Lois Riess pleaded guilty to first-degree murder on Tuesday in the death of her husband in 2018 and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Lois Riess pleads guilty to murder and is sentenced to life without parole
Already convicted of a Florida murder, she pleaded guilty to killing her husband in Blooming Prairie.
August 12, 2020 at 5:26AM
John Stiles, spokesman for Attorney General Keith Ellison, whose office was handling the prosecution, confirmed the sentence.
In July, Riess, 58, who was recently extradited from Florida to Minnesota in the killing of her husband, David, pleaded not guilty in a pretrial hearing in Dodge County District Court.
After the killing in her Blooming Prairie home, she was the subject of a nationwide search that lasted nearly a month. Authorities charged her with first-degree murder in his shooting in March 2018. After killing him, she went to Fort Myers Beach, Fla., and befriended a woman who had a similar appearance to hers.
Riess admitted that she later fatally shot Pamela Hutchinson, 59, in her rented condo room and stole her identity.
She fled to Texas in Hutchinson's car, according to authorities, making stops at casinos in Louisiana. She was arrested in Hutchinson's death in South Padre Island on April 19, 2018.
Riess pleaded guilty in December to first-degree murder for the killing of Hutchinson in Lee County Court and was sentenced to life in prison.
Republicans across the country benefited from favorable tailwinds as President-elect Donald Trump resoundingly defeated Democrat Kamala Harris. But that wasn’t the whole story in Minnesota.
