A year after her husband's sudden 2022 death, Utah mother-of-three Kouri Richins self-published a children's book about coping with grief, called Are You With Me?
In promotional interviews with local media, Richins said she had written the book with her kids, the oldest of whom was 10. She told NPR member station KPCW in April 2023 that the process "brought a little peace to me and my boys."
"It was a really good distraction from this last year and going through the first holidays without my husband, his birthday, like our anniversary, all these things, and it gave us something to work towards," she added.
Weeks later, Richins was charged with killing her husband, Eric. And on Monday, a jury in Summit County, Utah, convicted her of his murder.
Prosecutors alleged that Kouri Richins spiked Eric Richins' cocktail with fentanyl in March 2022, after several earlier attempts, because she was millions of dollars in debt and believed she would inherit his estate. She did not know that Eric had quietly cut her out of his will years earlier after discovering that some of that debt had been racked up in his name.
Prosecutors also said she had taken out multiple life insurance policies on her husband while having an affair.
"She wanted to leave Eric Richins, but she did not want to leave his money," Summit County chief prosecutor Brad Bloodworth said in his closing argument on Monday.
Kouri Richins has denied wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty to the five charges against her in this case. She declined to testify during the trial, which lasted three weeks and featured testimony from some 40 witnesses.
Her defense attorney, Wendy Lewis, said Eric had Lyme disease and was addicted to painkillers, and called the investigation into his death "nothing but sloppy" and "driven by bias."
After three hours of deliberation, the jury found Richins guilty of aggravated murder — punishable by 25 years to life in prison — and the four other charges, which include forgery and fraud related to the opening of nearly $2 million in life insurance policies for Eric without his knowledge. Richins bowed her head as the verdict was read.
Richins is scheduled to return to court for sentencing on May 13, which would have been Eric's 44th birthday.
That may not spell the end of Richins' legal troubles. She is facing 26 other felony charges of alleged financial wrongdoing in the years leading up to Eric's murder — including mortgage fraud, money laundering and issuing bad checks — in a separate case that prosecutors filed last year. She is also litigating property issues with Eric's family in civil court, KPCW reports.
The case against Kouri Richins
Kouri Richins called 911 just after 3 a.m. on March 4, 2022, to report that she had found her husband, Eric, unresponsive, according to prosecutors' legal brief. Responders declared him dead at the scene — their home in Kamas, a mountain town about 40 miles southeast of Salt Lake City.
The medical examiner found five times the lethal level of fentanyl in Eric's blood and ruled his death an overdose. The medical examiner also determined the drug was illicit (as opposed to medical-grade) and ingested orally. The only people home at the time were the Richins and their three young kids.
According to her arrest warrant, Kouri told investigators that she had made Eric a Moscow mule the previous night to celebrate closing on a property for her house-flipping business. She said he drank the cocktail in bed, and she went to sleep with one of their kids who was having a nightmare — only to return a few hours later and find her husband cold to the touch in bed.
Law enforcement officers say they quickly found holes in Kouri's story. For example, she told them she had left her phone charging in her room while she went to comfort her son, but phone data showed it had been opened — and messages sent and deleted — during that time.
That prompted a search of the Richins' house, and the eventual seizure of Kouri's electronic devices — including a second iPhone found in her bedside drawer.
Prosecutors said it contained a slew of incriminating online searches, including: "what is a lethal.does.of.fetanayl," "can cops.uncover deleted.messages iphone," "women utah prison," "if someone is poisned what does it go down on the death certificate as," "death certificate says pending, will life insurance still pay?" and "luxury prisons for the rich in america."
Kouri's other phone revealed a series of messages in which she asked someone identified as C.L. for help obtaining prescription pain medication, which she said was "for an investor who had a back injury."
C.L. is the family's occasional housekeeper, Carmen Lauber, who testified at trial — under immunity for her cooperation — that she had provided illicit drugs to Kouri on four occasions between December 2021 and March 2022.
The third time, in early February 2022, prosecutors say Kouri asked specifically for fentanyl: she "said that her investor wanted something stronger and asked for 'some of the Michael Jackson stuff.'" The singer's 2009 death was officially attributed to the legal anesthetic propofol.
"Kouri Richins was a suburban mother-real-estate-agent: She does not know a lot about the illicit street drug world, but she knows Michael Jackson died from taking drugs," Bloodworth, the prosecutor, said in court. "She knows she wants it because it is lethal, it is fatal, it kills."
Multiple court filings indicate Eric got sick after eating a sandwich that Kouri had left him — alongside a "love note" — days later on Valentine's Day, saying he broke out in hives and had trouble breathing immediately. He self-administered his son's EpiPen and slept it off, but later "told a friend that he thought his wife was trying to poison him."
Kouri asked Lauber for more fentanyl pills about two weeks after that incident, prosecutors say, and picked them up from the drop-off location on Feb. 26. Eric died six days later.
The financial picture
Prosecutors painted Kouri as an "intensely ambitious" but "incompetent" business owner who projected affluence even as she fell deeper and deeper into debt.
Kouri was Eric's second wife, and when the two married in 2013, they signed a prenuptial agreement establishing that they would not have rights to each other's property with one exception: if Eric died while the two were lawfully married.
"Their prenuptial agreement meant that if she left him, she would also leave most of his money," Bloodworth said. "So Kouri Richens took a quarter of a million dollars in equity out of Eric Richins' home, without him knowing it, so that she could start her own business and earn enough money to leave Eric Richins."
Kouri started a small business flipping houses in 2019, buying more and more of them amid mounting debt.
That same year, prosecutors say, she used power of attorney to execute a $250,000 home equity line of credit on their family home, unbeknownst to Eric even though it was his pre-marital property. She also "began misappropriating monies distributed from Eric Richin's business that were intended for his quarterly tax payments."
This came to Eric's attention in September 2020, by which point Kouri had charged more than $30,000 on his credit and withdrawn at least $100,000 from his bank accounts. When confronted, she promised to repay him.
In the meantime, Eric quietly consulted both a divorce lawyer and an estate planning lawyer, changing his will in 2020 to place his estate under the control of his sister for the benefit of his kids.
Prosecutors say by the end of 2021, Kouri's business bank account was overdrawn by $22,520, and she was "paying thousands of dollars daily to service her debt" and overdraft fees. She had seven phone calls with a money lender on the day of Eric's death, by which point Bloodworth said her net worth was "negative $1.6 million."
But she was named as the beneficiary on multiple life insurance policies belonging to Eric.
According to prosecutors, at the time of Eric's death, he was insured by at least six different policies. At least four of those — totaling $1.9 million — were, unbeknownst to him, purchased by Kouri between 2015 and 2017. She also made herself the beneficiary of another policy held jointly with Eric and his business partner just months before his death, though he changed it once his insurance company alerted him.
Kouri found out that she had been removed from Eric's estate plan days after his death. Court filings say she learned from his sister, whom she then punched "in the neck and face."
For more on Kouri Richins' case, head to KPCW.
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