A Death That Made No Sense: Meet Kouri Richins

On the evening of 3 March 2022, Kouri Richins had reason to celebrate. She had just secured the property she'd been chasing for months — a partly built mansion in Midway, Utah — with settlement only days away. That night, at her home outside Park City, she mixed a couple of cocktails and carried one through to her husband, Eric, who was already in bed.

By the early hours of the morning, Eric was dead. He was thirty-nine, athletic, with no history of drug use. The autopsy found fentanyl in his blood at roughly five times a lethal dose — illicit, street-grade, swallowed.

For a while now my blog space has been dominated by Australian poisoner, Erin Patterson. You've been patient with my obsession, and I'm grateful. But it's time to cross the Pacific to a new crime. A new poisoner.

In the recent Kouri Richins trial, prosecutors pulled on a number of different threads - there was the money: a house-flipping business the state described as failing, a mountain of debt, and life insurance policies worth more than a million dollars. There was another man. And there was Valentine's Day, weeks before Eric's death, when — prosecutors alleged — a first attempt on his life had already been made and failed. The cocktail Kouri carried to bed that March night, the state argued, was the second.

Then there is the detail has featured in more than one headline.

A year after Eric died, and while the investigation was still open, Kouri published a children's picture book about a boy grieving his father. She promoted it on local television as something she'd written for her own children. Trial testimony told a different story: she had actually paid a ghostwriter to write it.

For me, though, the case turns on the forensics. The digital evidence — search histories, deleted messages, the movement of a phone through a house in the hours that were supposed to have been quiet.

Kouri Richins is where True Crime Verdict Files — Volume 1 opens. The other eleven chapters each take up a different poisoner — twelve cases in all, twelve verdicts, out in late August 2026.

Want to get started on the book before release, and be notified the moment the book lands? Register here for a free bonus chapter: https://www.cherylwarrenauthor.com/bonus