Author Accused of Killing Husband Faces New Charges

Kouri Richins, the Utah woman charged with fatally poisoning her husband in 2022, has been hit with more than two dozen new charges. The mother of three, who wrote a children's book about dealing with grief after Eric Richins' death, was indicted Friday on 26 charges, including multiple felony counts of mortgage fraud, forgery, and money laundering, NBC News reports. Prosecutors say Richins, who is slated to go on trial next year, killed her husband for financial gain because her real-estate business was deeply in debt, reports the New York Times. She was also allegedly planning a future with a man she was having an affair with.

According to charging documents, Richins, 34, "used a power of attorney to obtain a $250,000 home equity line of credit on Eric Richins' premarital home without his knowledge" in early 2019 and put the money into her business, per KSL.

• The "secret origination and continued existence of the HELOC was a source of tension between the Defendant and Eric Richins," the indictment states. The defendant, it states, "informed Eric Richins that she would repay the loan and led Eric Richins to believe that she had repaid it. The HELOC was not paid off on the day of Eric Richins' death."
• The indictment states that in 2020, Eric Richins consulted an estate planning lawyer to "protect himself in the short-term from recently discovered and ongoing abuse and misuse of his finances ... and to protect his three children in the long-term by ensuring that the Defendant would never be able to manage his property after his death."

• Eric Richins ran a successful stone masonry business. When the couple married in 2013, they relinquished claims to each other's businesses as part of a prenuptial agreement, with the exception that his business would be transferred to her if he died while they were still married, CBS News reports. Prosecutors said that months before Eric Richins' death, his wife's business was on the "precipice of total financial collapse," while his estate was worth around $5 million, plus life insurance policies she mistakenly believed she was the beneficiary of, KSL reports.
• Kouri Richins' lawyers called the new charges "extremely troubling," arguing that filing them at this stage "underscores the weakness of the state's pending murder charges," per NBC.

Richins is also accused of stealing more than $100,000 from her husband's business. Prosecutors say she killed him by putting fentanyl tablets in a cocktail he drank in March 2022. It wasn't the first time she had tried to kill him, prosecutors say.