Lois Riess is 56 years old. In a driver’s license photo released by police, she looks like a kindly grandmother. She has a pleasant smile, blonde hair, brown eyes. She doesn’t look like a killer.
Police say she is a killer, and she’s on the run, and no one is safe.
Riess is the alleged killer of Pamela Hutchinson, age 59. The Bradenton, Florida woman was only guilty of one thing: resembling Lois Riess.
Police in Fort Myers Beach, Florida found Hutchinson dead from gunshot wounds last Monday. As reported by multiple media sources including the Associated Press, no one is aware of any social connection between Riess and Hutchinson. Riess may have killed Hutchinson to assume her identity. A Lee County official reportedly said Hutchinson’s purse “was found to be in disarray and all cash, credit cards and identification appeared to be removed.”
The buried lede is this: Hutchinson isn’t Riess’s alleged first victim. Her first victim may have been her husband, David Riess.
In late March, David Riess was found shot to death at the Blooming Prairie home he shared with his wife. After she allegedly wrote checks amounting to $11,000 on David Riess’s account, Lois Riess—who is said to have a gambling addiction—visited an Iowa casino, then vanished for a while.
Investigators think she popped up again in Florida, where she met Pamela Hutchinson.
The AP reports that after abandoning her Escalade, “Riess is believed to be driving Hutchinson’s car, a white Acura TL with Florida license plate Y37TAA.”
So far there have been sightings of the Acura TL in Louisiana and Texas.
Can a gambling addiction make someone snap like that? Several reports quote police as saying Lois Riess’s m.o. is to steal identities—as if she’s done it before.
She may look like a plump, friendly middle-aged woman, but it sounds like Lois is as dangerous as any wild-eyed psycho.
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