BLOOMING PRAIRIE, Minn — The Minnesota woman who hit the road and hid in plain sight while authorities tried to apprehend her for two murders appeared in a Florida courtroom Thursday.
Lois Riess is charged with first degree murder in the death of 59-year-old Pamela Hutchinson, a woman she allegedly killed while on the run as authorities sought her in the shooting death of her husband David. She is being represented by public defenders who noted during court proceedings that Riess' legal proceedings are being delayed by a backlog of other ongoing death penalty cases for their office.
The judge set Riess' next pre-trial conference hearing for December, hoping to get her case moving forward.
The appearance comes just days after new details surfaced in the former "Fugitive Grandma's" Minnesota murder case. The new information is revealed in more than a dozen search warrants the Dodge County Sheriff's office executed in the two months after David Riess was killed.
According to the paperwork, deputies found David Riess dead, covered with a blanket, after his business partner asked them to check on him. He hadn't seen Riess in 16 days, but had received suspicious text messages. The search warrants say investigators suspect Lois Riess was using David's phone. David's employees said Lois told them David was leaving for a fishing trip, was sick, and they shouldn't bother him at the house. The lead investigator believes David Riess was already dead.
The search warrants say Riess was killed by multiple shots from a .22 caliber gun. The Dodge County Sheriff says testing confirms the gun found in Lois Riess' hotel room was the one used to kill David.
The paperwork doesn't reveal any other possible motive, beyond the more than $10,000 in business checks belonging to her husband that Lois Riess is charged with illegally cashing.
The search warrants say investigator's traced Lois' cell phone, and it showed she was at the Diamond Jo Casino in Iowa the day before they found David's body. But the woman dubbed by authorities "Losing Streak Lois" was gone when police arrived. She's accused of killing Pamela Hutchinson in Florida 13 days later.
