The Lois Riess HBO Documentary

WWhat drives a woman to murder her husband, run away, 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 will air Oct. 15 and 16, featuring Lois Riess, a Minnesota woman serving two life sentences in prison for the 2018 murders of her husband David Riess in Blooming Prairie, Minn., and Pam Hutchinson, a woman who met while jogging in a bar in Fort Myers Beach.

Riess was arrested in April 2018, when George Higginbotham, then manager of Dirty Al’s restaurant on South Padre Island in Texas, reported her to US Marshals after recognizing her. CBS this morning. He pleaded guilty to both murders.

For the documentary, director Erin Lee Carr interviewed Riess from prison to find out what was going through his mind when he committed those horrific acts.

Exploring what drove Lois Riess to murder

Viewers won’t get clear answers as 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 waxworms for fishermen, was physically and verbally abusive towards her and their children.

“I would throw things and break things that were important to me, like photos,” says Riess. Then he says he got to the point where he “had to push and hit.” She describes not feeling like she had an outlet and experiencing “a lot of verbal abuse, which I think is worse than physical abuse.”

Kari Schirber, a friend of Lois Riess, supports her claim on the series, saying, “He was a hothead.”

What was really going on in their marriage was a mystery to many of their relatives. As Carr tells TIME, “She never said anything about the marriage, and so (her husband’s murder) came as a shock to everyone who knew her, everyone who covered the story.” Carr adds, “It seems like to people, she just had a gambling addiction and let him down because he cut her off or something.”

But based on many interviews with background sources, Carr says “Lois was in a toxic abusive relationship.” At one point in their 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 broken around this time.

Lois Riess and a history of mental health problems

The documentary explores how a gambling addiction may have helped fuel his impulsive decisions, even with a gambling addiction specialist talking about what goes on in a gambler’s mind. Riess passed on all of his heritage through the game. While on the run, she hit casinos after draining her husband’s personal and business bank accounts. “The only thing that made me feel good was playing,” Riess says. “Gambling is the worst drug ever. It’s like a euphoria. You feel special.”

Throughout the documentary, Riess expresses remorse for both murders and blames mental illness for his actions, though he does not discuss a specific diagnosis. Several members of his immediate family suffered from mental health problems, and his 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 saw Riess as the prime suspect and believed she had killed Hutchinson because the two looked alike. When asked how he went from chatting at the bar with Hutchinson to killing her, Riess says, “When I say it’s a puzzle, it really is a puzzle because I don’t have all the memories and all the answers for it.” He adds: “Mental illness – the mind is a crazy thing. All I know is that it happened.” Hutchinson, she says, “just got stuck in my breakup.”

It’s rare for a killer to appear on camera, but Carr told Riess that addiction and mental health issues also run in his own family. She is a daughter of old New York time columnist David Carr, whose memoirs The night of the gun is a harrowing account of his struggles with drug addiction. And she herself has been sober for 9 years. He argued that he could approach the interview with some level of understanding, even though he still cannot fully understand what led Riess to murder twice.

“I found that I wasn’t able to take full ownership of what I did,” Carr says.

Write to Olivia B. Waxman at [email protected].