Hannah Schoenbaum
Park City: A Utah woman who wrote a children’s book about coping with grief after her husband’s death was convicted of aggravated murder in his death by poisoning him with fentanyl.
Prosecutors say Kouri Richins slipped five times the lethal dose of the synthetic opioid into a cocktail that Eric Richins drank in March 2022 at their home outside the ski town of Park City.
They say Kouri was $US4.5 million ($6.4 million) in debt and falsely believed that when her husband died, she would inherit his estate worth more than $US4 million.
They also say she was planning a future with another man she was seeing on the side.
Kouri stared at the floor and took deep breaths as the judge read the verdict on Monday (Utah time). Family members on both sides of the case left the courtroom, hugging and crying.
She was also convicted of other felony charges, including an attempted murder charge in what authorities alleged was another effort to poison her husband with a fentanyl-laced sandwich that made him break out in hives and black out, weeks earlier on Valentine’s Day. Jurors also found Kouri guilty of fraudulently claiming insurance benefits after his death.
Sentencing was scheduled for May 13, the day her husband would have turned 44.
Kouri’s defence attorney said Eric was addicted to painkillers and had asked his wife to procure opioids for him. Kouri, however, told police earlier in a video that her husband had no history of illicit drug use.
“She wanted to leave Eric Richins but did not want to leave his money,” said Summit County prosecutor Brad Bloodworth.
Kouri had pleaded not guilty to all charges. The most serious charge – aggravated murder – carries a sentence of 25 years to life in prison.
What was scheduled to be a five-week trial was cut short last week when Kouri waived her right to testify, and her legal team abruptly rested its case without calling any witnesses. Kouri’s attorneys said they were confident that prosecutors did not produce enough evidence over the past three weeks to convict her of murder.
“They haven’t done their job, and now they want you to make inferences based on paper-thin evidence,” defence attorney Wendy Lewis urged the jury on Monday.
Prosecutors said Kouri, a real estate agent focused on flipping houses, was deep in debt and planning a future with another man. She had opened numerous life insurance policies on her husband without his knowledge, with benefits totalling about $US2 million, prosecutors alleged.
They showed the jury text messages between Kouri and Robert Josh Grossman, the man with whom she was allegedly having an affair, in which she fantasised about leaving her husband, gaining millions in a divorce and marrying Grossman.
The internet search history from Kouri’s phone included “what is a lethal.dose.of.fetanayl (sic),” “luxury prisons for the rich America” and “if someone is poisned (sic) what does it go down on the death certificate as”, a digital forensic analyst testified.
Bloodworth replayed for the jury a clip of Kouri’s 911 call from the night of her husband’s death. “[That’s] not ‘the sound of a wife becoming a widow’,” he said, quoting the defence’s opening statement. “It’s the sound of a wife becoming a black widow.”
Lewis responded that the prosecution “looks at facts one way and sees a witch, but if you look at those facts another way, you see a widow”.
The defence focused on trying to discredit the prosecution’s star witness, Carmen Lauber – a housekeeper for the family who claimed to have sold Kouri fentanyl on multiple occasions.
Lewis argued that Lauber did not deal fentanyl and was motivated to lie for legal protection. Lauber said in early interviews that she never dealt the synthetic opioid, but later said she did after investigators informed her that Eric died of a fentanyl overdose, the defence noted.
Kouri had asked Lauber for “the Michael Jackson stuff”, which Bloodworth said likely referred to the drug combination that killed the singer. “She knows she wants it because it is lethal,” he argued.
The housekeeper was already in a drug court program as an alternative to incarceration on other charges when authorities arrested her in connection with the Richins case, investigators said. She had also violated some conditions of drug court.
The defence showed a video of law enforcement warning Lauber that they could pull her drug court deal and that she could face a lengthy prison sentence.
“Give us the details that will ensure Kouri gets convicted of murder,” a man in the video said.
Lauber was granted immunity for her cooperation in the case. She testified that she felt a need to “step up and take accountability of my part in this”.
Shortly before her arrest in May 2023, Kouri self-published the book Are You with Me? She promoted it on local TV and radio stations, which prosecutors have pointed to in arguing that she planned the killing and tried to cover it up.
Summit County Sheriff’s detective Jeff O’Driscoll, the lead investigator on the case, testified that Kouri paid a ghostwriting company to write the book for her.
AP
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