Original subtitles

Harlan, over here.

Ladies and gentlemen, Harlan Coben.

He's the greatest thriller writer.

Oh, come on.

Coben's written over 30 "New York Times" bestsellers.

With over a dozen hit TV shows and movies.

Just when you think you have it all figured out,

think again.

I'm Harlan Coben.

My favorite stories start in neighborhoods

that look perfectly unremarkable...

a cul-de-sac, a backyard barbecue,

a basketball hoop in the driveway.

Troy, Missouri, is that kind of town.

Houses huddle close together.

Neighbors who don't just wave, they watch,

and they know your name.

It's the kind of ordinary that feels smug,

like nothing could possibly find its way here.

That's why Betsy Faria's case is so compelling.

We tell ourselves violence happens somewhere else,

to someone else.

But we all know that's not the case.

Hang with us until the very end.

There's a final twist you'll never see coming.

But first, let's go back to where our mystery begins.

Betsy was a very vibrant person.

Everybody loved Betsy.

My first impression of Russ, he was like a big kid.

So when Russ first met Betsy,

I knew that she was the one.

They had their ups and downs,

but we never thought something bad would happen.

The first officer responded and said,

"This is not a suicide."

She had multiple stab wounds.

If you stab somebody that many times,

usually it's someone who is psychotic.

Russ can be kind of rough around the edges.

The shocking verdict in the case against

a man prosecutors say stabbed his wife 55 times.

Once I met Russ, it was blatantly obvious.

Russ has an ironclad alibi.

Follow the facts, follow the evidence.

For Russ to have committed it,

he would have had to have time to clean up.

A Lincoln County murder case so unbelievable,

it keeps unraveling.

Detectives found out that Betsy,

she was going to change her life insurance policy,

and that threw him into a rage.

This person has done things out of the ordinary,

has lied through every investigation, every interview.

There's crazy cases out there,

but this case, there's no other case like it.

A crime happened here.

The past isn't what it seemed.

The story told turns out to be deception.

And just when you're sure you have the answer...

911, what is the address of your emergency?

Hello? Anyone there?

There's one final twist.

Betsy was... she was just a bubbly personality.

She was the one that was the life of the party.

I met Betsy at church.

She was a funny, funny girl.

Had a really good sense of humor, loved to laugh.

Always looking for some type of an adventure to do with Russ.

Russ is a big guy, but he's... he's a teddy bear.

With Betsy, he found happiness.

They were right for each other.

We got married in January of 2000.

She had two children, two daughters

from a previous relationship.

I helped raise them just like they were mine.

At that time, we had moved to Troy.

We're starting a new life in a new town,

and we were kind of looking forward to all of that.

Then she was diagnosed with breast cancer,

and that was just a really big punch in the gut.

Betsy had a lot of people that would take her

to her chemo treatments.

She didn't want Russ to be alone.

But then the doctor let us know that

the breast cancer had spread to her liver,

that it was inoperable.

She had three to five years.

Normally, on Tuesdays,

when I got off of work,

I would come from Troy down to St. Charles

to play role-playing games with several friends of mine.

On that particular night,

we decided to watch a movie or two.

It was around 9:00 when I left there.

I arrived home right around...

had to have been around 9:30 or so.

You know, all the lights were on in the house.

So when I came in the door,

I was calling for Betsy.

Didn't hear her calling back to me.

And as I cleared the stairwell

is when I saw her on the floor.

She wasn't moving at all.

I knew she was gone.

Seeing the slashes on her wrists,

I immediately jump to the conclusion

that she had committed suicide.

Betsy did struggle with depression.

Betsy had attempted suicide before.

The day that we were at the... at chemo,

she talked about death.

We were doing really well.

Why would she choose to...

to leave this world in such a way?

EMS walked Russ outside,

tried to calm him

and talk to him while the police showed up.

When Russ finds Betsy,

she is wrapped in a blanket,

laying on her side.

One arm's kind of splayed out in front of her,

on the floor of the house,

with her back towards the door.

She has a giant cut in her arm.

She has dozens of stab wounds to her body,

and she has a knife sticking out of her neck.

Investigators ruled out suicide.

It immediately became a crime scene.

Most of the stab wounds were conducted

after she had already died.

She had multiple, multiple stab wounds.

That does tend to indicate

that it's someone who is very passionate,

that has an emotional connection to the victim.

It's a natural inclination.

If the wife has been killed, it's... you know,

you look at the husband.

All right.

Detectives had asked, would you mind

coming down to the police station tonight

and answering some questions and making a statement?

They took a DNA sample from Russ.

They took Russ's fingerprints.

They looked under Russ's nails.

They did everything that they should have

to a suspect in a homicide.

We want to know, what did Russ do

from basically the time he woke up

to the time he called 911?

If someone's telling the truth,

we should be able to verify

where they're at, what they did.

If they're lying, we should be able

to poke holes in those timelines.

They were questioning him for hours.

And that's when the insurance came up.

Russell was the beneficiary of Betsy's life insurance.

Betsy had a $150,000 insurance policy.

That was the basis of this whole thing starting off.

He's saying that he didn't do it.

Well, let's take a polygraph and see if we can clear him.

They start asking you,

did you have anything to do with your wife's murder?

Did you murder your wife?

Russ failed the polygraph.

I write about liars for a living.

Spotting those lies?

That's the job.

That's the chase.

That's what my characters do

and what investigators in real life do too.

So when detectives question Russ Faria,

it isn't small talk.

They're poking and prodding in a quest for one thing...

the truth.

The problem is, the truth doesn't always cooperate.

It hides.

It waits.

And sometimes, it sits right in front of you

and still refuses to speak.

The police, they said Russ failed the polygraph.

Since there was no evidence that he was involved,

there was no charges issued.

Right after the murder,

the police went through any potential motive.

Everyone is saying it was generally a happy marriage,

but then allegations came out

about some of the issues that Russ and Betsy had had.

The detectives started to look at infidelity

as a motive for murder.

Both of us had had issues with fidelity

in the past.

Now, I've heard since then

that Betsy had an ongoing relationship

with her ex-husband, Mike.

There was semen found inside of Betsy.

They took it, ultimately, to the lab to test.

Maybe somebody came there and violated and raped her

and then murdered her.

Law enforcement, they interviewed Mike Hillman,

Betsy's ex-husband.

His DNA was taken.

But he was excluded.

It was Russ's semen, and Russ told the police

that they had had sex 48 hours prior.

We want closure.

We want answers, even if we know

they don't quite ring true.

But tragedy is a pressure cooker,

and at Betsy's funeral, the lid finally blew.

Betsy's funeral started out OK.

And there was a ton of people

that showed up for her service.

We had a circus, is the nicest way to put it.

Betsy's mom started talking really bad about Russell,

her sisters, Betsy's daughters.

Then there was Pam Hupp at the funeral.

She came in screaming and saying Russ was a murderer.

I had her kicked out.

Then Betsy's youngest daughter told me I couldn't kick Pam out

because that was her mom's best friend.

Pam and Betsy had worked together

at a insurance company in Wildwood.

I saw her almost every day, every other day.

We had our fair share of arguments.

We'd even separated a couple times.

Pam's statements about how Russ treated Betsy,

about Russ's pillow over Betsy's face,

about Russ's financial motive, all of these things were key.

When we were processing the house,

we found out that two days before Betsy was murdered,

she made a beneficiary change to her life insurance policy,

transferring sole beneficiary to Pam Hupp away from Russ.

The theory became she was afraid that

Russ would blow through the money.

Because he was a terrible money manager,

Betsy had signed over her $150,000 life insurance policy

from him to Pam.

Russ must have found out.

And that's what led to his outrage

and overkill of his wife.

So if Russ had committed this during the time frame

that it would have been possible,

there would have had to have been some kind of cleanup.

They look in the kitchen area.

Blood was found.

And it had been mopped up.

So they took pictures to illustrate

where the bloody trail led to.

There was a smear of blood on the light switch

in Betsy's room, and there was a pair

of Russ's slippers found in the closet

with some blood on it.

The detective said, "Now we have probable cause."

We had police come into the house.

They barged in.

He was officially arrested.

I was hired as Russ's defense attorney.

Once I met him, I had some serious doubts

as to him having committed this homicide.

He had the most solid alibi I've ever seen.

Investigators had their suspect,

and it's the obvious one...

the husband, Russ Faria.

They have a narrative that works

with all the facts in front of them.

We humans like a narrative, and once we have ours,

we tend to twist any new evidence

to fit that narrative

instead of maybe considering a new one.

I thought that I was going up to do

what I call damage control, to attempt to reduce

the potential penalty to Russ Faria.

Once I met him, he had given me

convincing information, so much so that

it was almost impossible for him to have done it.

Russ had an airtight alibi.

December 27th at 5:00,

Russ decided to go to his friend's house.

He picked up some lemonade, got some cigarettes,

and this particular night, they decided to watch a movie.

So that's four alibi witnesses who he was with.

Russ gets a text message around 9:00.

He leaves.

He goes to the Arby's.

He orders two sandwiches.

When his car is searched the next morning,

there's a bag from Arby's with the receipt stapled to it.

The receipt was for 9:00-something at night.

Gets on the road and heads back up to his home in Troy,

and his cell phone data confirms all of this.

Betsy Faria was brutally murdered at her home

at about 7:00 that night.

The initial officers on scene discovered that

when Russ arrived home,

she had been dead for several hours.

He couldn't have gotten back there.

It would have been impossible to have done this.

So I made an appointment with the prosecutor.

And I knew when I came out of there that

this would pretty much be done,

and I'd never hear the name Russ Faria again.

Couldn't have possibly been more wrong.

About 10 days before trial, the letter that Pam referred to

that those detectives needed to find...

Was found on Betsy's computer.

The letter was essentially saying, from Betsy,

"If something happens to me, Russ did it."

My first thought when I got that letter was,

we got problems.

As we start the trial, it becomes clear that

the prosecution was going to attack the alibi.

What the state is arguing is that

they are not alibi witnesses.

They are co-conspirators.

They're accomplices, and they are lying for Russ.

The theory for the prosecutor

was that one of them had

kept Russ's phone at the house

to explain the cell tower data

while Russ went and committed this murder.

Prosecutors are painting Russell Faria

as a frightening father who screamed and cussed

at his wife and kids.

The state talks about how Russ was a bad guy.

On the stand, her sisters said he was mean.

He was abusive, an absolute monster.

Their theory was that this was a crime of passion,

that Russell was so enraged about losing his inheritance

that he killed Betsy.

Life in prison without parole

for a man convicted of stabbing his wife 55 times.

We're pleased with the outcome.

It's the outcome that we prayed for.

It's still very sad, 'cause we don't have Betsy.

I know the public wants to know exactly what happened.

You don't have a doubt?

No doubt.

There wasn't a shred of evidence

pointing to his guilt.

Ridiculous.

Absolutely ridiculous.

I told Russ I was going to never let this die.

I meant it.

And so what next?

We filed the appeal, and we'll do this again.

I guarantee it.

With an appeal, we still have hope that

we can get Russ out of prison.

I was sentenced to life

without the possibility of parole,

plus an additional 30 years.

Life in prison without parole.

That obviously sent a lot of other things into motion.

There were rumors that Russ was going to try

to somehow get that money that he believed was his

back from Pam.

In fiction, this is where we wrap it up.

A conviction, the bad guy behind bars.

Life returning to the quiet rhythm of the American suburbs.

Credits roll, curtain drops.

But real life doesn't work that way.

Real life keeps the book open.

It keeps feeding us new twists,

twists that even this fiction writer

could have never imagined.

It's the middle of the day.

A 911 call came out from our dispatch,

and it was just the strangest call.

When I first arrived on scene,

the victim was stating that she had been attacked

by a man in her car, that she was screaming for help,

that she had run inside her house,

and that he was threatening her with a knife.

She started yelling to me that she shot him.

And I could see a person on the floor.

Initially, they told me that the homeowner was Pam Hupp.

Betsy's best friend.

She said that this man tried to kidnap her,

tried to hurt her, and in fear,

she defended herself.

There was this young man who was dead, lying on the floor.

As they're processing the body,

they find this Ziploc bag that contains

miscellaneous items in it.

There was cash, and there was a pen.

I had no idea or any thoughts about

who else could be involved, not until we got to the note.

The note, it looked like a planned attack

because it's giving directions...

kidnap Pam Hupp,

take her to get Russ's money, kill Pam Hupp,

and then make it look like Russ's wife's death.

So based on the note, based on what Pam told us,

we had to consider Russ as a suspect.

It would have been possible.

The theory was that Russ orchestrated

this contract killing.

He was eagerly awaiting release from prison.

If his appeal was granted, then the money would be his.

I... I cannot understand why.

Is Russ... is he that dumb

that he would put his name on there

and associate himself with this crime?

It just didn't make any sense.

Investigators chase down every lead,

looking for answers.

But sometimes when you think you're heading

closer to the truth, you're actually heading

even deeper down the rabbit hole.

The mystery doesn't reveal itself.

It actually grows murky, more elusive.

We get a call from.

St. Charles County Police Department,

from a detective who says,

"I need to talk to you right now."

A subject by the name of Carol McAfee

had information regarding our case.

It was weird.

I was home, and I see

this car go driving by.

We'd just put up security cameras.

And she pulls up, and she's just looking at me,

like...

And I'm thinking, what does this lady want?

She's like, "Do you know what a sound bite is?"

She said that they were in town

doing sound bites for "Dateline,"

with 911 recreations, and that she would give me

$1,000 just to come and do the sound bite.

You know, money's tight.

I'm working a job that's not paying

more than $9.18 an hour.

And I climb in her car.

So I ask her where she was shooting the set,

and she's like, "Oh, we rented

one of the newer mobile homes here in your park."

She circles the block.

And then when she gets to the stop sign,

she takes a left.

That's leaving.

My brain always triggers to the worst.

So I was like, you know what?

I need to run back to the house.

She turns around, and she goes back,

and she's, "OK, but we gotta hurry."

I had to think of something.

I told her I... was like, look, I can't help you.

My son just called me.

I gotta go pick him up from work.

She gets out of her car.

She looks up, and she's, like, still.

She's like, "You got cameras."

I said, "Yeah."

And then ducks back in the car and shuts the door.

Like, I was fidgeting. I was nervous.

I'm like, what the hell's going on?

And then I called the police.

We get the video.

You see a vehicle

with the license plate

and her face.

My Spidey senses goes off.

Sure enough, this unknown TV producer was Pam Hupp.

What is she up to?

So who is the man who broke into Pam Hupp's house?

For now, the dead man is a stranger...

no name, no story.

Just a body and a knife.

And then there's the separate case of Russ Faria,

already in prison, charged in the stabbing murder

of his wife, Betsy.

At first, detectives treat these as two separate cases,

but come on.

If I'm them, here's one time

I would go with my fiction-loving gut.

There has to be a connection.

St. Charles County Crime Scene was able

to get fingerprints on this young man

who was found in Pam's house, laying on the floor.

His name was Louis Gumpenberger.

Louis's mom, she had actually filed

a missing person's report.

The reason why was Louis never left the apartment.

He would walk outside, sit in his favorite chair,

and smoke.

When she walked outside, she noticed that

his cigarettes and phone were still there.

She believed that was very odd that he would, first off,

not tell her that he was going somewhere,

but that he would also leave his phone and his cigarettes.

We start listening to Pam's 911 call,

and it just doesn't seem right.

Typically the first two, three, four seconds,

they are being recorded before the dispatcher answers,

"911, what's your emergency?"

Interesting thing about this 911 call was

there was complete silence.

So there was no commotion.

When the dispatcher answered, it was almost like, action.

Help, help, help.

Hey. Help, help, help. I need help.

But there was nothing beforehand.

You can hear Louis in the background,

and he's not making a lot of sense.

It just didn't make any sense.

At the same time, the crime scene investigators were

looking at $100 bills in Louis's pocket.

There was sequential serial numbers

that matched what was found in Pam's house

and what was found in Louis's pocket.

The statistical possibility of two separate people

with sequential serial-numbered bills

is almost impossible.

Louis's mom, she told us about his car crash.

He had suffered traumatic physical and mental injuries.

Louis actually worked at a nonprofit

that basically helped those with disabilities.

So we talked to the coworkers,

and they all confirmed, yes,

there is no way that Louis could run.

He couldn't hardly write...

Let alone come up with this elaborate kidnapping,

robbery, murder-for-hire plot for Russ.

We asked Pam if we could download her phone,

trying to account for where she was.

My cybercrime detective called me.

"Hey, I've got the results."

And it zooms in and shows me all these little pin drops.

Pam's phone was stationary for approximately

three to five minutes outside Louis's apartment.

So it was clear that Pam and Louis had interacted

before the break-in.

It dramatically shifted our attention

from looking at Louis and Russ as a suspect

to now looking at Pam as a suspect.

Just minutes before the 911 calls,

we had a video that clearly showed her vehicle

with a man in the car,

and he had on a black cap like Louis was wearing.

Pam offered cash to do a reenactment of a 911 call.

Pam drives him back to the house.

Unbeknownst to him, he was going to be

murdered in the next hour.

And the note found at Pam's, we sent that off to an expert.

It absolutely was not Russ Faria writing that note.

Pam wrote the note.

What I find fascinating here

is something I never knew before.

911 centers start recording

before the operator starts speaking.

In this case, the recorded silence changed everything.

And you don't have to be a theater critic

to spot the bad acting in that 911 call.

We found out that Pam Hupp killed Louis Gumpenberger.

We arrested her

for the murder of Louis Gumpenberger.

I said, "We know you killed Louis.

We just want to know why."

And I remember her looking and turning to me

like she had no care in the world,

and her response was, "I'm a little cold.

Can you turn down the AC?"

We drive her back to the station,

and I remember feeling, somebody's staring at my gun.

And I looked at her,

and her eyes were dead set on my gun.

She was trying to figure out,

how am I going to get out of this?

We step out of the room, and we try to make contact

with the defense attorney to let them know

Pam was arrested and was going to be charged

for the murder of Louis Gumpenberger.

Well, while we're out of the room,

Pam's contemplating what she's going to do.

Pam has multiple stab marks

that she did with this ballpoint pen

to both sides of her neck and both to her wrist.

She was taken to the hospital,

but the stab wounds were superficial.

She was not going to die.

New developments in the Pam Hupp murder trial.

For the first time in months, Hupp was in court today.

Hupp is accused of staging a home invasion

and killing Louis Gumpenberger.

What was agreed upon was that if Pam would plead guilty

to murdering Louis, the judge would take

the death penalty off the table.

So she took what was called an Alford plea,

which basically says that, I am not saying I'm guilty,

but what I'm saying is there is enough evidence

that I would be convicted in court.

So Pam is currently spending the rest of her life in prison

for the murder of Louis Gumpenberger

here in the state of Missouri.

A closed case can feel like the ultimate win.

But every ending tends to send you back to a beginning.

It had been four years since Russ Faria went to jail.

I had sunk quite a bit of time,

effort, and energy into it.

I had Pam's lies.

I had Pam's motive.

I had everything to prove

that Russ could not have murdered his wife.

For example, I had the letter.

It was found on Betsy's computer.

My expert came in, and he basically spent

24 hours a day going through the forensics

of this computer.

As it turns out, it wasn't written by Betsy.

It wasn't conceived in the computer it was found on.

And it was uploaded onto the computer

when Betsy was playing tennis,

and Pam happened to be there with her.

Pam Hupp committed this murder.

We discovered Pam put Betsy's insurance money

in a trust, where she would

turn that trust over to Betsy's daughters.

But after Russ's conviction,

she immediately took that money

and put it back into her savings account.

The girls got nothing.

My personal belief, Betsy's death was based on

the insurance money.

That led to murdering Louis and setting Louis up.

She was worried Russ's defense was making progress

and tried to turn the attention back to Russ

as the murderer.

Leading up to Louis's murder,

Pam was going to set Carol up

and then murder her.

Luckily, her survival instincts goes off,

and that saved Carol's life.

OK.

Ultimately, Pam's the last person to see Betsy alive.

The day of the murder, Pam volunteered that

she would pick Betsy up from her cancer treatment.

But there's a text from Betsy telling her not to come,

that she wants to spend one-on-one time

with a friend of hers who was in town.

Pam went anyway.

For her to insist on taking Betsy home that night

doesn't make any sense, unless she has to be with Betsy

in order to continue this plot.

Normally, if you see that many stab wounds,

you would conclude a crime of passion.

But the wounds to Betsy's torso,

Betsy wasn't moving when those stab wounds were created.

So somebody, after Betsy was killed,

stabbed her over and over and over

and then buried the knife in her neck.

It's not a frenzy.

It's calculated...

calculated to look like a crime of passion.

And we found out Pam had talked about how her mom

had passed away of Alzheimer's.

And then we were approached

by a source who told us,

"Hey, did you hear about

what actually happened to Shirley Neumann?"

Shirley Neumann did not die of Alzheimer's.

And then we've learned that

she did not fall over the ledge of her balcony.

She went through her balcony.

We also found out that in the course of a deposition,

Pam says something to the effect of,

"Why would I ever harm Betsy?

"If I needed money, my mom's got Alzheimer's,

and she's worth a bunch."

Hate to say it...

And to my knowledge, the last person

to see Shirley Neumann alive was Pam Hupp,

just like the murder of Betsy Faria.

Given all the evidence that's out there,

I filed something called a Mooney motion.

A Mooney motion says there has been new evidence found.

Please remand it for a new trial.

We end up with a new judge,

and he finds that that evidence is sufficient

to grant a new trial for Russ.

After we finished arguing our case,

the judge called us up, and he said,

"This was certainly a heinous murder.

However, there was no evidence that Russ did it."

The first charge, not guilty.

Second charge, not guilty.

I was behind bars 3 years, 5 months, and 11 days.

I was just so emotional.

It was incredible.

I got my life back for good.

It's a unique way to make a friend.

Not quite as unique as the way Russ and Carol met.

I was hanging out with my neighbor,

and he told me he knew Russ.

And I said, well, tell him that I'm sorry about his wife

and that I hope that one day,

he can find some peace and happiness.

I was literally getting ready to walk back across the street

and go home.

Here comes that Jeep of his.

We became friends.

We were both at a time in our life

when we needed to be reminded that we were

worthy of being loved.

Well, eventually, that friendship grew

into bigger and better things,

and two years ago this past October,

we were married.

After our wedding, he looks over at me,

and he takes my hand.

And he says, "Nobody said you couldn't have

more than one soul mate in life."

There's a piece of Russ Faria's heart

that is always going to belong to Betsy.

And I'm OK with that.

Betsy made me so happy throughout the time

that we were together.

10 years after

Betsy was brutally murdered,

Pam is now charged with

the murder of Betsy Faria.

I do hope and believe that Pam will be convicted.

Betsy's family deserves that.

There are a lot of steps to go.

Justice is just getting started.

The evidence in Betsy Faria's murder

pointed undeniably at Russ.

But evidence can be arranged, staged.

It can gaslight the best of us.

What's the final twist here?

Is it what Pam Hupp, the supposed best friend,

did to destroy so many?

Is it Pam's mother plummeting off the balcony?

Or in this case, was love the final twist?

In the end, was the final twist about Russ and Carol

and love and hope and second chances?

You decide.

I'm Harlan Coben.

Good night.