didn't shout.
He was actually fairly quiet.
But yeah, I mean, he maintained his innocence.
They found him guilty.
When they announced that he was guilty, his knees went out from under him.
This guy had the clearest alibi you can imagine.
On the night that Betsy died, it was a Tuesday night.
And every night, Tuesday night, Russ, her husband, had a game night with these buddies.
They would play these role-playing games at this other guy's house.
It was well known.
Pam knew he wasn't going to be home.
He didn't get home usually until 9 o'clock.
And he had, they went, when they looked into it, there were video surveillance cameras showing him putting gas in his car on his way to Game Night.
Three store videos showing him buying dog food, buying tea, buying cigarettes, time stamped.
Four people at Game Night vouched he was right there the whole night, and he was 30 minutes away from home.
They said the guy can't be in two places at the same time.
And when he left, he stopped at Arby's and they had a time stamp receipt from Arby's showing he was at Arby's at 909 headed home.
And Pam had nothing, no alibi, no nothing to show where she was.
And he had all of that.
And in the picture, in the videos, you see the clothes he's wearing.
He's wearing the exact same clothes when the police arrive, when he calls 911, not a drop of blood on him.
No blood in the drains.
They took the drain traps and everything out of the house.
No blood.
None on the towels.
How did this guy clean up after 56 stab wounds?
So he had to have a good alibi if it would be listened to.
But what about his legal team?
Were they not putting those points?
Oh, yeah.
They showed all of it.
So the prosecuting attorney in her closing remarks said, here's what happened.
He got one of his buddies to hold on to his cell phone.
He did all of those little things, getting gas, getting dog food.
She goes, it was over the top.
How many people make four stops to make sure they're seen on a camera before he gets to game night?
Game night started at six.
And yeah, he did all those things on the way.
And she said, but what he did was he had one of the game night buddies take his phone and hold on to it so the cell phone data would show he was over there and in Lake St. Louis when he was actually home killing Betsy.
Then the buddy went through Arby's, got a receipt, brought Russ the phone and the receipt right before he calls 911.
That's what she told the jury.
That would make him an incredibly calculating person.
Well, at that point, Russ's attorney, Joel Schwartz, jumped to his feet and he goes, ladies and gentlemen, she just accused four innocent people of being co-conspirators in murder.
He was furious.
And she got away with it and they found him guilty.
So the legal team, did they immediately go to the press?
You have more freedom, I think, around trials and court cases to comment and speak.
You know, people get it.
I think, you know, sometimes I think jurors get interviewed there, don't they?
But, you know, you have more freedom about these things than we do in the UK.
I would imagine the legal team immediately would have said this is a miscarriage of justice.
Oh, yeah.
He was incensed.
He said, Russ, don't give up hope.
This man was destroyed.
He lost his wife.
He'd heard his daughters and relatives testify on the stand that he had a temper to where he felt his whole family, not his family, but Betsy's side, had sunk him as well.
His whole life was destroyed.
So he goes to prison for two years.
And in the meantime, his attorney's trying everything he can to get an appeal and he's not getting anywhere.
So here's where things, if you want me to, I can continue and tell you where they went south.
During that time, the detectives are still talking to Pam and all of that.
And the one says, did you ever put any money in the trust for those girls?
And she said, no.
And he said, well, that's going to look really bad if another trial, if they do get the appeal.
He says, you need to do that or it's going to look really bad that you haven't.
Oh, okay.
So she opens the trust, but she didn't put any money in it.
Hang on.
Just remind me who gave her that advice.
One of the prosecuting detectives.
They're leading her, telling her so that she won't be a suspect.
That's what I'm talking about.
This whole thing.
It's breathtaking.
Yeah, it is.
They even lied on the stand about evidence they said they found of a bloody cleanup that was completely a lie.
And I'm presuming that more people than you have said these things about the investigation.
They're going after him, Howard.
The new prosecuting attorney, Mike Wood, last year in his probable cause statement said he's not only going after Pam for the death penalty, he's going after the prosecutor and the detectives for perjury, for inventing evidence that wasn't there, for tampering with witnesses.
It's going to be pretty bad.
And have you heard from any of that side, the police side, the prosecution side, because of the book that you published?
Yes, I interviewed all of them for the book.
I talk with the lead detective at least once a week.
I talk with Mike Wood several times a month.
I'm actually going to be meeting with them in St. Louis next month.
We're doing a television show.
And these guys have so much integrity.
They're the exact opposite of the team that was before.
And he's going to get it done.
I'm so proud of them.
And the people who are directly involved in the case, none of those people who tried to sue you?
Nope.
Nobody, and there's nothing, I mean, this isn't slander or libel.
I'm basically quoting The probable cause statement.
I'm just saying what's out there.
I was very careful about that.
So, anyway, here's what happened: is that Pam had already spent the money.
And this detective is saying you need to get that money in there.
So, the girls in the meantime, Betsy's daughters are suing Pam for the money.
So, they've got a civil case coming up.
And Pam's brought in for a deposition by the two girls' attorneys to kind of see where she stands.
Where's the money?
Are you going to give them any?
And she plays around with them for a while.
She's actually flirting with the camera.
She's acting like this is no big deal.
And finally, she says, they said, what do you plan on doing with the money today?
She goes, I plan on doing nothing with it.
And then finally, she goes, it was a revocable trust.
I revoked it.
I emptied it.
And she was really confident.
And they're looking at her saying, there's no more money.
She goes, I invested it in real estate.
The minute she left the office, one of the attorneys jumped on the phone to Russ's attorney and said, this may interest you.
Pam Hupp was just here and said she's not giving the girls any money and it's gone.
And Joel Schwartz jumped on it.
He'd been looking for one thing.
He needed one piece of new evidence to take it before a new judge and say, there's another person you need to look at.
And he took it into this guy, crossed his fingers.
The judge came back and said, you're right.
We're going to give Russ a second trial.
And now Pam is like freaking out.
So before that second trial, this detective's saying, you got to show them you've still got that money.
You got to put like at least $100,000 in there to show you've still got that money.
And if you put it in real estate, where's the real estate?
Well, yeah, yeah.
Well, she flipped houses.
So here's the really, well, they're all horrible.
So the trial is going to be in November, one month before Halloween.
Her mother plunges from the third story balcony of her senior citizen living facility, and Pam gets $100,000 life insurance.
Four days before Russ's trial, she's got the money and she showed it to him.
She took it in cash to show the prosecuting attorney.
She walked in with a duffel bag of cash to show them.
See, I didn't spend it.
It's right here.
She killed her mother.
Her mother was found with eight times the amount of ambient in her body that should have been in a normal person.
So she drugged her and pushed her over the balcony.
And yet it was ruled an accident.
Okay.
And is that what the TV miniseries has said?
Yes.
So then.
I mean, that's more to this case, isn't there?
Yeah.
So Russ has his second trial and they acquit him.
They find him not guilty.
He bursts out crying.
He's now been in prison for three and a half years.
He goes out to the waiting arms of his family and his attorney says, oh, we're not done.
I'm coming for Pam.
And she knows it.
She moves to a different county, still not, I mean, that's only like 20 minutes from where she did live.
And so right after, this is the weirdest part yet.
Dateline had been doing all of these episodes.
And Kathy Singer is the producer of Dateline.
And she kept asking Pam for interviews.
And Pam kept turning her down.
Pam got in her car, went to a trailer park, trolled through the trailer park, up in front of one where a lady was leaning against the railing watching her dog and yelled out, do you babysit?
And the lady looked at her like she was crazy.
What stranger goes around, you know, asking another stranger, do you?
And she goes, no.
And she walked to the end of the driveway to talk to her.
And Pam goes, well, actually, I'm Kathy.
I'm the producer of Dateline.
And if you'll get in the car with me, I'll give you $1,000 to go with me to do a 911 reenactment call.
We rented a little house right over here.
$1,000 for just a couple of minutes of your time.
Well, the lady didn't have shoes on, but she thought, this sounds weird.
And she goes, hang on, let me put my dog in the house.
And while she was in there, she slipped a knife up her sleeve of her hoodie and put another one in the pouch of the hoodie and went out and got in the car with her.
And they're halfway down the street.
And she said, can I see some credentials that says you're with Dateline?
And she goes, oh, we can do that when we get there.
And she said, you know what?
I need to go back.
I need to get my shoes.
And she's getting scared.
She had Pam pull into her driveway where she has a surveillance video camera.
The camera not only catches Pam's license plate, you can clearly see Pam.
Pam went to get out of the car, looked up and said, oh, you've got a camera.
She goes, yes, I do.
She goes, you know what?
I don't want to do this.
And she went in.
Pam went around the block, stopped a guy that was lawn mowing all the lots in the place, offered him the same thing.
He turned her down.
Six days go by, and I think she was worried about the surveillance camera and waited to see if the police were going to come or anything.
Nothing happened.
So she went to an apartment complex.
This poor guy was sitting out there, Lewis Gumpenberger, 33 years old.
He'd been in a car accident, and he had the mental acumen of a 12-year-old.
He was clearly disabled.
He limped when he came over to the car.
His voice was slurred, and he bought the story and got in the car.
Hold on.
She drove him home, told him he was to pretend that he was an intruder coming into her house, bang on the walls, yell things, and that it would be a fake 911 call, only she really did call 911 so they could hear the whole thing.
And she's yelling, help, help, there's an intruder in my house.
And the dispatcher's trying to get the address.
She won't give it to her because she doesn't want him to get there too soon.
And she's yelling, help, help.
And you can hear him banging on the walls and yelling.
And then you hear five gunshots.
And she killed him.
So she set him up.
She set him up.
And in his pocket, she put a fake note that was supposed to look like Russ sent him to get her, to take her to the bank and get the $150,000 and then kill her and put a knife in her neck.
And that was the fake note that she put in this man's pocket.
So her mind is, in an evil way, absolutely brilliant because it's working on multiple levels.
Well, I call the book Countdown to Murder because to me, she had to lay awake at night doing a countdown.
She had to do a laundry list, how this woman pivoted and stayed.
It was always about money and not going to prison.
So she thought, they're going to think Russ did this.
He must have been guilty of Betsy all along.
She's got Russ's name on the fake note.
They'll send him back to prison and she's off the hook.
But it didn't work.
In his other pocket, in Lewis's other pocket, there were nine $100 bills in perfect sequential order.
They hadn't been circulated yet.
And in her nightstand, she blew it.
She kept one of the $100 bills and it matched the sequential order.
They're the odds that she'd have the same one that's in this stranger's pocket.
Wow.
And then they found out she bought a knife at the dollar store that she said he was holding to her throat.
She bought the notepad, the pencil that the note was written on.
And that's why she's in prison.
And she taken out her $1,000 and kept $100.
Yeah.
From the same sequence.
So that puts her away.
Does it also make her complicit in the case of Betsy?
Exactly.
Not only that, but as soon as the other county where the mother fell over the balcony heard that she'd shot Lewis Gumpenberger and was in prison, they changed her mother's death from accidental to undetermined.
And they're now looking into it.
So the sky's beginning to fall in on her.
Yeah, yeah.
And they're going for the death penalty.
So the preliminary hearing is this fall.
I don't expect the trial to be for a while.
It would be nice if it's next year, but it could take a while.
You see, it's interesting for us here in the UK to be discussing this in this detail.
I'm not actually sure that we would be allowed to in this country, and yet they've made a whole mini-series about her there with Rene Zellweger.
Yeah.
How is she portrayed by Rene?
They started it out, and I didn't understand the treatment of the show.
It was almost a parody or a farce.
It almost was trying to make Pam look comical, which I didn't understand.
As it progressed, it was six episodes once a week.
It got darker and darker until I thought, well, that's how it should have started out.
Now you're sensing how evil this woman is.
In the beginning, they tried to make her look almost clumsy and cartoonish, and I didn't understand that.
But now, yeah, tonight's the final, and tonight's when they're going to show her shooting Lewis Gumpenberger, and I'm actually not looking forward to this one.
I'm sure they'll do it discreetly, but I'm friends now with this man's sister.
I'm friends with Betsy's daughters.
The pain that these families are still going through is very, very hard.
And in the meantime, before the fingers started to point properly at Pam and eventually get her brought to justice over that, what was the determination over Betsy?
If, you know, Russ was cleared, it was obviously not him, then what were police doing about that?
Well, now you've got all new detectives and they decided that they were going to go after Pam.
They had tons of evidence against her at this time.
So they were already starting the process, as you hinted before.
Yes.
And can I tell you the one really strange final thing?
And this is current.
This is just last year.
I mentioned Russ's bloody slippers.
They found that they showed no one had stepped in the blood.
They looked like they had been dipped in the blood.
And then the light switch, the blood on the light switch did not look like fingerprints.
It had a weave pattern, like a fabric pattern that nobody could figure out what that meant.
And the knife handle, the knife still in Betsy's neck, the handle had the same weave fabric thing.
Well, in the crime scene photos, and these are in the book, the Betsy's anklet socks are halfway off her feet and they have blood on them.
And yet there's no blood on her feet.
It doesn't look like she actually stepped in blood.
So this came out last year in the probable cause statement.
What they have found is it looks like someone used them as gloves, that they took Betsy's socks off.
They said it looks like fingers in the socks, not toes, dipped them in the blood, and swiped the light switch, and then pressed it down on the knife handle, possibly to obliterate their own fingerprints.
But that's why there's this fabric pattern.
And then they tried to put them back on her feet, couldn't quite do it, and just left them.
There's a little piece of blood on her heel that looked like they tried to hold her foot and put them back on, and they couldn't do it, and they just left them halfway off.
I mean, that's bizarre.
It is, and it's all shocking.
It's a case where there have been failings.
It's a case where people are going to be talking about it for years, I suspect.
Well, especially with the trial still coming up.
I mean, we're not done yet.
And they're looking into her mother's death.
So, yeah, it's going to be going on for a while.
And I'm grateful for the way the book is sold.
But I have to tell you, if it weren't for all of these amazing interviews from the people behind the scenes that were there, the detectives and everybody else, and the family members, It wouldn't be the book it is.
And I appreciated their time and their trust in me.
My father was a police officer for part of his career, not a very long part, he was a detective in plain clothes.
Mostly he was a uniformed guy.
But, you know, a police officer is always a police officer.
They have the same instincts.
And if he was here now, he would say, somebody who's done something like this and woven such an intricate web of deceit and lies, they always do or say something to somebody that gives them away.
Did Pam do that?
Well, she couldn't keep her stories straight.
She would change things in two sentences, and why they didn't pick up on them is beyond me.
But yeah, in fact, the murder of Lewis Gumpenberger, the prosecuting attorney, Tim Lomar, said it was a scheme a middle schooler could have put together.
He thought it was totally stupid.
He goes, Pam's biggest flaw is she thought she was smarter than everybody else.
Is she saying?
I mean, that's a ridiculous question for me to ask, bearing in mind her background and the things we've been talking about.
But I'm talking about in the judicial definition, in the legal definition, whether that would make a difference in a court of law when all these things are analyzed.
You know, could it be claimed that she was not in possession of her faculties and it was something else that made her do what she did?
The only thing that she's done is that when they brought her in, when they arrested her for Lewis Gumpenberger's murder, they read her her rights.
She said, I want to see an attorney.
They left the room.
And this is all on camera.
She reached over for a bottle of water.
A big pin, a writing pin, was next to it.
She made it look like she was pulling the water bottle toward herself, but she hooked the pin as well, stuck it in the back of her pants.
And when they came back in, she said, I need to use the bathroom.
A female officer took her in.
She was taking a while, and the lady said, are you okay?
And she goes, yeah, I'm fine.
Right when she's yelling out, I'm fine.
She is stabbing herself in the neck and the wrists with the pin at kind of a light-hearted attempt to commit suicide.
And they took her to the hospital.
It was superficial.
Some of them looked like they hurt.
And yet, she never really, I think she's too egotistical to say she's got problems.
She's never tried to run the, you know, the insane thing by anybody.
And as we record these words, she is in prison now.
She's in prison for Lewis Gumpenberger for life.
But now they're going after her for Betsy's.
Okay, wasn't there something unusual about the plea that she made originally in that case?
Yes.
She thought she could still get out of it after they arrested her.
And you can hear it on a recorded police phone call with her husband.
And she's making fun of them at the arraignment, like they're never going to get me.
And she said, can you believe they even said they tracked my OnStar system in the car and showed me going right to his apartment and bringing him home?
She goes, it was turned off.
And her husband went, well, it was turned off, but it's always on.
It was the first time you heard her stutter.
She goes, what?
He goes, yeah, it's always on.
You can turn it off in the car, but it's always on.
Oh, whatever.
And I think that's when she realized she was screwed.
So she suddenly took the Alfred plea.
And what that means is you can plead that you believe the prosecution probably has enough to find you guilty, but you're not going to come right out and say you did it.
I've got a definition here.
It's a way to get out of the death penalty, basically.
It's very unusual.
It's bizarre for the British ear, but an offered plea is a plea in which one doesn't admit guilt, but concedes that evidence exists that would likely result in a conviction if a trial were to take place.
Isn't that guilt by another name?
Well, sure.
And here's his family who walked away with an empty bag.
They didn't get to hear her say she did it.
They received no closure.
They weren't allowed to get up and give the victim's response where they could look her in the face and say what they were deprived of all of that.
So she's in prison indefinitely, as we speak now.
And on the basis of that case, she hasn't actually said, I did it.
Correct.
Why?
Oh, she'll maintain she's innocent until she dies.
So she's in there.
Her sentence was life plus 30 years.
And now they're going for the death penalty this time for Betsy.
Do you know, I don't know how they've been able to do a mini-series when this is all fresh and still ongoing.
That strikes me as being, well, I mean, obviously, just like the people who've been watching this, I can't wait to see it.
But it's, again, bizarre to me, you know, thinking about this from a British perspective.
Well, they're calling it season one.
My guess is they'll do season two after the trial and whatever happens with her mother.
And I'm going to be going to Florida to look to see if there is another victim there.
Boy.
Boy, so this is to be continued.
Well, I'm a little breathless after this conversation.
It's just astonishing, really.
And as you said at the beginning of this, the statistic that we have to remember and recall is that 5 to 7% in the United States of serial killers, those responsible for multiple killings, are women.
The rest are men.
So this makes this an extremely unusual case.
And I honestly can't think of anything with a parallel in my experience.
I can't think of anything else like this.
Well, a lot of us believe she would have probably kept going.
Every time she ran out of money, somebody died.
And they found on her possession not only her mother's will, some personal things of Betsy's, they found that she had the bank accounts of all of her family members.
And she hated her sister.
She tried to throw her sister under the bus for the mother's fall from the balcony.
I mean, I don't think she would have stopped.
What a story.
Sadly, we haven't got time to talk about anything else.
I was going to try and get into the Lizzie Baldmer house story.
Maybe we can do this next time.
I would love it.
Pam, you were saying that obviously the book sales are going well and people are buying it here in the UK.
What's the title of the book?
It's Countdown to Murder Pam Hup, H-U-P-P.
And my website is Rebecca FPittmanBooks.com.
And you can find the book in all, yeah, two T's.
Rebecca F is in FrankPittmanBooks.com.
And all of the books are on sale on Amazon.
And if you write a sequel to it, I guess you could call it, Every Time She Ran Out of Money, Somebody Dies.
There will be a sequel.
I'm waiting for the trial.
But yeah, can I steal that one from you, Howard?
You shocked the least I can do for you.
Hey, Rebecca, thank you very, very much indeed.
What a story.
I just, I'm, I am, it takes a lot to shock me.
I'm shocked.
Well, email me your address and I'll send you an autograph copy.
I love that.
Thank you very, very much.
Thanks for having me on.
What a story.
Thank you, Rebecca.
All right.
Bye-bye.
Thank you.
I think I need to be a little quiet and contemplative for a little while after that story.
The story of Pamela Hupp and Rebecca Pittman, who's written a book all about that, which you will see extensively reviewed and commented about online.
What a story.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained online.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been the Unexplained.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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