The Grief Book Murder | The Kouri Richins Case

Kouri Richins presented herself as a grieving widow after her husband, Eric Richins, died from fentanyl poisoning. But behind the public image was a case involving debt, life insurance, alleged prior poisoning attempts, and a children’s book about grief that shocked everyone watching.

In this episode of GBRLIFE Of Crimes, we break down the Kouri Richins case and the psychology behind one of the coldest performances of grief in recent true crime.

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Transcript

Kaitlyn: 0:00

She wrote a children's book about grief. That sentence alone should tell you. Everything you need to know about Corey Richens. But the full story is so much darker, so much more calculated, that even people who follow this case from the beginning sat in that courtroom in 2026 and could not believe what they were hearing. A woman who spent years quietly drowning in debt while performing the perfect mountain town life. A woman who allegedly tried to poison her husband three times. A woman who, after he finally died, published a picture book for grieving children, went on local television to promote it, gave interviews about her loss, and smiled for the cameras. Her name is Corey Richens. Her husband's name was Eric. He was 39 years old. A stonemason from Utah who grew up in a cattle ranch and loved his family unconditionally. He's survived by a father, two sisters, and three small boys who will spend the rest of their lives without him. And in May 2026, the judge handed down the sentence on what would have been Eric's 44th birthday, life in prison without the possibility of parole. This is her story. Welcome to GBRLIFE Transmissions. I'm your host, Kaitlyn, and you're listening to GBRLIFE of Crimes, where we explore not just what happened in crimes committed by women, but why they happened, and the psychology behind them. Today, we're a Utah mother, a fentanyl-laced cocktail, and a children's book about grief. Corrie Richens was born in Oklahoma in 1990. By her own account, her childhood was defined by instability. Her family moved 17 times across 17 different states because of her parents' work, and she had never had the chance to put down roots anywhere. When Corrie was six years old, her father, who she described as a successful engineer, was arrested. He had been drunk and passed out at the wheel of his car. when he struck a police officer during a traffic stop. So he went to prison and then her parents divorced and her mother moved Corey and her brother to Utah in 2000. Her mother, Lisa, who Corey would later describe as her best friend, struggled with gambling addiction. Corey wrote in a personal statement that became part of the trial record that she spent weekends in casino hotel rooms watching her mother lose money and then the family house and their cars. The picture she painted of her childhood is one of constant financial chaos and physical uprooting, plus emotional instability. She said college felt like a fresh start, and that's where she met Eric, Eric Richens. He was everything her childhood was not. He came from a tight-knit family in rural Utah. He grew up... On a cattle ranch, hauling hay and mending fences. He was athletic, naturally competitive, a hunter, outdoorsman, who, according to everyone who knew him, was simply a genuinely good person. His family friend, Linda King, who introduced the two, said that he was one of her own kids, at least to her. Sweet to the core, Corey said she instantly fell in love with the idea of Eric. He was gonna bring her a stable family and a home that stayed put and children who would grow, knowing that they belonged with their family. And they married in June of 2013, June 15th. They already had their first son, Carter, and they would go on to have two more boys, Ashton and Weston. From the outside, the Richens family looked like the dream that Corey had been chasing her entire life. A home near Park City, Utah, one of the wealthiest resort communities in the state. Three healthy boys, a husband with a successful business. The picture of. Well, they made it in their mountain living life. Eric ran C&E Stone Masonry. He was good at it. And the business was profitable. He coached the boys' soccer and basketball teams. He taught them to hunt and hike. He was, by every account, very present as a father and husband. But Corey had a prenuptial agreement. And that prenup would become the foundation of everything that followed. The document spelled it out plainly. Anything that belonged to Eric, his business, property, accounts, all of his assets would remain his in the event of a divorce. So that means that Corey would leave this marriage with significantly less. But there was one exception. If Corey died while they were still legally married, all of his business interests would transfer to her. She signed that document, but she never stopped thinking about it. To understand what Corey Richens did, you have to understand what she was building in the years leading up to March 2022. In 2019, she started a real estate business, K. Richens Realty. So she also had a business. But this was after they got married. And she was buying homes, flipping them, reselling them. The first year, she bought one property. The second year, she bought five. And that totaled into $2 million. And by 2021, she had purchased 15 more homes, totaling $6.5 million. So she was expanding fast. But as anybody who knows business, there is such a thing as expanding too fast. And the money to do it was not always hers. According to prosecutors, Corey began stealing from Eric in 2019. She went into his accounts without his knowledge. And when Eric discovered it in 2020... He quietly took steps to protect himself. He met with estate planning attorneys and established a living trust. His sister, Katie Richens Benson, was named trustee. Corey was not informed. He also updated a significant life insurance policy to remove her as a beneficiary. He told his family that he suspected that she was trying to kill him. That sentence requires a moment to sit with. This was not 2022. This was years earlier. Eric was a man who continued to live his life with his wife, raise his children, coach soccer games, and smile, all while quietly telling people closest to him that he was afraid his wife was planning to kill him. And yet he stayed, for the boys, for the stability, for all the reasons that people say they stay. And he did. Corey, meanwhile, was quietly constructing an alternate life. She began a romantic relationship with a man named Robert Josh Grossman. She texted him things like, I'm in love with a man that is not my husband. She planned a Caribbean vacation with him for April 2022, knowing prosecutors would later argue that Eric would be dead by then. Her financial situation was also collapsing beneath the performance. By early 2022, she owed approximately $4.5 million in debt. Her business accounts were regularly overdrawn, and in December of 2021 alone, there were 77 overdraft fees and non-sufficient fund transactions, generating $2,000 in fees in a single month. She had taken out four payday loans, each requiring $2,100 per day in payments. With interests that would nearly double if they went into default. She had also, without Eric's knowledge, taken out roughly $2 million in life insurance policies on him in January of 2022. The Valentine's Day poisoning attempt came 10 days after those policies went into effect. What the evidence describes is not a woman who snapped. It describes a woman with a plan that she had been developing for years. A woman who watched her debt spiral, watched her husband quietly wall off his estate from her, watched her affair partner talk about a future together, and decide that the only way out of this trap was to kill the man standing between her, his money, and her freedom. Clinically, this case draws attention to a cluster of behaviors that forensic psychologists associate with instrumental aggression, meaning violence used as a tool to achieve a goal, rather than violence born from rage or impulse. The methodical timeline, the premeditated procurement of drugs, the layered financial fraud and the careful construction of a grieving widow identity. Afterwards, those are marks of someone who calculated. There is also something worth naming about the performance of identity that Corey had been running her entire adult life. A woman who grew up in financial chaos, moved 17 times. Learned early that stability was a thing that you could appear to have, even when you didn't. She had been performing this version of herself that did not match her reality for years, and what prosecutors describe at trial was simply the deadliest version of a pattern that she had been running since childhood. Now, the first known attempt on Eric's life may have happened years before the fatal poisoning. Eric's family told investigators that during a couple vacation to Greece in 2019, he got very sick after Corey gave him a drink, but he recovered and he told his sisters what happened and it stayed with the family. That was not the last time. And by early 2022, Corey had begun getting fentanyl through a contact that she saved in her phone only as CL. And that was Carmen Luber. The Richens family housekeeper. Luber testified at trial that Corey asked her to buy pills multiple times beginning in early 2022. The first purchase was hydrocodone. Corey told her that that was not strong enough. She reportedly asked for something stronger, what she described as the Michael Jackson stuff, as reference to the powerful sedatives that killed the pop star. Luber made a second purchase, and that time, it was fentanyl. And it was purchased from a man named Robert Krauser at a gas station in Utah. Six days before Eric died. And then Valentine's Day came on February 14th, 2022, just 10 days after Corey had taken out life insurance policies on Eric. She prepared his favorite sandwich and gave it to him. Within hours, Eric called two of his friends and told them that he felt like he was going to die and he broke out in hives. He struggled to breathe. He survived. He told his family he thought that she was trying to poison him. He didn't leave. The boys were young. The life they had built was complicated and perhaps part of him could not fully accept what he was saying out loud. 17 days after that, March 3rd, 2022, Corey told investigators that she made Eric a Moscow mule to celebrate a house closing. She brought the cocktail to him while he was resting in bed. She said, then she went to sleep in one of the children's bedrooms. Around 3 in the morning, she said she went back to the master bedroom and found Eric cold and unresponsive at the foot of the bed. He was pronounced dead shortly after. First responders initially suspected a spontaneous aneurysm. The real cause came back in the toxicology report. Eric had approximately five times the lethal dose of fentanyl in his blood. The medical examiner also found high levels of an antipsychotic, sometimes used as a sedative, in his gastric fluid. And the picture that emerged was of a man who had been given a drink designed to stop his heart. Phone records complicated Corey's account of the night. She said she was asleep. But the records show her phone locking and unlocking repeatedly and moving around the house during the hours she claimed to be unconscious. Eric was 39 years old with no history of drug use. There's really just no plausible way that that much fentanyl entered his blood accidentally, especially with all of the other evidence showing that he was fearing that his wife was trying to kill him. And in the days and weeks after his death, Corey moved quickly. She signed paperwork to close on real estate deals the day after Eric died. And she had that Caribbean trip booked for April. And she began work on what would become the most audacious move yet, a children's book. Are You With Me? It was published March of 2023, exactly one year after Eric's death. It tells the story of a child who loses his father, but is reminded that his presence still exists in the world around him. Corrie promoted it on local television. She gave interviews. She performed grief publicly and convincingly. She sold the book on Amazon. Six weeks after her television appearance, she was arrested. On May 8th, 2023 is the day that she was arrested. She immediately pleaded not guilty. The case that followed was a legal marathon. Corey's attorneys filed motion after motion seeking bail, arguing that she posed no flight risk because she had three boys to go home to. Prosecutors held firm. They didn't trust her, so she remained in custody. And her children were placed in the care of Eric's sister. Then, in September of 2023, a document surfaced from inside Corey's jail cell. Prosecutors called it the walk the dog letter. It appeared to be instructions to family members about what to say to her attorney, specifically a narrative suggesting Eric had asked Corey to buy drugs from Carmen Luber. Prosecutors argued it was witness tampering, plain and simple. Corey's defense team offered a different explanation. It was part of a fictional novel she was writing about her fictional stay in a Mexican prison. The judge was not moved. Over the following two years, additional charges piled on. And by June 2025, Corey faced 26 new felony counts, including mortgage fraud, money laundering, bad check issuance, and a pattern of unlawful activity charge. The financial portrait prosecutors were building was staggering, and they needed it to show exactly what was going on. The trial itself began February 23rd of 2026, and it was expected to last. Five weeks, but it wrapped in three. Over 13 days of testimony, prosecutors called more than 40 witnesses. And when it boils down to it, everything was showing how it all happened. Carmen took the stand and described the fentanyl purchases in detail. A forensic accountant spent an entire day walking the jury through Corey's financial collapse, establishing that by the time Eric died, she was in $4.5 million in debt. with no realistic path out. A close friend of Eric's testified that he had never seen Eric use drugs of any kind ever. Eric's sister recalled his fear that Corey was trying to kill him. Grossman, the boyfriend, took the stand and confirmed the affair while downplaying any expectation of a future together. And jurors saw text messages, including his description of their dynamic as draining to love you. Prosecutors also introduced Corey's Google search, where she searched the legal dose of fentanyl. She searched luxury prisons. The defense did not call a single witness. They rested without putting anyone on the stand. They knew. And closing arguments were delivered March 16th, 2026. Prosecutor Brad Bloodworth told the jury that Corey wanted the perfect life, or at least the appearance of one. In that when life began slipping through her fingers, she chose to murder the man at the center of it because she wanted to leave but did not want to leave his money. So she killed him. The jury deliberated for three hours, guilty, on all accounts, aggregated murder, attempted aggregated murder for the Valentine's Day poisoning, and two accounts of insurance fraud and forgery. And after the verdict, one of the things that struck me about the case is how long the performance held. From the outside, Corey looked like a grieving widow for about a year. She published a book. She gave interviews. She appeared on television looking composed and maternal. And the reason that she could do that, the reason that she didn't fall apart, is the same reason that she was able to follow through on killing her husband in the first place. This is someone who had been managing an enormous gap between her real life and her presented life for years. The financial chaos hidden beneath the Utah aesthetic. The marriage she described as suffocating while she coached soccer games and attended birthday parties along with her husband. But then there's the affair, the debt, the fraud. She had built a second life inside the first one and kept both running simultaneously for a long time. What we see in cases like this, and we've seen it in others that we've covered on the show, is the compounding effect of shame avoidance. When someone has invested heavily in a particular identity, in this case, wife, mother, successful entrepreneur. Community member, the threat of that identity collapsing can become something they experience as existential rather than merely embarrassing. The research on this is consistent. People who feel that their core sense of self is under threat sometimes make decisions that look incomprehensible from the outside, but they feel in the moment like it's self-preservation. That does not make what Corey did understandable in any moral sense. It makes it legible in a behavioral one. What's harder to process, and what sets this case apart from many we cover, is the book. Sitting with someone who could write those words for grieving children while knowing what she had done to create the grief, that's a level of compartmentalization that most people simply do not access. Whether that reflects psychopathy, dissociation, or something else entirely is a clinical question no one outside of a formal evaluation can answer with certainty. But it does... Kind of show issues specifically in psychopathy. Antisocial personality disorder? It's a possibility here. But what I can say is that Eric Richens saw something in her that frightened him years before she killed him. He restructured his estate. He tried to protect himself, and yet he still stayed. And that's what people do when they're trying to hold their families together. But he deserved better. His boys deserved better. and the fact that she addressed them from the sentence podium, saying she had something to prove to her sons after everything she took from them. That's the final piece of this portrait. Corey Richens was sentenced to life in prison without parole on May 13, 2026. And the judge did not choose that date carelessly. He stood in that courtroom and said to Corey and everyone else that she's simply too dangerous to be free, ever. He noted the jury's unanimous verdict. He noted the attempted murder that preceded the completed one and the 17 days Eric had to live after the first poisoning attempt, 17 days during which Corey prepared to try again. Corey said at sentencing that she would appeal. She said that she had nothing to prove to court, to the state or to the Richens family, but instead she said she had everything to prove to her three boys. Carter, Ashton and Weston are now living with their aunt. They didn't testify at trial because their father's family made sure of that. Eric grew up on a cattle ranch. He planned to buy a cabin, and he shared a special bond with his father. He coached his son's sports teams and taught them to hunt. He was, by every account, a man who loved his children without conditions. He was 39 years old, and he told people who love him that he was scared. And they believed him, but no one could stop what happened. That's the part that stays with me about this one. Not the fraud, not the book, not even the fentanyl. It's that Eric knew, and he was right. This has been GBRLIFE of Crimes, part of GBRLIFE Transmissions. I'm your host, Kaitlyn, reminding you that understanding the darkness helps us appreciate the light. Join me next time as we uncover another case that challenges everything we thought we knew about the criminal mind. Hey, it's Kaitlyn. If you stayed this long, a big thank you. And if you could do one more thing and like and subscribe every time you listen to GBRLIFE Transmissions, that would mean the world and it would really help GBRLIFE Transmissions grow. Also, don't forget to check out the reviews and blogs and so much more on gbrlife.com. Can't wait to see you there.