Eric Richins Told His Sister Kouri Richins Was ‘The Most Evil Person He’d Ever Met’

**Tony Brueski** (0:00)
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:07)
Everyone asks the same question about Eric Richins, the deceased husband of Kouri Richins, that thing back there. The second they hear the details of the case, the same five words show up in every comment section, every group chat, every conversation, at every kitchen table where someone is catching up on what happened in Park City, Utah. Why didn't he just leave?
It's the wrong question. And it's the wrong question in a way that matters because asking it assumes that leaving was the safe choice and staying was the dangerous one. For Eric Richins, that math, the math, it ran the other direction. He didn't stay because he was blind to what Kouri was. He stayed because he saw it clearly, more clearly than the friends around him, more clearly than the systems that were supposed to help him. And he concluded that leaving would put his kids closer to the danger, not further from it. He wasn't a man who didn't see the fire. He was a man standing between the fire and his three boys. Convince that if he stepped away, the fire would reach them. That calculation is what the story is really about. Not what Kouri did. What it was like to live inside the world she built, to see it for what it was, and to decide that the safest place to stand was still inside of it to protect his kids. Before we can understand why Eric stayed, we have to understand what happens inside a person who is holding two completely incompatible truths at the same time. On one side, the person is trying to kill me. On the other, this is my wife, the mother of my children, the person sitting across from me at breakfast, the other half of the carpool. Your brain is now built to carry both of those at full volume, one of them has to get turned down. And inside a marriage, inside a home with three young boys, inside a life that still looks like a life to everyone on the outside, the threat is almost always the one that gets quieter. Not because you forgot, because you can't really function if you don't.
As we go through this, if you've been in a situation like this, male, female, whatever it may be, if you had a monster like Kouri in your life, a narcissistic, sociopathic, cluster B monster like Kouri Richins, in my opinion, share your story. A lot of people are finding community within this and going, oh, ho, ho, this hits home. I'm not alone. Cause you're not. I've survived it. Many other people have survived it as well. And there is life out there. You do not have to stay in this situation. And you also don't have to end up dead by a Moscow mule in your bedroom. But let's understand. Let's understand how he ended up on the floor of that bedroom, overdosed with fentanyl by his loving wife, Kouri, and why he chose to stay.
Greece, in this case, is the first evidence. Years before Eric died, the couple took a trip overseas. Kouri gave Eric a drink. He became violently ill, ill enough to pick up the phone and call his sister from another country and say the words out loud, I think my wife just tried to kill me. That sentence spoken to family with a clarity that only comes from genuine fear. And then he came home. They resumed. Years passed. That phone call didn't disappear from Eric's memory, but it got reclassified. A bad night on vacation, a scare that didn't repeat, because of the alternative. That the woman raising your children just tried to end your life is something the brain will fight. Long before it accepts. It wasn't weakness. It was the only way to keep getting up in the morning inside a situation. He hadn't yet left. Then came Valentine's Day of 2022 and whatever wall Eric had built between those two versions of his life cracked in a way the rest of us can actually see. Kouri left Eric his favorite sandwich from a local diner, handwritten note of Valentine's gesture. Supposedly, he took one bite and his body went into revolt. Hives, throat closing, grabbed his son's EpiPen, took some Benadryl, passed out for several hours. When he woke up, he texted Kouri that he wasn't feeling well, that he might need to go to the hospital. She told him to take a nap. The woman who just left the sandwich that did that. After he recovered, he called two friends. Here's where it gets important, not because of what happened, but because of the two completely different stories Eric told about the exact same event. One friend, Allie Staking, later testified that Eric described the sandwich incident almost like a funny story. An allergic reaction, something they were laughing about together. His other friend, Josh Craze, got a completely different call. Craze testified that Eric was somber, serious. And Eric's business partner, Cody Wright, said he could hear fear in Eric's voice. Eric told the last one of these people directly, or at least one of these people directly. He thought his wife was trying to poison him. Same event, same man, same afternoon. Two entirely different versions of reality, both coming out of the same mouth. And neither one was a lie.