THE GRIEF AUTHOR GETS LIFE: KOURI RICHINS SENTENCED ON ERIC'S BIRTHDAY

0:03 Kalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. I'm Garrett Fisher and this is Daily Crime in Justice for Tuesday, May nineteenth, twenty twenty six. We're back. Two weeks ago production packed up and went on vacation. And if you stayed with us through the Fighting Back Series, The Central Park Five, The Radium Girls, Stella le Bec, Aaron Brokovich, Karen Silkwood, then thank you. Genuinely. Those ten episodes were about ordinary people who took on something enormous and refused to let go. And I hope they landed for you the way they landed for me. But the Daily Docket doesn't take a vacation.

0:45 While we were gone, the courts kept running and one case in particular reached the end of its road, a case we have followed on this show since February, a case we covered Gavel to Gavel in March, and a case that last week finally arrived. At the moment, every trial is building toward the sentencing. You know the name Houri Richins, the Utah mother of three who wrote a children's book about grief, a book about a father with angel wings watching over his sons from heaven, and then turned out to be the reason those sons needed it. In March, a jury convicted her of murdering her husband, Eric Richins, poisoning him with a lethal dose of fentanyl so she could collect his life insurance and walk away from millions of dollars in debt. Five counts. Guilty on every one of them. We brought you that verdict the day it came down. What we have not brought you until today is what happened next. And what happened next is the whole show. Because last Wednesday, Coury Richins walked into a Park City courtroom to learn how she would spend the rest of her life. And the date of that hearing was not an accident. It was May thirteenth.

1:53 It would have been Eric Richards's forty fourth birthday. We are going to talk about why that date matters and why her own lawyers fought so hard to move it. We are going to talk about the three boys, Eric and Corey's sons, all of them under fourteen years old, who had statements read aloud in that courtroom by the counselors who have been helping them survive this. I want you to hear what those children said about their mother, because it is the most important testimony in this entire case, and it did not come from a forensic accountant. And we are going to talk about how Coury Richins behaved while she listened to all of it, because she did not sit still. She rolled her eyes, she made faces, she mouthed the word what at her attorneys, and then when it was her turn to speak, she talked for more than half an hour and called none of it an apology. Look, I'm going to be honest with you.

2:46 This is not a who done it anymore. The jury answered that question in three hours back in March. What is left is something harder and in some ways uglier, the question of whether a person convicted of murdering the father of her children is capable of understanding what she did last Wednesday in front of those children's words. She gave us her answer. Let's start where this show always starts, with the person who is not here to tell you his side of it. Eric Richins was thirty nine years old when he died. He lived in commas Utah, a small town east of Park City, the kind of place where people know each other. He ran a stonemasonry business with a partner, Cody Wright, and by every account, he was good at it, successful, hard working, the type of man who his partner testified would power through a sickness or an injury rather than slow down. He had survived COVID, he had survived lime disease. He kept going. He loved to hunt, and he loved his three sons more than anything in the world. Here is the detail about Eric that I cannot stop thinking about, and it did not come out fully until the sentencing hearing, so hold on to it. Eric Richards, in the period before his death, had consulted a divorce attorney. His marriage was over and he knew it, but he did not file. And according to his own sister, the reason he did not file

4:18 was that he was afraid, genuinely, specifically afraid that a divorce court might give his wife equal custody of their boys. He could not accept that risk, so he made a decision. His sister described in that courtroom last week, and I want to quote her because it is devastating. He chose to, in her words, live his life through hell every single day until his youngest son turned eighteen, rather than risk his children being alone with coury. He was right to be afraid. He just did not understand how little time he had. On March fourth, twenty twenty two, Eric Richins was found dead in his bed. His wife called nine one one and said she had come back to their room in the early morning hours and found him cold.

5:06 She told the dispatcher they had been celebrating, she had just closed a real estate deal, a mansion she had flipped, and that she had made him a cocktail a moscow mule. The autopsy found fentanyl in his blood at five times the minimum lethal dose, and then for fourteen months, Corey Richins performed. She put her name on a children's book about grief called Are You With Me? A book featuring a father with angel wings watching over his young son. She went on a local morning show to promote it. She presented herself to her community and to a television audience as a widow helping her babies cope with the unimaginable loss of their dad. Prosecutors later showed the jury text messages establishing that a ghostwriter actually wrote the book.

5:53 Corey Richins was not processing grief, she was managing a brand. In May twenty twenty three, she was a rested. Here is what the trial laid bare and I'll keep it tight because we covered it in full. In March, Coury Richins was drowning. Her real estate company was, in the words of the prosecution's forensic accountant, imploding millions of dollars in debt, hundreds of bounced checks, short term loans from hard money lenders with balloon payments she could not make. She was having an affair under the couple's prenup. A divorce left her with very little, but Eric's death she believed would hander his estate and more than a million dollars in life insurance money. What she did not know was that Eric had quietly seen all of this coming.

6:39 He had moved his assets into a trust for his sons and named his sister as trustee. The money Coury Richards killed for was money that was never going to reach her. The prosecution's case was that she tried twice. The first attempt was on Valentine's Day twenty twenty two, a sandwich allegedly laced with benten al left in Eric's truck with a love note. He got violently ill and he survived. And then, according to the family's former housekeeper, who testified that she had sold drugs to Kury on multiple occasions, Kury came back looking for something stronger. The way the housekeeper described that request is one of the chilling moments of this trial. And I'll flag for you that there's a wrinkle in the exact wording, which is why I'm not going to put a specific phrase in your ear here. What matters is the meaning of it.

7:30 The first method had failed, and she wanted something that would not Seventeen days after the Valentine's Day attempt, Eric Richards was dead on March sixteenth of this year. After thirteen days of testimony and a defense that rested without calling a single witness, the jury deliberated for just under three hours and convicted Kury Richins of aggravated murder, attempted aggravated murder, forgery, and two counts of insurance fraud. Five counts, five convictions. That was March. The sentencing was last week, and that is where this gets hard. Welcome back. The sentencing hearing for Coury Richins was held last Wednesday, May thirteenth in Summit County, Utah. And I need you to sit with that date for a second, because Coury Richins's own defense team certainly did they filed a motion to move it. They argued they needed more time to prepare.

8:34 But here's the thing. Everyone in that courtroom understood May thirteenth would have been Eric Richards's forty fourth birthday. Judge Richard Morazak denied the motion, the sentencing went forward. On the birthday, Eric's sister Amy Richins stood up in that courtroom and said something about that date that I have not been able to shake. She said, birthdays are supposed to be proof of life, a day to celebrate another year of growth, and in ste it's dead. She said, this birthday had become a cruel reminder of another year Eric will never see, and a reminder of the fatherhood that was stolen from his three sons. Stolen, that is the right word. And the people who can tell you exactly what was stolen are the boys themselves. Eric and Coury Richins had three sons at the time their father was killed. They were small. One of them was nine years old. They are all still under fourteen today, and since April twenty twenty four they have not been in their mother's custody at all. They have been raised by Eric's sister, Katie Richins, and her husband the boys did not speak in that courtroom themselves. Three counselors, the people who have been doing the quiet, unglamorous work of helping these children survive, read statements the boys had written. I am going to tell you what those children said, because nobody else's words in this case carry the weight that theirs do. One of the boys wrote that after his death died, his mother would put him and his brother's in the basement. He wrote that he felt scared because

10:06 he thought something really bad was happening again. He wrote that when someone talks about his mother it makes him feel hateful and ashamed. He asked the judge to send her to prison forever. The middle son, the one who was nine when his father was poisoned, who is thirteen now, wrote that his mother should get a life sentence because what she did was very sick, because it had no reason to happen, and because it hurt a lot of people, including him. And here is the detail from this hearing that I think will stay with me longer than any piece of forensic evidence in the entire trial. Prosecutors say that boy now wears his late father's clothing to school thirteen years old, putting on his dead dad's shirt in the morning so he can carry a piece of him through the day. The third son did not soften anything.

10:55 He wrote directly to his mother, you took away my dad for no reason other than God read, and you only cared about yourself and your stupid boyfriends. All three boys asked the judge for the same thing. Prison, no parole. There's a playbook for how the state frames a case like this, it's sentencing, and the lead prosecutor, Brad Bludworth, ran it cleanly because he did not need theatrics. He had the timeline. He reminded the court that on Valentine's Day twenty twenty two, Coury Richins tried to murder her husband and failed. And then he said the thing that is the entire moral center of this case. He said that over the next seventeen days, she did not think what have I done? She thought how can I do better?

11:41 And then she murdered Eric in the presence of their children, using poison for money. That is not a crime of passion, that is a project. She failed. She reviewed her failure, she corrected for it, and she tried again until it worked. Judge Moreazak said he was looking hard at exactly that sequence of events when he handed down his sentence. And the sentence is this for the aggravated murder of Eric Richins, life in prison without the possibility of parole on top of that, consecutively, meaning stacked one after the other, not served at the same time. Up to five years for forgery, one to fifteen years for each of the two insurance fraud counts, and five years to life for the attempted murder.

12:25 Coury Richins is thirty six years old. She is going to die in prison. That is what the sentence means. You would think that would be the end of it. It was not, because we have not yet talked about how Coury Richins behaved while all of this was being said, and that that is its own story. Welcome back. Most defendants at a sentencing hearing do one of two things. They sit stonefaced, or they cry. Coury Richins did something else. According to Court TV's coverage from inside that courtroom, while Eric's sisters delivered their victim impact statements, while they described their brother, while they grieved him out loud, Coury Richins could be seen rolling her eyes, making faces faces described as disgust or surprise, mouthing the word what and turning to whisper with her attorneys. When her former sister in law, Katie told the court that Eric had believed Coory was the most evil person he had ever met, Coory mouthed what again, and it kept going while the counselors read the children's statements. Three little boys telling a courtroom how their mother had frightened them and hurt them, asking a judge to keep her away from them forever. And the person those words were about was, by multiple accounts, making faces.

13:53 Here is what I want you to notice, though, because it is the tell. Her demeanor changed, the eye rolling stop the moment the hearing turned to her side when a letter from her own mother was read. When her own sister and her own brother spoke about her coury, richins dissolved. She sobbed at the defense table. So she was capable of being moved. She was fully capable of emotion in that courtroom. She just did not spend any of it on Eric, and she did not spend any of it on her sons. She saved all of it for herself. And then she got to speak, and she spoke for more than half an hour court TV described her statement as something that came across less like remorse and more like a love letter. To her three boys, She told them repeatedly to be like your dad, the man a jury found she murdered. She admitted for the first time to the affair, though she also accused Eric of cheating on her, and she offered her sons marriage advice.

14:56 She told them never to keep secrets, always to put a spouse first. She said their love hers and Erics never failed. She told the boy she loved them, that she was not angry at them for hating her, that she would be waiting whenever they were ready. She pleaded with them to ask their guardians for the letters and cards she says she has been sending what she did not do. Not once in more than thirty minutes was apologized, and she was explicit about that. She told the courtroom. Never apologize for something you didn't do, Never admit to something you didn't do. Never beg for mercy for something you didn't do. She said she could not believe the conviction was real. She called it cruel and heartless that eight jurors who had never met her got to decide her future in less than three hours. She is pledged to appeal, and she is entitled to do that. An appeal is a real and legitimate part of the process, and a conviction is not the absolute last word until that runs its course. I want to be fair about that, but I also want to be honest with you about the rest of it. Prosecutors in a sentencing memo said that even after the conviction, Coury Richand sent a message to an admirer vowing to expose the County, the prosecution, the judge, and Eric's family, declaring that sentencing was not the end, it was the beginning, and that, in her words, they picked the wrong one. Now I have to flag this clearly, and I want you to hear the flag. Curry.

16:29 Richin's defense attorney pushed back hard on that memo, calling it unreliable and irrelevant and saying its contents were misleading or outright falls. So I am not going to present that message to you as established fact. What I can tell you is this, the prosecution put it in front of the court, the defense disputed it, and you are allowed to hold both of those things at the same time. There was one more strange piece of this hearing, worth knowing about the judge allowed the defense to bring in statements from people who had never met Eric or Courry at all, including a woman whose own father was sentenced to life without parole for murdering her mother, who asked the judge to leave a door open for parole in case the Richens boys ever changed their minds about wanting their mother in their lives. Some of those statements were read anonymously. I understand the human impulse there, I do, But I keep coming back to those three boys who were not anonymous, who used their names, who said exactly what they wanted. They ask for prison forever the court listened to them. Look, I'm going to be honest with you.

17:34 I have covered a lot of these and what makes this one sit wrong is not the murder alone. It is the fourteen months afterward, the book, the morning show, the performance of Grief sold to a community and a TV audience, while three real children actually lived inside that grief because of what she did. That is not a mistake. That is a choice made over and over every single morning she woke up and decided to keep the act running. Coury Richins' next court day is a restitution hearing on July thirty. First, we will tell you what happens, but the verdict that actually matters in this case was not read by a judge. It was written by three boys in their own words, and read aloud by the counselors trying to help them heal. They told the truth about their mother, and a courtroom finally believed them. That is Daily Crime and Justice for Tuesday, May nineteenth, twenty twenty six.

18:37 The Whole Show, one case, because Eric Richins earned a whole show. Eric Richards was a Stonemason from Commas, Utah. He was thirty nine years old. He built things with his hands. He powered through every sickness life through at him, and he stayed in a marriage he wanted out of through what his sister called hell because he was afraid of what would happen to his son's if he left. He was trying to protect them. He ran out of time, and his three boys are growing up without him, raised by an aunt, one of them wearing his father's clothes to school so he can keep his dad close. Someone has to say his name, So we did Eric Richins, be honest, be the kind of person a child would actually want to be like. And then go be it every day when no one is watching. Do better. We'll see you tomorrow. Disclaimer Daily Crime and Justice is a production of Calarogus Shark Media. This episode covers the May thirteenth, twenty twenty sixth, sentencing of Coury Richins, who is convicted in March twenty twenty six in the death of her husband, Eric Richins. Coury Richins has maintained her innocence, and her attorneys have stated they intend to appeal. Her conviction and sentence are subject to that appeal process. Accounts of the length of her courtroom statement vary across sources, from roughly thirty to forty five minutes. A message attributed to cour Mary Richins and a prosecution sentencing memo was disputed by her defense team, who characterized the memo as unreliable and

20:07 in part falls. We have presented it as a contested claim and not as established fact. In our March trial coverage, the housekeeper's testimony about a requested drug was referenced using a different celebrity name than the one appearing in some published trial reporting. Listeners should treat that specific detail as unsettled. Reporting in this episode is drawn from Court TV coverage and the trial record. Commentary and editorial opinion are the views of the host and are clearly framed as such. Nothing in this program constitutes legal advice.