Kouri Richins: Children's author found guilty of killing husband

Kouri Richins, a U.S. woman who penned a children’s book about bereavement after the death of her husband has been found guilty of killing him.

A jury took three hours to reach its guilty verdict on Monday (16 March), after prosecutors called more than 40 witnesses during the trial.

The jury heard how Kouri Richins had accumulated millions in debt, taken out life insurance policies on her husband, Eric Richins, and was having an affair when she poisoned him with a drink laced with fentanyl in March 2022. 

The 35-year-old was arrested in March 2023, two months after she published a book dedicated to him called ‘Are You With Me?’ She said she penned the book to help people, including her three kids, deal with the death of a family member.

"We wrote this book and we're really hoping that it provides some comfort for not just obviously, our family, but other families that are going through the same thing," she told radio station KPCW in an interview before her arrest.

But officials found Richins, from Park City, Utah, to have laced her husband’s food and drink with fentanyl, increasing the doses until he died. 

According to court documents, Eric Richins believed that he had been poisoned and also told a friend that the thought his wife was trying to poison him.

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Richins administered the fatal dose in a vodka drink she gave her husband before bed. She called the police in the middle of the night, saying her husband wasn’t responding. 

A medical examiner later discovered  that he had five times the lethal dose of fenatyl in his body. 

Richins was also found guilty of fraud for claiming on the insurance after her husband’s death, as well as attempted murder, for earlier poisoning incidents which failed to kill him. 

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