As Lois Riess faces arraignment on first-degree murder charges, questions abound. What may have sparked the Minnesota grandmother’s alleged cross country gambling spree that left a trail of death, and heartbreak? The News-Press
One thing Pamela Hutchinson and David Riess had in common was a deep love of fishing.
She relished heading out to sea to chase marlins; he was a freshwater specialist whose Facebook profile picture shows him gripping a lunker walleye.
The other thing they had in common was that Lois Riess was probably the last person they saw before they died.
The rural Minnesota woman is accused of shooting them both with the same handgun, 1,400 miles and two weeks apart. Though her home state has yet to charge Riess in the death of her husband, she's facing first-degree murder charges in Florida for killing Hutchinson.
David Riess, Lois’ worm farmer husband of 35 years was discovered dead in the couple’s rural Minnesota home March 23; Hutchinson’s body was found in a rented condo on Fort Myers Beach on April 9. Both corpses were on the bathroom floor, covered with towels, reports say.
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Gunned down on a Minnesota worm farm
It began on the northern prairie, in a town Grant Wood might have painted.
For a century, the biggest news from Blooming Prairie, Minnesota was its role as a Prohibition-era liquor hub, a past old-timers still chuckle about.
Then came Lois Riess.
The 56-year-old put the tiny south Minnesota city back on the national map in a way that makes residents cringe, shattering their sunny vision of small-town life.
Her cross-country crime spree allegedly began with Riess gunning down her husband and ended near the Mexican border (with a few casino stops along the way). Another stop: Fort Myers Beach. There, she allegedly shot 59-year-old Hutchinson twice, according to the Lee County Sheriff's office report, before gathering up the dead woman's ID and credit cards, getting into Hutchinson's car heading north.
Media outlets around the world tracked her flight, nicknaming Riess “Killer Grandma, “Losing Streak Lois” and “Gambling Granny.”
But beyond the tabloid trumpeting are the lost lives of Riess’ alleged victims: her husband, David, and Hutchinson, the woman who spent the last day of her life eating, drinking and laughing with Riess on Fort Myers Beach, far from the black-earth farm fields of her hometown, where Riess’ neighbors are still trying to grasp what broke inside of her.
More: Details in case of Fort Myers Beach homicide suspect Lois Riess outlined in court filings
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The Lois Riess Blooming Prairie didn’t know
Even when mid-morning sun shines outside, inside the cavernous faux barn that is Diamond Jo Casino, it’s electrified midnight.
Giant air handlers hum in the hayloft-styled rafters, but they’re not quite up to the smoke that rises from ashtrays of players, some of whom spin from game to game in wheelchairs, trailing rolling oxygen tanks.
Though she was known in town as a caregiver — an amiable babysitter and the guardian of her disabled sister, Kimberly — over the years, Riess spent a lot of time here, just over the Minnesota border in Northwood, Iowa.
On the surface, Riess was a regular gal. “She was funny. She was cute,” said Becky Noble, who runs the Blooming Prairie Chamber of Commerce and used to drop off her grandson at her in-home daycare. “(She was) a little round, blond hair, kind of piercing eyes … They were both fun. Dave was really nice, witty. Lois was just bubbly.”
As far as Blooming Prairie Police Chief Greg Skillestad knew, there'd never been trouble on the Riess wax worm farm, no calls for service, no reports of domestic violence. "Nothing like that," he said.
Riess went bowling with the girls at Bunkies, a vintage four-lane alley downtown. Her husband served on the board of the local Serviceman’s Club, where the couple often grabbed meals. As a couple, they hung out with car lot owners Rod and Tess Koster, who shared the Riesses' love of boating and fishing.
“Just really nice … friendly, fun, outgoing,” is how Tess Koster describes Riess, but what she says she didn’t know is that Riess was struggling with a darker, much less public life. Court documents show she began stealing and ultimately lost tens of thousands of dollars of her sister’s money in casinos.
FGCU professor and Ph.D. forensic psychologist, David Thomas, theorizes that when Riess snapped, she was broke and “fiending,” a term more commonly used for addicts frantic for a drug fix, but that can also be applied to gambling addictions.
“When you get into serious financial trouble like that and there is no way out, at some point, your significant other’s got to go, ‘You know what? There’s nothing I can do for you,’ so you’re left on your own … the husband said, ‘Nope, I ain’t doing it any more. You’ve (messed) up my business, you’re stealing my money. If I lose my business, I have nothing left, so I’m cutting you off,' ” he said. “And now she’s on her own and she’s like … ‘I can’t control this so I’m going to do what I need to do.’ And that’s what she does. She’s desperate.”
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The day her husband's body was found, Riess had driven the Cadillac Escalade he used to tow his boat to fishing tournaments, half an hour to a bank in Glenville, Minnesota to cash nearly $11,000 in forged checks she stole from him and his business account, authorities say.
Then Riess placed her final bets at Diamond Jo’s before buying a sandwich at the gas station next door, and asking how to get out of state, 10 days before Hutchinson would arrive on Fort Myers Beach.
Her husband dead at home, Riess asks the best way to head south
Right next to Diamond Jo’s is the Kum and Go, a standard-issue interstate gas station/snack shop with 'round-the-clock surveillance cameras focused on the cash register.
Suddenly Riess appears, sandwich in one hand, cash in the other, strolling to the counter. Almost as an afterthought, she asks the clerk how to get out of Iowa.
“If you want to start heading south, would you take 35 south?" she asks in a classic "Fargo" accent. "Just keep going on down to the next state?”
Striped cardigan swinging open over pale sweats, the silver-haired woman doesn't look or sound like someone who'd left her husband shot to death before heading out to spend the day gambling, as authorities allege.
"She's not the common murderer. She doesn't portray that image," said Fort Myers-based Deputy U.S. Marshal John Kinsey. "People just don't think of a grandmother being a cold-blooded murderer."
“He just looked at me and said, ‘Pam is dead.’”
Ellen Britt Watts and her husband had embarked on their annual trip to Florida. Leaving their North Carolina home, they drove through the South toward their ultimate goal: the Florida Keys.
This year, they planned a two-day stop in Bradenton to have dinner with Pamela Hutchinson, Watts' cousin.
But she wasn’t answering her phone.
“I kept telling my husband something was wrong,” Watts said. Still, the couple settled into a Sarasota hotel room for the evening.
“We didn’t hear anything on Monday and I kept telling my husband, ‘You need to reach out to Pam,” Watts said. By Tuesday the couple was in Key West, and Watts’ husband was also uneasy.
Interactive map: View Lois Riess' path from Minnesota to Florida
Timeline: What we know now about Lois Ann Riess
They got off the trolley tour to get a slice of Key lime pie, when her husband noticed he’d missed a phone call.
“I could see the change in his face, literally,” Watts said. “He just looked at me and said, ‘Pam is dead.’”
Pamela Hutchinson: "Too friendly for her own good"
Hutchinson had been on the verge of change.
Her 20-year marriage over, the North Carolina native of Columbus, a town of about 1,000 in the Blue Ridhe foothills, was starting anew.
With an outgoing personality, she had a gift for selling cars — she was top-ranked in Virginia Beach, where she’d made a life with James Hutchinson filled with boating and excursions to catch marlins.
“After the divorce, she just wanted to get out of here,” her ex-husband said shortly after Hutchinson was found dead. “Small little country town —that’s where she was from. Of course, she had no desire to go back there.”
She’d been aiming to buy her own place in Bradenton at the Riverview condos overlooking the Manatee River, just a short walk from where she worked catering at the upscale waterfront restaurant Pier 22. “The dust had settled in her life from the divorce and she had finally found a place that was going to be hers,” Watts added. The funding came through shortly after she was killed.
“Everything was really coming together for her, you know,” said Hutchinson’s friend, Gary Poff, 72.“That’s the sad part of this whole situation.”
If the photographs of Pamela’s short time in Bradenton offer any clues, she was happy in the coastal Manatee County city. She’s beaming during the Sarasota Christmas Boat Parade, a Santa hat perched on her head. Photographs show her enjoying St. Patrick’s Day at Clancy’s, an Irish pub in Bradenton. And on Easter, a few days before she was killed, she enjoyed a drink, with a colorful flower-crowned hat.
Friends say she was amiable, easy to talk to. “She was one of these people — she was too friendly for her own good — trusted everybody,” said Poff, who met Hutchinson at Cortez Kitchen, the kind of place where fishermen bring their catch for the day as patrons order beer by the pitcher and classic rock plays.
Hutchinson gravitated to its Old Florida atmosphere and its bar, where Poff befriended her after he asked her to move one stool over so he could sit with his friend.
“We just started talking,” he said. “She wanted to know about everything around it — where were the nice places to go, where to eat, where to dance.” Poff told her about a nearby bar that had good live music and they met there again. His friends became her friends, and before long she was joining the group on pontoon boat rides.
Hutchinson rented for a year in one of Bradenton’s gated communities, but her ultimate goal was to own.She spent part of 2018 vacationing in Mexico and during that time, she sublet a room to Barbara Pauls, who winters in Florida. The two hit it off from the first.
“We got along like mother and daughter,” said Pauls, who had daughters almost Hutchinson’s age. “She called me mommy-mom and I called her girly-girl.”
“We jabbered and talked half the night away.”
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Hutchinson made Pauls her famous corn chowder and introduced her housemate to her group of friends. “We joked and laughed and had fun and we got to know each other so well in a short time,” Pauls said.
For the last two decades, Pauls had a timeshare on Fort Myers Beach at the Marina Village at Snug Harbor, and when Hutchinson told her she was headed to Lee County to help a friend mourn the passing of her husband, Pauls suggested she check it out.
Hutchinson arrived April 3, posting on Facebook about the amazing time she was having on the Beach: listening to the music at Nervous Nellie’s from her room, watching the sunsets and joking she’d be returning to Bradenton on one of the fancy yachts docked next to her condo.
As someone who never met a stranger, it doesn’t surprise those in Hutchinson's circle that she’d befriend someone on Fort Myers Beach. That someone was Riess.
“She said she met a lady and that they were going out to eat that night and the lady was single too,” Pauls said. “And that’s really all she said about her.” There were no red flags.
According to Riess’ arrest warrant, detectives believe she moved into the suite’s spare bedroom after Hutchinson extended her stay.
The two went out to dinner on April 5 at the Smokin Oyster Brewery. Surveillance footage captured the two talking and a smiling Riess’ distinctive hair-flip.
Did the women bond over fish tales? Did Riess talk about ice fishing with wax worms, while Hutchinson described deep sea marlin hunting?
Whatever they discussed, that night, after dinner is when detectives believe Lois took her handgun and shot Pamela through the heart.
“I’m going to go to jail … Hell, I might as well enjoy myself on the ride.”
By the time the Lee County Sheriff’s Office had identified Hutchinson’s body after an employee discovered her corpse, Riess was long gone. She’d ditched the Escalade at a Fort Myers Beach park and was on her way to Texas in Hutchinson’s white Acura, wearing the dead woman’s white straw hat.
Along the way, she stopped for a night at the Ocala Hilton, where she treated herself to room service and a movie using Hutchinson’s credit cards.
By this point, FGCU’s Thomas thinks Riess was going for broke. “My belief is she was like, ‘You know what? I’ve got nothing to lose. I’m going to go to jail … Hell, I might as well enjoy myself on the ride.”
After Ocala, it was on to Louisiana, with a stop at the Coushatta Casino Resort in Kinder where she won a $1,500 jackpot, which she collected using her own name April 8.
That may have been Riess’ last stroke of good luck. Later that night, the Acura was spotted by a license plate-reading camera in Texas.
Soon, there was a “wanted” poster, a $6,000 reward on her head and a multistate billboard campaign by the U.S. Marshal Service to find the woman they’d dubbed “Losing Streak Lois.”
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For a while, she seemed to be nowhere. Then April 19, she appeared at the bar at the Sea Ranch Restaurant, a popular, fairly crowded waterfront place on South Padre Island, another spring break hotspot.
Before long, an alert restaurant employee noticed the pleasant-looking woman with the trademark hair flip, and decided to call in a possible sighting of the wanted fugitive.
Not long after, cameras show Riess apparently caught unaware as five U.S. Marshals pull her off the bar stool, and put her under arrest.
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"Oh my gosh, what would make her do that?"
Now, as the legal process begins unfolding with Riess behind bars, the questions still swirl. Riess' public defenders have not responded to repeated requests for comment.
Hutchinson's friends wonder whether she could have been saved had law enforcement reacted with more speed to two reports of a Riess sighting on Fort Myers Beach, three days before she's alleged to have killed Hutchinson.
On April 2, Tess Koster, dialed 911. She told the call taker that she had seen Lois Riess outside of her home on Fort Myers Beach. (Megan Kearney/The News-Press) Wochit
Tess Koster, who winters there, reported seeing Riess outside her condo, with a notepad in hand, according to a 911 phone call. She pretended not to recognize Riess, but Riess quickly appeared to change her mind and left. Kosterr reported seeing her to the Lee County Sheriff's Office. "She was just here,” Koster told a dispatcher April 2, adding that Riess was a fugitive from Minnesota.
“So she has a warrant, is that what you are saying?” the dispatcher responded.
“Yes, for the possible murder of her husband and (unintelligible) embezzling charges,” Koster said.
At that same time, Koster’s daughter was telling Minnesota authorities what her mother saw.
Ellen Britt Watts, Hutchinson’s cousin, is sympathetic with the challenges officers face, but wishes things had gone differently. "Nothing against law enforcement because I know they have a real hard job (but) I think they missed a big opportunity when that couple reported her being on Fort Myers Beach on April 2.”
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For its part, the office won't talk in detail about an active investigation, but Lee County Undersheriff Carmine Marceno said, "One thing I can tell you is, there was no opportunity missed, I know that.
"Obviously, she was arrested so hopefully, that will bring some closure to the family."
But closure may be a long time coming for many, who are still working to understand how this could have happened at all.
“It wasn’t a man who did it,” said Judy Wilder, one of Hutchinson's friends. “It was a woman. This has like blown me away.”
And not just any woman — one her fellow townspeople were sure they knew, said Noble, whose grandchild Riess once babysat
"When you're a small town and then somebody does something like that ... It just makes you feel creepy. Then you wish you never knew who she was," Noble said. "It scared a lot of people. We had so much anxiety in the community until she got found ... It's just weird, what makes people snap. After she did that, we thought, ‘Oh my gosh, what would make her do that?’ "
That's what Koster wonders, too: "How can you be such a nice person and then turn into a monster?"
— The News-Press reporter Michael Braun contributed to this report.
What's next
Lois Riess has a court date for case management July 11.
