I’m Not A Monster: The Lois Riess Murders-A Rewatch & Recap (re-release)

We hope you enjoy this re-release from 2024. It's one of Jill's favorites!

Jill and Dick rewatch and recap the HBO 2-part docuseries I Am Not a Monster: The Lois Riess Murders. This is a shocking case of a mother and grandmother who kills her husband, then goes on the run and commits another cold-blooded murder in Florida. We discuss the unexpected twists, the mental health history of Lois and her family, and the unsatisfying interview where Lois fails to take any real accountability for her crimes. Join us!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
True Crime Brewery contains disturbing content related to real life crimes.
Medical information is opinion based on facts of a crime
and should not be interpreted as medical advice or treatment.
Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Welcome to True Crime Brewery, Ty Grabbers, I'm Jill and
I'm Dick, and today we're back with a special recap
of a true crime documentary series for our premium subscribers.
So it should be fun. This is when we've been
looking forward to. What's it about.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
It's about a woman who kills her husband.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
Yeah, that starts out that way. A lot more to it.

Speaker 3 (00:52):
Yeah, that's just a tip of the iceberg kind of.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
Yeah, that just kind of starts things out.

Speaker 3 (00:56):
She's going to kill again, That's all I'll say.

Speaker 2 (00:59):
Okay, so this is the documentary I'm Not a Monster.
This is about Lois Reese. This is on HBO Max.
So it is three episodes, I believe, right, was it
two or three? We should know that we should Well,
it was two or three. You'll see if you go
to watch it. But we want to talk about it
because we thought it was quite a story.

Speaker 3 (01:20):
It is and it almost sounds made for TV or
something like that.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
It's pretty shocking. Yeah, So we're going to start off
with Lois in jail. She's an older lady, like sixty ish,
long gray hair. She's crying in a chair as an
interview begins. So we go back and forth to this
interview throughout the show, and she says, Oh, I hope
this is the right thing to do. So I don't
know if it was for her, really, I don't think

(01:46):
if I was her, I would have done it.

Speaker 3 (01:48):
Well, I don't think it helped her.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
No, it didn't make her look good, did it.

Speaker 3 (01:51):
No.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
She had a few sympathetic people, but I was not
one of them. So we're starting this story in winter
in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota. We're kind of in the country there,
I'd say, lots of snow.

Speaker 3 (02:03):
Well it's cold, yeah, because it's winter. It's winter and
there's snow on the ground. And this is a little
tiny town.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
Yeah it is. Everybody knew Lois and her husband David,
So we might as well spill it now. If you
haven't watched it, go watch it now if you don't
want to be spoiled, because we're going to say that
David Reese was murdered and this would be the first
murder in Blooming Prairie in about thirty years. So of
course his murder became a big story in his town

(02:31):
and around the area. But this story would end up
being known throughout the country, and I think it even
would have if it had just been David. But the
fact that she killed again really put it over the
top as far as attention.

Speaker 3 (02:43):
Uh huh. So we see a guy riding a four
wheeler and he's a friend of Dave's. His name is
Scott Carlson, and he liked Dave a lot, like Lois too,
but he and Dave were tight.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
I think that was like his best buddy.

Speaker 3 (02:56):
Yeah. He thinks he probably met Dave in the local bar,
and he thought that Dave and Lois were a fun couple.
Everybody liked Dave. He was fun to be around. He
could always have a good time with Dave.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
Yeah. I mean he was kind of your Midwestern guy,
right Yeah. Yeah. So then we talked to a woman
named Tess Costner who's another resident of Blooming Prairie. Her
and her husband Rob met Lois and Dave at the
Serviceman's Club. So that's like a bar, right for veterans
or something.

Speaker 3 (03:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
Yeah, So Tess and her husband Rob knew Dave and
Lois pretty well. They were neighbors, and after they got
to know them, they invited them to their lake home
for a weekend, which they did go and they had
a great time, she said. Lois brought steaks and helped
out in the kitchen. They went pontoon boating and fishing.
So pontoon boating I learned is those big floaty boats

(03:50):
with pontoons, And that's correct. So they're pretty much just
for partying. I guess you can fish off them, but
those are basically for just going out and drinking and having.

Speaker 3 (03:58):
Fun with you for entertainment.

Speaker 2 (04:02):
Yeah, right, because they have a lot of floor space
they do. Yeah. So I guess after Dave moved to
Blooming Prairie with Lois, that's when he bought his worm
farm and they sold the worms his bait for fishermen,
which if you're not from the worm farm community, it
doesn't seem like much, but I guess it was kind
of a big deal.

Speaker 3 (04:21):
Well, someone said, I guess it was Lois that when
they're thinking about starting the farm, there was only like
two waxworm farms in the country.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
Yeah, but Dick. I wouldn't have known there was one.

Speaker 3 (04:32):
I know, but we're not fisher people, that's true. Fishermen
women fair enough. But it was. It was pretty lucrative business.

Speaker 2 (04:40):
Yeah, and it was right on their property, just a
little ways from their house, and it thrived very successful.
Money seemed good. They seemed like they were doing well. Also.
They had a big, loving family and Lois seemed well loved.
Dave had a contagious smile and he laughed a lot,
kind of a joker.

Speaker 3 (04:57):
Yeah, one of these guys is a good old guy.

Speaker 2 (04:59):
Yeah, kind of like a Tim Waltz. Get from him,
you get that kind of friendly, everybody's buddy vibe. Yeah.
So they had a routine. Both went to the bar
to drink and both would go bowling. So we see
pictures of them, and we see this one picture with
an ash tray full of beer caps, and this is
Dave and his buddy Scott, and they had this ash

(05:21):
tray full of bottle caps. That's how they'd show how
many beers they had drink that night. There were quite
a few. But these are guys with beer bellies, they
could probably put away a fair amount.

Speaker 3 (05:30):
Well, they probably could. I mean I think their main
activities were drinking beer and fishing.

Speaker 2 (05:35):
Yeah, well everybody said Dave love to fish.

Speaker 3 (05:38):
Yeah, he lived to fish.

Speaker 2 (05:40):
But he also has pictures of him and Dave hanging out,
going to football games, and you know, he talks about
Dave for a while and gets teary. He's lost his
friend and it was heartbreaking for him. Yeah, as well
as a shock. Right, So it all kind of started.
I mean, I'm sure a lot of stuff was going
on before this, but the whole murder and all that

(06:00):
kind of started on Monday, March twelfth, twenty eighteen, and
that was payroll day for the Wexwarm farm, so Dave
handled payroll. But that day Lois came and she told
the workers that he wasn't feeling well, and she didn't
seem like her usual chip herself. She didn't give out hugs,
almost seemed standoffish and distracted, which wasn't the normal Lois.

(06:23):
Then she came back on Thursday, the fifteenth and kept
up with this story that Dave was set. She said
that she was going to take him to the doctor
that Friday.

Speaker 3 (06:32):
Yeah, if he wasn't getting better, he was going to
go to the doctor's office.

Speaker 2 (06:36):
But nobody had seen him, but lois that's important.

Speaker 3 (06:38):
To note, Yeah, because rumors started circulating that Dave just
hadn't been seen, nobody remembers seeing him for several days,
and they're starting to talk about it. Right in a
small town, you're gonna gossip. Yeah, people had been texting him,
but people were had been texting him, and he had
been responding, but the text seemed different than his usual

(06:58):
text because Dave would talk text his messages, so whenever
you got his messages, they were scrambly, you know. Sometimes
there was misspells, misspellings, and now they weren't matching up
to what he normally talked, text emogis and different things.

Speaker 2 (07:13):
Yeah, yeah, there were emojis, there were periods and capitals,
and that's not how he did it.

Speaker 3 (07:18):
No, he was more a stream of consciousness exactly.

Speaker 2 (07:21):
So they weren't matching up. So that was another curious thing,
and people started wondering, well, what the heck's going on here?
So the next week comes and Dave was supposed to
go to a fishing tournament on Tuesday, which this is
something Dave would not miss. He'd have to be on
his deathbed, right right or Dad? Then on Thursday, two
workers at the waxworm farm saw Dave's Cadillac Escalade pull

(07:44):
out of the driveway and Lois was driving it. And
that's the car that Dave would have taken to his
fishing tournament, because that's the one he would use to
tow his fishing boat. So now they know that Dave
is not at the fishing tournament. Where the hell is he.

Speaker 3 (07:58):
Something's wrong, he's not home, he's not at his tournament
that he was looking forward to. Something's wrong here.

Speaker 2 (08:05):
Yeah, and Lois normally did not drive the Escalade. That
wasn't normal. So that's when a business partner reported to
the Dodge County Sheriff and two officers came out to
the house pretty much to do a welfare check on Dave.
They rang the doorbell on March twenty third, twenty eighteen,
and they walked into the house, so this was like

(08:25):
eleven days after he had last been seen by anyone
but Lois. They're walking around the house and they saw
that the bathroom window was open. So this was too
cold a day to have the bathroom window open. It
was weird.

Speaker 3 (08:38):
Well, yeah, I mean here we are in the middle
of winter or late winter, you're not going to be
opening up windows. But one of the officers hoisted the
other one up so he could take a look in
that open window, and he saw what look like a
body under a blanket or a towel something. It was
a form underneath some covers.

Speaker 2 (09:00):
Well, this is a real holy shit moment. Yeah, no kidding, right, because,
like I said, no murders in this town for thirty years,
and this is a beloved guy in town, right, And
what the heck's going on with his wife driving off
in his car.

Speaker 3 (09:13):
We got some mystery here.

Speaker 2 (09:15):
So Dave's good buddy Scott and his wife Pam, were
on their way home from Austin, and as they drove by,
they noticed that there was a cop car sitting outside
of the Reese's house. Something wasn't right. The police went
into the house and that's when they found that it
was Dave in the bathroom, covered with a blanket or
a quill. He'd already started to decompose. So it turns

(09:35):
out he'd been there decomposing for about twelve days now.
The bathroom door was shut and the window was open,
and the vent fan was on, so obviously someone was
trying to get the smell to dissipate and not leave
the bathroom.

Speaker 3 (09:49):
Yeah, trying to minimize the aroma.

Speaker 2 (09:51):
Yeah, because you got to think about it. Lois was
still living there those twelve days.

Speaker 3 (09:56):
Yeah yeah, yeah, I'd just been that very day she'd
taken off.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (10:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:01):
So so weird.

Speaker 3 (10:03):
Well, that part's weird.

Speaker 2 (10:04):
It's very weird.

Speaker 3 (10:05):
How could you do that?

Speaker 2 (10:06):
I don't know. I mean, killing your spouse is one
thing that's not great, But if you're going to just
live in the house with the body, there's something seriously
wrong with you. I mean seriously say that. Yeah. So
then the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension the BCA was
called in to assist because this is a big investigation.
It's a murder. You know, Blooming Prairie is not used

(10:28):
to this.

Speaker 3 (10:29):
Yeah, But the important thing is they called the BCA.
The local police realized they didn't have the ability to
work the murder, so they rightfully asked for some help.

Speaker 2 (10:40):
That's important because once in a while you hear of
police departments who don't want to turn it over and
just really fuck it up badly.

Speaker 3 (10:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:47):
Yeah, So Lois's niece, Lindsay first knew something was going on.
Because she got a call from her mother that morning
that Dave's body was found, and she and her mom
usually didn't talk in the morning, so she knew something
was up right away. And her mom told her that
Dave was found dead at home, and then she told
her that Dave had been shot twice, so he'd been

(11:07):
shot once in the chest and in his back. He
also had a wound in his wrist lower arm area,
likely holding it up to protect himself.

Speaker 3 (11:15):
Yeah, defensive wound.

Speaker 2 (11:17):
Yeap, So he must have known at least one of
those shots were coming. There was a shell casing from
a twenty two that they found underneath Dave's body, but
no other shell casings, so whoever had shot him had
picked up one of the shell casings and then covered
him up with a blanket, shut the bathroom door and
kind of put towels down by the bottom to block
the smell, and had that bathroom door open, I mean

(11:39):
that bathroom window open and the fan on. So there
was really nothing in the house that made it look
like anyone was in a hurry to leave or anyone
had rushed out of the house, and no one wanted
to point fingers right away at Lois but Lois was
gone and Dave had been dead in that house for
quite a long time, and people knew she'd been living there.

Speaker 3 (11:59):
Yeah, so sounds easy.

Speaker 2 (12:01):
It does sound like pretty easy case.

Speaker 3 (12:03):
Lois shot Dave and killed him.

Speaker 2 (12:05):
Yeah, son took off. Yeah, this woman shot and killed
her husband and left. So huge story in town. No
history with law enforcement for these two. There were no
domestic calls really, so no one saw this coming. People
were looking to the local newspaper to get the facts
on the case, but they didn't know much. And we
hear from a couple of the local media people who say,

(12:28):
you know, the police were just very closed and lipped
about this. They weren't really giving out information like they
felt that they should.

Speaker 3 (12:34):
Yeah, the typical stuff. Media wants to know all the details, right,
and the investigators don't want to give them all the info.
They want to withhold some of it.

Speaker 2 (12:44):
Well, true enough, but this is a problem later on. Now,
Dodge County Sheriff's office was run by Scott Rose, and
he was the contact person for the press. Very limited
information and Scott Rose made things difficult for the media
and for other people who wanted to know just what
was going on here. But Dave's body was found on

(13:05):
March twenty third, and there was no doubt that Dave
had been killed by someone else. Pretty sure it's Lois,
but it was three days before Dodge County put out
any information about this to the public. Then Lois came
into the picture the following week when the BCA put
out an alert looking for her and for Dave's Cadillac Escalade.
So now Lois was officially a person of interest. Why

(13:27):
that delay, I don't know. Now, a nationwide manhunt was
on the TV news and Dave's buddy Scott was mad
about what she'd done to his friend. She was on
the run and no one knows where she is, and
at this point she wasn't even wanted for the murder,
she was just wanted for the theft.

Speaker 3 (13:44):
Yeah. It turned out that Lois had cashed in ten
thousand dollars from Dave's personal account and business account. One
of the workers had collected payments for the worm farm
and had a stack of checks. He noticed some were missing,
so Lois had posited them at a bank and then
withdrew the funds and left. So she's got at least
ten grand, so.

Speaker 2 (14:05):
That makes it more suspicious that she's on the run
because that's not money. She just needs to pay some
bills or get some groceries.

Speaker 3 (14:12):
No, no, no, Although it's not a huge amount of
money to stay on the run for a.

Speaker 2 (14:17):
Long time, No, but it's a good start.

Speaker 3 (14:19):
It'll get you somewhere. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:21):
I don't think I've ever seen ten thousand dollars cash
in my life, so it's a lot to me. Now.
She was writing herself checks from Dave's business account, so
she was suspect number one. Of course, they knew she'd
be looking for a place to stay, so Brian Smith
Us Marshall actually volunteered to help look for Lois and
to assist in this investigation. He got a copy of

(14:42):
the warrant, no warrant for the homicide, which kind of
surprised him, But there was a warrant for felony fraud
charges for Lois, So I guess sometimes they won't file
the homicide charges right away because of a speedy trial
clock that starts, so they decided to kind of hold
off on that, which turns out to be a big mistake.
Probably gets someone else killed as far as I can see.

Speaker 3 (15:05):
Yeah, well, they didn't feel like they had enough to
charge her with murder at least at that point right now.

Speaker 2 (15:11):
Which I'm kind of surprised that that's even something. They said, Yeah,
it's pretty obvious.

Speaker 3 (15:17):
Well from what we're told, Yeah, it sounds like a
no brainer.

Speaker 2 (15:21):
It really does. So they're waiting for more evidence and
they're waiting for the crime scene to be fully processed,
which I guess that's fair enough. But Tess and Scott
say that there maybe had been some issues between Dave
and Lois leading up to this time, but nothing that
would have made anyone think there'd be violence, And Scott
finally admits, well, you know, Lois was just a click off.

(15:43):
I like that phrase, just a click, just a click,
just you know, one sandwich short of a picnic, that
kind of a thing. So he said, she once showed
up and an event dressed as a mermaid.

Speaker 3 (15:54):
Yeah. It was some school thing, wasn't it.

Speaker 2 (15:56):
It was something inappropriate to be dressed as a mermaid
with the boobs out in your fifties, right, Yeah. Yeah,
But he said, well, you know, that's just Lois and Okay,
she's not hurting anybody, so.

Speaker 3 (16:07):
What Yeah, Dave would just roll his eyes and go
along with things.

Speaker 2 (16:10):
Right, So she shot Dave. He was dead in the house,
and she went about her daily business there, apparently eating,
sleeping there for eleven days with a decomposing corpse in
the bathroom. Gee, I hope they had a second bathroom.
I imagine they did. Yeah, but I don't know. So
that seemed beyond just what an angry spouse would do.
Something really weird. And of course this probably didn't happen

(16:33):
in a vacuum. There had to be some things like
going on in the house, or at least some strange
things going on in Lois's brain.

Speaker 3 (16:41):
Yeah, there's something there. You don't just go and kill
your husband for no particular reason.

Speaker 2 (16:46):
No, So then we go back to Lois at the
Minnesota Department of Corrections and she says, you know, I'm
not a monster, and nobody knows what I've been through. Okay, well,
so far, so good. So Lois says, you know, I
was the strong one in the family. I was the
family caregiver. She says, her mother had mental health issues

(17:07):
and Lois was the youngest of five and things were
bad in the house, so she'd spend a lot of
time hanging out at her friend's house or running away.
So Lois's friend Carrie from childhood speaks to the documentary
people and she says Lois did get into some trouble.
She'd met Lois in Rochester, Minnesota, in junior high in
the seventh grade. Lois was the youngest, like I said,

(17:30):
and had to survive and take care of herself quite
a bit. Her mother was bipolar and a hoarder, so
no one came to the house because it was a hoarderhouse.

Speaker 3 (17:39):
Yeah, it sounds sick. It was really a tough house
to navigate.

Speaker 2 (17:43):
It does, yeah, I'll give her that. To walk in
the house, they had to follow paths or climb over clothing.
And Lois's dad was actually a successful engineer for IBM,
but he was rarely there. He'd kind of checked out.
The parents didn't sleep together, and he seemed to be
living in denial of the dysfunction. So her dad always
had a lot of money, but he was stingy with it,

(18:04):
so they didn't have much spending money. And even though
they were probably, you know, upper middle class, she led
a lower class life and many of their peers were wealthier,
so it was difficult for her to have that kind
of a home. Life, but she did hang out with
Carrie and her sister a lot. Those were two of
her closer friends. So Don, Carrie's sister, who was also

(18:26):
friends with Lois, said, you know, Lois skipped school and
ran away quite a bit. By the time she was eleven,
she was drinking and smoking pot and her mother was
a little bit abusive. Her mom had slapped Lois and
her sister Cindy, and one time Cindy had gone into
like a manic state. She was screaming and swearing, and

(18:47):
then Cindy said she was pregnant and it was too
late for an abortion. So this is something that Lois
remembered when her sister Cindy was a team. So Cindy
did have pretty severe mental illness as she got older.

Speaker 3 (19:00):
At least, yeah, we're learning that it wasn't just the
mother who had mental health issues.

Speaker 2 (19:06):
No, it seems like a tough time all around for
the whole family. Yes, so Lois said she was always
an extrovert, but she quit school at age sixteen. She
worked at the Mall in Rochester and she met Dave
at a store called Dayton's in the mall, and Dave
was working as a custodian there. They dated for just
two months, and then they moved together to San Diego.

(19:26):
He was in the Navy, and three months after they eloped,
she was pregnant with their first child. Then she soon
got pregnant with her second child. So Lois says Dave
wasn't really ready to settle down. She handled the kids
and paid the bills and everything, and he just went
to work and came home. He wasn't physically abusive, but
she said when he got angry he would break things
in yell. So for a long time they lived in

(19:49):
a one bedroom townhouse and her friend Carrie, who went
to visit once and he kind of had her thrown out,
said that he was a bully, but Lois said divorce
was never an option that she would have considered. So
she was in California with no support system. And then
they moved back to Rochester and they moved into a
house where she ran a daycare, and she seemed like

(20:10):
she was really good at that. She did well, and
Dave went out to work his job and he had
good benefits, so it seems like they did okay financially.

Speaker 3 (20:19):
Yeah, and she really liked having a daycare. Center.

Speaker 2 (20:22):
Yeah, it seems like she really was good at it.

Speaker 3 (20:25):
She thrived, and her niece had good memories of being
at Lois's daycare. Lois took care of everybody. Dave worked
a lot. He also seemed to care about everybody and
seemed like a happy guy. Lois always had meals planned
and cooked and handmade everything, and she was kind of
like a mom to all the kids in the daycare,
and she was raising her own three children as well.

Speaker 2 (20:46):
Yeah, Lois really loved having all the kids around and
seemed like a really kind, loving, maternal person. But according
to Lois, by the early nineties, Dave had quite a temper.
She said he started pushing and hitting. But the niece
says she never heard of any domestic violence in the home,
so if it was going on, it was secret. Lois
and Dave moved from Rochester to Blooming Prairie in two

(21:08):
thousand and five, and then the waxworm farm did well.
It was really a pretty house, but Lois felt separated
and isolated there. She did do daycare there for a while,
but Lois says that Dave was controlling and abusive and
he made her stop doing daycare so he had control
of the money. Lois said he could be intimidating. He
was big and aggressive, but Lois is saying all this

(21:30):
after she murdered him, so kind of hard to know
how much to believe it is because we've got a
lot of victim blaming here with Dave, which really annoyed
and upset a lot of Dave's friends. Scott says that
his buddy Dave would speak up for himself, but he
wasn't a mean guy, even though Lois says he was
very controlling. She did mention she spent like three grand

(21:53):
on Christmas one year, and he was mad about that,
not knowing how much money they had if they could
afford that. It's hard to say, but that's a good
amount of money back in the nineties, Yes, it is
even now, right, So Lois said they had a difficult
life when she was growing up, but during the holidays,
her mom was always warm and things were better then,
so the holidays were important to her when she was

(22:14):
an adult and a mother, so she did kind of
go all out for Christmas now. Mental illness was a
big thing in Lois's family. Her mother was in the
hospital and two of her sisters would later be diagnosed
with schizophrenia. Sister Kim ended up needing a kidney transplant
and sister Cindy. Cindy donated a kidney. Lois took care

(22:35):
of her for two months after the transplant. Kim then
got a divorce, but then she was found mentally incompetent
and Lois took care of her and she ended up
becoming her legal guardian. Kim would end up having two
kidney transplants, so Kim's health went downhill, downhill, and she
ended up living with Lois and Dave. So Kim was

(22:55):
getting disability and Lois would pay herself to be her guardian,
which led to trouble.

Speaker 3 (23:01):
Yes, it did. Now that by itself hanging herself for
being a guardian isn't by itself wrong.

Speaker 2 (23:07):
No, you get paid for it.

Speaker 3 (23:09):
But she's taking a pretty good chunk of the disability payment. Well.

Speaker 2 (23:13):
Yeah, Lois would start to develop a gambling problem, so
she was giving herself twelve hundred a month of Kim's
money to be the guardian.

Speaker 3 (23:20):
Yeah. I think Kim was getting like two thousand a
month something like that. Yeah, and Lois was taking the
majority of it.

Speaker 2 (23:27):
Yeah, but she was driving her to appointments, and it
was a big responsibility. Lois says. Having Kim around was
like having a child. It was a burden, and Lois
didn't feel like she was getting much credit for it.
So Lois said that Dave didn't like her time being
given to Kim when he felt like she should be
taking care of him. That's fine, Lois says that, but
we don't have anyone backing that up as a real thing.

(23:49):
Lois says Dave put his foot down one day when
Kim got mad at them, and he said, enough is enough.
And then she went and found an assisted living place
for Kim to live in. She said she helped her
get settled there, and then she had to care for
her dad, who was at home because he got sick.
Then her brother Bob had a motorcycle accident and broke
his back, and Lois helped to take care of him.

(24:11):
Apparently he too had mental health issues. Lois helped to
sell his house and moved him into an assistant living
place too close to Kim's. So it's kind of your
basic disaster. When you put all this together.

Speaker 3 (24:23):
It looks and it sounds to me like it's something
that just starts to grind you down. Yeah, can only
do so much and then you're going to start having problems.

Speaker 2 (24:32):
Well, Lois had her own depression at this point.

Speaker 3 (24:34):
She can understand that.

Speaker 2 (24:36):
Well, yeah, that is understandable. She didn't feel supported, and
that's when she got into gambling. So she would drive
out to this place, Diamond Joe's Casino, which was right
over the Iowa border, and she'd play the slot machine.
So this was probably a big part of her downfall.
This led to a lot of problems. Yes, so Dave's
buddy Scott, he had gone to Diamond Joe's with David Lois,

(24:59):
and he said Dave hadn't been a big gambler, but
Lois was. Lois just loved the high that she got
from winning. Marty Paulson, a gambling addiction expert, is in
the series and she tells us how people who are
addicted to gambling really get a high and relieve their
stress by gambling. So Lois would actually go into the
high stakes room and bet a lot of money. You know,

(25:21):
with those slots, you might be putting in a quarter
or dollar each time at the most. Well, she'd go
in there and she'd have like fifty dollars twenty dollars
slot machines, which seems pretty crazy for a middle class person.

Speaker 3 (25:34):
Huh.

Speaker 2 (25:34):
At this point, she wasn't even working. She's just living
off the wax farm and taking care of her siblings.

Speaker 3 (25:40):
Yeah, well she was taken twelve hundred a month from
one of them.

Speaker 2 (25:44):
Yeah, but I think once she got into the assisted
living she probably shouldn't have been taking so much.

Speaker 3 (25:49):
Probably not now.

Speaker 2 (25:51):
But gambling is like drug addiction. They continue to chase
the win until there's no money left. So Lois's dad
had gotten sick and she became his power of attorney,
and after he died, she saw that he had set
up the inheritance by percentages, so he gave money in
his perception of how he valued each of his children.
So William Lois's dad had a will where he gave

(26:14):
Kim twenty five percent, Bob twenty five percent, Cindy got
twenty four percent plus a house, and Lois got fifteen percent.
So I guess Lois had been looking forward to this
inheritance and was pretty disappointed with her fifteen percent. But
then she admits that she did inherit a few hundred thousand,
so that's a lot of money.

Speaker 3 (26:34):
It's a good amount, A.

Speaker 2 (26:35):
Good amount, she says. It wasn't that much though, And
what she did is she spent it all. She didn't
invest or save at all. She bought a car, a
skid loader, a bunch of gifts for her children, a
lot of fancy things for her house. I mean, basically
blew the money on gambling and just buying crap. I
guess a car's not crap, that's reasonable, but a lot
of it was just ridiculous. They showed her house had

(26:57):
a lot of crap in it.

Speaker 3 (26:58):
Yeah, well, need to have your jet skis and your
snowmobiles and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (27:05):
Yeah she did, which she did. Yeah, Dave did have
a forty thousand dollars boat and they did have the
snowmobiles and all that. Lois had spent the money pretty
quickly and gambled a lot of it away. And Lois
would say gamblings the one thing that made her feel good,
made her feel special, she said, at the casino she
felt beautiful and they treated her well.

Speaker 3 (27:23):
Well, sure she's a good customer. Yeah, so we'll be
really extra nice to her so she'll keep coming back.

Speaker 2 (27:30):
So Scott says, Lois gambled away tens of thousands she
spent and gambled her inheritance away. And then because she
was the guardian or the executor or whatever, she had
access to Kim's inheritance, and she really resented Kim because
Kim had gotten more money from their dad. She also
had her Social Security and she'd gotten alimony when Kim

(27:50):
got divorced. That's when she kind of had the mental breakdown, remember,
right around the same time. Yeah, yeah, So she had
gotten alimony for that, so it was all being put
into the bank and she's not like outspending it because
she's disabled. So it would take two or three years
for the authorities to figure out that something was going
on with Kim's money. Lois was actually stealing money from

(28:12):
her sister. So Lois really kind of tries to minimize this,
which I didn't like because that's the one thing with
Lois's interviews and when they talked to her, she really
didn't take responsibility for things. There's a lot of victim blaming,
a lot of excuse making, a lot of you know,
undertalking things that were actually pretty big.

Speaker 3 (28:31):
Right.

Speaker 2 (28:31):
Yeah, So Lois says this was difficult because Kim was
defying her and having her investigated constantly. So it's Kim's fault.

Speaker 3 (28:40):
Yeah, it's Kim's fault that I'm taking your money.

Speaker 2 (28:44):
Yeah, and she's making a big deal out of it.
You know, maybe I wasn't foulwing the rules, she says,
but you know, it was basically okay. Things like that
she said, which I thought kind of set off my
bullshit meter. So an adult protection social worker stepped in
and investigated Lois, and she looked at Lois's activity in
Kim's account, and she found large amounts of money being

(29:05):
taken from Kim's account and put into Lois's account. So
Lois wrote a check for twenty thousand to her son,
and she says Kim was too much, so she started
paying herself not correctly, So she wasn't stealing, she was
just paying herself not correctly, Like if she was going
to the casino instead of going to the bank to
get money, she'd just take money from Kim's account and

(29:28):
spend it at the casino. But she said it was
basically working out okay, But everybody else would disagree.

Speaker 3 (29:33):
Yeah, Lois says it's all legitimate, but the records that
were looked at don't show that.

Speaker 2 (29:40):
No, there were checks in the thousands spent and gifted
to her children. But Lois says, Kim. You know, Kim
was a giver. Kim liked to give, but then she
wasn't mentally stable, so she'd forget. You know, she'd say, here,
take this twenty thousand, and then she'd turn around and
have me investigated. So, you know, what was I to do?
I know, but Kim, when she was asked, she had

(30:00):
not given permission for any of it. Lois was embezzling
money and had to face everyone knowing that she was
stealing from her disabled sister. So that's kind of humiliating.
There's a lot of shame involved. And then Lois did
have a suicide attempt after that. She took a bunch
of pills and Dave found her on the couch and
she was, you know, on the verge of being dead.

(30:21):
If he'd been another hour or two late, she probably
would have died.

Speaker 3 (30:25):
Yeah, she was serious. Yeah, wasn't a gesture.

Speaker 2 (30:28):
No, and she'd left a note, but Dave saved her.
He did CPR on her until the paramedics showed up.
She was on life support after being transported to the
Mayo Clinic by helicopter. Then she was on the mental
health unit at Mayo. Lois says that Dave was ashamed
and embarrassed by this. She says he didn't go to
the family counseling appointments, but he did try and save her.

(30:49):
Though he did save her, so.

Speaker 3 (30:51):
She was in the hospital for about two weeks. He
had depression and was treated for that. In early twenty sixteen,
she was removed as Kim's guardian. During her time as
a caregiver to Kim, she had taken about fifty thousand
dollars and she was found to have mishandled the funds. Yeah, duh.
She was ordered to repay fifty eight thousand. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:11):
They made an agreement that she would pay thirty eight
thousand in cash and then give her two cemetery plots
she owned that were worth twenty grand. So Lois did
write the check for thirty eight thousand, but the check bounced.

Speaker 3 (31:24):
Yeah, And she had to know the check was going
to bounce, right of course. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:28):
And then she disappeared. She was actually missing for a bit.
Dave reported her missing to the police, and she had
taken her meds and Dave was afraid she was going
to try and kill herself again. But what Lois actually
did is she called her friend Carrie and said she
needed somewhere to go for about a week. So she
ended up going to Carrie's family cabin and Carrie's daughter
went with her. So July twenty sixteen, Lois was at

(31:51):
the cabin for the Fourth of July and they show
pictures of her just having a great time with sparklers
and laughing. You know. Turned out that she reached turned
and was fine. But since that thirty eight thousand dollars
check had bounced, they had another hearing and Lois didn't
show up. She claimed she was sick that day, but
she didn't call ahead or try and reschedule it, and

(32:12):
she didn't have the money, and she said she was
afraid to tell Dave about it. So the court changed
the agreement. She lost her settlement and the new judgment
was for one hundred thousand. So now our life is
even worse. That's triple yeah, pretty much. And Dave was
pretty angry and upset about this. He was afraid, you know,
she's going to make him lose the worm farm, and

(32:32):
that's what they're living off of. So Lois is now
endangering their livelihood. And Dave told a friend when he
was really upset about this, that the worst thing he
ever did was to get home and save Lois. That day,
he regretted that he'd showed up while she was still alive. No,
I don't know how much he meant it. He might
have meant it completely, or he might have just set
it out of frustration. I've said worse things in my life,

(32:55):
but maybe he meant it. He may have, but Lois
said after that things got really bad and he was
verbally abusive. So she took a job at Target, but
kept on gambling. Then she called her friend Carrie one
day and asked her for money. But you know, Carrie
was not a wealthy person, and Lois wanted like thousands.

Speaker 3 (33:13):
Yeah, this wasn't like can you owe me fifty dollars
for a couple of days.

Speaker 2 (33:17):
No, she's trying to pay off that money. Or probably
she's trying to get enough money to go gamble and
win back the money because that's how her brain worked.

Speaker 3 (33:25):
Probably.

Speaker 2 (33:25):
Yeah. So the gambling expert says that gamblers are much
more likely to hurt themselves than others. It's very rare
for them to hurt others, maybe twenty cases of that
in modern history, so no one's thinking she's going to
go and start killing people. So according to Lois, she
said she was at home on that March day when

(33:46):
Dave died, and Dave handed her a gun and told
her just go ahead and kill yourself, and that, she says,
is when she shot and killed Dave. She says this
was just the perfect storm of enduring abuse and ignoring
her own mental health for soul long long that she snapped.
So once the police found Dave's body in March twenty third,
twenty eighteen, they were looking for Lois and they got

(34:07):
a report that she'd left and they didn't really know
where to look. Her niece checked all the casinos and
asked them to let her know if they saw her,
and sure enough, a guy who worked at Diamond Joe's
called the niece and told her that he had seen
Lois there and that she'd seemed normal. But then by
the time the police got to the casino, Lois was gone.
There was no sign of her, so Lois wasn't returning

(34:28):
calls or texts. The police then found surveillance footage from
the gas station near the casino. That shows Lois buying
a sandwich. But then she changed her voice and sounded
kind of weird and asked for directions to get on
the highway going south. So Lois wanted to go south.
She didn't really know anyone outside of Minnesota, though, and
she was on the run, so that was a little weird.

Speaker 3 (34:50):
It's like, how do I get there?

Speaker 2 (34:52):
Yeah, they said she didn't know directions very well. And
the Scott said, you know, she was no brain surgeon. Yeah, yeah, let's.

Speaker 3 (35:00):
Go back to Test. Remember her from Blooming Prairie, one
of the friends.

Speaker 2 (35:03):
Uh huh? Tests and Rob.

Speaker 3 (35:05):
Now she was living in Fort Myers Beach in Florida
most of the time. I guess there were snowbirds. Her husband,
Rod and her are both retired. They have a business
in Fort Myers Beach. They have eight rental houses that
they rent out.

Speaker 2 (35:18):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (35:19):
So it was April second, twenty eighteen morning. Test decided
to finish cleaning in the garage, so she went to
start sweeping. The car pulled in and guess what there
was a white Cadillac Escalade.

Speaker 2 (35:31):
Yeah, Lolas was driving pretty shocked.

Speaker 3 (35:33):
Yeah, yeah, so Tests, because she hasn't heard anything from her.

Speaker 2 (35:37):
No, she didn't even really realize it was Lois until
she saw her face.

Speaker 3 (35:41):
So Test, we want to ask the lady what she needed,
and then she recognized it as Lois. But Lois said, oh,
I'm in the wrong house.

Speaker 2 (35:48):
And she left right but she definitely recognized Tests. Yeah,
surprised to see text Tests.

Speaker 3 (35:54):
Yeah. Can you imagine she's on the run and she
pulls in and there's one of her good friends from Yeah, boo,
get out of there.

Speaker 2 (36:02):
Well, I guess they think that she was thinking she
could find a place to stay there because she knew
Tests owned properties. But she wasn't gonna ask Tests. I
think she was just going to break in or something. Yeah,
but anyway, Tess ran right inside and told her husband Rod,
Lois Reese is in our driveway. She just drove away,
and Tess said, let's follow her. So she wanted her

(36:23):
husband to hop in the car and follow her. But
Rod's like, are you kidding me? She murdered someone, she
has guns, We're not following her. So this part was
pretty funny. He was on the phone with his daughter
already told her to call the police and let them
know that they'd seen Lois in Florida, and then Rod
did call the police himself as well, but that was
just kind of a funny little episode. So Tess thought

(36:45):
that Lois had a warrant for homicide and in besling,
but remember there's only a warrant for the embezzling, right,
So Tess called the sheriff and she remembered that she
had once invited David Lois to come and visit them
down in Florida, So now she's thinking Lois was planning
to squat in one of the houses that she and
her husband owned. So the police did show up, but

(37:06):
they said there wasn't enough for them to go out
looking for Lois. There was no warrant for homicide, and
they probably wouldn't extradite her for theft and forgery. So
Roden Tests kept saying, yeah, but she's wanted for murder,
but they just couldn't convince the police to do anything,
and Tests just had this feeling that Lois was still
in the neighborhood. So she and her husband went to
stay at a resort that night, and the Dodge County

(37:28):
Sheriff's office had to know that Lois was wanted, but
they didn't alert anyone, and now no one really knew
where she was. They knew she'd been.

Speaker 3 (37:36):
There, right, but they didn't know at all what her
plans were.

Speaker 2 (37:39):
No, but it's pretty unstable at this point.

Speaker 3 (37:42):
Uh huh. So April eighth, twenty eighteen, the escalator was
found at the end of the island, about a mile
from tests in Rod's house. The car had been abandoned
in a parking lot, so the police took it to
go through it look over, see what's going on. Meanwhile,
Lois was just blending in on Fort Myers Beach and Tess,
not knowing where she was, was afraid for her life.

Speaker 2 (38:05):
I think that's reasonable.

Speaker 3 (38:06):
She thought that Lois had killed once she was capable
of killing again.

Speaker 2 (38:11):
Reasonable, yes, ma'am. So then we're going to find out
there's a dead body found in a condo on Fort
Myers Beach. But this episode ends, we go to episode two.
Episode two starts in Florida with Lee County Sheriff Marcino
shows recruitment video for the Sheriff's office, and this guy
is just a lot takes himself super seriously, almost to

(38:33):
the point of craziness. But anyway, his motto is let's
keep paradise paradise. Lois committed a murder in his county
now and took away paradise from the residence there. So
he sees this as a personal attack on him because
Lois has killed one of his residents. So it's April ninth,
twenty eighteen. There's a nine to one to one call

(38:53):
from Snug Harbor down on Fort Myers Beach. A woman
took someone with her because she had a bad feeling
about the condo and they found a dead body inside
of it. So the nine to one one operator asks
if there are with the person or if she's awake. No,
they say they took a quick look and could tell
that this was a dead person in one of the condos.

(39:14):
Is she breathing? Well, no, it's a dead person in
one of the condos, they're telling the lady on the phone.
Sometimes these nine to one one operators can just frustrate you. Yes,
they can, be they really can. So the parking lot
of Snug Harbor Marine Village in Fort Myers Beach is
shown and we see that room four oh four was
the crime scene where the body was found. It's a

(39:35):
typical Florida building of condos, you know, few stories high,
white colored with the balconies walkway. So the April ninth
crime scene video is shown, and it's a pretty normal
looking condo until you get to the bathroom and then
they see a dead person on the bathroom floor. Sound
familiar sounds familiar manner of death homicide by gunshot. A

(39:57):
bullet entered this woman's back and exited out of her shoulder,
so it looked like she'd been taken by surprise. She'd
been in the bathroom, probably brushing her teeth, getting ready
for bed, and someone had come up behind her and
shot her. So the state of Florida has this Marcy's Law,
which kept the victim's information private, so early on the
police couldn't reveal the name of the victim. But again,

(40:20):
there were towels at the bottom of the bathroom door.
There was no bullet casing, so someone had cleaned up
after themselves, so they knew that another person was involved.
This wasn't self inflicted or an accident.

Speaker 3 (40:31):
Right.

Speaker 2 (40:32):
Putting towels down at the bottom of the bathroom door,
so the odor of the dead body is masked is
very similar to Dave's situation. Plus it shows a culpable
state of mind and a cover up someone wants to
get time to flee the scene. Then they noticed the
master bedroom and bathroom had been used by the victim,
and what they found in the spare bathroom and bedroom

(40:53):
showed that those were being used by someone as well.
There was used soap and towels in the guests bathroom
and the guest bedroom had been slept in, so two
people had been staying there. So it led the police
to believe well, the victim knew the suspect was probably
staying with her. Then the police looked at hours of
surveillance footage. Video from the Smoke and Oyster restaurant, which

(41:15):
is next to the Marina Village, shows the victim meeting
a woman at the bar. So you see Lois come
in looking all casual, long white hair, T shirt and shorts,
and she befriends the victim. These two, you know, upper
middle aged women, saying hi, giving each other a high five,
and then Lois looks at the menu. So once they

(41:35):
saw the suspect on video, they know it's Lois, but
then putting the two together, they had just received information
about Lois abandoning her Cadillac. The night before as well,
so they look at Lois Rehese's ID. She matches the
woman who met the victim in the bar restaurant. There
were a lot of surveillance cameras at Marina Village, and
later that evening, the victim and Lois are seen together

(41:58):
going towards the victim's condom. Then later at eight thirty
four pm, we see Lois exit the condo without the victim.
She looks like she might be a bit distraught. She's
standing on the landing and that was just forty eight
minutes after Lois and her victim had entered the condo.

Speaker 3 (42:14):
So the news of this murder got around pretty quickly
and his camera crews all around Snug Harbor. So Tess
asked one of them what was going on. The officer
told her there had been a murder and room four
oh four. So this was Tess's first inkling that Lois
might have been involved in something bad.

Speaker 2 (42:32):
Well, yeah, she just saw her old friend who she
thought was wanted for killing her husband the day before,
and now there's a murder.

Speaker 3 (42:39):
So that night Tess turned on the news and watched
all of it. Lois's face was on the news and
it said the police was looking for fifty six year
old Lois Reese. Her victim was fifty nine year old
Pam Hutchinson, who was from Bradenton, Florida, And that's not
too far north of Fort Myers Beach.

Speaker 2 (42:58):
No, they learned that Pam had been ordered by Lois.
She may have decided to take over Pam's identity. So
in Bridington we meet Gary, a guy on a boat
in his sixties, talk about how he loves the lifestyle
in Florida. And this is a guy who was close
to Pam Hutchinson. Kind of seems like he might have
been her boyfriend. I got that vibe.

Speaker 3 (43:18):
It seems from his interviews that they were pretty close.

Speaker 2 (43:21):
Yeah, so he and the other retirees they are like
to go boating and drinking and have fun. He says,
there's always live entertainment out by the water, and Pam
loved to be with the people there. So photos of
Pam very outgoing and fun woman. She made friends everywhere
she went. Gary says she was a real free spirit.
There were times when she would go out late and

(43:42):
she would stay at most of the night talking. She
was a fun and exciting person, a woman friend of Pam.
Barbara talks about what a really lovely person Pam was.
Pam had been married and she'd gotten divorced, and she'd
come to Florida to start over on her own. She'd
had a controlling husband and she'd eventually rebelled and left.
Then Gary had met her and introduced her to all

(44:04):
his friends, and he said they all loved her. He said,
you know, I've met a lot of women over the years,
and Pam really was one of a kind. And you
do get that feeling from the footage of her. Just
seems like a very positive woman.

Speaker 3 (44:16):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (44:17):
So Barbara says that Pam had a friend whose husband
had died and they wanted to spread his ashes on
the beach on Santa Bell. So Pam had checked room
rates and they were very expensive, and when she told
Barbara about it, Barbara told her, well, why don't you
let me call Snug Harbor, where I have a timeshare,
and I'll see if I can get you a room
there for a more reasonable price. So she did and

(44:37):
that worked out, and Barbara told her, now, when you
go down there, you have to go to the Shrimp
and Oyster bar there and try their spicy shrimp, it's
just to die for. So Gary and Barbara were texting
with Pam while she was there, and she was telling
them what a great time she was having, So then
she'd decided to stay an extra night there. Then she
mentioned she'd met someone and they'd been talking, but Barbara

(44:58):
tried texting her and and then Pam just seemed to
drop off the map. Her friends and family couldn't get
a hold of her. All of a sudden, Pam had
met a widow and befriended her. She had a really
big heart and felt compassion for this woman, who it
turns out, unfortunately, was Lois. So Pam had invited Lois
to spend the night in her condo.

Speaker 3 (45:17):
So when Gary hadn't heard from Pam for about a day,
he just figured she'd gotten sidetracked, and he didn't get alarmed.
But Barbara was getting more and more worried, and she
calls Snug Harbor and the woman there said, don't you know?
Barbara said, know what? And the responsible Pam had been murdered.
So Pam had been planning to go back home that Thursday,
but Lois talked to her and to stay another night.

(45:38):
Bad luck for Pam because that's when Lois killed her.

Speaker 2 (45:41):
Yeah, and poor Gary was just shocked and heartbroken by this.
And Barbara felt guilty because she's the one who had
told Pam to stay at Snug Harbor, but of course
she thought it was safe. It wasn't her fault. No,
but you know, she'd loved Pam. So they pinned the
suspect down to a woman, which was surprising when Barbara
heard that, kind of shocking. They didn't think that Lois
would commit another murder, even people that thought she'd killed

(46:04):
her husband didn't think she'd just go out and kill
a stranger.

Speaker 3 (46:07):
Well that's that's the part. This gets mysterious to me.

Speaker 2 (46:11):
Yeah, you can almost see, you know, a domestic situation
where someone kills their spouse or whatever. Yeah, even though
the staying in the house thing was extra weird, that
part is. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (46:21):
But then to go and deliberately kill somebody.

Speaker 2 (46:25):
Because she's perfectly innocent person.

Speaker 3 (46:27):
Right, and I'm sure she's doing that to take her identity.

Speaker 2 (46:30):
Oh yeah, seems very cold blooded.

Speaker 3 (46:32):
Kind of resembled each other slightly.

Speaker 2 (46:34):
Well, that's insulting to Pam, I think, But I see
what you mean. There are two women in their fifties,
two white women in their fifties similar. Yeah, yeah, so
Lois could get away with using Pam's identity, which she did. Yeah.
So when Barber heard that Tess had called the police
and reported that Lois was in Florida and the police
told her they was sure she wasn't there anymore, she

(46:57):
was upset because this could have been prevented. Had parked
her Cadillac just a block from Tessa's house, and the
police hadn't bothered to look. So Dodge County in Lee
County hadn't even looked for Lois in Lee County, they
only knew that Lois was a person of interest in
not a suspect in a murder. So Dodge County really
had made a mistake by not reporting her as a
suspect in a homicide and not getting a warrant on that. Yeah,

(47:21):
that really could have changed everything and saved Pam Hutchinson.
So now the identity of Reese took on a whole
new dimension. She spent the night in the same place
with a dead body like she had at her house
with her husband, and the fact that she'd picked out
this innocent stranger to kill was pretty scary.

Speaker 3 (47:37):
For sure.

Speaker 2 (47:37):
So again we flashed over to the prison interview with
Lois and she's asked if she knew something bad was
going to happen when she met Pam, and she says, oh, no.
Pam had approached her and she was also alone. They
were having dinner as two single women, and they made
friends easily. Lois said Pam was nice and she was

(47:58):
also a woman who was from an use of marriage.
So Pam told Lois she didn't have to stay in
a hotel, she could stay with her, So she was
being kind to Lois. But Lois says she never anticipated
harming Pam, which I don't believe at all. I think
she picked out Pam.

Speaker 3 (48:14):
I think she did too. And remember told that Lois
brought a gun with her to the room.

Speaker 2 (48:20):
Absolutely, it wasn't left in the escalator or anything.

Speaker 3 (48:23):
Right, Why are you taking a gun to a friend's house,
a new friend's house, where you're just going to be
spending the night.

Speaker 2 (48:30):
Right, Well, she claims that she packed the gun when
she was in Minnesota, along with many unusual things, kind
of like saying, well, I don't know, I was just
out of my mind. When asked about how she ended
up killing Pam. She says, well, that's a puzzle.

Speaker 3 (48:43):
Come on, it is a puzzle.

Speaker 2 (48:44):
She said she doesn't remember that. She says that she
had asked Pam to help her with a suicide attempt,
but she doesn't say Pam's name. She says they stayed
up late into the night talking and Lois says Pam
understood why Lois was suicidal. But the interview says, yeah,
but you killed her. Maybe you're thinking about what you
said happened with Dave when you'd been talking about taking

(49:06):
your life with him. And Lois says, oh, yeah, it
does sound like that. Well, you know, mental illness, the
mind is a crazy thing. It happened, Yeah, it just happened. Yeah, crazy.
So the gambling expert says that to her, it looks
like Lois impulsively killed Pam, and she's just so removed
from herself at that point that it's just actions. Family

(49:27):
in Blooming Prairie had kind of put together the pieces
of Dave's murder, but now this situation with Pam was
absolutely shocking. Doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 3 (49:37):
Yeah, and I'm not sure i'd say that it was
an impulsive act that she killed Pam.

Speaker 2 (49:41):
No, I think it was planned. Yeah, yeah, I mean
it could have been impulsive if you think you could
plan something a day ahead of time and do it impulsively.
But it wasn't a spur of the moment idea.

Speaker 3 (49:51):
No, No, I don't think so.

Speaker 2 (49:52):
No, it was very cold blooded. After she shot Pam,
she'd spent the night in the condo with the deceased.
Then in the morning she'd pecked up hers and many
of Pam's belongings and took Pam's car, a white Accura,
and left. So now she wanted to take her stuff.
She didn't have a vehicle because she'd left the Cadillac.
She was probably running out of gambling money. She took

(50:13):
some of Pam's personal items and information, including a debt bit, car,
to check book and ID and she even wore her hat.
So Lois was using the victim's information and withdrew five
thousand dollars from her bank wearing Pam's hat. You can
see her on the video. Yes, she stopped at a
Hilton hotel in the Akalla area and made three separate
withdrawals for five hundred dollars each from Pam's account, So

(50:36):
she'd executed two people. Stole money and continued on her way.
So now we're seeing she's really cold and calculated.

Speaker 3 (50:43):
So back in Minnesota, Scott couldn't believe what he was hearing.
Why would she murder someone basically over money? Lois left
Florida because she was terrified, at least she claims to
be have been. She stopped at least one casino where
she won a fifteen hundred jackpot, and this was in Louisiana.
She used her own identity there to collect her winnings.

(51:03):
She had already used Pam's identity by withdrawing money there.

Speaker 2 (51:07):
Yes, that's kind of weird. Then she used her own,
but maybe she just got confused or forgot, or maybe
she didn't want to use Pam's identity later, because you know,
because now people are finding out that Pam's debt.

Speaker 3 (51:18):
Yeah, if Pam's dead, they'll find out what her car
make and model was, license plate right, and they'll be
looking for.

Speaker 2 (51:25):
But what she didn't know is the car was already
being tracked by the highway cameras. So she stopped at
the gas station and tried to take money from an
ATM in Pam's name, And they show the video footage
on TV in the news. So she's known now as
the killer Grandma Geez. They put billboards up in four
states and she was wanted by the US Marshals Police

(51:46):
worried that she could be headed to Mexico, but they
lost track of her again. So Lois ended up in
South Padre Island off the southern tip of Texas. So
she had this song here about parrot heads that she liked.
It seems like it's mostly like retired, kind of eccentric
people there, just kind of living a life of going
to the bar and hanging out and enjoying the warm weather.

(52:09):
So she was staying in a motel six next to
the Padre Rita grill. Lois was there in beachware, happy
and just hanging out, and when asked her name by
some of the people there, she said lah, like she
was going to say Lois, but then she said La Donna,
but I just normally go by Donna. So she actually
became pretty well known there hanging out with the locals.

(52:30):
She said she was a widow who'd come into some
money and was looking for a place to buy a
place to live. So we really see some characters at
this place.

Speaker 3 (52:38):
Yeah, the bartender was quite a character. So he's talking
about Lois. He says the first time he talked to her,
she ordered a top shelf margarita. She paid in cash
and tipped well, and she ended up ordering three margaritas,
all top shelf and asked the bartender if he wanted
to go out. He declined, mostly because he was married.
I think. No.

Speaker 2 (52:58):
He said that she was crazy. He said he could
tell she was crazy right off.

Speaker 3 (53:03):
Well he knew she was drunk, yeah, but.

Speaker 2 (53:05):
Crazy, not just drunk crazy. He said he wasn't going
to go anywhere with her.

Speaker 3 (53:09):
Yeah, So law enforcement was searching for Lois, and there
was a worldwide hunt. Basically, she had already shown that
she was a dangerous person. She's armed and on the run,
and that's not a good combination.

Speaker 2 (53:23):
No, So then we hear from Bernadette and this is
quite a story.

Speaker 3 (53:26):
Yeah, this gets another twist to the tail.

Speaker 2 (53:29):
Yeah. I feel like she came very close to being killed.

Speaker 3 (53:32):
I think she dodged one.

Speaker 2 (53:33):
So she's a single, older woman, about the same age
as Lois. She's on San Pedre Island, but she doesn't
live there, but she goes there most weekends and that's
where she met Lois. So she'd been a widow for
a few years and she was out dining alone when
she met Lois, and they ended up having dinner together.
Bernadette became friendly with Lois. There's these two widows sharing

(53:54):
their stories. Lois said she just lost her husband and
her family wasn't allowing her to grievely.

Speaker 3 (54:00):
Well, that's probably true.

Speaker 2 (54:02):
That is true now when she told her she was
a widow. Bernadette had no idea that she was a
widow because she'd killed her husband. So Lois liked to
be the center of attention, which is common with gamblers.
So one night, Lois and Bernadette were talking and Bernadette
invited her to stay at her house. They used the
hot tub together, and Lois said she felt very relaxed.

(54:24):
She even told Bernadette that she and her husband had
owned a waxworm farm. Bernadette had no idea what that was,
but Lois explained it how it's a bait for fishermen
fisher people. So Lois said her husband had died of
a heart attack.

Speaker 3 (54:38):
Well, I guess if a bullet through the heart could.

Speaker 2 (54:41):
Be considered Yeah, if the heart stops beating, right, So
she slept that night in Bernadette's guest room, and they
got up in the morning and Bernadette drove her back
to the Motel six and dropped her off, and then
they kept communicating with each other online after that and
discussed getting together again. So now we go to Dirty
al that's a seafood place where Lois went looking for

(55:02):
a bar, but Dirty Owls didn't have a bar. But
the cook there had seen Lois on the news several
times and when he saw her show up in person,
he knew who she was, but she looked very laid back,
like she was having a good time. So he had
sent her next door to a bar called Sea Ranch,
and Lois went into that bar and ordered a glass

(55:23):
of reasling. Then the cook at Dirty Owl's called the
U S Marshals, so Lois was picked up at the
Sea Ranch bar. The Marshals saw her car parked in
the parking lot, Pam's car, and they sent two deputy
Marshals to pick up Lois. So Lois had paid her
bar tab with one hundred dollar bill, and the marshals
came in in plain clothes and walked over to the
bar where they zip tied her and led her out,

(55:45):
and Lois was very quiet. She had nothing to say
when she was picked up. She may have had remorse,
but she didn't show it. And Lois was first taken
to the San Padre Island jail. She was wearing a
tank tap in shorts and she was cooperative.

Speaker 3 (55:58):
And the bartender said Lois did seem a little bit off,
but didn't think she would kill anybody. She didn't look dangerous.

Speaker 2 (56:05):
Yeah, he said, he didn't think she'd kill anybody, but
you never think anybody's going to kill anybody, right, right.
And meanwhile, Bernadette was still trying to reach her, but
then she was told that Lois had been arrested for
two murders.

Speaker 3 (56:18):
Can you imagine that? I can't if you're Bernadette.

Speaker 2 (56:20):
Oh God, very scary because Lois had befriended her, just
like she had befriended Pam before she killed her. Bernadette
had had this woman in her home. And she said, well,
maybe because she told her about her security cameras, Lois
had decided not to kill Bernadette.

Speaker 3 (56:38):
That's a believable possibility.

Speaker 2 (56:41):
It is. And I'm just telling you right now, I
think Lois is a lot more diabolical. Yeah than most
people are thinking.

Speaker 3 (56:48):
I think if you watch that interview that travels throughout
the documentary, Yeah, she comes across as a very intelligent,
conniving woman.

Speaker 2 (56:58):
Yeah, I agree, just immediately asked for a lawyer and
remained silent. She was picked up by the Minnesota police
on San Padre Island to take her back. Tess and
Rod left Florida to go back to Minnesota on April nineteenth,
and they ended up out with friends in town and
they all saw Lois being captured on the television. Everybody
was excited and cheered because she wouldn't be able to

(57:20):
hurt or kill someone else. So she was first charged
in Florida. Her Motel six room was searched and they
found Pam's hat, They found a gun and what they
called a go bag. It's like a black Duffel bag.
And this makes me think she was worse than we thought. Right.
She had duct tape, ammunition, latex gloves.

Speaker 3 (57:39):
Yeah, and then she was plotting something.

Speaker 2 (57:41):
Yeah. The weird thing is she had Pam's sunglasses wrapped
up like a trophy or a souvenir. That I thought
was pretty creepy. So June first, twenty eighteen, Lois was
recorded talking to her daughter, crying and asking her to
keep Dave's ashes to spread out on his favorite fishing spot.
Her case did not end up going to try. In
December twenty nineteen, she pled guilty to murdering Pam Hutchinson,

(58:04):
and she was sentenced to life in prison. Now, she
says she wished she'd gone to trial, but she didn't
want to be found mentally incompetent and wind up spending
the rest of her life in a mental institution. She
says she did feel mentally incompetent. She says she was
in the middle of a breakdown, but she was able
to avoid the death penalty. I just find how she
keeps going back to herself and what she had to

(58:27):
deal with.

Speaker 3 (58:28):
It all goes back to.

Speaker 2 (58:28):
Her very off putting Yeah, I don't see any empathy
for anyone else though.

Speaker 3 (58:33):
After the Florida sentencing, she was extradited to Minnesota to
face charges for the murder of her husband, and again
she agreed to another plea deal for life in prison
with minoparole, and she also would be near her children
and grandchildren so they could come visit if they wanted to.

Speaker 2 (58:51):
Yeah, I think most of them don't visit her. There
was a hearing in the high school auditorium because the
courthouse only had a room big enough for seven people,
so all the media showed up and Lois was walked
in with her hands shackled at her waist, and she
did recount killing Dave through a series of questions asked
by her attorney. She said that they went to her
grandson's lacrosse game together the day she shot Dave, but

(59:14):
Dave was angry and only let her stay there for
about fifteen minutes. And this is another thing where she's
kind of feeling sorry for herself over this, which I
didn't like. She says. They drove back home, but he
was in a really bad mood. They argued on the
drive home, and she said Dave had a smoking closet
where he was smoking when they got home, and when
she walked in, he handed her a gun. She said

(59:35):
Dave took a loaded twenty two pistol out of a
drawer and said, why don't you just kill yourself and
get it right this time? And Lois said, well, that's
all she knew about that. She had never had a
gun and she doesn't shoot guns. But then the interviewer
reminds us that was her dad's gun. So Lois said
she looked at Dave, pointed the gun at his heart,
and fired. Do we believe this story? No, I don't

(59:58):
difficult to believe, don't you think totally? So for the
most part, people are suspicious and don't believe her story.
But if Dave had given her the gun, why didn't
she just run out of the house after shooting him.
According to Lois, she started having blackouts and losing track
of time. She said she was incontinent and went driving
for miles and miles. She said she had no idea

(01:00:20):
why she drove to Florida. It's still a puzzle to her.
But you have to remember after she killed Dave, she
went out and did payroll.

Speaker 3 (01:00:26):
Yeah, she lived.

Speaker 2 (01:00:27):
She ate meals, early normal life for almost two weeks,
killing him exactly, and stole money new enough to go
steal checks. So there were victims statements that were read
and Dave's mother, a very elderly woman, wrote a statement
that was read out loud for her. So what she
said was that Lois did an unpardonable crime and her

(01:00:48):
life without David is her punishment. Lois apologized to her
family for killing her husband, but she never apologized for
killing Pam. She claims she doesn't remember killing Pam and
that she actually wasn't right or hiding from the law.
She says she feels terrible that she took lives, especially Pam,
because she had reached out to her to be her friend.
She says, if she wasn't in the middle of a

(01:01:09):
mental breakdown, then maybe she and Pam could have been friends. Yeah. Sure,
but she really killed Dave and Pam and fled with
their money, so it seems very purposeful and cold. Any
claims she made about blacking out and having these extreme
mental breaks really doesn't add up with her behavior. If
nothing else, she seems like she knew what she was doing.
So at the end, Lois tells us about many of

(01:01:32):
these mental health issues in her family. She acts like
she came forward and accepted responsibility instead of admitting to
reality where she killed people and went on the run
and got caught. Then it ends with Carrie, who said
she visited Lois in August of twenty twenty one and
talked to her for about an hour about what led
up to Dave's shooting, but She said Lois never talked

(01:01:54):
to her about what she did in Florida. Carrie's mother's there,
and she says she prays for Lois every night to
find peace. Pam's old boyfriend or friend, Gary, says Pam
would like to be remembered as a free spirit. Her
last trip to Mexico, just a few months before she
was killed, she'd send Gary a video and wrote, until
we meet again. So Lois is serving concurrent life sentences

(01:02:17):
and she caused a lot of damage. Now, there is
a lot of history about mental health in the family,
which they go over, but I just don't see that
as an excuse, especially for the second murder.

Speaker 3 (01:02:28):
Oh it's no kidding.

Speaker 2 (01:02:30):
Yeah, I wouldn't trust her. Would you have her come
stay with us?

Speaker 3 (01:02:33):
I don't think so.

Speaker 2 (01:02:34):
No. I mean it's kind of even scarier that she
seems normal and friendly.

Speaker 3 (01:02:38):
Of course, if I knew her history, I certainly wouldn't.
I wouldn't even.

Speaker 2 (01:02:41):
Talk to her, right, Yeah. But just the fact that
the way she makes excuses and victim blames.

Speaker 3 (01:02:48):
I mean, the only thing she takes responsibility for is
killing her husband, right, but.

Speaker 2 (01:02:52):
She kind of blames that on him too.

Speaker 3 (01:02:54):
Yeah, kind of thing with Pam. She just doesn't remember.

Speaker 2 (01:02:57):
Yeah, that's the bullshit. Yeah, of course, it is definitely
some bullshit. All right. Well, this is fun. I like
watching these docuseries and talking about them. So we'll probably
do it again.

Speaker 3 (01:03:07):
And we'll do some more.

Speaker 2 (01:03:08):
Yeah. Absolutely, And it's just a way of us thanking
our supporters. We appreciate you so much, and we'll see
you next time at the quiet end.

Speaker 3 (01:03:16):
Plenty of room, come on down, all right, Bye, bye, bye, guys.