On Wednesday, Pamela Hupp admitted—not guilt—but that prosecutors have enough evidence to convict her of Louis Gumpenberger’s 2016 murder. Called an Alford plea, Hupp’s plea stops prosecutors from pursuing the death penalty. She will serve life in prison without parole, and will be sentenced August 12. The St. Louis-Post Dispatch was first to report the news.
Hupp was arrested for the murder of Gumpenberger, a disabled man, on August 23, 2016 (and just an hour later, stabbed herself in her neck and her wrists with a pen). She was charged with first-degree murder and armed criminal action, and prosecutors announced in 2017 that they would seek the death penalty.
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Hupp’s trial was delayed repeatedly, but this January, the Post reported that the court would allow the unsolved murder of Hupp’s friend, Elizabeth “Betsy” Faria, to be mentioned during the trial. Russ Faria was first convicted, then acquitted, of his wife’s murder. No one has since been charged, though the possibility of Hupp’s guilt has been frequently raised.
Hupp has also not been charged in the case of her mother’s 2013 death. In late 2017, Dr. Mary Case, medical examiner, changed the manner of death from “accidental” to “undetermined,” telling the Post that as investigations continued and new information surfaced, she “was no longer willing to say it could have been an accident.”
Earlier in 2017, SLM staff writer Jeannette Cooperman delved into Hupp’s story, which she summed up as a “tangle of lies, greed, sex, and death—and a surprise arrest.” Cooperman noted a Twitter user’s take on the bizarre plot: “Even Hollywood doesn’t write scripts this convoluted.”
Read the backstory and full saga of Pamela Hupp here.
