HBO Documentary Explores the Motives Behind Lois Riess’s Double Murders
What compels a wife to murder her husband, flee, and then kill another woman during her escape?
This is the central question explored in the two-part HBO documentary I’m Not a Monster: The Lois Riess Murders airing on October 15 and 16. The documentary focuses on Lois Riess, a Minnesota woman currently serving two life sentences for the 2018 murders of her husband, David Riess, in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota, and Pam Hutchinson, a woman she encountered at a bar in Texas while on the run.
Riess was apprehended in April 2018 after George Higginbotham, then the manager of Dirty Al’s restaurant on South Padre Island in Texas, recognized her from CBS This Morning and alerted the U.S. Marshals. She confessed to both murders.
For the documentary, director Erin Lee Carr interviewed Riess in prison to delve into her state of mind when she committed these heinous acts.
Exploring the motives behind Lois Riess’s murders
While the documentary doesn’t provide definitive answers to why Riess killed Hutchinson or her husband, it delves into Riess’s turbulent marriage, offering insight into her mindset leading up to the murders. She recounts her husband’s physical and verbal abuse towards her and their children.
“He would throw things and break things that were important to me like pictures,” Riess says. She claims the abuse escalated to the point where “it got to be pushing and hitting.” She describes feeling trapped and experiencing “lots of verbal abuse, which I feel is worse than the physical abuse.”
Kari Schirber, a friend of Lois Riess, corroborates her account in the series, stating, “He was a hot head.”
Many family members were unaware of the true nature of their marriage. As Carr tells TIME, “She never said anything about the marriage whatsoever, and so [her husband’s murder] became a shock to everybody who knew her, everybody who covered the story.” Carr adds: “It seems like for people, she just had a gambling addiction and offed him because he cut her off or something.”
However, based on numerous interviews with sources, Carr asserts that “Lois was in a toxic abusive relationship.” At one point during her marriage, Riess underwent mental health treatment after a suicide attempt, but her husband visited her only once. Carr speculates that a breaking point may have occurred around this time.
Lois Riess and a history of mental health issues
The documentary explores how a pre-existing mental health condition might have contributed to her impulsive actions, even featuring a gambling addiction specialist discussing the psychological factors involved in gambling. Riess squandered her entire inheritance on gambling. While on the run, she frequented casinos after depleting her husband’s personal and business bank accounts. “The only thing that made me feel good was gambling,” Riess admits. “Gambling is the worst drug ever. It’s like a euphoric kind of a high. You feel special.”
Throughout the documentary, Riess expresses remorse for both murders and attributes her actions to mental illness, though she doesn’t disclose a specific diagnosis. Several members of her immediate family struggled with mental health issues, and her mother passed away in a mental institution.
When police officers discovered Hutchinson dead in her condo on April 9, 2018—with identification and credit cards missing—they considered Riess a prime suspect, believing she killed Hutchinson because of their physical resemblance. When asked how she transitioned from conversing with Hutchinson at the bar to taking her life, Riess replies, “When I say it’s a puzzle, it truly is a puzzle because I don’t have all the memories and all the answers for that.” She adds, “—the mind is a crazy thing. All I know is it happened.” Hutchinson, she claims, “just got caught up in my spiral.”
It’s uncommon for a murderer to appear on camera, but Carr shared with Riess that addiction and mental health issues also run in her own family. She is the daughter of the former New York Times columnist David Carr, whose memoir The Night of the Gun vividly depicts his struggles with drug addiction. And she herself has been sober for 9 years. She argued that she could approach the interview with a certain level of understanding—although she still finds it challenging to fully comprehend what motivated Riess to commit murder twice.
“I found that she wasn’t able to take full ownership over what she did,” says Carr.