The Utah woman accused of fatally poisoning her husband and then authoring a children’s book about grief allegedly purchased four life insurance policies on his life totaling $2 million years before the alleged murder, according to newly revealed case details.
Kouri Richins, 33, purchased the policies without her husband Eric Richins’ knowledge between 2015 and 2017, prosecutors alleged in an update to charging documents on Thursday.
The new allegations led a judge to postpone Richins’ detention hearing from its previously scheduled Friday date to June 12.
Prosecutors said the mom of three slipped five times the lethal dose of fentanyl into a Moscow Mule she mixed her 39-year-old husband in March 2022.
She made national headlines last week when she was charged with his murder after she had self-published a kids book titled “Are You with Me?” about a father who passed away and looked down on his sons as an angel and promoted it on TV and radio shows.
Prosecutors also said Richins took out a $250,000 home equity line of credit and spent it, stole about $134,000 from her husband’s business, withdrew $100,000 from his bank accounts and spent more than $30,000 with his credit cards.
Eric Richins learned about his wife’s secret financial decisions in September 2020 and met with a divorce lawyer and estate planner the next month, according to the documents.
She reportedly agreed to pay her husband back when he confronted her about the missing money.
Before his death, Eric Richins had recently cut his wife out of his will and changed his life insurance policy as he sought a divorce.
Richins allegedly tried to name herself the beneficiary of that policy but was caught and Eric Richins reversed the move, adding back his sister to the plan.
Both sides of the family have spent the past several months in court battling over Eric Richins’ $3.6 million estate.
His sisters told investigators that Richins had previously tried to poison their brother including on a trip to Greece.
He had reportedly warned his family that “if anything happened to him she was to blame,” according to court records.
The murdered husband also “had reason to believe” Richins was carrying out an affair throughout their marriage, his family representatives have said.
She allegedly poisoned him a final time between the night of March 3 and early March 4, 2022. Police found Eric Richins’ body “on the floor at the foot of his bed” and pronounced him dead at the scene.
Richins reportedly told cops she and her husband had been celebrating plans to purchase a $2 million home that night. She later found him on the floor “cold to the touch” upon returning to their bedroom after sleeping in the kids’ bedroom.
Police later learned that she had placed two $900 orders for fentanyl pills, from an drug dealer acting as an informant on the case.
Richins has been charged with first-degree aggravated murder and multiple counts of second-degree possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute, records show.
With Post wires
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