The story of Kouri Richins is an unfortunate reminder of why, despite its exploitative nature, the true crime genre will never go away. Tragic real-life stories unfold with the twists and turns of a carefully scripted narrative. It satisfies that portion of our brain that wants life to be neat and complete. Yes, it is extremely on the nose for a grieving widow to write a children’s book about how to cope with the death of her husband, whom it turned out she murdered. It’s some real Lifetime movie s—t. But it’s super compelling.
This week, a Utah jury found 35-year-old Richins guilty of murdering her husband, Eric Richins, along with attempted murder, fraud, and forgery. The jury deliberated for all of three hours after a three-week trial, after hearing the prosecution’s version of the events, which was that Richins poisoned her husband with a massive fatal dose of fentanyl in March 2022 to cash in on life insurance policies and escape a mountain of debt.
The couple were house flippers whose house flipping business was in dire straits. Prosecutors argued that she owed millions and had secretly taken out nearly $2 million in a life insurance policy on her husband without his knowledge. She planned to kill him, collect the money, and start the next phase of her life with a new partner.
It didn’t work out quite that way.
Utah Mom Who Murdered Her Husband And Wrote A Children’s Book About It Found Guilty
She got the killing part right, but she messed up everything else. This is how callously you begin to speak when you get wrapped up in the salaciousness of true crime and start to dehumanize everyone involved.
Kouri didn’t realize that before she killed Eric, he had sneakily moved much of his estate into a trust controlled by his sister. I don’t think the marriage that ended in murder was super healthy before it ended in murder—a belief supported by the fact that she had previously attempted to murder him on Valentine’s Day. It didn’t work, but he immediately became suspicious.
Investigators found all sorts of evidence that pointed back to Kouri, like burner phones and Internet searches asking “what is a lethal.does.of.fetanayl,”” and “death certificate says pending, will life insurance still pay?”
The best search she conducted was “luxury prisons for the rich in America.” It really tells you everything you need to know about life in America in 2026. A woman murdered her husband for money and felt mostly okay with it because even if she were caught, she was at least somewhat confident that she would just be sent to a luxury prison for rich people to live out her remaining days in relative comfort. The jumpsuits aren’t flattering, but the squash courts are lovely.
The defense tried to lean on the ambiguity of it all, which there was some of, but not nearly enough. They argued that there was no direct evidence showing how the fentanyl entered Eric’s system, arguing that he had a history of painkiller use that would likely explain the overdose.
The jury wasn’t convinced.
And then, about a year after Eric’s death, Richins published a children’s book about grief that she said helped her sons process their father’s loss, a loss that she was later charged with causing. When she was interviewed about the book, Are You With Me?, she framed the whole project as a way to navigate through the tragedy and eventually reach some nebulous concept of healing.
Sentencing is set for May, and she’s facing 25 to life, which is roughly how long the true crime industry is going to be obsessed with this story.
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