ST. LOUIS — The Washington Post is highlighting Dateline NBC’s incredible success with podcasting. The network news show is over 30 years old and is finding new audiences through its true-crime podcast.
In 2019, “Dateline NBC” launched its first podcast, “The Thing About Pam,” focusing on the case of Pamela Hupp, accused of murder in 2011. This foray into podcasting marked a significant evolution for the decades-old “Dateline” brand.
The post reports that the podcast series was a major success, achieving over 1.3 billion downloads since 2019 and ranking high on major podcast charts, including being Apple’s No. 3 podcast for two consecutive years. “The Thing About Pam” attracted a massive audience, with more than 32 million downloads, appealing to a younger demographic and introducing “Dateline” to a new generation of true-crime enthusiasts.
FOX 2 has spent over a decade reporting on the murder of Betsy Faria. She was dying of cancer and didn’t have much time left. So why did someone stab her repeatedly, leaving her to die on the floor? The more we learned, the more we kept coming back with questions about a woman named Pam Hupp.
Hupp is now infamous for her involvement in multiple crimes in Missouri. Her criminal activities began to surface with the 2011 murder of her friend, Betsy Faria, where she was the beneficiary of Faria’s life insurance but wasn’t initially charged.
The case took a sinister turn in 2016 when Hupp fatally shot Louis Gumpenberger in her home, claiming self-defense. Investigations revealed that she had lured Gumpenberger, who had a disability, in a plot to divert suspicion from herself in the Faria case, staging the scene to appear as self-defense.
Hupp was eventually arrested for Gumpenberger’s murder, and her involvement in the Faria case was re-examined, along with suspicions about her own mother’s death in 2013.
