Utah mom Kouri Richins who wrote grief book for her children found convicted of husband’s murder.
According to The Guardian, Utah woman was convicted on Monday of aggravated murder after poisoning her husband with fentanyl and then self-publishing a children’s book about coping with grief.
Prosecutors said Kouri Richins slipped five times the lethal dose of the synthetic opioid into a cocktail that her husband Eric Richins drank in March 2022.
Prosecutors also revealed she was $4.5m in debt and falsely believed that when her husband died, she would inherit his estate worth more than $4m and was planning a future with another man.
“She wanted to leave Eric Richins but did not want to leave his money,” the Summit County prosecutor, Brad Bloodworth, said.
Richins stared at the floor and took deep breaths as the judge read the verdict.
She was also convicted of other felonies, including an attempted murder charge in what authorities alleged was another effort to poison her husband weeks earlier on Valentine’s Day with a fentanyl-laced sandwich that made him black out. Jurors also found Richins guilty of forgery and fraudulently claiming insurance benefits after his death.
Sentencing was scheduled for 13 May, the day her husband would have turned 44. The aggravated murder charge alone carries a sentence of 25 years to life in prison.
The scheduled five-week trial was cut short last week when Kouri Richins waived her right to testify, and her legal team abruptly rested its case without calling any witnesses.
