Murder of Eric Richins

Eric Eugene Richins, 39, died on March 4, 2022, at the home he shared with his wife, Kouri Richins, in Kamas, Utah. Kouri Richins called authorities to report that her husband was unconscious, saying the couple had spent the evening celebrating the closing of a real estate sale and that she had made him a cocktail, a Moscow Mule, before he went to sleep. An autopsy found that Eric Richins died of a fentanyl overdose; the fentanyl concentration in his blood was roughly five times a lethal dose, and the drug had been ingested orally.

Eric Richins had reportedly told family and friends that he feared his wife was trying to poison him, after he became seriously ill on two earlier occasions. Weeks before his death, on Valentine's Day, Kouri Richins gave her husband a fentanyl-laced sandwich that left him unconscious, conduct that was later charged as attempted murder.

While the case remained under investigation and before her arrest, Kouri Richins, a real estate agent, published a children's book in March 2023 titled "Are You With Me?", dedicated to the couple's three children and framed as a resource for children coping with the loss of a parent. She appeared on television programs discussing grief. Prosecutors later argued that these public appearances concealed her role in her husband's death.

On May 8, 2023, Kouri Darden Richins was charged with murder in her husband's death. Additional financial charges were filed on June 27, 2025, and the murder charges were amended on October 6, 2025. Prosecutors said Richins was deeply in debt at the time of her husband's death, was reportedly planning a future with another man, and had taken out multiple life insurance policies on her husband without his knowledge, together worth roughly $2 million. A digital forensics analyst testified that her phone's search history included queries about a lethal dose of fentanyl and about "luxury prisons" for wealthy defendants. A supplier testified that he had sold her fentanyl pills weeks before her husband's death, and prosecutors presented evidence that she had attempted to change the beneficiaries on her husband's will without his knowledge.

Kouri Richins stood trial in March 2026. On March 16, 2026, a jury convicted her on all counts, including aggravated murder, attempted murder over the earlier poisoning episode, forgery, and fraudulently claiming her husband's insurance benefits after his death. On May 13, 2026, she was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The case drew extensive national and international media coverage, in part because of the earlier publication of Richins's children's grief book, and has been publicly referred to as the "grief author murder trial."