Kouri Richins’ Best Friend Gave Her WHAT?!

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

**Tony Brueski** (0:06)
Kouri Richins had a best friend. Had is the operative word there. That best friend trusted Kouri enough to hand over $45,000 for a home. A rent to own deal on a house in Hebrew city that Kouri's real estate company owned. According to prosecutors, the friend moved her family in, started paying rent, believed she was working towards owning that house. Every dollar went into K. Richins' realty's accounts. Not towards the friend's equity, towards Kouri's debts. The property already carried $456,000 in loans that Kouri was defaulting on. A lender foreclosed the friend's family was evicted from the home. Kouri had promised them $45,000. Gone! No house, no refund, no equity, no warning.
That was January 2022, two months before Eric Richins was found dead in his bed with roughly five times the lethal dose of fentanyl in his blood. The murder case is over. Kouri Richins was convicted on every count. Aggravated murder, attempted aggravated murder, insurance fraud, forgery, life without parole. The jury needed three hours. Judge Marzic called her too dangerous to ever be free. Her motion for a new trial denied. She's sitting in a cell with nowhere left to go on the murder. But there's a second case, a separate filing in Summit County. 26 felony charges that haven't gone to trial yet. Kouri's going back to court. The magic continues. And what those charges describe isn't a woman who snapped or a woman who got desperate or a woman who made one catastrophic decision in a financial crisis. What those charges describe is a pattern. Years of forged documents, years of stolen money, years of bad checks, years of lies aimed at everyone around her, not just Eric, everyone.
There's a clause in the prenuptial agreement Eric and Kouri signed in 2013 It's one sentence and it looks ordinary until you realize what it made possible. That prenuptial said Kouri had no claim to Eric's business or his major assets. If they divorced, no ownership interest, no cut of the masonry company he'd built with his partner, nothing unless Eric died while they were still married. That was the one exception. If he died before her, while they were legally husband and wife, those interests transferred to Kouri. That's a lever that would have to be pulled for that to happen. You don't pull a lever that involves someone dying. Those levers just kind of happen if there's nothing illegal going on. Keep that clause in your head. We're going to be needing it here in just a few minutes. Eric Richins and his partner ran a C&E stone masonry in Summit County, Utah. Successful business. Eric was worth approximately $5 million. He and Kouri met in 2009 while she was working as a cashier at Home Depot. The child in 2012 married the following year. And according to prosecutors, by 2019, Kouri had started taking money from Eric's accounts and misappropriating distributions from his business. But the move that launched everything, the one that built the entire House of Cards, was the power of attorney. In early 2019, according to the charging documents, Kouri used the power of attorney to take out a $250,000 home equity line of credit on Eric's pre-marital home, his house, the one he owned before they got married. She did it without his knowledge. She drew down the entire $250,000 and used it to form K. Richins Realty, a house flipping business. She saw herself as being somebody that was on HGTV. The empire she'd later parade around is proof that she was a self-made real estate entrepreneur, was bankrolled with a quarter million dollars stolen from a man who didn't know his own house was collateral. You must be so proud, Kouri.
Her family told 48 Hours that Eric was always aware of the family's finances, that she didn't steal from him. But Eric's own estate planning lawyer, Crystal Bowman Carter, filed a statement with the court. In it, Bowman Carter said Eric's primary goal was to protect himself from, and this is a language in the filing, discovered an ongoing unauthorized use and misappropriation of his finances by his wife. Those two versions of reality can't both be true. Either Eric knew about everything and was fine with it or not saying anything, or he went to a lawyer because he was afraid of what Kouri was doing to him financially.
The court filings say he went to the lawyer. That's the version with documents behind it. What it leads me to believe, this is 1000% my conjecture, and I know you all like my conjecture on this case.
I think he was weighing it. He was planning an exit strategy.