The Thing about Pam, episode 6: "She's a Killer!" (Big Picture Company, Blumhouse Television, NBC News Division, NBC-TV, aired April 12, 2022)

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

My husband Charles came home from work at 9:15 a.m. and I put on the final episode of the six-part NBC-TV miniseries The Thing About Pam at 10 p.m., which Charles joined me for most of the show. The Thing About Pam, episode six, “She’s a Killer!,” dramatizes the crime that finally brought down Pam Hupp (Renée Zellweger) after she had escaped justice for allegedly murdering her mother, Shirley Neumann (Celia Weston), for the money she could get from her insurance, as well as allegedly murdering Betsy Faria (Katy Mixon) for her insurance money just after Pam got Betsy to make over her life insurance policy so Pam, not Betsy’s husband Russ Faria (Glenn Fleshler), would be the beneficiary. Since Betsy had already been diagnosed with terminal cancer – indeed, Pam and Betsy met when Pam offered to be Betsy’s caregiver, since she’d already had caregiving experience with her mom (and her mom is show as such a handful to take care of, really the bossy home-care client from hell, we’re not as shocked as we should have been that Pam finally has enough and … well, Shirley fell off her apartment balcony ahd the police ruled it an accident, but we suspect that Pam pushed her off) – and it seems like it would have made more sense for Oam just to wait until Betsy expired normally. But throughout the series one aspect of Pam’s personality that has remained unchanged is her impatience, her unwillingness to wait. If she wants something, she wants it right now.

At the start of episode six, Pam concocts a hideous plan to get herself back in the good graces of the townspeople, who originally supported her but have since turned against her after a series of shows on the NBC-TV true-crime series Dateline NBC. which suggested that though Russ Faria had been convicted of murdering Betsy (largely on the basis of Pam’s perjured testimony) and had already served three years in prison for the crime, Russ was innocent and the real killer was someone with the most money to gain from Betsy’s death: Pam Hupp. At the start of this episode Pam is driving around the neighborhoods in the Missouri small town where all this took place when she accosts a woman neighbor and makes her a preposterous offer: she poses as “Kathy,” a reporter for Dateline NBC, and offers her $1,000 if she will recite the line that “we” will go back and finish what they started, including stealing all Russ’s money and blowing the insurance company money, which Pam told Betsy’s daughters Mariah [Gideon Adlpn] and Lily [Olivia Luccardi] Day (they were Betsy’s daughters by her previous husband, not Russ) she was going to put into a trust fund for them but she really stole the money for herself. Pam had worked out a scheme by which she will trick an innocent bystander to come home with her, speak the line as she calls 911 and then she will use a gun to kill her patsy and claim she did it in self-defense. Only the woman gets suspicious and demands that Pam let her out of her car and drive her home, so Pam next picks up a young man, Louis Gumpenberger (Jeff Ryan Baker), to be her substitute fall guy.

What she doesn’t realize is that Louis has been “slow” ever since his recovery from a near-fatal car accident in 2005. He can barely get the line out that Pam wants him to say, and he also can’t move fast enough to have threatened Pam the way she says he did. But she goes ahead and kills him anyway, then plants $900 and a note on his body; the note is supposedly from Russ and is meant to establish a conspiracy between Russ and Louis to kidnap Pam and steal back the money Pam cheated Russ out of. At first the police investigating Louis’ murder get Pam’s last name wrong as “Huff” instead of “Hupp,” but eventually they realize that the woman they have in custody is the notorious Pam Hupp, already under investigation by newly elected district attorney Mike Wood (Dane Davenport) for the Betsy Faria murder after Russ’s attorney, Joel Schwartz (Josh Duhamel, the only cast member besides Zellweger I’d heard of before), got him a retrial and won his exoneration. By then Russ had relocated to Florida and the last thing he wants to do is return to Missouri to face legal process that can either prove him guilty or free him again, but he accepts Joel’s advice even though, as Russ bitterly reminds Joel, “The last time you told me to trust the process, I ended up spending three years in jail.” Wood defeated Leah Askey (Judy Greer) for re-election, and the main argument against her was that she had railroaded Russ Faria for his wife’s murder and failed to investigate Pam as a suspect.

On the advice of her counsel, Pam enters a so-called “Alford plea,” after the 1970 U.S. Supreme Court case North Carolina v. Alford. It’s essentially a piece of legal legerdemain that allows a defendant to concede that enough evidence exists to convict him or her of the crime, while still officially maintaining his or her innocence; and as in both Alford’s and Hupp’s cases, it’s a tool used by a defendant who wants to get life imprisonment instead of the death penalty. Louis Gumpenberger’s family members are upset that with Pam’s Alford plea, there will no longer be a jury trial that will establish Pam’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The episode peters out once Pam is remanded into custody and starts serving her sentence, though there is a where-are-they-now sequence in which Russ Faria is depicted as being engaged to a woman named Carol Alford (Kerry Cahill) – ironically – while his stepdaughter Mariah is expecting her second child. (We haven’t seen her with either a husband, boyfriend or first child.)

To my mind, the most sympathetic character in this episode was Pam’s long-suffering husband, Mark Hupp (Sean Bridgers), who as this show closes we can see him reach his limit as Pam comes home from police interrogation and he’s clearly asking himself, “What the hell trouble has she got us into now?” Mark Hupp filed for divorce in September 2020 but did not actually win his freedom from her until March 2022. Both the show and Pam Hupp’s Wikipedia page depict her suicide attempt in jail after she was arrested for Gumpenberger’s murder – she smuggled a ballpoint pen into the jail restroom and repeatedly stabbed herself with it, in what real-life assistant prosecutor Phil Groenweghe said showed her "consciousness of guilt." Pam Hupp, already serving a sentence of life without parole at the Chillicothe Correctional Center, a women’s prison in Missouri, was supposed to go to court again for Betsy Faria’s murder, but the preliminary hearing, scheduled for February 2022, was put on hold following the death (from a heart attack) of Pam’s public defender. And Dateline NBC, which did so much to expose Pam Hupp as a cornpone psychopath, is planning to do a rehash of the entire case this Friday with the real people involved (the living ones, anyway). In a weird way, this has truly become The Case That Wouldn’t Die!