People USA — August 21, 2017

Police say Pamela Hupp

collected $150,000 after her

friend’s death, then killed a man

to frame another for the murder.

Now they’re asking if she’s

killed beforeByJEFF TRUESDELL

DEADLY DECEIT

SERIAL

KILLER

FOR CASH?

P

amela Hupp seemed to be having a

run of particularly tragic bad luck.

Her friend Elizabeth “Betsy” Faria,

42, was murdered in December 2011,

fatally stabbed in her Lincoln County,

Mo., home. Next, Hupp’s 77-year-old

mother, Shirley Neumann—whom

Hupp had just visited—died falling

off her third-floor balcony in 2013 in

what was then deemed a tragic acci-

dent. And then on Aug. 16, 2016, Hupp

called 911 to say she had been accosted

in her O’Fallon, Mo., driveway by a man who put

a knife to her throat and demanded she drive him

to the bank. But after shots rang out on the call,

responding officers found Louis Gumpenberger,

33, a disabled man with a traumatic brain injury,

fatally shot—and Hupp’s story full of holes. “I was

heartbroken for his family,” says Julie Swaney, Bet-

sy’s sister. “I knew exactly what they were going to

be going through, because we had gone through it.”

Authorities are now looking into suspicions that

Hupp’s connection to three dead victims could

be less of a sad coincidence and more of a tangled

web of deceit and murder, with money as the mo-

tive. Hupp, 58, was arrested on Aug. 23, 2016, and

charged with first-degree murder in the death of

Gumpenberger. She remains in jail on $2 million

bond and has pleaded not guilty. “Ms. Hupp has

been the subject of a local barrage of innuendo,”

says her attorney Nicholas Williams.

But police say the truth is far more complicated.

They allege Hupp killed Gumpenberger in a plot

to frame Russell Faria, the husband of her mur-

dered friend Betsy. Russell had been convicted of

his wife’s murder in 2013—at a trial in which Hupp

THREE

LIVES LOST

The deaths

of Hupp’s

mom, Shirley

Neumann,

friend Betsy

Faria and Louis

Gumpenberger

remain under

review.

‘SHE

EXHIBITED

A CALLOUS

DISREGARD

FOR HUMAN

LIFE’

—PROSECUTOR

TIM LOHMAR

85

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: ST. CHARLES COUNTY PROSECUTOR’S OFFICE; KTVI; LINCOLN COUNTY PROSECUTOR’S OFFICE; KTVI(2)NEUMANN FARIA GUMPENBERGER