Criminal - The Caller

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

In 2008, an article in the monthly FBI bulletin argued that 911 calls could contain clues for homicide investigations. “The caller, in fact, may be the killer.” Brett Murphy investigated 911 call analysis for ProPublica. You can find their new show, Paper Trail, wherever you listen to podcasts. Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Criminal. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. This episode contains recordings of 911 calls and references to suicide. Please use discretion. How did you and Betsy meet? How did we meet? Well, we actually met at a local gas station where she was working. And I was a regular customer there, and we just started making friends, I guess, and eventually went out on a date. What did you like about her? Well, her bubbly personality, and she was just so outgoing and friendly with everyone she ever met. We would always chat and, you know, kind of flirt around and whatnot.

Russ Faria met Betsy Meyer in 1995. On top of working at the gas station, Betsy ran a business DJing parties. She called it party starters. Russ helped her out. He was good with computers. In 2000, Russ and Betsy. she got married. She was just always a positive person, even when she felt bad. So, other than when we were alone in private, most people wouldn't know, you know, if she was feeling bad or sad at all.

When did you find out about her cancer? That was in 2010, early 2010. We didn't know how bad it was or any of the prognosis as far as what needed to be done and how it was going to be treated. She had to have a full mastectomy and chemo and radiation treatment. And that was quite intensive. After about a year of going in for treatments,

once a week, sometimes twice, Betsy and Russ planned to go on a cruise. It looked like Betsy's cancer was gone. And they were calling it a celebration of life. They bought the tickets for November of 2011, but in October, they got news. That's when we found out that the cancer had returned, and it was actually in her liver,

and the doctor kind of told us at that time that she had about, if we were lucky, maybe three years. They decided to go on the cruise anyway. How was she doing on the cruise and right after? Oh, she was doing quite well, actually. She got to do one of her dreams, which was swim with the dolphins. And when we came home, you know, we were looking forward to Christmas. They spent Christmas with Russ's family and Betsy's father.

Betsy stayed at her mother's apartment outside St. Louis the next night. It was closer to the cancer center, and she had an appointment for chemo on Tuesday, December 27th. So I was at home by myself. and got up and started work like any normal day. I worked from home on the computer, and we texted back and forth throughout the day because I had a standing appointment with some friends of mine and we like to get together and play games on Tuesday nights,

and I was trying to ascertain whether or not she needed a ride home afterwards, and at some point or another, she let me know that her friend Pam was going to bring her home, which struck me as kind of odd, but I said, okay, well, if she wants to bring you home, I guess that's fine, and I'll see you there when I get done with my friends. What is your usual Tuesday night with your friends? What do you do? Well, we used to play some role-playing games similar to D&D, however, those type of games.

If you have a group of, say, four or five people that play, everybody has to be present. And that particular night we had one friend that had to work. And so we sat around and watched a couple of movies. actually the second movie was kind of boring, and so everybody decided to split. Ross and Betsy had talked on the phone around 5 p.m. Ross got to his friend's house around 6 and left around 9. On the way home, he remembers he was hungry and stopped at Arby's.

He says when he got to the house, he called Betsy's name, but didn't hear anything. I came around the corner, and that's when I saw her on the floor. Tell me what you saw. Well, I saw her laying in a pool of blood initially, and when I went down to the floor, I realized that there was a knife in her neck. Russ called 911 and told the dispatcher,

my wife killed herself. She's on the floor. I jumped to conclusions because she had gone through depression before and actually was on medication for depression and whatnot. The 911 dispatcher told Russ someone would be on the way and started asking questions. She wanted to know what kind of medications she had and was directing me to try and find those and read the labels off to her so she could get a list of those things. What were you thinking about? I mean, do you remember?

I think I was in one state or another of mental shock for quite a while, and so I was just kind of on automatic mode trying to follow instructions and help until somebody actually physically showed up. It took police about 10 minutes to arrive. They took me outside and I guess they were performing their initial investigation inside and eventually they came out and asked me

if I could come down to the station, which I did. And then they started questioning me about all the events of the day who she was with, who brought her home. If she had any enemies or I guess it lasted overnight, the questioning. And sometime the next day, they decided and asked me if I could go take a lie detector test. After the test, an officer told him that he'd failed it. What were they saying exactly that you had done to Betsy? They said that I stabbed her over 50 times.

And did they say why you had done that? They said that evidently I had found a change of beneficiary on some insurance, and so I had gotten angry and emotional and killed her for the money. Four days before she died, Betsy had removed Russ as the beneficiary on her life insurance policy. On January 4th, Russ was charged with first-degree murder. He was put in jail, and his trial began almost two years later in November 2013. The prosecutor, Leah Cheney, argued that Russ had killed Betsy soon after he got home, then showered, then called 911.

Leah Cheney played the recording of Russ's call for the jury. It was the first time he'd heard it. What was it like hearing it played back? It was quite emotional. Brought back all of the feelings and everything that I was going through at the time. Leah Cheney called the 911 supervisor to testify. And what did the 911 supervisor say in their testimony? She tried to say that it sounded like I was acting it out.

She hadn't answered Russ's call, but she listened to the recording. She said that Russ seemed hysterical until he was answering a question. Quote, and then it would go back to hysteria again. Lincoln County 911, what is the location of your emergency? Okay, ma'am. Hello? Hello? Yes, I need you to take a couple deep breath so I can see what's going on.

What is the address where you need this to come? One, one, one, one, one, 30 CMAQ. Okay, what is the telephone number you're calling from me? Zero seven. Okay, who am I speaking with? My name is Russell Faria. Russell, what's going on there? I just got home from a friend's house.

And my wife killed herself. She's on the floor. Okay, Russell, I need you to count down, honey, okay? I need you to count down, take a couple deep breaths. We're going to get somebody on the way there, okay? Russell, how long were you gone today? I left around five. I just got back.

But she was at her mom's and her friend was bringing her home, so I don't know what time she got home. Has she been depressed lately? She's got cancer. She has, but she does have cancer. Russell, do you think that she's beyond help right now? I don't know. I think he is dead.

Okay. Russell, I have a couple officers that are out there right now. Can you do me a favor and open your front door? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay, well, good luck to you, honey. I'm going to go ahead and hang up, and we're going to try to call your mom, okay? All right. Bye-bye. One of the first officers to get to Russ and Betsy's house said it seemed like Russ was panicking, having difficulty talking and breathing. But when the officer tried to distract him, talking about where they grew up in the same neighborhood, Russ spoke normally and sometimes laughed. Police noted that when they left Russ alone, his emotions seemed, quote, over the top. The trial lasted four days, and Russ Ferrea was convicted of first-degree murder

and sentenced to life in prison without parole. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. Support for criminal comes from Quince, with the warm weather already used. here, now is a good time to upgrade your wardrobe. And if you're looking for high-quality, long-lasting pieces that you can wear every summer, you might want to consider Quince. Quince has beautiful everyday pieces, like 100% European linen pants, dresses and tops, with style starting

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suite that brings your financials, inventory, commerce, HR, and CRM together, and it's trusted by over 43,000 customers. NetSuite Next uses AI to identify relevant insights and bring them to you throughout your day, and to help you solve problems and handle routine work. And anytime you have a question about anything, all you have to do is ask. Whether your company earns millions or even hundreds of millions, it's time for NetSuite Next, where your business meets AI. For the first time ever, you can try NetSuite Next for free. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, go to netsuiteaI.com slash criminal. Built for every industry ready for every boardroom, netsuite.aI slash criminal. In June of 2008, the FBI published volume 77, issue number six, of their monthly

bulletin. It's sort of this newsletter that's sent directly to police departments. I think it has something like a readership of 200,000. Journalist Brett Murphy. The bulletin featured an article with the title 911 homicide calls and statement analysis is the caller, the killer. The article said that 911 calls to report a death contain, quote, uncontaminated clues, and that specific features of a call can help identify whether a caller is innocent or guilty. Certain turns of phrase, different omissions, verbal cues became indicators of guilt, guilty indicators. If someone calls 911 and they say one of these things or they don't say one of these things, then it means that it's more likely that they are guilty of the crime that they are calling to report.

Today, Brett is a reporter for ProPublica, but in 2021, he was working for USA Today on a series of stories about whistleblowers in police departments. I was on the road somewhere outside Shreveport, Louisiana, and I met with a woman who was telling me all about this really upsetting case. The woman's mother had died. Police said it looked like suicide, but the woman believed it was a murder by her stepfather. And she kept mentioning this new thing called 911 call analysis and saying her stepfather had called police, and he had failed this analysis that was called a cop scale.

The 911 cop scale, an abbreviation for considering offender probability in statements, appeared on page 27 of the FBI Bulletin. It was the title of a one-page worksheet with a list of checkboxes, organized in two columns, labeled Innocent Callers and Guilty Callers. The article was written by an FBI agent named Susan Adams and an Ohio deputy police chief, a man named Tracy Harpster. Susan and Tracy met in 2004 at the FBI Academy

in Virginia. Tracy was there for a 10-week training, and Susan was there to lecture. She had written a dissertation a few years earlier on studying, quote, linguistic and structural features of written statements to predict whether someone was telling the truth.

Soon after the training, Tracy Harpster started a master's program in criminal justice. He asked Susan Adams to help with his thesis. They collected these 911 calls that included 50 people who were later convicted of some sort of crime and 50 people who were not. Together they analyzed the 100 calls, looking for patterns. In the summary of their findings in the FBI bulletin, they wrote that guilty callers tended to give, quote, rambling information. Another indicator was insulting or blaming the victim or asking for help for themselves and not the person who died.

Did police and prosecutors immediately seem interested in this research? Oh, yeah. People really loved it. It was originally just what researchers call an exploratory analysis, meaning there's a lot more research needed to see if it's valid and sound and should be applied in real-world situations. but this kind of just took off right from that exploratory analysis. After the bulletin came out, a sheriff sergeant in Colorado asked Tracy and Susan to help with a case she was working on. She sent a recording of a woman calling 911, saying her husband had died.

They replied to the report. They'd found one indicator of innocence and 12 indicators of guilt. things like saying the word blood instead of saying bleeding. They wrote, quote, callers who chose to comment on the presence of blood at the scene rather than on the condition of the victim were more likely to be guilty. The focus appears to be on the bloody scene rather than on her bleeding husband. They also wrote that the woman had, quote, no sense of urgency and was too patient.

Saying things like, I'm sorry. and thank you, that's what they would call being inappropriately polite. If you interrupt yourself, if your answers are too short, too long, saying somebody, you know, that means there's a lack of commitment. Harpster and Adams said that witnesses to a crime should be able to report their observations clearly. They wrote that the woman, quote, hesitated to commit to her narrative. They noted that she said, God who would do this, which they found to be, quote, a curious and unobstated. expected question. Investigators kept asking Tracy Harpster for help, and he started teaching classes. He kept listening to more calls, he wrote a book about it, and hit the road training

police departments, prosecutors, coroners, 911 dispatchers on this system that he developed. In 2014, police in Aspen, Colorado, were investigating the death of a woman named Nancy Fister. Nancy's friend Kathy Carpenter had called 911. She said she hadn't heard from Nancy for a few days, and she'd gone looking for her. She told the dispatcher she found Nancy dead in her closet. And the local police asked the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to help find who did it,

and then there was an agent at CBI, who was one of Harpster's students. He stepped in to help analyze the phone call. 911. What is the address of the emergency? What is the address of the emergency? Is that a house business or apartment? It's a house. It's a house. It's a house. My friend.

Ma'am, tell me exactly what happened. Okay. My friend had it. I've done my friend in the closet. Ma'am, tell me exactly what happened. My friend came back from our children. She had some people living there, and she really pissed them off, and she made threats to them about owing money, and I don't know what it is. I couldn't find her.

He didn't call, and these people said the dog has been in the house and she hasn't been around, so I went up there to get the dog. I was looking for her. I need you to tell me exactly what happened. I can. My friend is in her closet. Yes. In her closet.

Yes. Okay, stay on the line with me. We're going to send help that way. A Colorado Bureau of Investigation agent wrote a report, analyzing Kathy Carpenter's call. He noted that Carpenter had said, help me. she repeatedly interrupted herself.

She didn't immediately answer when the dispatcher asked for the address. She provided extraneous information about Feister's dog. While the phone was ringing, Kathy repeated, Oh, my God, oh my God, which the agent found suspicious, writing, quote, The caller gives repetitive phrases even before the dispatcher answers the call. He wrote, the caller's very first statement is to request help for herself

and that, quote, the caller repeated her friend was dead and full of blood. He also wrote, quote, innocent callers typically minimize the injury and rarely comment about the amount of blood unless the victim is currently bleeding. In total, the agent found 39 guilty indicators and zero indicators of innocence.

Eight days after, he sent the report, police arrested Kathy Carpenter. She was in jail for three months before someone else confessed to the murder. It was one of Nancy's tenants, the ones Kathy talked about when she called 911. This totally upended her life. She told me. She lost her job, lost her home, a car was repoed, diagnosed with PTSD, had to move in with her mother across the state. People still call her a murderer. And she was just trying to live the rest of her life in solitude.

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after a jury ruled he murdered his wife Betsy. His lawyer had presented new evidence about another potential suspect, Betsy's friend, Pam Hopp, The woman who had given her a ride that day. In the new trial, Russ's lawyer called the 911 operator, who answered his call to testify. And in her opinion, you know, I wasn't play acting at all.

A TV station in St. Louis broadcast an interview with the operator, Tammy Vaughn. You can't fake that. You can't fake that emotion. In my personal opinion, you can't. Vaughn says 911 operators, are expected to get hysterical callers to answer questions. It's a redirection. It's a technique that communicators use to try to redirect, calm them down, ask them the question, and then whenever they have to focus back on the victim or the patient,

then they do what's called a refreak. The prosecutor, Leah Cheney, called the 911 supervisor from the first trial to testify again. This time, the supervisor said that she'd learned to evaluate calls like Russ's from Tracy Harpster's class. And she was saying all the reasons that she thought for Rio was guilty based on his word choice and demeanor during the 911 call. Brett Murphy. But the judge in the second trial wouldn't let the supervisor's testimony in his evidence. The new verdict was announced on a Friday. I was completely free, found not guilty on all counts, and completely exonerated.

Leah Cheney didn't charge anyone else with Betsy's murder, but Russ's lawyer asked the U.S. Attorney's Office to review the case. He wanted someone to look more closely at Pam Hubb. When Betsy removed Russ as the beneficiary on her life insurance, she had replaced him with Pam. Pam and Betsy had met as co-workers at State Farm. Betsy's sister said Pam was instructed to use the life insurance to support Betsy's daughters from a previous relationship,

which she had not been doing. What did you think of her? Well, I thought she was a little weird, but, you know, there's a lot of people like that in this world, and I really certainly didn't suspect her of being somebody that was malicious at all. In 2016, Pam Hup was arrested and charged with killing a man named Lewis Gumpenberger. She was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Then, in 2021, she was charged with Betsy's murder.

There hasn't been a trial yet. It is suspected, and Pam is alleged to have done that. She will be facing trial in January of 2008 for said murder. Since Russ was released, he's opened a motorcycle shop and gotten married. He says it's strange how many people have heard his 911 call. It's been played on Dateline six times now, and I don't know how many times on local news, and that's one of the things that I meet and that recognize me come up, and they're just very emotional about having listened to that call.

While reporter Brett Murphy was looking into 911 call analysis, he found emails Leah Cheney and Tracy Harpster had written each other after Russ was exonerated. Harpster was looking for marketing material and a chapter in his upcoming book. And he wrote to the prosecutor saying, Can you give me an endorsement, cite this case where you used it? And he says in his email, we don't have to say it was overturned. Just hook me up and make it say. As I was working on this story, the months I was working on this, I listened to, you know, I must have listened to dozens, if not hundreds of 911 calls.

Can you tell any difference? Could, you know, from someone who's ultimately guilty as opposed to someone who someone claimed was guilty? No, I can't. I mean, I can't. To me, it always seemed, like when I first heard about it when I was in Louisiana, And I thought it seemed far-fetched, but I don't know. So I wanted to look into it, keep an open mind. I thought I might come away with some ability to predict one way or another, but I was never able.

I mean, there would be people who have the flattest of FX, other people who seemed absolutely heartbroken and distraught and in shock and try. trying to divine one way or another was like reading tea leaves. If I were to call 911, I think the last thing on my mind would be that someone potentially was going to listen to that call and look at me as a suspect, depending on what words I chose to use. This was another concern of law enforcement and prosecutors I talked to, that there would be a chilling effect, right? people, if they were worried that their word choice might implicate them, that they might not want to call 911. And don't, like, don't get me wrong. The 911 calls are crucially important to a homicide investigator. It's kind of like the first record starts the timeline. You can check what someone said versus facts that come up later.

It's a critical piece of evidence for, like, you know, for a number of reasons. but to use it in this way is deeply concerning to the people I spoke with who live and work in this world. There's a one 911 call in Ohio there was a couple of parents wailing on the phone

they were holding their child who had died Harpster listened to the call and he wrote back to the police officer who sent it to him he said, call me dot dot dot dirty like the parents were dirty and he didn't like

their 911 call. The mother who was on the phone in that case was never charged, right? So there's like these cases keep appearing in my research where it was applied, the 911 call analysis was applied in some way, but it didn't work. The person was acquitted or never charged. And this never seemed to be evidence that maybe there was something wrong with the thing. But on the flip side, anytime 9-1-1 call analysis was used and that person was later charged or convicted, that was evidence that it worked. Did you ever get a chance to interview him? Yeah, so I talked to him once on the phone.

It was one kind of short conversation. I raised, you know, a couple of questions and concerns from some folks I had been talking to at that early stage. I could not get back in touch with them. Brett says he sent him emails and texts for months. He'd asked Tracy Harpster if he could sit in on one of his classes. He said no, it was only for law enforcement. I asked him, I was like, why can't I sit in? But he's very protective of it.

He told me that, you know, other people would use it for nefarious ends. People would start gaming their 911 calls. So he interviewed, a former student of Tracy's, and asked what it was like. There's a projector screen up top, is the caller, the killer. In bold, red font, kind of looks like dripping blood. And he claims that one in three people who call 911 to report a death are actually murderers. I never found any record to support that figure. We contacted Tracy Harpster for this story, and he sent a response, which includes the following.

Quote, we are not aware of any information. individual who has been arrested or prosecuted for murder solely based on a 911 call. The 911 call is but one piece of evidence that should be closely examined, just like any other. I think it's important to say that from what I can tell in his, what he tells students and what people who have attended the class told me is that he really believes in this. He really thinks that he is helping these cases and bringing, bringing, murderers to justice, and it's a kind of invaluable instrument for police and prosecutors to kind of help them solve otherwise potentially unsolvable cases. So I never got the

sense that he was operating in bad faith in any way or thought he was selling snake oil or anything, sort of his life's work. Brett spoke with an FBI behavioral scientist who had worked with Tracy and Susan on the research. He told me, I just don't see that the work we did rises to the level of success by the scientific community. There's no definitive answer as to whether this is useful. And everyone that I know of has kind of failed to reproduce most of his findings, which has kind of in their mind sort of invalidated the research quite a bit. Researchers at universities and the FBI have tried and failed to find evidence that the 911

cop scale method can reliably identify guilty callers. But in 2022, when Brett was investigating, some police and prosecutors still seem to be using it. There's not really like a governing body that's supposed to be vetting science or purported science that's getting adopted in the courtroom and works a lot unprecedented. You know, if it makes its way into one case, then an attorney can cite that case, which is sort of the opposite of how science works. change is based on new information all the time. But conversely, the court system works on precedent. So what's supposed to be happening is that there's supposed to be something like a standard applied. It's called the Daubbert standard or the Fry standard in which judges are supposed to evaluate whether it stands up to scrutiny. The Daubert standard from a 1993 Supreme Court case involving a pharmaceutical company says that judges should look at an

experts' methods to determine whether to allow them to testify, not just their credentials. There's all sorts of benchmarks it's supposed to hit. Has there been other studies that replicate the findings? Pretty much is it sound? Brad reported that in 2016, the Missouri prosecutor, Leah Cheney, wrote an email to Tracy Harpster. Quote, of course this line of research is not recognized as a science in our state. She said she was finding ways to use 911 call analysis in court anyway,

quote, getting creative without calling it science. Often prosecutors were, they would have a detective or a dispatcher testify. Harpster himself wouldn't, and unless a defense attorney catches that this is, hey, that's not lay testimony. That actually sounds like scientific or fact testimony. I want to challenge that for a Dobert hearing or something like that. If an objection like that isn't raised, then it might slip right through and get right in front of a jury.

Brett Murphy says sometimes judges would let 911 call analysis in his evidence because a state training board had certified Tracy Harpster's class. And I would go to those state training boards and they said, We're not actually vetting the curriculum. In one case in 2014 in Michigan, a 16-year-old named Riley Spittler had called 911 and said that he'd shot his older brother while playing with a gun. The police and prosecutors said he did it on purpose.

Spittler always maintained that it was an accident, and the difference, of course, is manslaughter and murder. A detective on the case had taken Tracy. see Harpster's class. I saw the checklist that he filled out, the detective filled out, and I listened to the call. Spitler is seems to me kind of

to be in shock. He saw being an hysterical. He told dispatchers that he shot his brother. He said it was an accident. Said twice it was an accident. This was extraneous information. By saying the shooting was accidental as an indicator of guilt,

quote, because the call should be about help, not about justifying actions. On another point, Riley says his life is over. Oh my God, my life is over. Saying something like my life is over shows that Riley was too focused on himself and not his brother. That's what the detective said. It was very me focused. And then finally, Riley said, I think I killed him. And this is before he starts kind of breaking down. He says, oh my God, please no. Multiple times in that call, Riley said he thought his brother was dead. The detective wrote that this is a guilty because he was accepting his brother's death.

I mean, I listen to this 911 call also. And I don't understand. I mean, it's confusing to know how you could even look for patterns and anything because Riley is, he's so upset that you can barely understand what he's saying. Yeah, he was, I mean, just to put into some perspective, Riley was having so much trouble thinking in this moment. He couldn't figure out how to open his own front door to his house from the inside. And he punched his hand through the glass door to open the door. And this is, I think, sort of at, it's at the heart of this 911 call analysis where there's just not enough

known about how people speak during a moment of trauma or shock. A lot of people don't even recognize themselves. They have no memory of saying that thing that they said on a 911 call. They have no memory of doing certain things that they were doing during the 911 call. You know, you are, you are kind of outside of yourself. And it's one thing to have a hunch about someone because you think they, and police do this all the time, right? Because you think they're, they're acting odd. But to lend the air of science and apply these indicators of guilt, that takes it to this, like, other level in which it starts becoming something really dangerous. Riley Spittler appealed his case on the basis of police, prosecutor, and judge misconduct,

and argued that the statement analysis used against him was, quote, junk science. He won, was resentenced for manslaughter, and released from prison in 2020. He was 21. Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajiko, Lily Clark, and Lena Silison. This episode was fact-checked by Katie Cedarborg.

Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. You can find a link to Brett Murphy's reporting about 911 call analysis for ProPublica on our website. This isn't the first time we've had a pro-publica journalist on criminal to talk about their investigative reporting. Often their stories stand out to us. And they just started a new podcast last month. The show is called Paper Trail. If you're a fan of criminal, there's a good chance you'll like it.

The first episode is a story about generic medications and things going wrong at the factories they come from. And they have other episodes out, and coming up about health insurance denials, national security, the courts, and more. You can listen to Paper Trail wherever you get your podcasts. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at this iscriminal.com. And you can sign up for a newsletter at this iscriminal.com slash newsletter.

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