Erin Lee Carr is a Minnesota girl who is an internationally recognized documentarian. Carr specializes in ultra-lurid crime stories -- the names of some of her films are illustrative: Thought Crimes: the Case of the Cannibal Cop, I love you, now die!,Mommy Dead and Dearest, The Ringleader: the Case of the Bling Ring. She has also made documentaries about Brittney Spears' lawsuit against her father and the sexual abuse inflicted on the little girls on the Olympic Gymnastics Team. She is reportedly working on a scripted film about the notorious killer-lawyer Alex Murdaugh. Ms. Carr has written a memoir about her relationship with her father and her own drug addiction. She was an editor for Vice both in print and on-screen and worked in production on Lena Dunham's Girls. In short, Carr has her finger on the Zeitgeist and has proven to be a swift, efficient, and effective purveyor of tabloid crime stories. Her most recent production -- and she is incredibly prolific -- is I am not a Monster: the Lois Riess Murders. This is a well-edited, if prosaic and unimaginative, documentary about a grandmother who committed two murders in 2018. The show's novelty for me is that Lois Riess was a well-known figure in the small town of Blooming Prairie, Minnesota -- a village of about 2000 people located 17 miles from Austin, my home. My excellent paralegal has lived in Blooming Prairie for 35 years and, so, she is personally acquainted with several of the people interviewed in Carr's 2024 HBO Max documentary. Of course, I have represented people from Blooming Prairie, tried cases with clients from that place, and have driven through the town hundreds of times. Once I even went swimming in the town's idiosyncratic public pool, a gravel pit amidst nice residential homes with a small beach and deep, cold water.
I am not a Monster, of course, demonstrates the opposite of the proposition espoused by the title. Without much doubt, Lois Riess is a monster, a stone-cold psychopath, and egregious, self-serving liar. Like many people of her kind, she overestimates her ability to talk her way out of trouble and, so, Carr, filming her where she is presently domiciled for life (the Shakopee Women's Prison), gives her plenty of rope with which to hang herself and, of course, Riess obliges. (She is the kind of person who wants sympathy because she is a widow -- but, of course, she is widow because she killed her husband.) Carr's documentary consists of nicely filmed but unimpressive interviews, generally conducted in someone's kitchen or living room or (weirdly) in empty taverns. There's no narration although some titles orient the viewer to events. Carr works by letting her interview subjects speak their piece, typically without much interruption, and, then, editing their words into meaningful 20 or 30 second snippets. This is state of the art documentary film-making -- there are lots of ominous drone shots with the camera gliding over the nondescript grain elevators and commercial downtown of Blooming Prairie. Cars drive down empty snowy highways and we see deer running through the forests, really just shelter belts, somewhere in southern Minnesota -- the influence of the Coen Brothers Fargo is pretty much everywhere evident. The story is gruesome and sensational: Lois Riess was a hard-partying woman whose husband operated a waxworm bait farm -- the place grew waxworms, a kind of plump, succulent larva, to be sold nationally and apparently was very profitable. Everyone knew Riess and her husband, David, as a fun couple, heavy drinkers and habitues of the local restaurants and taverns in town. (Blooming Prairie has a modest demi-monde of hedonistic businessmen and their blonde attractive wives.) When Riess didn't show up at a fishing competition, people were alarmed. The cops discovered that the man was dead, decomposing on the floor of his bathroom in his ranch-rambler adjacent to the worm farm. Lois Riess had shot him and, then, stayed in the house for ten or 12 days before making a somewhat inept escape in the couple's expensive SUV, a Cadillac Escalade. For the first half-hour of the show, Carr lets Riess give her account of the couple's secret life -- despite all appearances to the contrary, they were unhappily married and David was supposedly abusive. While he was inflicting psychological abuse on Lois, she used her gun to shoot him repeatedly. When the stench in the house became significant, she put towels under the closed bathroom door, opened a window despite sub -zero temperatures, and ran the toilet's fan to expel the smell. Lois, then, drove to Fort Myers, Florida where she picked up a nice blonde woman in the bar, sharing stories with her about being a widow and victim of abuse. The blonde woman was about Lois' size and age and had the same color hair. Lois shot this woman to death, stole her credit cards and money, and, apparently, decided she would cross the border into Mexico after driving to Brownsville, Texas. But Lois enjoyed drinking at bars and, on South Padre Island, picked up another lonely middle-aged widow, seemingly planning to kill her as well. (For some reason, she didn't follow through with this third victim.) By this time, the FBI was in hot pursuit and they captured Lois a few days later while she was nonchalantly having drinks at the bar at one of the local seafood places. Lois was extradited to Florida, a death penalty state. To avoid capital punishment, she pled guilty and was, then, returned to Minnesota where she is serving a life sentence in Shakopee, a Minneapolis suburb.
Lois is initially plausible in her rather baroque attempt to impose the blame for Dave's murder on her unfortunate husband But the film shows us that she is at heart a psychopath, a compulsive gambler who seems to have stolen from everyone who ever trusted her. (She stole over $55,000 from a mentally disabled sister that she was supposed to be assisting as her conservator and seems to have gambled away hundreds of thousands of dollars.) It quickly becomes apparent that you can tell when Lois is lying because her lips are moving. She cries and talks about "black-outs" and abuse but has no justification for the murder of her doppelgaenger in Fort Myers. Various local people, both in Florida and Texas as well as Blooming Prairie, talk about their encounters with Lois. With the exception of two "talking heads" no one show much sympathy for the murderous woman. One of the sympathetic witnesses is Lois niece who appears willing to give her aunt the benefit of the doubt; an old friend cautiously suggests that Dave, despite appearances, was a mean bastard himself. A gambling addiction counselor stinks up the show with various pop psychology excuses that are irritating and morally corrupt -- it doesn't help that this woman is filmed in what seems to be a closed bar.
The show is of no redeeming social value. It's garish, simple-minded, but fascinating. And it's fair in its own sub-literate, exploitative manner -- Carr lets you make up your own mind and doesn't tip her hand. But after three hours, it's pretty obvious what is going on. A reasonable criticism of the show is that it's too long -- it has a grim coda featuring the suicides and deaths of Riess' family members. The material is worth about two hours, but the show. I must concede, is as interesting as a bad wreck on the highway and you can't really look away.
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