We are taking a few weeks off to spend the holidays with our families. During this time, we will be replaying a few of our favorite episodes from this year.
The first will be a recast of episode 210 and we visited with Joel Schwartz. He is an attorney and the author of “Bone Deep: Untangling the Twisted True Story of the Tragic Betsy Faria Murder Case.” He wrote the book with Charles Bosworth Jr. and it was published February 22, 2022 by Citadel Press.
On December 27th, 2011, Russell Faria returned to his Troy, Missouri, home after his weekly game night with friends to an unthinkable, grisly scene: His wife, Betsy, lay dead, a knife still lodged in her neck. She’d been stabbed fifty-five times.

First responders concluded that Betsy was dead for hours when Russ discovered her. No blood was found implicating Russ, and surveillance video, receipts, and friends’ testimony all supported his alibi. Yet incredibly, police and the prosecuting attorney ignored the evidence. In their minds, Russ was guilty. But prominent defense attorney Joel J. Schwartz quickly recognized the real killer.

The motive was clear. Days before her murder, the terminally ill Betsy replaced her husband with her friend, Pamela Hupp, as her life insurance beneficiary. Still, despite the prosecution’s flimsy case and Hupp’s transparent lies, Russ was convicted—leaving Hupp free to kill again.

Bone Deep takes readers through the perfect storm of miscalculations and missteps that led to an innocent man’s conviction—and recounts Schwartz’s successful battle to have that conviction overturned. Written with Russ Faria’s cooperation, and filled with chilling new revelations and previously undisclosed evidence, this is the story of what can happen when police, prosecutor, judge, and jury all fail in their duty to protect the innocent—and let a killer get away with murder..
Joel was the defense attorney for both of the trials that Russ Faria had to endure and gives his insight into this strange and terrible case of justice gone wrong for too long.