Dateline Originals - The Thing About Pam - Ep. 5: I'm a little Cold

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

A 911 call. An intruder killed. Or was it something more sinister?This episode was originally published on September 26, 2019. 

So this is the place, huh? This is. It's almost as hot as it was the day of, almost three years to the date. Investigator Brian Hilkey and I took a walk over to Pam's home in O'Fallon, Missouri. It was August 2019, three years after he got dragged into a whole new chapter of the Pam Hupp saga. It started with her call to 911. 911, where's your emergency? Hey, hello, there's someone breaking in my house. Help! Help! And ended with five gunshots and a dead man. When Hilkey got to the neighborhood that day, he told me...

All the neighbors were out, lots of cars, police cars. Pretty quickly, the media showed up. Top story, twisted new developments in a deadly shootout of O'Fallon, Missouri. We begin this first at four with breaking news. Jacob Long just finished questioning investigators at the O'Fallon Police Department. There was an intruder that then chased her into the house. She's infamous in the neighborhood. I would say it goes beyond that.

Did you know initially as you came up here who you were dealing with? Initially, when the call came in, it was reported as a Pam Huff. Huff? Huff. Fs? Yes.

So originally, there was no tie-in, no aha moment until we got here and somebody clarified that it was the Pam Hupp. The Pam Hupp. The Pam Hupp. Her name and circumstances surrounding her are pretty well known in this area. Pam had called a felon police that day for help. A violent intruder was in her home. As Brian Hilkey walked through the scene, though, red flags popped up right away. Entering through the garage,

there is a garage door that leads into the house. That's where the gentleman was that had been shot, laying right there. Once we were able to maneuver around him, there was a door to the bedroom, which is where Pam said that this gentleman was trying to force his way in. What was the first thing, aside from that body, that stuck out? There's obviously a couple things when you're surveying a scene that you're looking for that to see if it matches up with the initial statements, the 911 call. Obviously, we were looking for some sign of struggle, some type of forced entry. There was none of that. One of the other things that we found very peculiar was a swath of carpet that had been cut out

that was directly underneath the gentleman that had been shot, almost like it had been purposely placed there. That swath of carpet had protected Pan's good carpet underneath from the gruesome mess. Just a piece that had been cut out and laid there. And he was very conveniently lying on it. He was. Now that is strange.

A lot of strange things. Investigators in Lincoln County, where Betsy had died, had taken Pam at face value. But for investigator Hilke, that was becoming harder and harder by the minute. I knew at that point that it was going to be a media circus, that there was going to be a lot of scrutiny on the case, a lot of high profile people wanting to know what was going on. He had to move fast.

And I knew we had to do it right. So he got to work. I'm Keith Morrison. This is The Thing About Pam, a podcast from Dateline NBC. Okay, so, again, I appreciate you coming here. Not long after the shooting, Pam sat alone in an interrogation room. A camera was trained on her. She was sitting at a round table, wearing a navy blue shirt,

clean tennis shoes, neon laces. Her expression gave away nothing. Two investigators with O'Fallon Police entered the room. Pam looked unruffled, tidy even I don't know about Chris Hayes, but in incidents such as this... One investigator asked about her morning, and Pam's voice was almost breezy as she ran through her routine. I took care of my dog, fed him, walked him,

got in the shower, and headed out, and I had to get gas. Walked the dog, got gas, used her loyalty card for her daily soda. A real little one down the street where I go every morning to get my soda. You get one free after so many. She had just escaped a violent attack, shot the intruder five times. It had been one hell of a day. But Pam couldn't stop talking about all these errands she had run,

the soda she'd had to drink. It's unusual here, as I say, without some type of tactical training or military training or law enforcement training, is to fire and then approach the target. When you and your husband go out, does he, besides the shooting, do you guys work on tactical movements or something like that? We just shoot at the target on a tree. Her demeanor seemed odd to investigators Brian Hilkey and Larry McClain.

How would they have described her attitude? Lackadaisical. For someone who just shot someone, who just entered their home and tried to kidnap her, very casual. Here's what Pam said happened. When she met her attacker, she had just gotten home to let her dog out. Then she got in the car to head to Best Buy. And as I started pulling out, I noticed as I was backing up that a car came down really fast on the cross street and whipped around right in front of my driveway.

Happened so fast she was startled. Couldn't think of what it could be. And somebody jumped out and then he ran up. I was halfway out the driveway where I was parked and he jumped in my car. He opened up the door and jumped in my car. And he had a knife.

As this stranger forced his way into her car, he was yelling. You're going to take me to the bank and get Russ's money. Take me to the yelling. You're going to take me to the bank and get Russ's money. Take me to the bank. You're going to take me to the bank. Russ's money? Russ Faria? Apparently, this attacker wasn't alone.

He'd been dropped off. Kept looking over his shoulder at his accomplice. Not exactly subtle. And did Pam get a good look at the driver? Why, yes, she did. Dark hair was kind of like a buzz cut. And dark skin, like Hispanic, maybe something like that. Sounded a little like Russ Faria.

Was Pam suggesting Russ was the driver? Indeed she was. And this stranger just inches from her was still screaming. We're going to the bank. We're getting Russ's money. Take me to the bank. But before that could happen, Pam escaped, went inside her house. Where her attacker chased her. She ran into the bedroom, called 911.

The man tried breaking down her door, and she fired. And I just kept shooting him. And he just kept standing there. How many times did you say you pulled the trigger? I unloaded the whole gun. Her exact words is, I advanced on the man and fired until I heard click, click, click. Now that sounded like something a military veteran would say. Investigator Hilkey told me he immediately thought this sounded scripted. But he wanted to hear Pam connect the dots. So he asked, what was this demand about Russ's money?

Pam told investigators the back story, as if they didn't know, as if the whole neighborhood didn't know about the Pam Hupp. Pam had been the prosecution's key witness against Russ Faria, and now, apparently, Russ wanted his wife's insurance money. It sounded like a revenge plot. But was it? The police worked quickly

to nail down the facts in this case. They identified the dead man on the carpet using fingerprints. A man named Louis Gumpenberger, 33 years old, blue eyes, brown hair. But when investigators spoke to Louis's mother, she told them some important information about her son. The fact that not only did he not have the mental capacity to perform a ransom-kidnapping murder-for-hire, but he was also physically unable to do even basic things such as running.

It turned out Lewis had been in a terrible car accident years before, one that left him with severe brain damage and nerve damage in one arm. His disabilities made it very unlikely that he could have done what Pam claimed. The evidence did not suggest a violent break-in, as much as something far more twisted. The police and prosecutor gathered the media for a press conference to lay out their case. Good afternoon, everyone. On August 16th of this year, we're in about 1210 that date,

Louis Gumpenberger was shot and killed by Pamela Hupp while he was at her residence. The investigation began on that date. That very first day of the crime scene, investigators found the additional carpet, no signs of forced entry. But that wasn't all. $900 in cash was found in the dead man's pocket. Crime scene investigators took pictures of every one of those bills. And what would they show? Some bills in Lewis's pocket were sequentially matched to a $100 bill in Pam's bedroom. The bedroom he never made it into.

In fact, we checked with Secret Service, and they said that the chances of that happening in a vacuum, if you will, were astronomical. Right, astronomical. It turned out Gumpenberger's pocket was a treasure trove. He had a handwritten note on him, too. County Prosecutor Tim Lomar explained during the presser. In Gumpenberger's pocket appeared to be instructions for Gumpenberger to kidnap Hupp,

get Russ's money from Hupp at her bank, and then kill Hupp. It's not every day a murder plot is so neatly laid out. Most people prefer to cover their tracks. But apparently, Russ had hired a hitman for revenge who carried handwritten instructions to kidnap, steal, and kill. Okay. From the very beginning, nothing about this attempted break-in felt right. Starting with the 911 phone call. A man was charging at Pam, threatening to kill her. And her first word to the 911 operator is, A man was charging at Pam, threatening to kill her.

And her first word to the 911 operator is, Hey, that's right, hey, let's hear it again. Hey, hello, there's someone breaking in my house. Help! What's the address you're at? Hello? Will me and Stevie do you? Will me do your wife? No, I'm not getting in the car with you. No, get away. What's the address? Get out, get out. Get out. Get out.

Get out. It sounds like a bad play, a bad script. Help. Help. I have somebody right here. It just sounded like somebody stage acting poorly. Is he a white male, a black male? He's white.

He's white. Holy, holy, holy, holy, holy. Blackmail? He's calling! He's calling! He's calling! He's calling! He's calling! But the biggest red flag was the silence on the line before Pam spoke up. It's complete silence. If there was a complete struggle, we should have been able to hear all that. There's no sound, no communication until the operator says,

911, what's your emergency? And one of the big indications to me that it was staged was most people don't realize that before you get picked up by dispatch, your call is being recorded. When Pam first called, there were no sounds of struggle, no signs of violence, just a bad actor. But the investigation wouldn't be over until they solved one big mystery. What brought Lewis to Pam's house that day? Eventually, the police would have an answer for that, too. We'll soon tell you how the police connected Pam and Lewis. It's a story that's stranger than fiction.

But just to put your mind at ease about Russ, we're going to tell you right now. The police quickly ruled him out. Pam's story pointed directly at Russ again. But too many contradictory clues were left like catnip for police. And Russ, he wasn't about to take the fall. He went right over to the O'Fallon police to set the record straight. We were able to confirm his alibi.

He even voluntarily provided his cell phone to us. As well as a handwritten statement. But for what? That note in Lewis's pocket? It also mentioned his last name, Faria. So Russ needed to prove he couldn't have written that note, and he had to do it right in front of the police. An investigator gave Russ a clean white notepad. Russ held a pen, ready for instructions. Ready. Stevie, follow Hupp. The investigator read the note found at the crime scene. New line, a little brave.

Then Russ wrote it out word for word. Blonde, older, and short. And then skip two lines. Get Hupp in car, in garage. For the record, Russ had already told the police he didn't know of anybody who went by the name Stevie. The investigator tore off the writing sample from the white pad, and then they started again. 180,000. 180, next line. Stevie, follow up. 180,000. 180, next line.

Stevie, follow up. Over and over. New line. 6-0-1-2-9. Russ wrote the note more than half a dozen times. You can skip two lines. Older. Long.

Next line. Little frame. Two. Short. Bank. Blonde. Next line. Little three. Two. Short. Next line. Over. 100. Set.

180. Blonde. Next line. As the minutes passed, his hand began to tire. People don't write like that anymore. Once he was finished, police were able to confirm what Russ knew all along. So we did actually eventually send that letter off to a handwriting specialist, and he, after his analysis, stated that note that was found in Mr. Gumpenberger's pocket was not Russ Reyes.

He'd been clearing his name, not just for the better part of an hour, but for several years at this point. So how did Russ, a recently freed man, feel about being twice targeted, twice, by Pamela Hupp? Creates a lot of anxiety and nervousness. Sometimes you don't even know what to think or feel. This man had more patience than anyone should be expected to have. Ross went home. He hadn't hired a hitman, and he hadn't put Lewis in the line of fire. But the question was,

how on earth did Lewis meet his killer? Well, to piece this together, we have to go back to Pam's interview with the police just after she shot Lewis. When I spoke with McClain and Hilkey, they told me she had made a crucial error at the end of the meeting. Detective Larry McClain explained. Before she left, she mentioned she called 911 from her cell phone, that her cell phone was in her hand, and the detective asked for her permission to search that phone. Right. And she gave it? And she gave it. And I immediately took it to our cybercrime lab, where I was stationed, and began to process that piece of evidence.

A little gold mine there, huh? It was way more than just a little gold mine. The phone was synced to a Google Gmail account, and its location services history was enabled. Yes, you heard that right. Her entire location history had been on. But Pam had already accounted for this, right? She told them in her interview that she'd been out and about running errands all day.

But Brian Hilkey had another theory. She was trying to establish her alibi that if for whatever reason we were able to locate her cell phone hitting off a cell tower in the area of our victim, she would have an alibi as to why she was there. What she didn't expect was what Larry found. And this is where things get really good. All right. What did you find? So I could see the location history and I could see her traveling. The information is extracted from the phone

is broad strokes. So I immediately did an emergency search warrant to Google for their records. And we got that information back fairly rapidly. It turned out Pam had been driving all through low-income neighborhoods like Lewis's for days, for weeks, searching for a target. So you were able to actually draw a map of where she went?

Not only the day of the murder, but days prior. That was one of those moments that I will, if I look back on my entire law enforcement career, that is probably one of my most profound moments. When the search warrant material came back, I'm sitting in this lab, I'm in a dark room surrounded by screens, and it looks like the Starship Enterprise Command Center,

and I get the data, and I pull it into Google Earth to plot it. Yeah. And Google Earth has this great feature where you see the entire globe and then it opens up and expands. But when it first happens, I just see the pins for the entire day. So it's a little bit of noise. And then I scroll in and I scroll in and I can see when she left the house, I can see everywhere she went. And as I scroll in and scroll in, and I can see when she left the house, I can see everywhere she went.

And as I scroll in and scroll in, I stopped. There's a pin on his apartment complex. Louis Gumpenberger's apartment complex. Bingo. How long was she there? Approximately three to five minutes. And then immediately the location history goes from there right back to the house. Pam's house.

But did McLean and Hilkey stop there? No, they didn't. They took her location information one step further. So what we did was, everywhere that we could plot she had been, Brian sent out teams. We just flooded the entire route for any possible camera footage. And if Google said she was there and there was a camera, she was there. That's right.

Everywhere Pam's phone showed she'd been, they checked for a security camera. They got a lot of videotape of her. But there was one shot in particular of Pam and Lewis that stuck with Detective McClain. Right before her neighborhood is a bakery. And I had a piece of location information that showed she was in front of that bakery. She had hit a data source. And they had video. And we have that video. And in the passenger seat of the vehicle, it's almost a ghost.

You see the victim going to his death. I believe. I think it was when Tim Lomar watched that video. Lomar, the county prosecutor. And we all agreed, that's Louis Gumpenberger. And that's when the decision was made to go arrest Pam Hunt. That seemed to be about the end of it for the investigators, right? Not quite.

Because even though connecting Pam with Louis might have been enough to arrest her, there was still a gap in the story. Why did Lewis get in her car? What could possibly have been the lure? We would soon discover that less than a week before Pam had gotten Lewis into her car, she had targeted other victims. Only those attempts failed. They did, however, help police fill in the gaps.

One of those people in particular had quite a story to share. Detectives got a tip that maybe they should give her a call. Her name was Carol Alford. It crossed my mind. I get a phone call from a detective from the St. Charles County Detectives Bureau. You know, he's like, can I talk to Carol Alford? And I'm like, you are?

He told me, I was like, can I help you? Carol, she's as sharp as a tack. Doesn't trust anybody she doesn't know. So she said... Care to tell me what this is about? Like we said, trust no one. But she did head down to the station, where police told her they needed to know

everything that happened at her house on August 10th. I'm talking about the only weird thing that has happened in my house lately is this crazy broad that come by a couple weeks ago. And they're like, well, tell me about the crazy broad. It was her Wednesday. She was at home when she let her dog, a friendly beagle, go out to the bathroom. A woman drove by in a black SUV as Carol leaned against a banister on her front porch. The driver waved and drove past. And before long, the woman was back. She was short, chunky. She was actually wearing a scrub top, if I remember correctly.

It was blue. Short, blonde hair. The look on her face, she had a permanent, like, grin, smile. Like, it was just weird. Weirder, she wasn't going anywhere. She just sat there, idling. My dog, she's never growled in her life. She's growling.

She's going crazy. So I walked down there. I was like, can I help you? You're kind of making my dog nuts. And she just kind of looked at me. And I'm like, she asked never growled in her life. She's growling, she's going crazy. So I walked down there and was like, can I help you? You're kind of making my dog nuts. And she just kind of looked at me and like, she asked me the weirdest thing, do you babysit? First thing I thought was, who asks a stranger, especially in a trailer park, if they babysit?

Carol's suspicions were on high alert. But Carol was curious too. So she heard the crazy broad out. So then she starts in with her whole, do you know what a soundbite is? So my response was, yeah, I know what a soundbite is. I'm not a moron just because I live in a trailer park. I was like, okay, where is she going with this? Turned out where she was going was unexpected.

She said that she was a producer from Dateline. Her name was Kathy. A producer from Dateline. Her name was Kathy. A producer from Dateline? Kathy? Her story went on. Said they were reenacting 911 calls. Said that Dateline had rented a trailer in the park. So I was like, okay, you're up to something.

And she's like, we'll give you $1,000 up front to help us and $1,000 when you're done. And I'm like, mm-hmm. Like we said, trust no one. By the way, Dateline doesn't pay for interviews. And we definitely don't make 911 call reenactments. We just don't do that kind of thing. Well, I knew she was lying. But I was still curious as to what she was up to.

So Carol let the lady's scheme play out a little more. But before she got in the car, she had this so-called Dateline producer pull into her driveway where she had security cameras. The cameras caught

the woman's license plate. Carol brought her dog inside, where she put a pocket knife up one sleeve of her sweatshirt. In her front pocket, she had her cell phone and a kitchen knife. Carol got in the car, but when she asked the woman for an ID, the woman replied she would show her once they were at the house, a house near the mall, not the trailer home she originally mentioned. That's when I was like, okay, I probably ought to get out of this car.

Carol convinced the woman to drive her back home, said she forgot to lock the front door. The lady said, fine, as long as it was quick. Once she got inside, though, she called the cops. She explained the whole story. During their interview with Carol, detectives had her look at six pictures to see if she could ID the woman. So we went through him the first time, and I'm like, okay, go through him a second time. And as he passed her the second time, I was like, wait a minute. And I grabbed the paper, and he snatches it away from me.

He's like, if you want to see it again, we've got to start all over. I was like, okay, flips them again. I was like, that's her. She'd been following the news. The woman I just picked out is that lady that killed that guy, isn't it? Detective looks at me, he's like, shut up and get in the car. Had things gone a little differently, Carol could have been Louis. If I was buying her BS, I'd be dead. But wait.

Pam didn't just tell Carol she was a Dateline producer. She made it personal. She told her she was Kathy, my colleague, our producer in Chicago. That got us thinking. Remember when Pam was leaving her civil trial? She looked straight into the camera and said... Say hi to Kathy. Our work had shed light on Pam's, let's call them, inconsistencies. So, yeah, Pam's greeting was strange.

But it didn't really hit home for us until the day the St. Charles County prosecutor held his press conference. I was told by someone, you must watch the press conference. You're going to be blown away. That was an understatement. Everything that the police chief and the prosecutor had to say was incredible to me. Every detail elicited a, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, for me. I mean elicited a, oh, my gosh, oh, my gosh, for me. I mean, it was just like, oh, my gosh, oh, my gosh. About eight minutes in, the prosecutor says, and we have reason to believe that Pam posed as a Dateline producer

to entice this guy into her car. And this bad scheme? Pam must have been thinking about it for quite some time. It was so intentional. She just knew me. She knew other people might know that I'd been covering the case for a number of years at that point. I think she was just thinking, how can I come up with a plot, some way to get Russ Freya again and throw the heat off myself. She was conniving and she put this together in a quote-unquote thoughtful way. My producer Christine thought so too. At this point, we had already aired two reports on the Betsy Freya case and we're getting ready

to air a third report. And each time we had asked Pam Hupp to sit down for an interview with us, so she knew we were working on these stories. And so it seemed strange that she was so friendly and, you know, wanted me to send Kathy her regards. It seemed Pam wanted to insert herself right into people's lives, get control that way. Was that the thing about Pam? You know, Kathy would ask her for things like,

would you be able to give us a photograph? She always responded and wanted to sort of keep the conversation going. She just felt like she wanted to have some control over where things were and know what we were doing. I think she was kind of fascinated and maybe playing a little bit of a cat and mouse game with us. For all of us, becoming part of the story is something we try to avoid. Throughout my years covering these cases, criminals try to impersonate others. They pretend to be cops and firefighters.

They use false identities on the Internet. They pretend to be all kinds of things. The more credibility the false persona has, the more the unwitting victim is apt to trust them. But when this happened, this Kathy thing, well, I was pretty shocked. Everybody was. I've never been involved in a case where the person who was involved in essentially framing someone for murder

went on to do more, like test the boundaries, see if they could get away with more. I've never met anybody like that. And for the record, Kathy wasn't all that impressed with her impersonator. Pam thinks she's smarter than everybody, but the prosecutor said that this scheme was no better than a middle schooler could come up with. No offense to middle schoolers out there. No offense indeed. So what about Pam? How did the rest of her middle school scheme play out?

Well, let me tell you. It was Betsy's murder that set off a series of ripples. But it would be Lewis's that sent Pam Hupp to prison. Now that police had a mountain of evidence suggesting Pam had murdered Lewis, they were ready to act. Two of my former detectives who were promoted to sergeant actually made the physical arrest. Myself and another detective were the backup, and we were the ones that actually transported her to the station.

Now that Pam had been caught, I wanted to know, how was she in the car? Cold. Calm? Odd. Well, unless you're Pam. We were explaining to her what was transpiring, that you're being arrested for murder, we have a mountain of evidence, and you're not getting away with this. After that, Pam had one thing left to say. Her only statement to me was, I'm a little cold. Could you turn down the AC?

I'm a little cold? That's certainly one way to describe it. Next time on The Thing About Pam. Will Pam's arrest mean that cops would take a second look at her past? Not just Betsy's murder, but another time she profited after a loved one died. You have one person who was either the last person to see three people alive or the next to the last person. And it's extraordinary. 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 Corfane is our senior broadcast producer.

Liz Cole is our executive producer. David Corvo is our senior executive producer. At NBC News, Steve Lichtai is the executive producer of podcasts and Barbara Rabb 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 Eapin. Additional production support from Tanner Robbins,

Natalie Bader, and Betty Marquez Rosales.