What drives a wife to murder her husband, flee, and then murder another woman along the way?
That’s the central question of a two-part HBO documentary I’m Not a Monster: The Lois Riess Murders airing Oct. 15 and Oct. 16, featuring Lois Riess, a Minnesota woman who is serving two life sentences in prison for the 2018 murders of her husband David Riess in Blooming Prairie, Minn., and Pam Hutchinson, a woman she met on the run at a bar in Fort Myers Beach.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Riess was arrested in April 2018, when George Higginbotham, then the manager of Dirty Al’s restaurant on South Padre Island in Texas, reported her to the U.S. Marshals after recognizing her from CBS This Morning. She pled guilty to both murders.
For the documentary, director Erin Lee Carr interviewed Riess from prison to find out what was going through her mind when she committed those horrific acts.
Viewers will not find clear answers to why Riess killed Hutchinson or her husband. But in the documentary, Riess opens up about her tumultuous marriage, shedding light on her state of mind in the time leading up to the murders. She says her husband, who ran a lucrative business harvesting wax worms for fishermen, was physically and verbally abusive towards her and their children.
“He would throw things and break things that were important to me like pictures,” Riess says. Then she says he got to the point where “it got to be pushing and hitting.” She describes not feeling like she had a way out and experiencing “lots of verbal abuse, which I feel is worse than the physical abuse.”
Kari Schirber, a friend of Lois Riess, backs up her claim in the series, saying, “He was a hot head.”
What was really going on in her marriage was a mystery to many of her family members. 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.”
But based on many interviews with sources on background, Carr says “Lois was in a toxic abusive relationship.” At one point during her marriage, Riess was checked into a mental health treatment facility after a suicide attempt, and her husband only visited her once. Carr says something may have snapped in her around this time.
The documentary explores how a gambling addiction may have helped fuel her impulsive decisions, even featuring a gambling addiction specialist talking about what goes on in a gambler’s mind. Riess went through all of her inheritance through gambling. While on the run, she hit up casinos after draining her husband’s personal and business bank accounts. “The only thing that made me feel good was gambling,” Riess says. “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 blames mental illness for her actions, though she does not talk about a specific diagnosis. Several members of her immediate family suffered from mental health issues, and her mother died in a mental institution.
When police officers found Hutchinson dead in her condo on April 9, 2018—identification and credit cards missing—they viewed Riess as a prime suspect and believed she killed Hutchinson because the two looked alike. When asked how she went from chatting at the bar with Hutchinson to killing her, Riess says, “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, “Mental illness—the mind is a crazy thing. All I know is it happened.” Hutchinson, she says, “just got caught up in my breakdown.”
It’s rare for a murderer to appear on camera, but Carr told Riess that addiction and mental health issues run in her own family too. She is the daughter of the former New York Times columnist David Carr, whose memoir The Night of the Gun is a harrowing account of his struggles with drug addiction. And she herself has been sober for 9 years. She made the case that she could approach the interview with a certain level of understanding—though she still can’t fully understand what drove Riess to murder twice.
“I found that she wasn’t able to take full ownership over what she did,” says Carr.
