PARK CITY, Utah (AP) — A Utah mother of three accused of publishing a children’s book about grief after her husband’s death and later poisoning him will go on trial Tuesday, a judge ruled.
Utah Judge Richard Mradzik ruled on the second day of Kouri Richins’ preliminary hearing that prosecutors had presented enough evidence to proceed with a jury trial.
She faces numerous felony charges for allegedly killing her husband with a lethal dose of fentanyl at their home in a small mountain town near Park City in March 2022. Prosecutors say Kouri Richins, 34, laced a Moscow Mule cocktail consumed by Eric Richins, 39, with five times the lethal dose of the synthetic opioid.
Kouri Richins remained calm as the judge broke the news that a jury would soon decide her fate. She continues to maintain her innocence, pleading “not guilty” to all 11 charges on Tuesday. Her trial is scheduled to begin April 28.
The second day of the preliminary hearing focused on an additional attempted murder charge filed earlier this year, alleging that she laced her husband’s sandwich with fentanyl on Valentine’s Day in 2022, causing a severe but non-fatal reaction.
Summit County Prosecutor Brad Bloodworth defended the charge, saying he believes Kouri Richins learned a lesson from the attempted assassination of her husband, which helped her carry out the murder 17 days later.
Prosecutors allege that Eric Richins broke out into hives and lost consciousness on Valentine’s Day after eating just one bite of his favorite sandwich, which was left with a note in the passenger seat of her truck. According to witness accounts and deleted text messages recovered by police, his wife bought the sandwich at a local diner in Camas two days after purchasing fentanyl pills from the family’s housekeeper.
Text messages and location information suggest Kouri Richins may have brought the sandwich home and then left to spend Valentine’s Day with another man with whom she was having an affair, Bloodworth said. The day after Valentine’s Day, she texted her boyfriend, “If only he’d gone…life would be so perfect.”
In written testimony, two of Eric Richins’ friends recounted phone conversations on the day prosecutors allege he was first poisoned by his wife of nine years. After injecting his son with an EpiPen and downing a bottle of Benadryl, he woke up from a deep sleep and told a friend, “I think my wife tried to poison me,” according to the indictment.
Detective Inspector Geoff O’Driscoll said on the first day of the hearing on Monday that housekeeper Carmen Lauber told police Kouri Richins then asked her to source a more powerful form of fentanyl.
“She learned that putting fentanyl in a sandwich where Eric Richins could take a bite, feel the effects and then put the sandwich down was not the proper way to administer it,” Bloodworth told the judge. “She learned that it would take a truckload of fentanyl to kill him.”
A few days later, Kouri Richins called 911 in the middle of the night to report finding her husband “cold to the touch” at the foot of his bed. He was pronounced dead, and a medical examiner later found five times the lethal dose of fentanyl in his system, according to a police report.
Defense attorneys Kathy Nester and Wendy Lewis argued that because police did not find fentanyl at Richins’ home, detectives cannot be sure that the drugs Kouri Richins purchased from the housekeeper matched those found in Eric Richins’ system.
“That’s an excellent legal argument,” Mradzik responded, but questioned whether any of their arguments were strong enough to argue there was no probable cause for the charges.
“We know that the prosecution was heavily favored at the preliminary hearing and we respect the court’s decision,” Nestor and Lewis said in a joint statement after the hearing. “We are convinced that the charges against Mr. Khoury do not stand up to thorough scrutiny, and we are confident that a jury will reach the same conclusion.”
Mradic recently appointed two lawyers to represent Kouri Richins after deciding she could no longer afford to pay his private attorney’s fees. Prosecutors say she mistakenly believed she would inherit her husband’s fortune under the terms of a prenuptial agreement and took out life insurance policies totaling about $2 million without her husband’s knowledge.
A Utah mother self-published a children’s book, “Are You with Me?,” depicting a father with angel wings watching over his dead infant son, months before her arrest in May 2023. The book could play a key role for prosecutors in framing Eric Richins’ death as a premeditated murder with an elaborate cover-up.
The judge scheduled a pretrial conference for Sept. 23 between the prosecution and defense to discuss jury selection.
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