Talk about art imitating life or vice-versa. In one of the stranger stories in recent memory, a Utah woman that wrote a self-help book is now charged with the murder of her husband. Ironically or not, the book deals with how to cope with grief after losing a loved one, specifically a husband.
Kouri Richins, 33, was charged with aggravated murder and possession of a controlled substance on Monday, more than a year after her husband Eric was found dead in his bed at the age of 39. Apparently, she was living her book.
Police responded to the couple’s home on March 4, 2022, at 3:22 am, after getting a call about an unresponsive male that turned out to be her husband, Eric. Paramedics tried to revive him but were unsuccessful, and he was pronounced dead at the scene.
The shady circumstances surrounding his death immediately led to an investigation. Richins’s version of what happened didn’t quite pass the sniff test. Her version of what happened went like this:
In interviews with police, Kouri — a realtor — claimed that while celebrating the closing on a new home, she made her husband a Moscow Mule, which he drank in bed. She said that she then went to sleep with one of the couple’s children due to them having a “night terror,” returned to the bedroom she shared with Eric around 3:00am and found him “cold to the touch.” She then called emergency services.
Since healthy, middle-aged people usually don’t just die in their sleep; police were on high alert. As they continued their investigation, Kouri and her story weren’t holding up:
Police claim Kouri told them she left her phone in her bedroom when she went to sleep with the couple’s child — but records show it was “locked and unlocked multiple times” during that time. She also allegedly sent and received messages in that same window, but they were deleted. An autopsy then confirmed Eric died from a fentanyl overdose — with the medical examiner saying the levels in his system were “five times the lethal dosage.”
After a search warrant was secured, police proceeded to find a number of text messages to an acquaintance with a background as a drug dealer and the wife asking about “some of the Michael Jackson stuff.” She subsequently requested fentanyl, the deadly drug flowing across our southern border, and shelled out $900 for somewhere between 15-30 pills on February 11, 2022.
Last year, Kouri Richins’ husband, Eric, died unexpectedly. The mother of three went on to write a children’s book about grief with her kids.
This week, she was arrested for Eric’s murder — and also charged with possessing the drug GHB, which can be lethal in large doses. pic.twitter.com/lTS7cAbNaT
— CBS Mornings (@CBSMornings) May 10, 2023
While the initial poisoning didn’t kill Eric, it only made him ill, but that didn’t deter Kouri from once again buying fentanyl pills and trying again, this time successfully. At this point Eric suspected his wife was trying to kill him, and even told friends as much:
On February 14, Valentine’s Day, Eric then allegedly “became very ill” after a dinner with his wife. At the time, he reportedly “believed that he had been poisoned” and even “told a friend that he thought his wife was trying to poison him.” Kouri is then said to have reached out for even more fentanyl pills on February 26, 2022 … before Eric was found dead of an overdose six days later.
The murderous wife had previously also changed the couple’s life insurance with her husband and his partner’s company to make her the sole beneficiary. Once the two men discovered that, they changed it back, and her plan seemed clear. She wanted to kill her husband for the insurance.
In the year following her husband’s murder, she wrote a book about how to deal with the grief of losing a husband.
In the months leading up to her arrest, Kouri has been busy promoting her children’s book, “Are You with Me?”, which came out on March 6, 2023 and — according to the Amazon listing — “gently guides children through the difficult experience of losing a loved one.” In a post about the book Kouri herself shared on Facebook, she wrote, “I lost my husband unexpectedly last year and we have 3 amazing young boys! As I was trying to find books for my kids that would help comfort them at nights, I really couldn’t find anything! So I wrote my own.
Richins will next appear in court on May 19 for a detention hearing, and the possibility of a conviction looks strong. It was a sad end to a marriage, and now three kids are parentless, all in the name of money. It is a weird, wild case, but one police were able to crack before this alleged murderous woman hurt anyone else.
Featured image screen grab from embedded Tweet
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