Kouri Richins Sentenced to Life Without Parole for Husband’s Fentanyl Poisoning Death

A Park City jury convicted Richins in March after deliberating for just under three hours. According to prosecutors, she mixed five times the lethal dose of fentanyl into a Moscow Mule cocktail prepared for her husband in 2022. The same jury convicted her of four additional felonies, including attempted murder for allegedly trying to poison Eric Richins on Valentine’s Day with a fentanyl-laced sandwich.

Richins, a real estate agent, had taken out multiple life insurance policies on her husband without his knowledge. Prosecutors said she believed she would inherit an estate worth more than $4 million. Text messages shown at trial included her discussions of leaving him and references to millions in a potential divorce.

Court records showed her phone search history included queries on fentanyl’s lethal dose, luxury prisons and how poisoning appears on a death certificate.

Richins wrote a children’s book about grief “to help their three sons process the loss” and was arrested in 2023 while promoting it. Defense attorneys argued that Eric Richins had been addicted to painkillers. They also contended that the prosecution’s key witness, a housekeeper who said she sold Richins fentanyl, was lying in exchange for legal protection.

The housekeeper received immunity from prosecution.

Prosecutors presented body-camera footage in which Richins told police her husband had no history of illicit drug use. Richins waived her right to testify. The defense called no witnesses.

” She stated that her brother was taken from his sons by the person he should have been able to trust the most. The three boys are now in the care of Richins-Benson and her husband. All have undergone intensive therapy.

Licensed therapists read the children’s victim-impact statements in court. The statements described Richins hitting and threatening to kill their animals, showing them videos of famished children in war zones when they refused to eat dinner, and appearing indifferent to their health.

” One added that she would “take me to places that smelled really bad. ” The oldest boy, now 13, said Richins would lock him inside “pretty much daily” after he pointed out that she was drunk.

Richins’s mother, Lisa Darden, asked “from a mother’s heart, that Kouri be given a sentence that allows the possibility of a future.”

In a separate development on the same day, the South Carolina Supreme Court overturned Alex Murdaugh’s murder convictions in the deaths of his wife and son. The killings occurred in June 2021. The court ordered a new trial, ruling that the 2023 proceeding was improperly influenced by a county clerk’s comments to jurors.