argued that the testimonies of the four friends he had visited, cellphone records evidencing his presence at his friend's house twenty miles away from the murder scene, and evidence of his making purchases from different stores over the course of the evening demonstrated that the timeline did not allow for him to commit the murder. There were no traces of blood on his body or clothes. Prosecuting attorney Leah Askey countered that Russ' friends were providing a false alibi and had conspired with him to perpetrate the murder including holding onto his cellphone and posing as him to buy food at Arby's to falsify his whereabouts as an "ultimate role play". The trial judge, Christina Mennemeyer, refused to allow Schwartz to present evidence implicating Hupp as an alternative suspect, including cellphone records showing she had been in the vicinity of the Faria house for up to thirty minutes after the time she claimed to have dropped Betsy off or that Betsy had made Hupp the sole beneficiary of the life insurance policy shortly before her death. During the trial, Detective Mike Merkel of the Lincoln County Sheriff's Office reported that a crime scene camera had broken and photographs had failed to develop; Schwartz later obtained copies of the photographs in question. In a secret hearing during the trial, Hupp claimed that she had put $100,000 of the insurance money in a trust for Betsy's daughters; in a July 2014 civil deposition, she admitted she had not done so. (In August 2016, it was revealed that Hupp's company H2 Partners LLC had loaned $122,574.84 to her son Travis.) On November 21, 2013, Russ was convicted on both counts. A month later, he was sentenced to life plus thirty years' imprisonment without possibility of parole and sent to the Jefferson City Correctional Center. Although a central premise of the prosecution's case was that his four friends had been complicit in the murder, no charges were ever brought against them; they were not aware they had been implicated by Askey in her closing arguments until the media informed them. The sentence was welcomed by Betsy's family; in an interview given following the sentencing, her sister Julie made claims unheard during the trial: that Russ had been angered by the removal of his name from a separate insurance policy, and that he had on one occasion held a pillow on Betsy's face and said