When Pamela Hupp is tried in 2016 murder, her lawyers don't want 2011 deadly stabbing mentioned
By Robert Patrick
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
ST. CHARLES COUNTY • Attorneys for Pamela Hupp, facing capital murder charges for fatally shooting a man in O’Fallon, Mo., in 2016, said that Hupp was never a suspect in the murder of her friend in 2011, and asked a judge to bar any mention of that crime.
In 68 pages of legal filings filed late last week, attorneys for Hupp predicted that the state would attempt to claim at Hupp’s June trial that a reinvestigation of the death of Elizabeth “Betsy” Faria led Hupp to fatally shoot Louis Gumpenberger more than four years later during what she said was a kidnapping attempt.
But lawyer Kim Freter wrote that no member of law enforcement contacted Hupp or intended to contact her to either re-interview her or tell her she was a suspect. She said despite that, prosecutors would try to establish that Hupp was a “person of bad character with the propensity to commit crimes, specifically the crime of murder.”
“Without intervention by this Court, the state will, at every opportunity, present its ‘Pamela murdered Elizabeth’ theory to the jury,” Freter wrote. Freter said that prosecutors “will never be able to provide” evidence that Hupp was a suspect in Faria’s death, or that there was even a re-investigation of the case. She said any claims otherwise would create “substantial and impermissible legal prejudice.”
Freter asked St. Charles County Circuit Judge Jon Cunningham to bar any mention of Faria’s death, the acquittal of her husband on a murder charge, the potential motive for Hupp of an insurance payout after Faria’s death or the fact that Hupp stabbed herself after her arrest on a murder charge in the death of Louis Gumpenberger in 2016.
In his own filing, Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Philip Groenweghe wrote that Hupp injected the Faria murder into the Gumpenberger case by trying to frame Faria’s husband, Russell Faria, for Gumpenberger’s death. She did that, they claim, by telling police that she was being kidnapped to get “Russ’ money” and via a kidnapping note she placed in Gumpenberger’s pocket referring to the case and the Farias.
Groenweghe said prosecutors are not claiming that Hupp murdered Betsy Faria. They say she could have been trying to frame Russell Faria because she was afraid of being falsely accused of the Betsy Faria murder or because she “genuinely believed that Russ Faria murdered her friend.”
Groenweghe said jurors would have to have at least a “rudimentary” knowledge of the Faria case to provide context to the note and Hupp’s kidnapping claim.
Hupp’s filings quote Groenweghe as saying during a bench conference in a hearing last month that “Pam Hupp stabbed herself in the neck as part of a suicide. That will be admissible in the trial and evidence of consciousness of guilt. We also think it should be admissible as evidence of consciousness of guilt as a way of her, even in her attempt at death, tying this to the Faria case.”
Betsy Faria was found by her husband with a knife in her neck after being stabbed dozens of times.
Russell Faria was convicted of his wife’s murder by a jury before that conviction was overturned, in part because his attorneys were unable to try and blame Hupp. He was acquitted by a judge in a retrial.
Hupp has denied any role in Faria’s death to both the Post-Dispatch and KTVI (Channel 2), which have jointly investigated Faria’s death since 2013.
Freter wrote that prosecutors would try and confuse jurors at her trial in believing that a not guilty verdict for Russell Faria was equal to a judicial finding that Hupp was guilty of that crime.
“The Faria evidence changes Pamela from a 60-year-old woman with no prior convictions who shot a man in her own home into a ‘serial killer’ responsible for two murders,” Freter wrote.
Freter also said that St. Charles County prosecutors have repeatedly been faulted by appeals courts for the erroneous admission of “unconstitutionally prejudicial propensity/character evidence through prior bad acts.”
The filings follow a hearing on the issue of the Faria evidence last month. Both sides will also have a week to respond to each other before Cunningham makes a decision.
Hupp shot Gumpenberger, 33, on Aug. 16, 2016, while on the phone with 911. Prosecutors claim she tried to lure two others to her home by posing as a producer for NBC’s “Dateline” seeking help in re-enacting a 911 call.
https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/...23b458b80.html
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