--- title: The Lois Riess HBO Documentary description: Lois Riess opens up about killing her husband in the HBO documentary 'I Am Not a Monster.' canonical: https://time.com/7086222/im-not-a-monster-lois-riess-murders-hbo-explained/ author: Olivia B. Waxman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2024-10-15T17:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-24T18:25:27.454Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: The Lois Riess HBO Documentary og:description: Lois Riess opens up about killing her husband in the HBO documentary 'I Am Not a Monster.' og:url: https://time.com/7086222/im-not-a-monster-lois-riess-murders-hbo-explained/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt21955f2b34d1df94/698a843a457a525f69d6ef63/lois-riess.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: lois-riess og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Lois Riess HBO Documentary twitter:description: Lois Riess opens up about killing her husband in the HBO documentary 'I Am Not a Monster.' twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt21955f2b34d1df94/698a843a457a525f69d6ef63/lois-riess.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # HBO's _I’m Not a Monster: The Lois Riess Murders_ Explores What Drove a Woman to Kill Her Husband > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account.  by [Olivia B. Waxman](https://time.com/author/olivia-b-waxman/)  ## Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer Oct 15, 2024 5:00 PM UTC  Lois Riess Lois RiessCourtesy of HBO  by [Olivia B. Waxman](https://time.com/author/olivia-b-waxman/)  ## Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer Oct 15, 2024 5:00 PM UTC 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](https://time.com/6292242/last-call-review-hbo/) _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](https://time.com/7071787/tampa-hurricane-hilton/). 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](https://apnews.com/national-national-general-news-95d06a67f35fcf2563ea639c8769b19e) 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. ## **Exploring what drove Lois Riess to murder** 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](https://time.com/7016958/suicide-preventable-problem-essay/) attempt, and her husband only visited her once. Carr says something may have snapped in her around this time. ## **Lois Riess and a history of mental health issues** The documentary explores how a [gambling addiction](https://time.com/6342504/gambling-addiction-sports-betting-college-students/) 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](https://time.com/3841369/gamblers-gambling-addiction-gaming-patterns/) 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](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/grandmother-two-murders-stole-thousands-dollars-look-alike-victim-police-n866736) 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](https://time.com/6265241/america-care-of-mentally-ill-people/)—the mind is a crazy thing. All I know is it happened.” Hutchinson, she says, “just got caught up in my [breakdown](https://time.com/6308096/therapy-mental-health-worse-us/).” It’s rare for a murderer to appear on camera, but Carr told Riess that addiction and [mental health issues](https://time.com/6307996/mental-health-content-red-flags-social-media/) run in her own family too. She is the daughter of the former New York _Times_ columnist [David Carr](https://time.com/3708895/david-carr-appreciation/), whose [memoir](https://time.com/3708846/david-carr-obituary/) _The Night of the Gun_ is a harrowing account of his struggles with drug addiction. And she herself has been [sober ](https://time.com/5743993/stopped-calling-myself-alcoholic/)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. 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