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[DISPATCH]

Written by DANIEL HILL

Disgraced former governor and exercise equipment enthusiast Eric Greitens held a political rally in Robertsville on Saturday, meaning that, for a few hours at least, it could reasonably be assumed he wasn’t actively sexually assaulting or blackmailing anyone.

The former chief executive of the state of Missouri, who resigned in 2018 after being accused of doing just that, mostly treated the afternoon event as an audition for an endorsement from former president Donald Trump for U.S. Senator Roy Blunt’s soonto-be-vacated seat, despite recent reporting that Trump does not support him and is angry that anyone in his orbit does. In keeping, the entire affair amounted to a series of fevered hallucinations plucked straight from the former president’s own addled brain and presented in the direst of terms to a frothing crowd in the serene environs of a Franklin County wedding venue. There were warnings of the imminent destruction of the United States at the hands of the (lol) communists currently occupying the White House, dutiful hand-wringing over nonexistent election fraud and lamentations about the impending ban on the singing of “Amazing Grace” that’s apparently coming down the pike any day now.

But even with the support of suspended attorney and sweatdrenched fountain of bullshit Rudy Giuliani, who also made an appearance at the event, Greitens is unlikely to persuade Trump. According to a Friday report from Politico, our dumbest former president has become increasingly angry that his son’s girlfriend and loud-talking nonsense factory Kimberly Guilfoyle is working for Greitens’ campaign and has flat-out said that he would not endorse Greitens if the primary were today.

“Trump thinks Greitens is problematic, and that Kim is annoying,” one Trump adviser told the media outlet, summing up the opinion of millions. “He said, ‘Why the fuck is she working for him?’”

At issue, apparently, is the very scandal that led to Greitens’ resignation from office. It’s become a source of consternation for establishment Republicans throughout the state and nation, who fear that his considerable baggage will cost them what should be a safe seat. Trump’s dissatisfaction probably comes from a different place, though; he tends to be less concerned about sexual abuse and corruption than he is about whether or not someone is a “loser” or a “quitter,” which are labels one can assume he applied to Greitens the second the latter chose to resign instead of attempting to overthrow the state government.

But none of this was of any concern for the 150 or so die-hard Greitens fans in attendance at the Venue at Maison du Lac on Saturday. The small event space was actually the backup plan for the rally, which was originally set to take place outdoors at a nearby ranch but was moved at the last minute due to the weather, sadly depriving us all of the chance to see Giuliani’s hair melt all over his face in the Missouri heat. A woman with a microphone assured the half-full venue that there would have been 600 to 700 attendees were it not for the change, which is confusing since the new location was only a two-minute drive from the original and only has a capacity of 300 anyway.

The rally kicked off with a prayer, as tends to be the way with these things. In the style of our lord Jesus Christ, a pastor took the mic and began lamenting the “militant Marxist groups” he claims are bringing “anarchy to our cities,” vowing to “defeat the enemy” with the help of the holy spirit and assuring the crowd

Written by DANNY WICENTOWSKI

In Lincoln County, where prosecutors long believed in the innocence of Pamela Hupp, the 62-year-old is now facing her second murder charge — a killing which lies at the bottom of a mountain of schemes.

But it’s not just Hupp facing a reckoning for the December 27, 2011, slaying of Betsy Faria, who was discovered dead on the floor of her home in Troy, Missouri, with a steak knife still lodged in her neck and more than 55 stab wounds on her body.

In a press conference on Monday to announce the new charge, Lincoln County Prosecuting Attorney Michael ood said his office would seek the death penalty. He summarized the evidence, pointing to Hupp’s plan to kill Faria and then collect a $150,000 life insurance payout — a plan which Wood said “stands alone in its hideousness and depravity.”

“Yet, prosecutors and investigators denied it all the same,” added Wood, who inherited the case when he took office three years ago.

This was the introduction to the second act of the Wood’s newsmaking press conference, revealing not only a new murder charge against Hupp (who is already serving a life sentence for a murder she committed to cover up her role in Faria’s death) but the possible criminal complicity of the county’s former top prosecutors and law enforcement officials.

While Wood did not name names during the press conference, he made it clear that this second branch of the investigation would target “potential prosecutorial and police misconduct in the Faria investigation.”

That wasn’t all: Wood claimed his office had discovered an internal attempt to issue a “destruction order” that, if carried out, “would have almost destroyed all physical evidence in this case.”

Wood did not provide further details about the destruction order, only that it was drafted at some point after 2015, but promised that his office would release a report after they complete their investigation at some point in early December.

“I don’t know where this investigation will go,” he added, “but I will take it wherever it leads me.”

In part, Wood is in his current position because of the Faria murder. In the 2018 election, he successfully campaigned against Leah Wommack Chaney, the prosecutor who oversaw the case and in 2013 convicted the victim’s husband, Russell Faria, who would spend years in prison while appealing the decision. Even after a court overturned the conviction because Russell Faria had been prevented from bringing evidence of a different perpetrator — Hupp — the Lincoln County Prosecutor’s Office insisted on his guilt and attempted to convict him yet again at a retrial. Instead, the attempt ended in an acquittal and affirmation of his innocence.

On Monday, Wood described the initial investigation into Betsy Faria’s murder as “mismanaged from the beginning” and driven by “confirmation bias in its purest form” to produce a case against Russell Faria.

In Wood’s statement, he appeared to suggest that the prosecutors at the time did more than just focus their investigative efforts on the single subject, but even manipulated the evidence.

“The only evidence they ever wanted to look at was anything they could possibly try to use, manufacture, conceal,” Wood noted.

By the time of the second trial against Russell Faria in 2015, Wood said the Lincoln County prosecutors were acting out of self-protection, not justice for the murdered woman.

“I think investigators and prosecutors doubled down because they knew how deep they had gotten,” he said. “At that point, you have to believe that they were concerned that their own civil liability was on the line, and certainly it was.”

Indeed, the case produced a seven-figure settlement In , an insurance company representing Lincoln County settled a federal lawsuit from Russell Faria — who accused the county’s police of misconduct and fabricating evidence — for $2 million, the St. Louis PostDispatch reported at the time.

The launch of a parallel investigation into Lincoln County’s 2013 prosecution of Russell Faria arrives at the same time that the current prosecutor’s office is gearing up to pursue its murder case against Hupp, who had been made the beneficiary of etsy aria’s insurance policy just four days before her death.

Hupp had been the last person to see the victim alive, and, in later interviews with police, repeatedly contradicted herself on her whereabouts. Hupp’s phone also placed her at the scene of the murder.

According to a probable cause document filed by the incoln County Sheriff’s Office in support of a first-degree murder charge, investigators described Hupp’s efforts to cover up the killing and pin it on Russell Faria: Citing the forensic evidence, the document describes a crime scene discovery of “an unusual blood transfer pattern on the handle” of the knife left protruding from Betsy Faria’s neck.

The blood had come from the socks on the victim’s feet, but the results of a closer inspection of the bloodstained socks “resemble impressions of fingers and not toes.

The killer, investigators allege, had actually removed the socks and then used them to handle the knife and a pair of slippers belonging to Russell Faria — and then “dipping the objects into the blood.”

The apparent evidence implicating Russell Faria, including bloody knife and slippers, were “staged on the scene by the perpetrator to obstruct investigators from finding the truth and deflect blame,” the charges allege.

Although the official investigation into the murder of Betsy Faria has taken nearly a decade to reach its accused perpetrator, Hupp is already serving a life sentence for yet another convoluted murder scheme: On August 16, 2016, Hupp killed a disabled man after convincing him that she was a producer for Dateline and that she was looking for someone to help reenact scenes for a crime-related episode.

Instead, Hupp shot the man dead in St. Charles and planted a note and cash on his body in an attempt to fabricate yet another crime pointing to Russell Faria — who, by then, was loudly calling for an investigation into his wife’s real killer. Eventually, Hupp entered an “Alford plea” to murder — acknowledging that prosecutors had sufficient evidence for a conviction. In 2019, she was sentenced to a term of life in prison without parole.

At the end of Monday’s press conference, Wood addressed a reporter’s question about his decision to seek the death penalty when the killer was already in prison for life.

“This case struck very deep to our souls and our conscience with the level of depravity not regularly seen,” he replied. “We have a person who not only murdered her friend, then mutilated the body, staged the scene, testified against an innocent man, and then — once he was acquitted — murdered someone in St. Charles County to prevent her from being considered as a suspect.” n

that they would “right the election that was wrong” whereupon “the corruption will be exposed.” With the souls of the faithful now nourished by that most pious of prayers, we were then treated to renditions of “Amazing Grace” (take that, libs) and our absolute banger of a national anthem, for which no one dared kneel.

From there it was a seemingly never-ending parade of far-right grifters and charlatans, starting with back-to-back-to-back talk radio hosts including Jamie Allman, who was fired from his gig in April 2018 after saying he was going to shove a hot poker up the ass of one of the kids who had survived the Parkland shooting just two months prior. That was followed up by a former state rep who recited the Declaration of Independence from memory, which appears to be a thing that political types think is fun.

After that a woman screamed at us about abortion for a while, then a former Marine screamed at us about China and the flag and how women can’t fight methedout ISIS terrorists as well as men and how she is not to be addressed as “sir” because this is not “the transgender military.” Most noteworthy at this point was the confusing lack of chairs in the venue, forcing the mostly seniorcitizen crowd to stand for hours while having exhausting culturewar talking points barked at them endlessly.

Roughly a thousand speakers later, we finally started getting to the headliners. Former New York City police commissioner and convicted felon Bernard Kerik served mostly as Giuliani’s warm-up act/ hype man, speaking gravely about the events of 9/11 and the heroics of the former mayor in a fairly transparent attempt to put those actions at the top of the crowd’s mind instead of the sweaty and unhinged clown antics for which he’s become best-known in recent years. He also credited Giuliani for bringing down rates of violent crime during his tenure, specifically noting the reduction of crime in the city’s Black communities, “where the crime and shootings and death were the highest,” which is less of a dog-whistle than it is a full-on foghorn.

Giuliani took the microphone next, speaking for twenty minutes. Characteristically, he said nothing of value.

At long last it was Greitens’ turn to speak, and he emerged holding aloft the still-bleeding head of an antifa militant before tearing off his shirt and scrawling “I WAS A NAVY SEAL” on his chest with blood. OK, maybe not quite that, but he did speak ad nauseum about his military service while bewilderingly claiming to have “defeated antifa when they came to Missouri,” to the cheers of the crowd. e also ba ingly referred to himself as a “political outsider,” seemingly forgetting that he was once the governor of the fucking state.

Aside from that, Greitens’ speech was wall-to-wall cookie-cutter bullshit that could have been recited by any conscienceless political hopeful angling to get into the good graces of the former president, with references to the Arizona “audit”/ clown show, the “Russian collusion hoax,” the tech companies “trying to silence Donald Trump” and on and on, all on tap.

Sure, there was a half-full wedding venue full of Missourians cheering as he droned on — and there’s a real chance those people will elect him, despite the handwringing of the party establishment, because this state is fucked — but it was crystal clear that Greitens’ real audience was just one man, who currently resides at a resort in Florida. If ever there was any doubt, the fact that he said the word “Trump” no less than eight times over the course of his seventeen-minute speech — making for a rate of nearly once per two minutes — should really drive that point home.

There’s one problem though, Eric: He’s just not that into you — and no amount of duct tape is going to fix that. n