Episode 149:
After Her Husband’s Death, a Mom Wrote a Book About the Man She Killed | Kouri Richins
At 3:20 a.m. on March 4, 2022, a sobbing 31-year-old woman named Kouri Richins called 911 in Summit County, Utah. Her husband wasn't breathing, she said, and his body was ice-cold. Paramedics found Eric Richins on the floor beside the bed in the master bedroom of the family's home in Kamas. They tried to revive him, but blood backed up from his lungs and airway, and at 4:58 a.m. he was pronounced dead. Kouri told them the couple had shared a cocktail the night before to celebrate a real estate deal, that she had gone upstairs around 9 p.m. to comfort one of their sons after a nightmare, and that she found Eric cold when she came back to the bedroom around 3 a.m.
On the nightstand were pills from a torn packet and scattered white powder, and the autopsy ruled the death a fentanyl overdose. It looked like a man who had used drugs alone and collapsed. But the fentanyl was in his stomach, meaning he had swallowed it, which pointed to illicit fentanyl and not a medical patch or injection, and he had no prescription. Everyone who knew Eric said he had never touched drugs. His mother was a drug abuse counselor who had warned him about them since he was a child.
The Widow Who Wrote a Children's Book
Eric had grown up helping on his family's ranch and built his own masonry company. At 27 he met Kouri, a cashier at a home improvement store who was working several jobs while earning a degree, and they married in 2013 and had three sons. In March 2023, on the first anniversary of his death, Kouri published Are You With Me?, a picture book meant to help children cope with losing a father. It became a bestseller, and she went on television to talk about her loss. Police, meanwhile, had kept investigating, and they had reason to. Two days after Eric died, in the middle of his funeral, Kouri had sent a locksmith to the house to open his safe. Her sister-in-law caught her, and the confrontation turned physical.
What Eric Suspected, and Why
Friends told police that Eric had been afraid of his wife. On a trip to Greece in 2019, he had collapsed with severe abdominal pain after a drink she gave him. In February 2022, he broke out in hives and his throat began to close after eating a sandwich from her. He warned his friends and his sister more than once. A month after the sandwich, he was dead. The motive was money. Kouri was known as a successful house flipper. In reality, every property had lost money, she had been sued over a home sold with known problems, and she was roughly $1.8 million in debt with $140,000 owed in taxes. A prenuptial agreement, signed at the insistence of Eric's mother after his costly first divorce, kept Kouri from using his assets without permission and from claiming them in a divorce. So she took $220,000 from his bank account, borrowed another $290,000 in his name, and between 2015 and 2017 forged his signature four times to take out nearly $2 million in life insurance on him. Eric seems to have understood. In the fall of 2020 he met with a divorce attorney and an estate planner and made his sister and his business partner the trustees of everything he owned, including the insurance. Then, in January 2022, someone accessed his account and changed the beneficiary back to Kouri, and on February 4 she took out yet another policy on his life. Her phone also revealed a lover named Robert, a handyman at her company whom she had set up in one of the couple's houses with a credit card opened in Eric's name. When he asked whether she could divorce her husband, she wrote back that if only Eric died, her life would be perfect.
The Fentanyl and the "Walk the Dog" Letter
What police still lacked was the source of the fentanyl. They found it in Carmen Lauber, a 51-year-old woman who cleaned for Kouri's company and was on probation for drug distribution. Lauber said Kouri came to her on January 2, 2022, asking for strong painkillers for a client, and received hydrocodone. In early February, Kouri came back and asked for fentanyl. Kouri would leave cash in the fireplace of a house she was remodeling, and Lauber would pick it up and leave the drugs. Lauber said she delivered fentanyl this way four times. Kouri was arrested for murder, still insisting she was a grieving widow. In September 2023, guards searching her jail cell found a six-page handwritten letter addressed to her mother that began, "Walk the dog but take vague notes so you remember." It told her mother to speak with Kouri's brother outside the house and laid out what he should testify to, including that Eric had told him he bought fentanyl from workers on the farm. Her lover appeared under the code name "Lotto." Kouri said the pages were an excerpt from a legal thriller she was writing, titled "To Hell and Back."
Final Thoughts
Kouri's lawyers asked to move the trial out of Summit County, arguing that everyone there had already heard about the case. The court refused. When the trial opened in February 2026, Kouri claimed Eric had been a drug addict who begged her to get the pills. A statement from the couple's three sons, submitted through a social worker, said they were afraid their mother would hurt them if she were released and that they wanted her to stay in prison forever. She was found guilty on all counts, including murder and insurance fraud, and in May 2026 she was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Read again with that verdict in mind, the book she wrote for her sons looks less like a way through grief than a way to be seen grieving.
Eric Richins suspected his wife was poisoning him, warned his friends and sister more than once, and quietly rewrote his estate so she would get nothing, yet he stayed in the house with her. Why do you think someone who sees the danger that clearly might still not leave, and what would have had to be different for him to get out in time?
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YOU DECIDE.
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