A woman who wrote a children’s book about coping with grief after the loss of her husband has been found guilty of his murder.
Kouri Richins slipped five-times the lethal dose of fentanyl into a cocktail that Eric Richins drank in the false hope of inheriting his estate worth more than $4m (£3m) in Utah in March 2022, prosecutors said.
They said Richins, an estate agent, was deep in debt and planning her future with another man.
She had opened numerous life insurance policies on her husband without his knowledge, with benefits totalling about $2m, prosecutors said.
The internet search history from Richins’s phone included “what is a lethal.dose.of.fetanayl” and “luxury prisons for the rich America”, a digital forensic analyst said.
Prosecutor Brad Bloodworth played a clip of Richins’s 911 call from the night of her husband’s death in court.
That’s “not the sound of a wife becoming a widow”, he said, quoting the defence’s opening statement.
“It’s the sound of a wife becoming a black widow.”
Defence lawyer Wendy Lewis said the prosecution “looks at facts one way and sees a witch, but if you look at those facts another way, you see a widow”.
The defence team argued Eric Richins was addicted to painkillers and asked his wife to procure opioids for him.
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Richins, 35, stared at the floor and took deep breaths as she was convicted of aggravated murder on Monday.
She was also convicted of other felonies, including attempted murder for trying 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.
Shortly before her arrest in May 2023, Richins self-published a book for children about coping with the loss of a parent.
Prosecutors argued she planned the killing and tried to cover it up.
She will be sentenced on May 13 – the day her husband would have turned 44.
