PARK CITY, Utah (AP) — A Utah mother of three who published a children’s book about grief after her husband’s death and was later accused of fatally poisoning him will stand trial, a judge ruled Tuesday.
Utah state Judge Richard Mrazik ruled on the second day of Kouri Richins’ preliminary hearing that prosecutors had presented enough evidence against her to proceed with a jury trial.
She faces a slew of felony charges for allegedly killing her husband with a lethal dose of fentanyl in March 2022 at their home in a small mountain town near Park City. Prosecutors say Kouri Richins, 34, slipped five times the lethal dose of the synthetic opioid into a Moscow mule cocktail that Eric Richins, 39, drank.
Kouri Richins appeared stoic as the judge delivered the news that a jury would soon decide her fate. She has been adamant in maintaining she is innocent and entered pleas of “not guilty” to all 11 counts on Tuesday. Her trial is set to begin on April 28.
The second day of her preliminary hearing centered around an additional attempted murder charge filed earlier this year that accused her of slipping fentanyl into her husband’s sandwich on Valentine’s Day 2022, causing a severe but nonfatal reaction.
Summit County Prosecutor Brad Bloodworth defended the charge by describing how he thinks Kouri Richins learned lessons during the first unsuccessful attempt on her husband’s life that helped her carry out the killing 17 days later.
One bite of his favorite sandwich — left with a note in the front seat of his truck on Valentine’s Day — made Eric Richins break out in hives and black out, prosecutors allege. His wife had bought the sandwich from a local diner in the city of Kamas two days after she purchased fentanyl pills from the family’s housekeeper, according to witness statements and deleted text messages that were recovered by police.
Text messages and location data indicate Kouri Richins may have brought the sandwich home, then left to spend Valentine’s Day with another man with whom she was having an affair, Bloodworth said. A day after Valentine’s Day, she texted her lover, “If he could just go away ... life would be so perfect.”
In written testimony, two friends of Eric Richins recounted phone conversations from the day prosecutors say he was first poisoned by his wife of nine years. After injecting himself with his son’s EpiPen and chugging a bottle of Benadryl, he awoke from a deep sleep and told a friend, “I think my wife tried to poison me,” charging documents allege.
Housekeeper Carmen Lauber told police that Kouri Richins subsequently asked her to procure stronger fentanyl, Detective Jeff O’Driscoll said on the first day of the hearing Monday.
“She learned that putting it in a sandwich, where Eric Richins could take a bite, feel the effects, set the sandwich down, was not the proper way to administer a fatal dose of fentanyl,” Bloodworth told the judge. “She learned that it takes a truckload to kill him."
Days later, Kouri Richins called 911 in the middle of the night to report that she had found her husband “cold to the touch” at the foot of their bed, according to a police report. He was pronounced dead, and a medical examiner later found five times the lethal dosage of fentanyl in his system.
Defense attorneys Kathy Nester and Wendy Lewis argued that because police never found fentanyl in the Richins home, detectives could not be certain that the drugs Kouri Richins bought from the housekeeper matched those found in Eric Richins' system.
“These are great trial arguments,” Mrazik responded, but he wondered aloud whether any of their arguments were strong enough to make the case that there wasn't probable cause for the charges.
“We are aware that the preliminary hearing stage favors the prosecution to an extraordinary degree and respect the court’s decision,” Nester and Lewis said in a joint statement after the hearing. “We firmly believe the charges against Kouri do not withstand thorough scrutiny and are confident that a jury will find the same.”
Mrazik recently appointed the pair of attorneys to represent Kouri Richins after he determined she was unable to continue paying for private lawyers. Prosecutors say she mistakenly believed she would inherit her husband's estate under the terms of their prenuptial agreement and had taken out life insurance policies on him without his knowledge that totaled nearly $2 million.
Court records indicate Eric Richins met with an attorney in October 2020 to discuss the possibility of filing for divorce, which he never did, and to quietly cut his wife out of his will.
In the months before her arrest in May 2023, the Utah mother self-published the children’s book “Are You with Me?” about a father with angel wings watching over his young son after passing away. The book could eventually play a key role for prosecutors in framing Eric Richins’ death as a calculated killing with an elaborate cover-up attempt.
The judge scheduled a pretrial conference on Sept. 23 for the prosecution and defense to discuss jury selection.
Hannah Schoenbaum, The Associated Press
