‘She challenged us to make sense of her story’
There was constant checking and rechecking by the production crew for a documentary about Lois Riess, the Blooming Prairie woman who killed her husband in March 2018, then traveled to Florida and killed a woman she befriended. The team interviewed many locals, including staff of the Steele County Times, back in 2022. Staff photo by Kay Fate
-Erin Carr, Riess Documentary Director
This world is full of remarkable people, places and things, both good and bad.
How then, did a young filmmaker and a huge production company – famous for movies like “Apollo 13,” “A Beautiful Mind” and “Friday Night Lights” – set their sights on the story of a troubled woman from Blooming Prairie, Minn.?
“When you have addiction, you have mental (illness), you have gambling disorders,” Erin Carr began. “When you have a complicated familial upbringing, and you have not only the murder of a spouse, but a random killing; you have evading the law…
“It has it all, right?”
Carr is the director of “I Am Not a Monster: The Lois Riess Murders,” which premiered this week on HBO, and is available now to stream on Max. It was produced and distributed by Imagine Entertainment, co-founded by actor Ron Howard.
The Case
In 2018, Riess, a 56-year-old wife, mother and grandmother from Blooming Prairie, killed her husband David at their home just south of town. She hid his death from his employees and family for nearly two weeks as he lay dead inside a bathroom in the house.
She then took more than $10,000 from Dave’s business account and went on the run, eventually landing in Fort Meyers Beach, Fla. There, she befriended a woman named Pamela Hutchinson – and killed her two days after meeting her, leaving her in a bathroom.
Riess stole $6,000 from Hutchinson’s bank account using the dead woman’s credit cards and identification.
She drove to a casino in Louisiana, where she won a $1,500 jackpot on a $5 play, claimed the winnings with her own driver’s license and social security card – and hit the road again.
Hutchinson’s body was found four days after she was murdered; investigators in Minnesota and Florida were starting to connect the dots.
Riess was by now on South Padre Island, Texas, making more friends, as law enforcement across the country looked for her.
They found her April 19 – about six weeks after she murdered Dave Riess – and arrested her.
She pleaded guilty to both murders and was given a mandatory life sentence in August 2020. She is spending it in the women’s prison in Shakopee.
Another Minnesotan
Carr was born in Minneapolis but grew up in Hopkins.
Now 36, she has 11 films to her credit, including the Riess production.
“It was always something I wanted to do – look at a crime story from Minnesota,” she said.
“I think Minnesota is incredibly cinematic,” Carr said, “and I love the people there.”
When she started the project in 2022, “it was pre-Tim Walz, so there was a pretty limited understanding of Minnesotans. This is not exactly the best vantage point, but it can add to the conversation.”
Carr was familiar with the case even before her development coordinator suggested it.
“Two people are dead, so there had to be a level of seriousness with it,” Carr said. “Someone who was in an alleged abusive relationship lost her life, right? It had all those ‘sticky’ factors, but also had these big stakes, so I knew we had to do it.”
She’s no stranger to complicated, tragic stories. As a freelance director for HBO Documentary Films, Carr created documentaries about the U.S. Gymnastics sexual abuse scandal; Gypsy Rose Blanchard and her mother, Dee Dee; and Sherri Papini, a real-life “Gone Girl” who faked her own kidnapping.
Though there’s been a clear focus on true-crime documentaries, Carr is now the executive producer and co-creator of a scripted TV show for Universal Studios about the Murdaugh murders in South Carolina.
Still, she said, the Riess story “was one of the hardest. It was almost impossible to get people to talk to us.”
The Interview
Carr established a relationship with Riess through Riess’s family “very early on” in the production process, said Ted Schillinger, a producer of the project.
Riess seemed amenable to providing an interview – then her youngest son, Bradon, died of a drug overdose.
Carr “moved very slowly and gently into the community of people who had been really close to Lois,” Schillinger said, “and with each new relationship established (herself) as a legitimate filmmaker who was genuinely interested in this woman’s story.”
He called it a “remarkable and respectful approach to a person who had a lot to say – and had a lot to worry about saying.”
On Nov. 9, 2022 – near the end of the year-long production process – Riess agreed.
The officials inside the facility at Shakopee “were spectacular,” Carr said. “We felt safe; they felt safe. I really like the people who were at the prison; I’m grateful to them.”
There were conditions, of course. Among them, the production crew had one hour to walk in, set up and complete the interview.
“A really comfortable interview will take anywhere from three, four, even six hours,” Schillinger said. “I told Erin, ‘you are really going to have to land this on the aircraft carrier.’
“I was amazed at the depth and the amount of subtlety and nuance Erin was able to explore with someone who had never given an interview before.”
They prepared for any situation, Carr said, “for what to do if she were argumentative, or crying. I tend to thrive in those situations.”
Not one second of that interview was wasted, Schillinger said.
The Results
Speaking a week before the premier, Carr said she thinks “people will be really surprised by everything that’s revealed, and it’ll create another dimension of understanding as they relate to the case.”
She has kept in touch with Riess and had spoken to her that morning.
“Lois has a lot of anxiety” about the documentary, Carr said. “She has reason to, but I’m showing it to one of her family members this week, then Lois will watch it with a case worker before it airs. I like to do that with every main subject, just so they don’t feel blindsided.”
Riess will see the reality of her crimes in a new way, Carr said.
“It will be extremely emotionally difficult,” she said. “There is crime scene footage, and old photos of her smiling when she’s partying around town – but it’s important that she sees it.”
Because Riess pleaded guilty without any trials, Carr believes the documentary might provide “an ability for her – not just us – to have a greater understanding of what this was. Right now, she has a very intense perspective that’s just hers.”
Carr called it a “very philosophical project,” saying it is “an enormous opportunity to share what happened to her, and potentially affect others.”
“It was this strange gift that Lois gave to us,” Schillinger said. “She challenged us to make sense of her story in a way that led us to really work to get as far down into the humanity of it as we could.”
He believes “one of the simpler messages you can take away from the film is that, when those (stressors) are happening, they can fester – and they can actually get worse… If the film can make people open up a little bit, that’s something that can be gained.”
Carr gives much of that credit to her editors, Jason Sager and Becky Goldberg.
“We’re the dingbats that get all the sound and video,” she said of executive roles, “and other people really spend their whole lives in a small room, making it.”
The Reactions
A case like this is fascinating, Schillinger said.
“There’s a slightly perverse pride in a small town that the spotlight and the eyes of the nation are upon them, and there’s a slightly bent celebrity that comes with it,” he said.
“The truth is, events like this: Dave’s murder and Lois … they form a kind of a wound on the community,” Schillinger said. “When you do stories like this, you very quickly come to see that on the one hand – and I believe this, top to bottom, on Lois’s story – there are stories that are absolutely worth telling, because they have human lessons that really need to be heard and need to be learned.”
There’s something about shining a light on it, “and really teasing apart the layers,” he said. “It really counts for something.”
Along with that, though, is the reality that for communities where these things happen, there is suffering.
In that grief, Schillinger said, “they may not be able to talk about it. It may express itself as anger, hostility to the media or the press, and you really just can’t let it offend you.
“We understand why,” he said.
“It’s always our intense hope that no one regrets speaking with us,” Carr said. “When I make work, I like to very much stand behind it, and I believe we were in service to everyone in the film.”
She would like viewers to do the same.
“I make documentary television,” Carr said. “Yes, it’s television, but it’s still people. I’m hoping to put a little bit more empathy into audiences as they watch things.”
Schillinger agreed, and believes the film successfully found a balance between respect for the community, and a deep sense of mission that telling the story is going to help.
“No matter how upsetting the story is, I hope that the compassion of the story comes through,” he said. “I hope people understand that you must be compassionate for someone like that because it’s the only way to really understand them.
“It’s your obligation,” he said. “You can’t just be entertained by their suffering.”