Original subtitles

Police say this surveillance video shows

a cunning killer on the prowl.

She's calm.

She has the appearance of a grandmother.

The U.S. Marshals Service today posted a $5,000 reward

for information about a fugitive grandmother.

Here we have the grandma killer.

She had a gambling problem,

and things spiraled out of control.

U.S. Marshals are actively involved

in a national search for this dangerous fugitive.

It is surprising to see somebody

immediately go off on a gambling jaunt

after they kill two people.

Is she looking for another person

to befriend, the next victim?

My fear?

Who is this suspect?

Do we have a serial killer on our hands?

I've had some wild cases that I have covered,

but I've never seen one like this before.

She is armed.

She is dangerous.

And she's a killer on the loose.

And she kept repeating, "He's going to kill me."

Then he shoots my daughter.

That's about the only time in my career

that I just wanted to shoot him.

You can run.

You can't hide.

So what I think is most important is to understand,

Lee County as a whole, it's 1,200 square miles

of land and sea.

We dedicate our lives to making sure these people

and everyone is safe.

So this incident, it rocked us.

I was a detective in the Homicide Unit.

And I received a call from my sergeant,

who told me they had a homicide on Fort Myers Beach,

and he needed me to respond.

He just said an elderly female was found

deceased inside of her condo timeshare apartment.

Driving to the scene initially,

my mind was going from one end of the spectrum

to the other of, okay, who might have done this?

What could have happened?

What went wrong?

So it was, at that point, for me, a real whodunit.

Once I arrived on scene, we did a walkthrough

of the crime scene.

I noticed that a towel was placed at the bottom

of the bathroom door.

It had been rolled up and kind of wedged underneath it.

And so that said to me, you know, initially,

okay, someone's trying to hide either the sight, the sound,

the smell of the homicide.

Once I entered the bathroom,

I noticed that there was a pillow.

It appeared to be from the bed itself that had a defect in it,

consistent with being a gunshot

and being in close contact

with a firearm as it was fired.

It was from the back.

So, obviously, it was, to me, taken by surprise.

The fatal .22-caliber pillow silenced, bam.

Shoots two rounds into the ceiling,

then into our victim.

It appeared, after investigating the scene,

that it was, in fact, a homicide victim

suffering two gunshot wounds.

And our office was told of this,

and we stood by to provide any assistance

we could to the Lee County Sheriff's Office investigators.

We know that she has suffered from a close gunshot wound

that appeared to be muffled by a pillow,

and she had been covered up with some sort

of blanket or cloth.

That killer takes the victim's driver's license,

credit cards, her identity, her vehicle.

The first thing we thought of,

was it a robbery or a theft gone wrong of a tourist?

She was spreading the ashes

of a friend's deceased husband on Sanibel.

And, yeah, she had been divorced herself

fairly recently and was starting over

down here in Florida

and renting a condo on Fort Myers Beach

as a more vacation spot.

She was a very trusting,

generous, gregarious individual

who would take somebody under her wing

and be very generous with them.

A couple things that I first noticed when we got there,

the spare bedroom and the spare bathroom looked

like they had been used.

There's only one person in a room,

you would think they would only use one bathroom,

maybe use both.

But then again, the bedroom,

the second guest bedroom was-- also looked like someone

had slept in the bed.

I knew that there was only one person

that checked into the room.

The Sheriff's Office immediately goes

to the condominium owners, the front desk,

and requests to look for video.

It's the simplest,

most direct, immediate form of evidence

that they could start working their investigation from.

Remarkably, the video is perfect,

perfect clarity.

And what we find through the video

is our victim

and another white, middle-aged female going back and forth

from the victim's condominium room on a number of occasions

over a course of a few days.

We see them leaving, we see them entering,

and then all of a sudden, we don't see

our victim leaving the condominium anymore.

This woman, we see her back and forth on the videos

numerous times, in and out of the room.

We see her also at some point seem to be not distraught,

but certainly thinking things through.

She's almost pacing on the landing of the hallway

outside the condo room.

It certainly shows somebody who's maybe thinking

of many, many things at one time,

maybe not fully aware that she may be being recorded.

And that begins, really, the investigation.

Who is that other woman with our victim?

The Sheriff's Office checked other videos

on Fort Myers Beach, and they were able to detect

the victim and this woman together

at the Smoking Oyster Brewery,

which is very close by to the condominium.

When I look at the video of them,

it looks like they've been friends forever.

I mean, it looks like maybe two women that came

to Fort Myers Beach together to have a good time,

get away, spend a few days in the beautiful weather,

the fun atmosphere.

They look like they had been friends forever.

She's somebody that, to me,

would just blend in with everyone else.

She does not stand out in any particular way.

The woman became a suspect.

Let's look at our suspect.

You know why she's able to fly under the radar?

Because she looks like anyone's family member,

grandmother, whose identity, at this point in time,

we don't know.

Then it dawned on me.

The night before the homicide, our agency found a vehicle

related to another homicide investigation

that was currently underway in the Minnesota area.

It was located about a mile away from where our scene was.

And so it dawned on me, okay,

we had that call a couple days ago.

Let me get a picture

of the person of interest for that case.

And once I received a picture

from Dodge County Sheriff's Office up in Minnesota

of who their person of interest was,

I compared it to our video surveillance,

and they were the same person.

We were all just kind of dumbfounded

and speechless for a minute.

We were like, okay, this appears to be our person.

So that way, we had good information,

pretty much from the beginning, of who we might be looking for.

Minnesota is the land of 10,000 lakes.

My name is Jeffrey Jackson.

I'm the former managing editor

of the "Owatonna People's Press"

in Owatonna, Minnesota.

Blooming Prairie is a small, small town,

less than 2,000 people.

I've lived in this community for...

16 years now.

And I can count on one hand

the number of murders we have had.

It just doesn't happen here.

The incident occurred right outside of Blooming Prairie

in Dodge County, Minnesota.

The body had been there for some time.

Multiple gunshot wounds.

His body had been covered up with a blanket.

It would have been a gruesome sight for anybody.

The community was shocked.

Their family, naturally, when this first started,

it was a shock to them what had happened.

This was a couple

that could have been any couple in Blooming Prairie.

They were just a normal couple.

They had children.

They had grandchildren.

They would go to their grandchildren's

sporting events, support them,

support the community.

They were known in the community,

liked in the community.

There was nothing that would have made a person guess

that this would have happened.

Beforehand, Lois had sent texts to people,

saying that David was not well,

that he was under the weather,

and that he would not be able to go to work

or be able to do several things like that,

that he was going to be gone for a while.

When she--when people would ask her, "Is he okay?"

Yeah, yeah.

He's just-- he's needing to get better.

It was well over a week

that people began to get a little suspicious.

They wondered, where is he?

They couldn't-- they would call.

They couldn't-- they couldn't reach him.

They couldn't contact him.

And, finally, a friend called

the Blooming Prairie Police Department

and asked for a welfare check.

They just wanted to make sure, is he okay?

And that's when police discovered his body.

What was being alleged or being suspected

from the very beginning

was that Lois had killed David and then taken off.

She kills her husband in Minnesota.

And where does she end up?

Fort Myers, Florida.

We have a murder investigation

going on in Minnesota.

At the same exact time now,

we have a murder investigation going on

in Fort Myers Beach, Florida.

My fear--

do we have a serial killer on our hands?

We're getting calls from everywhere,

because people are afraid.

Is there a killer on the loose?

Are the people safe locally?

People are afraid.

It rocked this county.

We want to gather information as much as we can

from Minnesota so that we can find

and track down the person that's responsible

for this horrific crime.

But also we don't want to release information

that could ruin their investigation or ours.

We developed a rapport, started communicating

basically nonstop over the next couple weeks,

just going over things,

providing them information, and vice versa.

We actually received photos of their crime scene up there

and compared it to what we had down here.

They were very similar with what happened

up there and down here.

The way she left the body,

the way she stuffed towels under the door.

That solidified for us that, okay,

the person who was responsible up there

was also responsible for the homicide down here.

Not only does she shoot the victim,

but then she covers up.

She starts to do her own cover-up of the crime scene,

puts the towel by the door so there's no odor coming out.

She was cold.

She was calculated.

She staged that crime scene.

She knew exactly what she was doing.

It appeared to me, based upon the information

that we were given by the Minnesota detectives,

that there was obviously some family difficulties.

She appeared to have been struggling

with her mental health, possibly,

and financial situations at home.

All the stresses that it seemed as if it just

kind of came to a point one day.

And it seemed like she just snapped.

When the sheriff of Dodge County

first reported Lois,

that she was a person of interest,

one of the things that he mentioned was

the fact that she had a history

of going to casinos.

And that piqued our interest

because we weren't quite certain

why he would have said that.

So I remember going to the courthouse,

and that's when I stumbled across some documents

concerning an older sister of Lois's.

She was in the court documents described as having

the cognitive level of a ten-year-old.

And in 2012,

Lois applied to become her guardian,

her legal guardian,

because she was a vulnerable adult.

And by 2015, the Human Services

here in Steele County and in Dodge County petitioned

the court to try to get Lois removed as guardian

because they said there was evidence

that she was taking money from her sister

and using it to go gambling.

The court determined that Lois had taken

just over $100,000 of her sister's money.

Wow.

It was amazing.

There was a knowledge within the community

that Lois had an issue.

And that issue was gambling.

And they were well aware that she had that problem.

Diamond Jo's Casino, that Lois frequented a lot,

that's about an hour away.

There was a history of depression in her family.

This could have been her way of trying

to find fulfillment by going out

and gambling the way she did.

She had a gambling problem,

and things spiraled out of control.

Once she had shot and killed her husband,

Lois--the very day that his body was discovered,

Lois had taken money out of his accounts

and transferred them or wrote checks on his accounts.

She cashed them, put them in her account,

and went gambling again.

Even on her way down to Florida to try to hide out,

she was stopping at casinos and spending money

that she had taken from her husband

after she had shot and killed him.

She was interested in the money

to feed her need to gamble.

That was her need, her addiction.

She's at the bar, and she's smiling,

and she's befriending our victim.

Now, why is our victim befriended by the suspect?

And what was that about?

There's a very general resemblance

as far as age and race and color of hair,

maybe build somewhat.

And it appears that Lois Riess took advantage

of a very kind, good-natured, lovely person.

It looked like she had done it to assume

a new identity of the woman that she killed,

because she was on the run.

She had an agenda.

She had a plan.

She wanted to steal this woman's identity.

Obviously, she had her husband's car.

And she knew that soon, that sometime,

that would be discovered.

She had to get rid of it,

get another mode of transportation,

and get another identity.

She's a wolf in sheep's clothing.

She walks up.

She smiles.

She's calm.

She has the appearance of a grandmother.

She's collective.

But make no mistake, she's calculated.

And I will tell you that this was unique,

because here we have the grandma killer.

They had drinks together.

They had fun together.

They talked. They laughed.

Until Lois killed her.

My cousin went out helping the world.

She befriended this woman, probably.

The woman probably gave her some sob story.

She took her in, alley cat thing.

She just was-- she's just giving to a fault,

to her death.

Pure evil, that's really the only thing

that could resonate with my system,

because it's not necessarily her or whatever.

It's just evil that flowed through,

because how can you go around killing people

for no other good reason

other than to keep yourself out of prison?

She's driving away right now after committing two murders.

She's got the victim's vehicle.

This woman had no heart.

She killed in cold blood.

She was calculated, and she was on the run.

We do not expect to see somebody who is

a typical suburban mom, grandmom,

who has been involved in not only killing their husband,

but assuming the identity of a completely innocent person

and then killing them to get that identity.

That was very surprising to us.

We have to get her before she commits another murder.

We knew what happened in Minnesota,

we knew what happened here, and we did not want

there to be a third victim.

We have someone-- someone that's already

killed now twice.

Do we want a third person, a fourth person?

Of course not.

Let's get this person off the streets

immediately before we have major events

and God knows where.

So our detectives are working so hard

to stopping this person from killing again.

Is she looking for another person

to befriend, the next victim?

We have to stop her and put an end to it immediately.

We knew who we were looking for.

We had her name, her date of birth,

and the vehicle that she was traveling in.

We then disseminated that information

through our sheriff's office to other states,

other agencies, other regions of the country

for where we think she might be going.

She's got the credit cards, debit cards of the victim.

She's got the victim's vehicle.

She's got resources.

Where is she going? Who knows?

We were following her financial information

and the victim's financial information.

We were behind the eight ball a little bit.

But with the investigation going forward

and all hands on deck, we were able to, you know,

make great progress in it very quickly.

She goes to an ATM

or to a bank on Fort Myers Beach,

where Lois Riess withdraws $5,000

from the victim's bank account.

And off she goes in the victim's car, the Acura,

not to be seen until many, many hours later,

farther up north in the state of Florida.

We actually found that she was in the Ocala area.

She stayed at the Hilton Hotel in Ocala.

She walks up to the front desk--

once again, her MO-- smiling, calculated, cool,

the appearance of anyone's grandmother.

She did the best she could to conceal herself.

She was wearing a hat.

We have her on video doing that.

And she uses the victim's--

it's the first time now.

She's taken on this new persona.

And she's now using the victim's identification

and credit card to check into a hotel.

She's on the run for murdering her husband.

She doesn't want to be detected,

so she assumes our victim's identity.

There was some general similarity

that allowed her to use the identification

without detection.

She orders room service,

and she checks out the next morning,

and then she's on the road again.

She headed north out of Ocala,

and then she essentially turned left

and had the rest of the country in front of her.

And we know this because there are license plate readers

that are able to identify the Acura by its license plate

progressively down the interstates.

She was lighting out for the territory.

I imagine there was a bit of a thrill,

a bit of a adrenaline rush-- the road trip of her life.

Well, that's a great way to describe it.

Where does she go from there?

We know she has a gambling habit, okay?

She's got resources.

She's in the casino.

And here she is now, fleeing,

now having committed two murders,

and still feels the need to stop and gamble

in broad daylight at a casino in Louisiana.

Well, she goes to the casino, and, remarkably,

she calls attention to herself because she has a bit of luck,

and she wins.

She wins about $1,500 at the slot machines.

And when she presents to the window to collect,

she shows her Minnesota driver's license,

Lois Riess,

and her Social Security card in order to claim the winnings.

And she continues to head west on the interstate

towards Texas.

It is surprising to see somebody--and unusual--

immediately go off on a gambling jaunt

after they've killed two people.

She heads south towards the Mexican border,

where she's picked up again on a license plate reader

in Refugio, Texas,

which is a suburb of Corpus Christi.

In my belief, she knows we're on her tail.

It's clear where she's going.

She wants out of the country.

Perhaps she thought she could escape.

She had so amazingly eluded...

law enforcement at that time

that they thought she might make it all the way to Mexico.

She checks into a Motel 6

right in the center of South Padre Island,

and it appears that she checks in for a period of two weeks.

She got out there, and she made friends...

much the same way she made friends with our victim

in Fort Myers Beach.

She encountered a woman at the pool at the Motel 6

and started chatting her up.

It amazed me that Lois would yet befriend another person...

And somehow get invited to stay in her guest room.

She also had the murder weapon with her.

Certainly, she had now committed one murder

with the intention of concealing her identity.

So it was very important to try to find her

so that she wouldn't do that again.

I've had some wild cases

that I have covered over the years.

But I've never seen one like this before.

This one was wild.

It eventually captured the attention

of the entire nation.

Good afternoon.

I'm undersheriff Carmine Marceno.

I thank you for attending today's press conference.

There comes a point in time where we want the media--

we want everyone, because now we go country-wide.

Riess's mode of operation is to befriend women

who resemble her and steal their identity.

U.S. Marshals are actively involved in a national search

for this dangerous fugitive.

Riess is considered armed and dangerous

and should not be approached if located.

We want everyone to help us.

Let's get this information out.

Let's be on the lookout.

Let's put her face on the billboards everywhere,

because where is she going?

We don't know, but we need to all work and stop her

before she commits another murder.

Police say this surveillance video shows a cunning killer

on the prowl, 56-year-old grandmother Lois Riess,

targeting 59-year-old Pamela Hutchinson

in a Fort Myers bar.

And now law enforcement has out

a full-fledged media campaign to try to catch her.

There's a BOLO, which means be on the lookout, for her.

And her picture's everywhere.

So that way, hopefully, someone could come into contact

with her and catch her.

The U.S. Marshals' Service today posted a $5,000 reward

for information about a fugitive grandmother.

Lois Riess is suspected

of murdering her husband in Minnesota

and a lookalike woman in Florida.

It has been determined that Riess has

fled southwest Florida

and has traveled through the Gulf states

and into Corpus Christi, Texas, area.

And current whereabouts are unknown.

She's sitting in a bar in South Padre,

and the bartender looks at her and says,

oh, that's the woman who's wanted who I just saw on TV...

And does the, of course, extremely correct thing

of calling local law enforcement,

who in turn calls in the U.S. Marshals.

She got a tap on the shoulder,

and it was a U.S. Marshal.

And he asked her to step outside, and she did.

And she was asked to produce identification, and she did.

And she was arrested.

The story, it gained a lot of notoriety.

People were using things like Killer Grandma

or Losing Streak Lois.

A tip-off led to the arrest of Lois Riess,

a suspected murderer who had been

on the lam for nearly a month.

When you look at the folks that she befriended

in South Padre Island-- I don't want to speculate,

but it is certainly something that has crossed my mind

that had she not been captured when she was,

perhaps she would have done the same thing.

Those people should thank their lucky stars that--

because she had the gun.

She had the gun.

She could have done it again.

Lo and behold, they discovered that the gun that had been used

on Pamela Hutchinson was the same gun

that had been used on David Riess.

She was certainly interested in casino gambling again,

because she did have literature that we found

in her hotel room that showed some sort of interest

in going to a casino somewhere in Texas.

Obviously, gambling was going to be part

of her continued life on the run.

Lois was first taken back to Florida,

where there was always going to be the question

of whose jurisdiction--who would get to try her first.

You committed that murder on a tourist in my county,

and we are going to get you.

And in the end, I wanted her to specifically

face the music here.

In this case, in our opinion, you had a very clear,

premeditated first-degree murder.

You got a woman who comes to Florida,

looks like she's looking for somebody

who looks at least somewhat like her

to kill and assume their identity.

To us, that was clear signs of a premeditated murder.

So we charged her

with first-degree premeditated murder.

Once you're convicted of first-degree murder in Florida,

there's only two possible sentences.

One is a life sentence without the chance of release,

and the second sentence is the death penalty.

In this case, we decided to seek the death penalty.

Our attorneys handling the case were contacted

by the defense for Lois Riess, and they said,

she wants to take responsibility.

She wants to enter a plea to life

without the possibility of parole or release

and go back to Minnesota,

where she was also facing murder charges.

And we determined that because she still had a case pending

in Minnesota and she needed to go back to Minnesota,

with the family, the next of kin's blessing,

we decided that the best thing to do in this case

would be to take the life sentence

and let her go on her way to Minnesota

and stay there and answer her charges there.

And we knew by that plea that she would be spending

the rest of her life in prison on our charges,

regardless of what happened in Minnesota.

She came out in her orange jumpsuit,

very matter-of-factly.

She answered the questions posed to her

by the prosecutors and by the judge.

Do you understand why you're here today?

Yes.

To the charge of first-degree murder with a firearm,

a capital felony, which is punishable by the death penalty

or life, how do you plead?

Guilty.

Pursuant to the terms of the agreement, ma'am,

I will adjudicate you guilty.

I will sentence you

to the Florida Department of Corrections

for a period of life on Count I.

She understood and accepted her responsibility,

and she took the plea,

and off she went, back into the holding cell.

She was extradited back to Minnesota,

where she was going to be tried

for the death of her husband, David.

It was a pretty packed area when the judge announced,

you know, we've reached a plea agreement.

And she pleaded guilty that day

and was sentenced that day to life in prison.

The court determined that on the night

that David was shot and killed...

he and Lois had apparently gone

to see grandkids in sporting events.

And on the way back to their home

there in Blooming Prairie,

they started arguing, probably about money,

probably about her gambling addiction.

And according to Lois...

while they were arguing at their home,

he handed her a loaded pistol

and told her basically to shoot and kill herself.

And instead, she took the gun, pointed it at him,

and shot him three times.

Where I have my doubts is his handing her the pistol

and saying, shoot yourself.

I have my doubts.

It's always disturbing to me as a prosecutor

and as a member of the community

to see when people do evil things

and just don't seem to have any care about what they did.

The way she had befriended the victim,

who was a loving and obviously a very trusting person,

and then killed her, we thought had the marks

of a really evil killer.

The enormity of this case,

geographically as well as just in terms

of what happened and how this destroyed

so many families' lives,

I've never seen anything like before.

And I hope I never see again.

And in the end, justice is served.

That killer is off the streets.

She's behind bars where she belongs.

You commit a crime in my county, you can run.

You can't hide.

Everyone was looking for Micah.

Where was Micah?

Where would someone have come by and tried to abduct her?

You add all the things together,

and something's not right.

It was clear that they knew about guns.