Dateline Originals - The Thing About Pam - Ep. 1: They're Still Counting

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

The evidence pointed to a crime of passion. But was it?This episode was originally published on September 18, 2019. 

This is a strange story. A strange story in a career of strange stories. It began in a little town in Missouri, a place called Troy, where people can live in what feels like country and still spend their days working an hour away in St. Louis. Quiet here. Lots of elbow room. It was December 27th, 2011. Country dark. Just a sliver of moon. Serene. Little off Highway H, there's a dead-end street called Sumac Drive. And on that street,

there's a house, nestled right on the corner. The only light, the soft glow of a street lamp near the front lawn. The air was still, sated, post-Christmas. On this night, just after 9.30, an approaching car broke the silence and turned into the driveway. A man stepped out. Forty-something. Dark hair. Slight gut. Orange T-shirt.

Blue jeans. He walked a short, shadowed path to his porch and opened the unlocked door of his home. Lincoln County 911. What is the location of your emergency? Hello? Hello? Hello? Yes, 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... 911 calls come in all flavors, calm to crazy. But this one? Russell Faria seemed to hyperventilate as he stood in his kitchen, struggled to form words. He wailed and sobbed and waited for help to arrive.

All alone, except for the operator on the phone. And his dead wife, Betsy, on the floor of the living room. 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, yeah. Okay. It's a lot. It's a lot. Okay, well, good luck to you, honey.

Okay. All right. Okay. Bye-bye. Picture a smooth stone in the palm of someone's hand. All right. Bye-bye. Picture a smooth stone in the palm of someone's hand. That's Russ Faria's 911 call. Now picture someone throwing that stone into placid water.

Watch it bounce. One, two, three times. The ripples traveling this way and that. When Russ Faria hung up the phone, he had no way of knowing. Just days later, he would be charged with murder. He couldn't see the ripple effects this event would have, not just on his life, but many others. Including my own. I'm Keith Morrison.

I've been a correspondent for Dateline NBC for a quarter century. So, I've seen devious. I've seen evil. But this? This time, the ripples splashed up against us. Against me a little, but mostly my producer, Kathy Singer. But, before we get to Kathy, I have just one question for you. When you pictured that stone, could you see who was holding it? Or was their face sort of blurred, shadowed, unclear? When Kathy and I first heard of this story, we thought we knew exactly who our stone thrower was. It was Russ Faria, right?

Wrong. Dead wrong. This is Dateline NBC's newest podcast, The Thing About Pam. I've worked on other cases that have twists and turns, but I've never worked on a case like this with so many twists and turns that were completely unpredictable. My name is Kathy Singer. I've been a producer at Dateline for 25 years and counting. I first heard about this story when right after Thanksgiving 2013, our office received a bunch of messages on Facebook about this guy, Russ Freer, looked like he was just convicted of killing his wife. I got called by somebody at our office at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where Dateline is based. Can you look into this? So I called the lawyer and I said, I was kind of cynical. I'm like, okay, so your client didn't kill his wife. Do you know who might have? And he says, yes.

And he starts telling me all this information. I'm like, okay, I will be there tomorrow. And I got up the next morning and got in my car and drove five hours from Chicago to St. Louis. When Kathy called me about this story, it didn't take much persuading. It was a case that seemed to have divided families, friends, much of the town of Troy. And there was a chance that the husband was innocent. Or at least, that's what his lawyer was telling us. The lawyer's name was Joel Schwartz. Got there probably about 1, 1.15 in the afternoon, went straight there. So I walked into the office and his office was a little cluttered, but you expect that from someone who's working hard.

There was a painting of Marilyn Monroe on the wall behind him, and it was from a client who couldn't pay him in cash, so paid him in this painting he did. Joel Schwartz, he's in his 50s, looks much younger, boyish curly hair, strong jaw. You can see right away he was sharp, empathetic, and skeptical. And if Joel Schwartz was right, his client had been railroaded. My first impression of Joel was like he knew what he was talking about. It's difficult to understand how this case came to be. In my opinion, the innocent man got charged with murder and then it sort of snowballed from there. And the investigators, I think,

made a snap judgment that the husband killed the wife. I know Russ, I would consider, very well. When you go through this with somebody, you get a real sense, and I've been doing this for 25 years now, and my sense of Russ is Russ is a good person. Rough around the edges, but ultimately a good person. But let's back up a little bit to that winter night in December of 2011. When Russ arrived at the house on Sumag

Drive and called 911, he summoned the whole apparatus of the law. Uniforms, CSI, detectives. And they looked through Russ and Betsy's house very carefully, minutely. The coroner examined her body. CSI spent hours searching for hair, blood, DNA. And in the meantime, they took Russ in for questioning. Talk in here if you don't mind. Questioned him basically for two days. If I can write things down, is it important to you?

Okay. In this police interview, recorded during the early morning hours after Betsy's death, a detective sat down with Russ. The room was nondescript. Four walls, a couple of chairs. That's about it. Can I get something to drink?

Yeah. I would like a cigarette. Yeah, let me work on that, okay? But it. Can I get something to drink? Yeah. I would like a cigarette. Yeah, let me work on that, okay? But I'll definitely get you something to drink. Okay? Okay. Russ was in bad shape, at best. And he went in and out of what seemed like shock,

answering questions one minute, crying the next minute, yelling, then answering questions again. This is where I need your help, okay? Okay. Eventually, Russ walked the detective through what happened when he got home that night. Did you come in through the front door or the garage? Through the front door.

Okay. Through the front door. Okay. And I was putting the dog food down and taking my jacket off when I saw Betsy. And I fell down, then I was looking at her and she wasn't moving. Wasn't moving. And I thought she killed herself.

Okay, what made you think that? Because I saw her arms slashed Her arm was slashed and it was slashed crossways Okay And it was very deep and I saw a knife I

Okay What Russ didn't realize was that the detective was not ignorant of the facts. He knew way more than he was letting on. And the whole interview, he was feeling Russ out, testing the waters. After a few hours at the station, two other investigators took over. In the taped interview, they came off as sympathetic to Russ's situation.

But it also seemed like there was something they weren't saying. One detective attempted to nail down Russ's timeline that evening. Up until 5 p.m., Russ had been at his job as an I.T. specialist. Once he got off, he

called Betsy to check in. When was the last time you talked called Betsy to check in. on my way home. And she said no, that her friend was going to bring her home, that her friend Pam was going to come pick her up after running some errands. You know Pam's last name? Yeah, it's H-U-F-F. H-U-P-P. Police made a note of this woman, Pam

Hopp. She might have been the last person to have seen Betsy alive. She might know more about what her friend had done that day. What do you know about Pam, her friend? Is there anything that would be hinky about her? No, no. What do you think of her?

Would you consider her a friend of yours as well? Yeah, she's a good person. She's very friendly. It was no big deal for Pam to give his wife a ride home. On the phone, Betsy said she had something to talk to him about. I said, well, is it good or bad? And she says, well, it's good. Don't worry. And I said, okay, well, I'll see you at home later. I love you. And that was the last time I talked to her. He hung up the phone, ran a few errands. And I stopped at the gas station right before the highway.

I had gas in the truck. I got on the highway. I knew I had to get cigarettes because I was out of cigarettes. My dog was out of food. Called my mom on the way and said, you know, I have some errands to run before going over to my friend Mike's house. I'm not going to be over for dinner tonight, you know, so that she wouldn't expect me. Mike hosted game night every Tuesday, and Russ went every week. That night he got there around six and settled in with Mike and Mike's girlfriend and a couple of other friends.

Hey, what'd y'all do? We watched some movies. What movies did you watch? We watched Conan, the new Conan. And then we started watching this movie called The Road. The Road? Yeah. But it was boring. Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

Boring? Well, to each his own. Russ left about 9 p.m. Since he missed dinner with his mom and had smoked a little weed with his friends, he was hungry. So he stopped at Arby's. Okay, he went to Arby's around, I guess, a little after 9 o'clock. And after you got your sandwiches, where did you go? I came home.

What time did you get home? I'd say probably 9.45. Let's debrief. Russ and Betsy spoke on the phone about 5 p.m. Then he ran errands for the next hour, filled up his tank, picked up cigarettes, dog food, couple of iced teas. He got to Mike's house for game night about 6 p.m. Left at 9.

Stopped at Arby's. And drove 30 or so more minutes to get home. Clocking his arrival at 9.40, 9.45. According to official records, Russ made that 911 call at approximately 9.40 that night. So, his story checked out. But you could tell that something wasn't sitting right with detectives. Does anybody else besides you right now know that Betsy's gone? Did you call anybody else?

I called the police first. I called 911. And if this comes back that it's not a suicide, you don't have any idea who may have harmed Betsy? No. Everybody loved Betsy. She was a positive soul. She always brought smiles to people.

She made me smile all the time. She made me so proud. I was happy to have her in my life. I mean the hang up, and you probably know this as well as I do, is it's not typical for someone that's going to commit suicide to do it by the way that she done it. And that's what concerns us. While investigators interviewed Russ, they also sat down with friends and family and other witnesses.

Included in these interviews was Betsy's friend, Pam Hopupp, the woman who had given her a ride home that night. When the two police officers arrived, she had just woken up, taken a shower, blonde hair drying. She sat down. She seemed to be in total shock at the news of her friend's death, but kept it together enough to be helpful. That's fine. Hey, can you state your last name for us, please?

H-U-P-P. And your first name? Pam. Is it Pam, Pamela? Pamela. What you told us just a few minutes ago was that you've known Elizabeth 10 years you guys have been friends?

Probably 10 years, almost 11, yeah. She did my daughter's wedding. She's a DJ. We saw each other almost every day. Including the day she died. Here's the rest of what Pam told investigators about that fateful day. Pam visited with Betsy and a family friend named Bobby. Pam then left for home to have dinner with her husband.

But she promised to pick Betsy up from her mother's house later that evening. She was happy to drive the 30 minutes out of her way to give her friend a ride home. She said pick her up between 5 and 6 and she would be ready to go. She said she didn't have any more clothes or anything with her. She'd been here, I guess, all weekend or something at her mom's house.

At her mom's house. How come she was staying the weekend at her mom's house? A lot of it she didn't like to drive, and a lot of it she didn't like going home. Why didn't she like going home? A lot of it was her husband. They had been separated, gosh, six, seven times off through the years that I've known her. That wasn't good. That didn't look like a woman happy with her home life or her marriage.

This is the point at which police began hearing a very different version of Russ and Betsy's relationship. He's not the most... He's kind of not nice verbally to her, you know, so he makes us uncomfortable sometimes. Have you heard him not be nice to her verbally? Oh, yeah. But through the years, Pam said, she had heard enough about Russ to make her skeptical.

And because of all this, the investigators started raising an eyebrow. He makes comments about how much money he'll have after she's gone because he's got, this is what she said, I don't know for sure, I've never seen their financials, but he's got life insurance on her at work. She's got life insurance on her at work. She's got life insurance. Pam continued to give police all this new information. She even knew about the good news that Betsy had wanted to tell Russ. Turned out that Betsy had decided to propose that they move in with her relatives and rent out their home in Troy to save money. But Pam told the cops her friend was very nervous about how Russ would react.

And she goes, OK, well, I'll tell him. But I'm telling you right now, he's going to get very angry. So she had already approached him with the idea? She was going to approach him when he came home. And according to Pam, this wasn't the only time Betsy had felt anxious around her husband. Lately, she had grown scared of him. The last weekend she was with him, he'd start playing this game of putting a pillow over her face to see what it would feel like.

I don't know if she said, this is what it's going to feel like when you die or whatever, and then act like he was kidding. She was very upset. So she said he was actually putting a pillow over her face? Yeah. Did she sound scared? Oh, yeah. Very scared. While Pam was giving investigators intimate details

of Russ and Betsy's marriage, Russ was getting grilled by investigators. They asked, would he take a polygraph test? He said, sure. After it was over, they went over his results. All right. How do you think he did? Had to pass. Had to pass.

Okay. Well, remember whenever I was talking to you before the polygraph examination, I said, in order for you to pass this test, you're going to have to be 100% honest with me. Yes. You are not 100% honest with me. I do this for a living. You are not 100% honest with me. I don't want to drag this thing out forever.

Okay. The fact of the matter is, you stand better. No, I did not. I wasn't even there. And so this kind of verbal tennis match began. Russ, denied, denied, denied. Didn't change his story. And in return, the detectives pushed harder.

They brought up Betsy's news, how she'd wanted to rent their home and move in with family. She never mentioned that to me. Well, that was the news that she wanted to share with you when you got home. I never got a chance to hear it. The first time I heard about it was when you told me. Russ stayed surprisingly cool through all of this. But the cops kept pushing. They confronted him with Pam's pillow story.

How many times did we practice putting a pillow over her face and suffocating her and telling her, this is what it would feel like to die? How many times did it happen? Why would her friends tell the police that she had done that and that she was scared of me? She had no reason to be scared of me. She's never been scared of me. For 40 minutes, police tried to get Russ to confess.

You got home, you got in a fight, you pulled a knife and you stabbed your wife multiple times and killed her. No, I did not do this. It's what everything points to. I didn't do this. I'm telling you what happened. I didn't do it. I am telling you the truth. That story is not correct. I know what I know, and I know that I did not do this. I did not do it. We know how she died. I did not do this.

We know who did it. I did not do this. And that's the only thing that we've got to figure out is the why. I did not kill my wife. And finally, a detective revealed this one important piece of evidence. It was something none of them had brought up yet. It was the evidence that made investigators doubt Russ's suicide story. It was the evidence that made them treat this case as a murder from the very beginning.

You have been stabbed over 25 times. Oh, my God, no. Over 25 times. And they're not done yet. They're still counting. Oh, my God. A burglar doesn't do that, Russ. A stranger doesn't do that.

Somebody who loves that person does that. Somebody who goes in a blind rage does that. Terrible words. They're still counting. That would be the coroner, who by then had finished counting. Betsy had been stabbed 56 times. Many of them after she was already dead. Wounds all over her body. So how could Russ have possibly thought she killed herself when he found her? Police suspected he must have known that she

hadn't. I want a lawyer. I want a lawyer right now. I want a lawyer. Investigators let Russ go, but not for long. On January 4, 2012, eight days after Betsy Faria was found dead in her living room, Lincoln County law enforcement arrested Russ Faria and charged him with the murder of his wife. He maintained his innocence. When we started researching this case, it became clear to me that that 911 call was one of the main reasons why investigators zeroed in on Russ. The fact that he had said his wife killed herself

when she had 56 stab wounds and a knife sticking out of her neck. We heard that phone call and wondered how that could be. Actually, a slight digression, but an interesting story. When we first did a TV report on this case, and we've done four so far, we asked viewers to weigh in about that call.

Lots of viewers tweeted they thought Russ was faking his emotion and tears. Like here. Listen to this part of the tape. It's laying right next to her. It's in her neck. Okay. Oh, my God.

I wish he didn't. You hear that and you may think, he's too much, over the top. But we've been covering these stories a long time. And it's not always so clear cut. Kathy can explain. What's funny about 911 calls is you think, oh, you can tell if someone's being real or not. And he is like over the top sobbing.

And it sounds legitimate. I mean, but some people can fake that really well. I've had one story in particular where a young man was in bed with his fiance and his mom was visiting and staying in a bedroom across the hall. And somebody came into their house and got into the bedroom and shot the young man to death. And both his mom and the fiancé called

911. And they were so calm. And the mom called and she says, someone's been shot. And the 911 operator says, who? And she said, my son. And she had nothing to do with it. In fact, the fiancé also called and was very calm, but the police looked into them a little bit because they were just ridiculously calm. So you think, oh, I can tell someone who's real or not who's really telling the truth, and they call a 911 call. But both this woman about her son being murdered

and Russ calling about his wife had completely different reactions. And so what I've learned from that is you can't really tell. And Russ's lawyer, Joel, had a different interpretation of that call. Of course, he's biased. But when I asked him about it, he said two things stuck out to him the first time he heard it.

Number one, her wrist was slit deeply, and the knife was in her neck. Although there was 56 wounds, those were the only two visible to the naked eye of somebody walking in and looking at the woman. Her shirt, her pants covered every other stab wound. I think the person calling this in as a suicide is not somebody who committed the crime, but somebody who had no idea. The other reason is because, unfortunately, Betsy had been despondent in the past and had attempted suicide at least approximately two or three times. According to Joel, Betsy had once attempted to cut herself

with a knife and Russ intervened. Another time, she was stopped by a police officer on a bridge and checked herself into a psychiatric institution. So, as Joel viewed it, she'd tried to hurt herself a few times. And this is where the story gets complicated. Mainly, what was her reason for wanting to kill herself? Betsy was, from all accounts, a very happy, gregarious person, notwithstanding the diagnosis of cancer. Betsy Faria had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010. After a year, it went into remission, and she and Russ decided to invite friends on a celebration of life cruise. And then in 2011,

just before the cruise was to set sail, there was news, and it was bad. Betsy's cancer was back, and it was stage four. The doctor said she might have a few years, but that regardless, it was terminal. So did they cancel? Did they crawl into a hole? Did she simply wait to die? No. Betsy announced that the cruise was still on, just as planned. And they played and laughed as she swam with the dolphins. They made love. And then the couple and their friends left behind the sunsets and waves in Cozumel, Mexico, and came home to a colder, darker place. Betsy resumed her chemo treatments. Russ went back to work.

The snow fell, the holidays arrived, and then came the night that Russ turned the handle, put down the dog food, and took off his jacket. He couldn't fathom that somebody else would have done this to her because she was the type of person who simply didn't make enemies and have enemies. Everyone loved her. So the only viable option at that point in time, without thinking, was her wrist is slid, she's laying there on the floor.

She must have done this. To me, so much about the death of Betsy Faria seemed off. If you stop to think about it, Russ's motive was weak. Why would a husband kill his terminally ill wife for insurance money he was bound to get anyway? Was he impatient? Criminally impatient? Or was the truth hidden behind a smoke screen? Back then, we didn't know the half of it. Next time on The Thing About Pam.

The prosecution makes its case against Russ Faria. Meanwhile, Russ's attorney says there is another suspect, one close to the case. The Thing About Pam is brought to you by Dateline NBC. From Dateline NBC, Kathy Singer and Christine Fillmore are producers. Jackie Montalvo is the associate producer. Susan Nall oversees our digital programming. Adam Gorfain is our senior Thank you. Rab is the senior producer of podcasts. From Neon Hum Media, Mary Knopf is the producer. Natalie Wren is the associate producer. Catherine St. Louis is the editor. Jonathan Hirsch is the executive producer.

Sound design and mixing by Scott Somerville. Additional mixing by Meneka Wilhelm. Original music by Andrew E. Finn.