A rocky marriage, secret affair and millions in debt: What we’ve learned so far in Kouri Richins’ murder trial
By Nicki Brown, CNN
(CNN) — Over the last two weeks, jurors in Kouri Richins’ murder trial have heard wide-ranging testimony about troubles in her marriage, her secret affair and the millions of dollars she owed in debt – all factors prosecutors say led her to fatally poison her husband.
Prosecutors say the Utah mother of three killed her husband, Eric Richins, with a lethal dose of fentanyl in March 2022. She is also accused of attempting to kill him by lacing his sandwich on Valentine’s Day, weeks before his death.
Nearly 40 witnesses have testified so far, including the woman who allegedly gave Richins the drugs, friends who said they had heard about the couple’s marital problems and the man with whom she was having an affair.
“The evidence will prove that Kouri Richins murdered Eric for his money and to get a fresh start at life,” Brad Bloodworth, chief prosecutor in the Summit County Attorney’s Office, said in his opening statement. “More than anything, she wanted his money to perpetuate her facade of privileged affluence and success.”
Kouri Richins has pleaded not guilty to aggravated murder and other charges, with her defense arguing she has been wrongfully blamed for Eric Richins’ death and that prosecutors are unable to prove how the fentanyl entered Richins’ body. If convicted of the most serious charge, she could face up to life in prison.
“They’re going to spend weeks in this trial trying to convince you that Kouri had reasons to kill her husband, because they can’t show you that she did kill her husband,” defense attorney Kathy Nester said in her opening statement.
With prosecutors expected to conclude their case in the coming days, here are five key revelations from their witnesses so far:
Kouri Richins dreamed of future with another man, texts show
Robert Josh Grossmann, the man with whom Kouri Richins had a yearslong affair, wiped his eyes and put his head down as their affectionate text messages were displayed in court.
“I do want a future together. I do want you. Figure life out together,” Kouri Richins texted Grossmann roughly two weeks before her husband died. “If he could just go away and you could just be here! Life would be so perfect!!! I love you.”
Grossmann worked on houses Kouri Richins bought for her real estate business, he said, and their relationship became romantic around early 2020. She let him live in a home she was flipping, bought him two trucks and gave him money whenever he needed it, Grossmann said. He loved her, he testified, and believed she loved him, too.
The jury saw dozens of texts where the two expressed their love and dreamed about being together in the future – though both acknowledged the idea was more fantasy than reality.
Grossmann and Richins planned to get brunch together on March 4, 2022, to celebrate her closing on a valuable property, he testified. The night before, he sent her a GIF – a type of animated image – of two people kissing with the caption, “love you,” according to messages shown in court.
Hours later, Eric Richins was dead.
The two stayed together for several months after Eric Richins’ death, Grossmann said. About a month after her husband died, Kouri Richins texted Grossmann, “I think I want you to be my husband one day.”
But their relationship soon ended. Grossmann said, “Things changed after Eric passed.”
Kouri Richins appeared to be grieving after Eric Richins died, Grossmann said on cross-examination.
Under questioning by defense attorney Wendy Lewis, Grossmann said after Richins’ arrest in May 2023, he spoke with a private investigator hired by Eric Richins’ family. The P.I., Grossmann said, told him Richins had killed her husband.
“I was blown away,” Grossmann said, “and then I’m like, looking at everything in our past with a different set of goggles on, through different lenses. And I was trying to figure out if she did it.”
He told the investigator about a sprawling conversation he had with Kouri Richins about two weeks after Eric Richins’ death, in which they discussed dying, God, bowhunting and “supernatural stuff.” During that conversation, Grossmann said Kouri Richins asked if he had killed anybody while serving in Iraq and how it made him feel.
“Today, sitting here, when you think back on that conversation, does that conversation seem like it was a strange conversation to you?” Lewis asked.
“I can’t tell one way from the other anymore,” Grossmann responded. “I’ve been confused for years.”
Kouri Richins felt ‘trapped’ in her marriage, friends said
Several witnesses testified there were difficulties in the Richins’ relationship, with two of Kouri Richins’ friends saying she told them she felt “trapped” in her marriage.
“She felt like she was frustrated in the relationship but also it would be difficult to leave – Eric would end up financially secure and her the opposite,” said Allison Wright, the wife of Eric Richins’ business partner. “She feared what would happen in divorce.”
Another friend testified Kouri Richins told her in December 2021 she couldn’t see an “easy way forward out of the marriage.”
“She said that, in many ways, it would be better if he were dead,” Becky Lloyd said.
During cross-examination, defense attorneys tried to undercut Lloyd’s testimony, playing recordings in which she expressed uncertainty about what was said in the conversation. But Lloyd stood by her testimony on the stand.
“I don’t want to be here saying it,” she said, “but I know that that is what was said.”
The jury also heard two recordings of phone calls between Kouri Richins, her best friend and Eric Richins’ best friend.
“We were in a rocky spot two years ago,” Kouri Richins said of her marriage during one of those calls, which occurred about two weeks after her husband’s death.
Eric Richins’ friend then referenced Kouri Richins kicking her husband out of the house for a couple weeks after she learned he had been seeing another woman.
Two divorce attorneys testified they met with Eric and Kouri Richins individually in 2020 and 2021, respectively, although neither filed for divorce.
Kouri Richins’ finances were ‘collapsing,’ accountant said
While Richins’ friends said she appeared to be financially successful, a forensic accountant testified her business flipping homes was “imploding.”
“As of the date that Eric Richins died, Kouri Richins was in financial distress and her financial enterprise was collapsing, had been collapsing – and but for a significant infusion of cash and capital, would have continued to collapse,” said Brooke Karrington, who analyzed financial records in the case.
Kouri Richins’ debt problems began after she took out a $250,000 home equity line of credit, or HELOC, against their family home in 2019, around the same time she registered her real estate business, Karrington said. The loan was taken out in her husband’s name and signed by Kouri Richins as his attorney-in-fact, according to records displayed in court.
By the time Eric Richins died, Kouri Richins had taken out multiple loans and owed thousands in debt payments every week, so her bank account was “perpetually in the hole,” Karrington said. Her net worth was negative $1.6 million the day after her husband’s death, according to Karrington’s analysis.
In financial records Richins submitted as part of four loan applications, she reported her bank accounts contained significantly more money than they had, Karrington said.
Eric Richins’ life was insured for approximately $2.2 million through several policies, according to Karrington. Prosecutors allege Kouri Richins forged an application for one of his life insurance policies that went into effect on February 4, 2022, 10 days before they say she first tried to poison her husband and a month before his death.
Richins received about $1.3 million in life insurance payments in the months after her husband’s passing, Karrington said. By September 2022, most of the money had been spent – much of it toward paying down her debt.
“If, in fact, Ms. Richins was in financial distress, you’re not here to say she killed her husband, are you?” Nester asked the forensic accountant during a testy cross-examination.
“That’s for the jury to decide,” Karrington said. “I’m not making any conclusion about that at all.”
2 witnesses described alleged drug deals prior to Eric Richins’ death
Carmen Lauber, a house cleaner who worked for Kouri Richins, testified she sold pills to the Utah mother four times in early 2022 at the defendant’s request.
“She’d called me and asked me if I could reach out to somebody for some pain meds for an investor that she knew,” Lauber testified. She bought illicit opiate pills for Richins, who later asked for something stronger, the house cleaner testified.
Lauber got in touch with Robert Crozier, who said he had pills containing fentanyl, Lauber said. When she texted Richins about the fentanyl pills, Richins responded, “OK, go ahead and get them,” according to Lauber’s testimony.
Lauber testified she bought pills from Crozier at a gas station in Draper, Utah, twice before Eric Richins’ death and a third time shortly after.
Chris Kotrodimos, a digital forensics analyst, showed the jury location data from Lauber and Crozier’s phones. The devices were both near the Draper gas station on February 11, February 26, and March 9, 2022, according to his analysis.
When Eric Richins was found dead on March 4, 2022, he had roughly five times the lethal dose of fentanyl in his system, according to charging documents.
On the stand, Crozier confirmed he gave Lauber pills at the gas station but insisted he did not sell fentanyl at the time.
In early 2022, Crozier was selling pharmaceutical oxycodone pills he received from people with prescriptions, he said, and didn’t start selling fentanyl until late that year.
Crozier had previously confirmed he sold Lauber fentanyl in a jailhouse interview with law enforcement during the investigation into Eric’s death. In footage of the interview shown in court, Crozier struggled to remember details about his interactions with Lauber and which drugs she asked for. But he said, “She knew what she was buying.”
“So, she knew that there was fentanyl in those pills?” an investigator asked.
“Absolutely,” Crozier said.
On the stand, Crozier said he didn’t remember that conversation.
“I was on a lot of drugs at that time, so I was detoxing from those drugs,” he testified.
Though he was called as a witness for the prosecution, Crozier’s testimony is key to Kouri Richins’ defense: In her opening statement, Nester argued if Crozier only sold oxycodone as he now claims, his pills could not have killed Eric Richins.
“The pills that were purchased by Carmen Lauber could not have been the cause of Eric’s death,” Nester told the jury. “The fentanyl must have come from somewhere else.”
Attorneys on both sides tried to undercut Lauber and Crozier’s credibility by questioning their recollections, histories of drug use and inconsistencies between their testimonies and their previous statements.
Crozier and Lauber both received immunity in exchange for their truthful testimonies. The defense has suggested Lauber altered her story to fit the prosecution’s narrative.
Kouri Richins’ phone records show searches about fentanyl, life insurance payments
Although lots of data from early 2022 was deleted from Kouri Richins’ phone, Kotrodimos testified about some of her cellphone activity around the time of her husband’s death.
Kouri Richins told investigators she left her cellphone in the master bedroom while she slept in her children’s bedroom the night her husband died and she called emergency services as soon as she returned to find him cold and unresponsive, according to court documents.
Kouri Richins’ cellphone was locked at 9:32 p.m. on March 3, 2022, and remained locked until 3:06 a.m. the next morning, according to Kotrodimos’ analysis. It moved 35 feet around 10:30 p.m. and then moved 243 feet at 3:08 a.m. The phone was unlocked six times in the 15 minutes before she called 911 at 3:21 a.m., he said.
Around 8:30 a.m., hours after she called 911, cellphone records show three GIFs were accessed on Kouri Richins’ phone: One was captioned, “Idiots. Idiots everywhere,” while another showed a woman wiping away her tears with dollar bills. A third included the caption, “I’m really rich.”
Kotrodimos testified he can’t determine who sent or received the GIFs – or if Kouri Richins even viewed them.
Kotrodimos showed the jury dozens of internet searches made on the phone Kouri Richins used beginning in April 2022, after her other phone was seized by law enforcement. The searches included queries about remotely deleting cellphone data, how investigators recover deleted messages, women’s prisons in Utah, and life insurance payments.
According to Kotrodimos, the searches included: “what is a lethal.dose.of.fetanayl (sic),” “kouri richins kamas net worth,” and, “if someone is poisned (sic) what does it go down on the death certificate as.”
Kotrodimos testified the searches were all made after Kouri Richins knew she was under investigation, and he confirmed he couldn’t say with certainty who made the searches nor what prompted them.
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