'I knew what she was capable of': Joel Schwartz on the evil of Pam Hupp
Ten years ago, when St. Louis defense attorney Joel Schwartz agreed to represent a man accused of killing his wife, he thought it was an open-and-shut case.
“The truth of the matter is I thought this case would be out of my life in about a month, maybe two months, because the evidence was simply so overwhelming,” he explained on Wednesday’s St. Louis on the Air. “Not that he was not guilty, or not that they couldn't prove it, but simply that he was innocent and could not possibly have committed this heinous act.”
Instead, Schwartz’s involvement with Russ Faria and the murder of his wife, Betsy, has been a constant in his life for a decade — and that’s thanks to Pam Hupp. A suburban mom with frumpy clothes and a reputation as the neighborhood “buttinski,” Hupp got herself named the beneficiary on one of Betsy Faria’s life insurance policies. And then, prosecutors now say, she killed Betsy and clumsily framed Betsy’s husband. It would take Hupp being implicated in two more deaths — one in which she was also the insurance beneficiary — for her to be arrested.
In his book “Bone Deep: Untangling the Betsy Faria Murder Case,” Schwartz details his attempt to exonerate Russ Faria and bring attention to Hupp. Co-authored by veteran true-crime author Charles Bosworth Jr., the book chronicles Schwartz’s frustration with members of Major Case Squad of Greater St. Louis as well as the judge in Russ Faria’s first trial, who refused to allow any evidence of Hupp’s insurance windfall, despite a mountain of legal precedent to the contrary.
https://news.stlpublicradio.org/show/st-louis-on-the-air/2022-02-23/i-knew-what-she-was-capable-of-joel-schwartz-on-the-evil-of-pam-hupp