BLOOMING PRAIRIE, Minn. — A new HBO documentary on former Blooming Prairie resident Lois Riess and the nationwide manhunt that ensued after she murdered two people will air this month.

Lois Riess (Steele County Jail via Associated Press)

It delivers the goods in one key respect that the raft of other documentaries on the “Killer Grandma” never have. It features the 62-year-old Riess telling, in her own words, why she did what she did in March and April 2018.

That in itself could be an intriguing draw for area viewers who were shocked by her murders and have always wondered “Why?” It will certainly set this two-part documentary titled “I’m Not a Monster: The Lois Riess Murders” apart from others.

How satisfying viewers will find her explanation and reasons for fatally shooting her husband, David Riess, in Blooming Prairie and, weeks later after fleeing south while stopping at casinos along the way, Pamela Hutchinson in a Fort Myers Beach, Fla., hotel room, is an entirely different matter. The trailer promises to delve into the Gothic nightmare, “a disturbing family history and an addiction to gambling,” that apparently was Riess’ life.

“I’ve never given an interview,” Riess says tearfully in the trailer released by HBO. “I hope this is the right thing to do.

“It was just years and years of abuse,” Riess says, referencing her marriage to David, whose killing led her to be sentenced to life in prison in 2020. “I just snapped.”

The documentary runs Tuesday, Oct. 15, and Wednesday, Oct. 16. Both episodes will be available to stream on Max on Oct. 15.

The docuseries attempts to grapple with the biggest head-scratcher: What made this seemingly sweet 56-year-old grandmother turn into a killer? And it discovers a deeper conundrum at the heart of her crime spree. If the murder of her husband was a spontaneous act, the second one was one of cold-hearted calculation: It was an effort to steal the identity of Hutchinson, who looked like Riess.

In the documentary, directed by Erin Lee Carr, who hails from Minnesota, Riess “admits to killing David, pointing to alleged emotional abuse in the relationship, but is unable to justify her methodical, well-planned crime spree that followed, which included embezzling funds, a second murder of a stranger, identity theft, and a callous, detailed coverup of her crimes,” a press release states.

Related: Fugitive Minnesota grandma Lois Riess sentenced to life in prison for Florida murder

It also roams over an extended cast of characters that includes former friends and neighbors, family members, journalists, an addiction specialist, law enforcement officers, witnesses who encountered Riess before her arrest, and a possible would-be victim.

Riess was apprehended in South Padre Island, Texas, a month after the nationwide manhunt began in the wake of her husband’s murder. Riess surrendered without resistance. Later, she claimed not to remember many details of her crime spree, but “police have evidence that details her sinister plan.”

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By ADITHI RAMAKRISHNAN, AP Science Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Prepare to spot a rare, bright comet.

The space rock is slinging toward Earth from the outer reaches of the solar system and will make its closest pass on Saturday. It should be visible through the end of October, clear skies permitting.

This photo provided by Nicolas Biver shows Comet C/2023 A3 (ATLAS-Tsuchinshan) as seen in the night sky of Granada, Spain, on Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024. (Nicolas Biver via AP)

Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas should be bright enough to see with the naked eye, but binoculars and telescopes will give a better view.

“It’ll be this fuzzy circle with a long tail stretching away from it,” said Sally Brummel, planetarium manager at the Bell Museum in Minnesota.

What is a comet?

Comets are frozen leftovers from the solar system’s formation billions of years ago. They heat up as they swing toward the sun, releasing their characteristic streaming tails.

In 2023, a green comet that last visited Earth 50,000 years ago zoomed by the planet again. Other notable flybys included Neowise in 2020, and Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake in the mid to late 1990s.

Where did comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas come from?

The comet, also designated C/2023 A3, was discovered last year and is named for the observatories in China and South Africa that spied it.

It came from what’s known as the Oort Cloud well beyond Pluto. After making its closest approach about 44 million miles (71 million kilometers) of Earth, it won’t return for another 80,000 years — assuming it survives the trip.

Several comets are discovered every year, but many burn up near the sun or linger too far away to be visible without special equipment, according to Larry Denneau, a lead researcher with the Atlas telescope that helped discover the comet.

How to view the comet

Those hoping to spot comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas should venture outside about an hour after sunset on a clear night and look to the west.

The comet should be visible from both the northern and southern hemispheres.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By CHRISTINE FERNANDO

CHICAGO (AP) — Four years of Donald Trump’s false claims about a stolen 2020 election have kindled growing suspicion of voting machines among conspiracy theorists. One of their solutions is to replace the tabulators that count every vote with people who will do that by hand.

Controversies over the issue have flared periodically in pockets of the country before the 2024 presidential election even though research has shown that hand-counting is more prone to error, costlier and likely to delay results.

The few counties that have attempted the massive task have found the process more time-consuming, expensive and inaccurate than expected.

In Texas’ Gillespie County, a hand-count of Republican primary election ballots this year stretched into the early morning hours, taking almost 24 consecutive hours with 200 people counting ballots, the Texas Tribune and VoteBeat reported. The hand-count cost taxpayers about double the wage costs of the 2020 Republican primary and involved fixing a series of errors, the news nonprofits reported.

In rural Nye County in Nevada, where volunteers in 2022 embarked on an unprecedented full hand-count of midterm votes, mismatched tallies led to recount after recount. After the first day of counting, the county clerk, Mark Kampf, estimated a discrepancy of nearly 25% between the hand and machine count, attributing it to human counting error. The painstakingly slow process was halted by the state’s Supreme Court over concerns that early vote tallies could be leaked publicly.

Shasta County, a conservative rural county in northern California, last year abandoned plans to hand-count ballots after the plan was estimated to cost $1.6 million and require more than 1,200 additional employees.

Still, some jurisdictions continue to call for hand-counting.

Most recently, Georgia’s State Election Board voted to require poll workers to count the number of paper ballots, but not the votes, by hand after voting is completed. The counting would have to be done by three separate poll workers until all three counts are the same.

The new rule went against the advice of the state attorney general, the secretary of state and an association of county election officials.

A ‘grassroots’ movement

Efforts to replace modern voting machines with more laborious, error-prone hand-counting are rooted in a set of conspiracy theories about voting machines that have been spread by Trump and his allies. Some Republicans, inspired by election lies claiming that widespread fraud cost Trump reelection in 2020, have pushed for hand-counting ballots and banning the electronic tabulators used to scan ballots and record votes, despite no evidence of widespread fraud or major irregularities.

“This movement could have died if it had just been a flash in the pan from the 2020 election,” said Charles Stewart, a political science professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But conspiracy theorists such as election denier and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell have traveled the country working “to create a grassroots social movement around this skepticism,” Stewart said.

While these conspiracy theories are not common nationwide, they have found a stubborn hold in pockets of the country, “primarily in the deepest red parts of the deepest red states,” Stewart said.

Problems with cost, speed and accuracy

The hand-counting of ballots threatens to delay results by days, weeks or even months, depending on jurisdiction and staffing. Swapping machines with hand-counts would not only be slower but also increase the chances for mistakes and fraud, research has shown.

In a New Hampshire study, poll workers who counted ballots by hand were off by 8%, compared with a 0.5% error rate for machine counting.

“Human beings are really bad at tedious things, and counting ballots is among the most tedious things we could do,” Stewart said. “Computers are very good at tedious things. They can count very quickly and very accurately.”

Paper ballots already used

Trump and other Republicans have called for the use of paper ballots in this year’s election. In fact, paper ballots or paper records of every vote already are produced in nearly every state.

The Brennan Center at New York University estimates that 98% of all votes nationwide will be cast on paper in this year’s presidential election.

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Paper ballots also are used in postelection, hand-count audits to identify any irregularities with ballot scanning and counting and to ensure the machine results are accurate. Election officials also conduct accuracy testing on the machines before every election.

Susannah Goodman, director of election security at Common Cause, said informing voters of the checks already in place can help reduce the fear and distrust at the center of calls for hand-counting ballots.

“If you show voters the process and all of the steps that are taken to ensure the outcome is correct – not just tell, show – they gain confidence,” she said.

Read more about how U.S. elections work at Explaining Election 2024, a series from The Associated Press aimed at helping make sense of the American democracy. The AP receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.