About a year after Kouri Richins’ husband died, she wrote a children’s picture book about dealing with grief and losing loved ones. She said writing it helped her and her three sons cope with the death of their father.
Now, she’s being charged with his murder.
Richins, 33, was arrested on Monday in Kamas, Utah, a small mountain town on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, for allegedly poisoning her husband with fentanyl last year. An autopsy of her husband, Eric Richins, turned up five times the lethal dosage of fentanyl in his system.
Kouri was charged with first-degree aggravated murder and three counts of second-degree possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute. Utah is a death penalty state, meaning Kouri could face capital punishment or life imprisonment if convicted of murder.
According to a statement of probable cause based on an investigation by the Summit County Sheriff’s Department, deputies responded to the Richins home in the early hours of March 4, 2022 and found Eric dead on the floor in front of his bed.
Kouri said that the couple had just been celebrating closing a deal on a house that night and she had made her husband a cocktail, which he drank in bed. Kouri told police one of their kids had a night terror shortly after, so she went to sleep in the child’s bed.
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She awoke around 3 a.m. and went back into the master bedroom, where she found her husband unresponsive and “cold to the touch.”
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Police received a warrant to search the Richins home and seized a number of electronic devices, which lead them to an unnamed source who had multiple previous charges for drug possession. Several communications were found between Kouri and the person, identified only as “C.L.” in the charging document.
In an interview with police, C.L. revealed that Kouri had come to them looking to buy prescription pain medication for an investor she knew who had a back injury. C.L. sold her some hydrocodone pills, but two weeks later, the source said Kouri was back, saying her investor friend wanted stronger stuff.
Kouri explicitly asked for fentanyl and bought US$900 worth of pills. Three days later, on Valentine’s Day, Eric became very ill shortly after eating dinner at home.
“Eric believed that he had been poisoned,” the document reads. “Eric told a friend that he thought his wife was trying to poison him.”
About two weeks later, Kouri bought another US$900 worth of fentanyl pills. Six days after that, Eric was found dead of a fentanyl overdose.
Two months before Kouri was arrested, she appeared on local television to promote Are you with me?, a picture book she wrote to help children cope after the death of a loved one.
For a segment entitled “Good Things Utah,” Kouri called her husband’s death unexpected and described how it sent her and her three boys reeling. For children, she said, grieving was about “making sure that their spirit is always alive in your home.”
“It’s, you know, explaining to my kid just because he’s not present here with us physically, doesn’t mean his presence isn’t here with us,” she told the anchors, who commended her for being an amazing mother.
Kouri’s lawyer, Skye Lazaro, declined to comment on the charges.
— With files from The Associated Press
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