Dateline NBC: "The Real Thing about Pam" (NBC-TV, aired April 15, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 I watched a two-hour Dateline NBC special called “The Real Thing about Pam” – the “Pam” in question being Pamela Hupp, whom NBC has been milking as a cash cow since 2014. That’s when Dateline did their first show about her, while Russ Faria was still in prison for murdering his wife Betsy, a terminally ill cancer patient who was stabbed over 50 times. At first Russ saw only the knife sticking out of her neck, presumed she’d committed suicide, and called that in to 911 – only when police recovered the body and found over 20 stab wounds all over it (there were actually more, but some of them weren’t discovered until a medical examiner did an autopsy), they immediately fastened on Russ Faria as a suspect and wouldn’t let go of him. In fact, prosecuting attorney Leah Askey (who’s now been married again and goes by the name of her second husband, Leah Cnaney) gave an interview to Dateline in which she said she is still convinced Russ Faria killed his wife even though he was exonerated in a retrial (a so-called “bench trial” before a judge, not a jury) and that Pam Hupp, the principal witness against him in his first trial even though neither Askey nor Russ’s incredibly dedicated defense attorney, Joel Schwartz (who was also interviewed for this show), called her as a witness in the retrial.

Eventually Pam Hupp’s story became the focus of five Dateline episodes between 2014 and 2019, the initial sequence of the Dateline podcast, and ultimately a six-episode mini-series (of which I saw episodes three through six) starring Renée Zellweger as Pam Hupp and Josh Duhamel as Joel Schwartz. (Those were the only two actors in the cast I’d heard of before, though to my mind the best performances were by Zellweger and Judy Greer as Askey.) The Real Thing about Pam focused on the bizarre ins and outs of the case against her and hit the main points of the case I had previously seen in the dramatization. These included claims that the photos taken of the crime scene after police detectives sprayed the area with Luminol, a chemical that reacts and lights up when it touches blood (it’s routinely used in police investigations today because it can be used to reveal blood even after someone tried to clean them up) were unavailable due to “a camera malfunction,” when in fact they turned up later and were leaked to Joel Schwartz. They revealed absolutely nothing – no trace of the blood that would have been there if Betsy Faria had been killed in Russ Faria’s home or on his clothes – though Leah Askey seriously suggested that the reason there wasn’t any evidence of blood on Russ’s clothes is because he had stripped naked before he killed her. She also rejected Russ’s alibi that he had been out at a weekly “game night” with four of hier (male) best friends by saying they had conspired with him to cover up the crime and lie that he had been elsewhere that night. Eventually Pam’s case unraveled after Askey lost her re-election bid to Mike Wood, who promised during his campaign that he would reopen the investigqation of Betsy Faria’s murder with Pam Hupp as his prime suspect. Between that and the Dateline NBC shows openly questioning Russ’s guilt and strongly suggesting that Pam killed her (four days after Betsy made over her life insurance policy to make Pam rather than Russ the beneficiary), and his ultimate exoneration in his retrial, Pam concocted a new scheme to make Russ appear guilty after all. This involved picking a random person off the street and posing as Dateline producer Kathy Singer to record a voice-over line for which Pam as “Kathy” would pay $1,000 in cash. (Keith Morrison, the real announcer for Dateline NBC who appeared in that role on the dramatization as well, assured viewers of both this wrap-up program and the mini-series that Dateline NBC never pays people for interviews or recorded voice-overs.) The first person she tried to recruit was a woman, Carol McAfee, who by sheer bizarre coincidence ended up meeting, falling in love with and ultimately being engaged to Russ Faria. (That sounds almost as preposterous as the revelation in the documentary included as a bonus item on the DVD release of the film The Conspirator, about the conspiracy to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln, that his killer, John Wilkes Booth, had previously acted alongside his brothers Edwin and Junius Booth in a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. No producer getting a script about the Lincoln assassination would have included that scene – it would have been unbelievable that one of the most famous political assassins in history acted in a play about another of the most famous political assassinations in history – and yet it happened and we have a photographic postcard of all three Booth brothers promoting the play to prove it.)

The next person she picked was a young man named Louis Gumpenberger, who in 2005 – 12 years before Pam Hupp picked him for her scheme – had been in a car accident that had damaged his brain and slowed his physical movements to the point where he could barely get out the line Pam wanted him to say. The point was that she was going to make it look like Russ Faria had hired him to steal back the $150,000 in life insurance. Pam forged a note ostensibly from Russ to Gumpenberger making that claim, and she would kill Gumpenberger and claim self-defenswe. Only the police had no particular trouble figuring out that the “note” was actually written by Pam and Gumpenberger could not have threatened Pam in any way because he was physically incapable of running around her house and moving as quickly as she said he had. Eventually Pam took a so-called “Alford plea” of guilty to the Gumpenberger killing so she would get life imprisonment instead of the automatic death penalty that a first-degree murder conviction then carried in her state, Missouri, a bit of legal legerdemain that allowed Pam to claim innocence even while avoiding the trial and near-certain conviction and execution if she had gone to trial. It’s easy to see why the Dateline producers were so fascinated with Pam Hupp – and why their audiences have been equally fascinated for eight years now – because Pam is one of those people who is clearly sociopathic and yet she was able to present herself as “just plain folks” and affect a surface of normality that fooled everybody for years – and one can readily see why Renée Zellweger wanted to play her in the mini-series even though Zellweger, by comparison to the real Pam we see in police footage and other interviews on this show, way overdid the Southern accent and exaggerated the already larger-than-life actions and gestures of the real Pam Hupp.