A Utah real estate agent and investor has been found guilty of poisoning her husband in order to fund her flips.
Kouri Richins via LinkedIn
Aside from the murder charge, Kouri Richins, 35, was found guilty on additional charges of attempted murder, falsifying insurance claims and forgery after prosecutors outlined a scheme that involved secret life insurance policies and real estate holdings worth millions of dollars.
Richins faces 25 years to life behind bars at her sentencing, which is scheduled to take place on May 13. The jury deliberated for less than three hours after prosecutors presented testimony from dozens of witnesses. Richins, by contrast, waived her right to testify; her attorneys did not call any witnesses on her behalf.
Prosecutors said that Kouri poisoned her stonemason husband, Eric, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl by slipping the drug into a Moscow mule cocktail on the evening of March 4, 2022, as they celebrated the sale of a property she was representing. Kouri said that she went to sleep in one of their children’s bedrooms and later found Eric “cold to the touch.”
A year later, Kouri published a children’s book about the incident, titled Are You With Me? In interviews promoting the book, she said she had written it to help her three children process the loss.
Richins’ primary motive appears to have been financial and involved millions of dollars in high-interest, hard money debt she had accrued in her real estate business from purchasing homes to flip. Richins was scheduled to close on another $2.9 million property on the day of Eric’s death, but delayed the closing by a day.
“On the day of Eric Richins’ death, K. Richins Realty owed hard money lenders at least $1.8 million and the day after Eric Richins’ death, it owed them nearly $5 million,” according to the charging documents.
Kouri had opened multiple life insurance policies on her husband over the years, totaling nearly $2 million in benefits. She also expected to inherit a significant amount of money from Eric upon his death.
However, unbeknownst to her, Eric had worked with divorce and estate planning attorneys to change his will and form a living trust, which he placed under the control of his sister, Katie Richins-Benson. He had also transferred partnership interest in his business to the trust and made it the beneficiary of his life insurance policy to the tune of $500,000.
Multiple additional charges for financial crimes were filed against Richins in late June 2025, including counts of mortgage fraud, money laundering, forgery and issuing a bad check, as well as a single count each of communications fraud and “pattern of unlawful activity.” Those charges are still pending and were characterized by Richins’ attorneys, Kathy Nester and Wendy Lewis, as an indication of the “weakness of the state’s pending murder charges,” filed in the event that they failed to secure a conviction.
Kouri has also been the subject of multiple civil suits, including one brought by real estate clients and another by Eric’s sister, who sued Kouri, her mother, brother and the real estate business, K. Richins Realty LLC, for improper financial actions.
