Evidence Against Kouri Richins: Fentanyl, Finances, and Phone Data

The evidence in the Kouri Richins case was almost entirely circumstantial. Prosecutors never recovered fentanyl from her home and no witness saw her give the drug to her husband, Eric. Instead, a Summit County jury convicted her in March 2026 on the strength of five overlapping bodies of proof: financial records showing a house-flipping business collapsing under $7.5 million in debt, testimony from a housecleaner who said she bought fentanyl at Kouri’s direction, phone data and internet searches indicating planning and cover-up, a forged life insurance application, and a six-page letter found hidden in her jail cell that prosecutors described as a script for a fabricated defense.¹²

The Financial Motive

Forensic accountant Brooke Karrington testified that Kouri’s company, K Richins Realty, carried roughly $7.5 million in liabilities by the time Eric died in March 2022 and required about $80,000 a month in debt service. Karrington called the business “imploding.” Between January 2021 and March 2022, Kouri attempted 236 overdraft transactions totaling more than $300,000 and accumulated nearly $6,000 in bank fees.³

Eric held more than $2.2 million in life insurance across several policies, and his estate was valued at over $4 million. After his death, Kouri received $1.4 million in insurance proceeds in three payments between June and September 2022. By September 19, 2022, her bank account held $802. The rest had gone to debt payments.⁴ The jury unanimously found that both the murder and the attempted murder were committed for financial benefit.²

Prosecutors also traced a pattern of financial misconduct that predated the killing. Eric’s family alleged Kouri had withdrawn at least $100,000 from his bank accounts, charged $30,000 to his credit cards, and used a fraudulently obtained power of attorney to open a $250,000 home equity line of credit against the couple’s home. When Eric discovered the HELOC in property records, he became upset and began speaking with divorce attorneys. He also created a trust naming his sister, Katie Richins-Benson, as trustee to protect his assets for the couple’s three children.⁵³

Prosecutors said Kouri did not learn about the trust until the day after Eric’s death, when estate attorney Kristal Bowman-Carter explained it over the phone. According to testimony, Kouri responded, “What is wrong with you people?”³

The Forged Insurance Application

The jury convicted Kouri of forging Eric’s signature on a $100,000 life insurance application. An insurance agent testified that the application contained errors, including an incorrect Social Security number for Eric, and a forensic document examiner concluded his signature was “probably forged.” That policy took effect ten days before prosecutors say Kouri first tried to poison Eric on Valentine’s Day 2022.¹ Separately, in January 2022, Kouri tried to change the beneficiary of Eric’s $2 million policy to herself without authorization. The insurance holder caught the switch and restored the original beneficiary, Eric’s business partner.⁶

The Fentanyl Chain

Because no fentanyl was recovered from the Richins home, prosecutors had to prove poisoning through the chain of acquisition. Their central witness was Carmen Lauber, a housecleaner who worked for Kouri.

Lauber testified that in early 2022 Kouri asked her to obtain drugs on multiple occasions, initially claiming they were for “an investor.” The first purchase was an envelope of opiate pills from one of Lauber’s coworkers. When Kouri asked for “something stronger,” Lauber turned to a man named Robert Crozier, who provided pills at a gas station. Lauber said she told Kouri the pills were fentanyl, and Kouri replied, “OK, go ahead and get it.”⁷ Payments for the transactions ranged from $600 to $1,300.⁸

Cell phone data corroborated the account. Digital forensics analyst Chris Kotrodimos showed that the phones belonging to Lauber and Crozier were near the same gas station on February 11 and February 26, 2022, matching the dates Lauber described. On February 11 alone, Kouri and Lauber exchanged 34 text messages, and Lauber and Crozier exchanged 50 texts and six phone calls.⁹ Hundreds of messages between Kouri and Lauber from this period had been deleted from both phones.²

Three days after Eric’s death, Kouri texted Lauber: “still have your hookup?”⁸

The toxicology backed up the mechanism. Dr. Brianna Peterson of NMS Labs testified that Eric’s blood contained 15 nanograms per milliliter of fentanyl — roughly five times the lethal dose — along with norfentanyl, acetylfentanyl, and ethanol.¹⁰¹¹

The Valentine’s Day Attempt

Prosecutors alleged Kouri first tried to kill Eric on Valentine’s Day 2022, about two weeks before he died. According to testimony, she gave him a sandwich laced with fentanyl. Eric broke out in hives, used his son’s EpiPen, and took a nap. Friends gave differing accounts of how Eric described the episode afterward. Allie Staking said he treated it as a funny allergic reaction; Josh Kraze and Cody Wright testified that he spoke about it with fear.¹²

Five days later, Kouri texted her boyfriend, Josh Grossman: “If he could just go away and you could just be here! Life would be so perfect!!”¹³ The jury convicted Kouri of attempted aggravated murder for the Valentine’s Day poisoning.¹⁴

Internet Searches and Phone Data

Some of the most striking evidence came from Kouri’s own phones. After her first device was seized, she got a new one and ran a series of searches prosecutors described as reflecting a “guilty conscience,” including:

“what is a lethal.dose.of.fetanayl”
“if someone is poisned what does it go down on the death certificate as”
“can fbi find deleted messages”
“luxury prisons for the rich in america”
“how long does life [insurance] companies take to pay”

Other searches asked whether police could force a lie detector test, how to delete iCloud data remotely, and how forensic data recovery works.¹⁵¹⁶

Kotrodimos also testified about phone activity the morning Eric died. Kouri’s phone became active at 3:06 a.m. and moved 243 feet at 3:08 a.m., about 15 minutes before her 911 call at 3:21 a.m. At 8:29 a.m. that same morning, three GIF images were accessed on her phone: one showed a character holding cash over his eyes, another read “Idiots. Idiots everywhere,” and the third showed Donald Trump with the caption “I’m really rich.” The images were classified as “orphaned” because their source had been deleted.¹⁶⁹

Prosecutors also introduced a handwritten note found in a kitchen cabinet of the Richins home containing the phrase “drink in bed,” which they argued chronicled how Kouri carried out the killing. It was a reference to the Moscow mule cocktail she told investigators she brought Eric the night he died.¹⁷

The Affair

Josh Grossman, a handyman Kouri met through her house-flipping business, testified about a roughly two-year affair that began around the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Prosecutors showed the jury text messages between the two, including “Life is going to be different, I promise” and “If I was divorced right now and asked you to marry me, you would?”¹⁷

About two weeks after Eric’s death, Grossman testified, Kouri asked him whether he had “ever killed anybody,” a reference to his service in Iraq, and how it made him feel. He described the conversation as “heavy.”¹⁸ Kouri had also booked a romantic trip for the two of them to Secrets St. Martin’s Resort for April 2022, one month after Eric’s death. They never took it. After Eric died, Kouri paid Grossman $25,000, which he said was for a house they had flipped together.¹⁷

The “Walk the Dog” Letter

In September 2023, the Summit County Sheriff’s Office searched Kouri’s jail cell and found a six-page document hidden inside a book. Written in large letters at the top was the title “Walk The Dog!!”¹⁹ Prosecutors said the letter was addressed to Kouri’s mother, Lisa Darden, and contained instructions for her brother, DJ, to pass a fabricated story to her defense attorney. The false narrative would portray Eric as someone with a history of buying drugs in Mexico and would claim he had asked Kouri to purchase drugs from Lauber.²⁰

Kouri denied the tampering allegation, claiming the letter was part of a “fictional mystery book” she was writing about a stay in a Mexican prison.²⁰ The letter was admitted into evidence and featured prominently in closing arguments as proof of what prosecutors called a “consciousness of guilt.”²

What the Defense Said Was Missing

Kouri’s defense rested without calling a witness and argued the state had not met its burden. Their key points centered on gaps in the physical evidence:

No fentanyl was recovered from the Richins home. A forensic scientist from the Utah Bureau of Forensic Services confirmed that 19 items from the scene were tested and none contained fentanyl.²¹
Defense attorney Wendy Lewis told the jury that none of the more than 40 prosecution witnesses could say how Kouri actually put fentanyl into Eric’s body: “They cannot tell you how Eric ingested that fentanyl… They haven’t done their job.”²
Crozier denied on the stand that he had sold fentanyl, contradicting Lauber. Confronted with a prior jailhouse interview in which he had admitted selling fentanyl to Lauber, he said he could not remember the conversation because he had been detoxing.²
The defense argued Kouri’s internet searches were the actions of a woman who had just learned her husband died of an overdose and feared she would be blamed.²²
An expired 2016 hydrocodone bottle found on the nightstand was never tested for fentanyl. The defense suggested it could have been used to transport illicit drugs from Mexico, where Eric had recently traveled.²²

How the Evidence Landed

The jury deliberated roughly three hours before returning guilty verdicts on all five counts on March 16, 2026: aggravated murder, attempted aggravated murder, forgery, and two counts of insurance fraud.¹⁴²³²⁴

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