What Happened to Pam Hupp’s Mother? Was She Murdered?

An autopsy later revealed that Shirley had .84 micrograms of Ambien in her blood, which toxicologists told Fox 2 Now is “eight times what you should have in your blood if you took a prescribed dose.” Shirley’s death was deemed an accident by police, at which point Pam was able to collect the $500,000 her mother was evidently planning on leaving her.

Then in 2015, Pam was talking to Lincoln County prosecutor Leah Askey ahead of Russ’s retrial when the conversation turned to Pam’s mom. “People say I killed her. We had sold her house, her car and everything she owned and put her in a home,” Pam said. “To everybody else on this planet, I took a 210-pound woman and threw her through railings. How do you do that? How does a man do that?”

How does a 210-pound woman with eight times the normal amount of Ambien in her system throw herself through the railings of a balcony? Dateline asked this same question when recording their podcast, so they turned to a structural engineer to examine the bars. He later came back with the conclusion that “it would take a lawnmower or a vehicle to cause that much bending.”