The ongoing case of Kouri Richins, a woman from Kamas, Utah, who was charged with killing her husband not long after publishing a book about grief to help her children cope with unexpected loss, has attracted national attention.
On Friday, it’ll be the subject of the newest “Dateline” episode.
Kouri Richins case featured on NBC’s ‘Dateline’
In the new one-hour “Dateline” episode, titled “Page Turner,” “friends of the couple speak out about the ongoing case,” according to a news release sent to the Deseret News.
The episode also features Deena Manzanares, a TV host who interviewed Richins about her new book on “Good Things Utah” just weeks before the author’s arrest. In a teaser for the episode, Manzanares recalls an anonymous note sent to the entire station that said, “You know she killed her husband.”
“This is the most surreal thing that has happened in my career so far, and I don’t know that anything will ever surpass this,” Manzanares says.
Greg Skordas, the spokesperson for the family of Eric Richins, Kouri’s late husband, will also be part of the “Dateline” episode.
The episode airs Friday, 9 p.m. MDT on NBC.
What we know about the Kouri Richins case
A year after her husband’s death in March 2022, Richins was accused of fatally poisoning him with fentanyl. A toxicology report from the state medical examiner determined that Eric Richins, 39, “died from an overdose of fentanyl” and that “the level of fentanyl in Eric’s system was approximately five times the lethal dosage,” KSL reported.
Members of Eric Richins’ family immediately believed Kouri Richins was involved in the death.
“They advised he warned them that if anything happened to him she was to blame,” according to a search warrant affidavit issued in the case, per KSL. “According to a sister, Eric and his wife went to Greece a few years ago and after his wife gave him a drink, he became violently ill and called his sister saying he believed his wife had tried to kill him. On Valentine’s Day of 2022, his wife brought him a sandwich, which after one bite Eric broke into hives and couldn’t breathe.”
Investigators discovered messages “between Kouri Richins and an acquaintance who detectives learned had a criminal history of drug distribution,” according to KSL. Charging documents indicate that Kouri Richins specifically asked for fentanyl.
Another story from KSL details years of financial disputes between Kouri and Eric Richins, and outlines the massive debt Kouri Richins had. She reportedly purchased, without her husband’s knowledge, at least four life insurance policies on his life between 2015 and 2017 that amounted to nearly $2 million.
Eric Richins and his business partner both had life insurance policies, with each other listed as beneficiaries. On Jan. 1, 2022 — two months before Richins’ death — Kouri Richins reportedly changed the beneficiary for the $2 million policy to herself, but Eric Richins changed it back when this came to his attention, according to KSL.
A more recent development in the ongoing case involves a six-page handwritten letter that was discovered in Kouri Richins’ cell at the Summit County Jail. Prosecutors have argued that in the letter, Richins asks her mother and brother to give false testimony at her trial, per KSL.
Richins has said the letter is “an excerpt of a fictional book” she’s writing about her stay in a Mexican prison.
“Those papers were not a letter to you guys; they were part of my freaking book,” Richins reportedly told her mom from a call in jail, KSL reported. “You can very much tell that the whole thing is very much a story.”
Katie Richins-Benson, the sister of Eric Richins who represents her brother’s estate, has also filed a civil lawsuit against Kouri Richins. The wrongful death lawsuit seeks more than $13 million in damages, and “all revenues generated from the sales” of Richins’ children’s book, according to KSL.