What Made Kouri Richins Escalate From Valentine's Day To The Moscow Mule?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This is The Big Breakdown, a long look back at some of the biggest stories we're covering for you at the Hidden Killers Podcast and True Crime Today.
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:16)
17 days. That's the window. On Valentine's Day of 2022, Kouri Richins gave her husband a sandwich laced with fentanyl. Eric Richins got violently sick. He called two friends, told them he felt like he was going to die. His body erupted. He could barely breathe. And then he survived. 17 days later, she did it again. This time with five times the lethal dose mixed into a Moscow Mule. She made to celebrate her real estate closing that he thought was an utter disaster. Because, it was. Because all of the decisions Kouri Richins made professionally and it looks like personally have been exactly that. Utter disasters. She is a woman with a broken brain. In my opinion, in the opinion of the court, in most people's opinions.
Eric did not survive that second attempt. Everyone who follows the case fixates on the how, the fentanyl, the drink, the 911 call at 3 in the morning. But if you want to understand Kouri Richins, not the crime, but the person, the question that matters is what happened in those 17 days. Because whatever internal framework allowed her to attempt this on Valentine's Day didn't collapse when it failed. It recalibrated. She didn't stop, she adjusted. She got more. She tried harder. And understanding that recalibration is the key to understanding everything she did before, during and after. This is the first of our five part series about Kouri Richins' broken brain.
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If you've been relating to the Kouri Richins story like I have, this is another series that will help you really grasp the framework of this type of thinking, of a person like Kouri Richins, because there's a lot of Kouri Richins out there. They don't necessarily get this far in the land of chaos and disorder, but so many, and the majority of this type of thinkers, produce such chaos as their lives are human tornadoes that go through unsuspecting souls with no regret and no self-reflection.
This series should hopefully help you recognize that a little bit easier and sooner. Because quite honestly, people easily fall victim to someone like Kouri Richins.
I did.
A lot of people have. Male, female, doesn't really matter.
They're out there. Recognizing it and also being able to see a path out of it is so incredibly important.
So, as we go through this, your thoughts in the comment section on Substack and YouTube, we'd love for you to weigh in. So let's talk about the architecture, not the physical evidence. The jury handled that, the psychological architecture, the internal operating system that had to exist for a suburban mother, a real estate agent, a woman who would go on to write a children's book about grief, well, it goes straight, to arrive at the decision to acquire a street drug she described as the Michael Jackson stuff and then put it in her husband's food twice. I want to be clear about what the series is and what this isn't. I'm not a psychologist. I'm not diagnosing Kouri Richins with anything. What I am is someone who spent years inside this case and the more time I've spent here, the more I needed to make sense of the decision making, not just what she did but how her brain got there, how it justified each step, how it kept functioning through things that would shut most people down. These are my observations connecting dots based on what has come out of trial, what's in the public record and what the behavioral patterns tell us when you lay them out together. This is about trying to understand how a broken decision making process works and why. That's a nice way of putting it, isn't it? You're just a broken decision making process. Just tell yourself that over and over, Kouri, it might help you sleep at night. Although I don't think she really has any problem because she believes her bullshit enough. This didn't start on Valentine's Day. The psychological groundwork was laid over years and it started, as it almost always does in cases like this, with the gap between who Kouri Richins believed she was entitled to be and who she actually was. Josh Grossman, Kouri's boyfriend, testified that she told him she grew up scrubbing toilets for wealthy people in Park City and promised herself she would own those homes one day. It's not just ambition, that's an identity contract, a deal she made with herself about who she was going to become. And look, there's nothing wrong with I'm going to rise out of this someday and do better and people do this all the time. That's fine. That's good. I think that's a healthy thing to do.