Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
At 3:21 in the morning on March 4, 2022, a woman called 911 from a house in Kamas, Utah, a small mountain town about 40 miles from Salt Lake City.
Her name was Kouri Richins. She told the dispatcher she had just found her husband, Eric, in their bedroom. He was cold to the touch and he was not breathing.
The dispatcher talked her through CPR. Deputies and paramedics from Summit County raced to the house. They could not save him.
Eric Richins was 39, the father of three little boys who were asleep in the house.
A marriage with secrets
Eric and Kouri married in 2013 and settled in Kamas, where they raised their three sons. Kouri ran her own business buying, fixing up and selling houses.
From the outside, it looked like a busy, happy family. Inside, it was falling apart.
Money was the biggest problem. Prosecutors later said Kouri’s business was millions of dollars in debt. Eric had grown worried about what was happening to his own money, and in November 2020 he quietly did something about it. He met an estate lawyer and put everything he owned into a trust. He named his sister, Katie, as the person in charge if he died. Kouri was not told.
His lawyer later said in a court filing that Eric wanted to protect himself from the misuse of his money, and to make sure his wife would never control what he left behind for his boys.
There was something else Eric did not know. Kouri had been seeing another man, Robert Josh Grossmann. Their text messages, read out years later in court, talked about love and a future together.
By early 2022, the couple were also fighting over a house: a huge unfinished mansion in nearby Midway that Kouri wanted to buy. The two argued about it.
Valentine’s Day
On February 14, 2022, Kouri gave Eric a Valentine’s Day meal at home. According to his family, it was a sandwich.
Soon after eating it, Eric became very sick. His family said he broke out in hives and struggled to breathe.
He survived. But afterward, he told a friend that he believed his wife was trying to poison him. His family later said he had told them something similar: if anything happened to him, they should take a look at her.
Three days before that Valentine’s dinner, a house cleaner who had worked for Kouri met a dealer and bought a batch of pills. She later told investigators the pills were fentanyl, and that she handed them to Kouri.
The Moscow mule
Less than three weeks later, on the evening of March 3, 2022, Kouri and Eric were at home. According to what she later told deputies, they were celebrating a real estate deal.
She made Eric a Moscow mule, a cocktail of vodka and ginger beer. She brought it to their bedroom, and he drank it sitting up in bed.
Then, she said, one of their sons had a night terror, so she went to sleep in the boy’s room. She said she left her phone in the master bedroom.
She said she woke up around 3 a.m., went back to her own room, and found Eric on the floor at the foot of the bed.
Deputies who came to the house that night were wearing body cameras. In the footage, later played in court, Kouri sits on a leather couch in the living room with her head in her hands.
At first, it looked like a sudden medical problem.
Five times the lethal dose
Then the autopsy came back.
Eric Richins had died of a fentanyl overdose. The amount in his system was about five times the lethal dose. The medical examiner found it was not medical-grade fentanyl, and that it had most likely been swallowed, not injected or smoked.
Detectives started looking closely at the person who had made his last drink.
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