The Utah mom charged with killing her husband who later published a children's book about how to cope with grief was indicted last week in connection with a series of financial crimes related to his death.
Kouri Richins, 34, was charged Friday with more than two dozen counts of mortgage fraud, forgery, issuing a bad check, money laundering, communications fraud and a pattern of unlawful activity in the months before her husband, Eric Richins, 39, was poisoned in 2022.
Richins, the mother of three children, was arrested and charged in May 2023 in connection with her husband's killing, which she pleaded not guilty to.
According to the indictment, Richins used a power of attorney in 2019 to obtain a $250,000 home equity line of credit (HELOC) on a house her husband owned before they got married without his knowledge. She then invested the money in her real estate business, the indictment claims.
"The secret origination and continued existence of the HELOC was a source of tension between the Defendant and Eric Richins," the indictment says. "The Defendant informed Eric Richins that she would repay the loan and led Eric Richins to believe that she had repaid it. The HELOC was not paid off on the day of Eric Richins’ death."
Eric Richins then consulted an estate planning lawyer in 2020 to "protect himself in the short-term from recently discovered and ongoing abuse and misuse of his finances by the Defendants, and to protect his three children in the long-term by ensuring that the Defendant would never be able to manage his property after his death," the indictment alleges.
Richins is also accused of stealing more than $100,000 from her husband's business and spending tens of thousands of dollars on his credit cards, the indictment says.
Richins’ lawyers, Kathy Nester and Wendy Lewis, said the new charges were "extremely troubling."
"This sudden push to file new fraud charges over two years later underscores the weakness of the state’s pending murder charges, since these fraud charges would not even come into play unless they fail to secure a conviction," the lawyers said in a statement.
Richins’ arrest drew national attention because she published a children’s book titled “Are You with Me?”— which tells the story of a child whose dead father watches over him as an angel — and promoted the book on national television.
Eric Richins was found unresponsive in the pair's home about 40 miles southeast of Salt Lake City after having had a cocktail to celebrate his wife’s business deal.
Five times the lethal dose of “illicit,” non-medical-grade fentanyl was found in his system, according to the local medical examiner's office.
The murder trial is scheduled to begin in February.
