282 Willow Court, Kamas, UT 84036
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Author: Jewls Krueger
On the morning of March 4, 2022, sheriff's deputies and paramedics were called to a home in the Kamas Valley, about 40 miles southeast of Salt Lake City, for a report of an unresponsive man. They found Eric Richins, 39, dead in the bedroom he shared with his wife, Kouri. An autopsy determined he died of a fentanyl overdose, with roughly five times a lethal amount in his system.
A year later, Kouri Richins published a children's picture book about coping with the loss of a parent and promoted it on local television. Two months after that, she was arrested for her husband's murder. In March 2026 a Summit County jury convicted her, and in May she was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Eric Eugene Richins was born in 1982 and grew up in the Kamas area. He co-founded a stone masonry business, C&E Stone Masonry, with partner Cody Wright, and built it into a successful operation. Reporting on his obituary described him as an avid outdoorsman and hunter who helped run his family's cattle ranch.
He and Kouri met in 2009 and married in the backyard of the home in June 2013. They raised three sons there. At trial, his father, Eugene Richins, testified that Eric was "their coach, their father, but most important, was their very, very best friend." One of his sisters recalled that he often arrived early at his sons' sporting events to hang up signs cheering them on.
In 2020, Eric consulted an estate planning attorney and created a living trust, naming his sister Katie Richins-Benson as trustee. He transferred his business interest into the trust and removed Kouri as a life insurance beneficiary. According to a statement the attorney later filed with the court, Eric said his goal was to protect himself from what he described as ongoing misuse of his finances by his wife.
Kouri Brock Darden Richins was working as a cashier at Home Depot when she met Eric. She later became a real estate agent and founded K. Richins Realty LLC in April 2019, buying and flipping homes across the Wasatch Back.
Charging documents describe a business in freefall. The company took in roughly $170,000 in revenue while its monthly debt service exceeded $250,000. By late 2021, prosecutors wrote, she stood on the edge of total financial collapse. She had also been carrying on a long affair.
Prosecutors said the first attempt came on Valentine's Day 2022, ten days after a life insurance policy took effect. According to charging documents, Eric called two friends that day and told them he felt like he was going to die after eating a sandwich his wife had given him.
Seventeen days later, on the night of March 3, the couple had a drink to celebrate a real estate closing. Kouri told investigators she made Eric a Moscow mule, then went to sleep in a son's room because the boy was having night terrors. She said she returned around 3 a.m. and found her husband unresponsive. Prosecutors argued she had laced the drink with fentanyl, though they never proved exactly how the drug was administered.
The day after Eric died, Kouri closed alone on a $3.9 million unfinished mansion in the Midway area, a purchase Eric had opposed as too expensive.
Investigators recovered a second iPhone from a dresser drawer beside her bed. Its search history included queries about lethal fentanyl doses, how a poisoning death is recorded on a death certificate, women's prisons in Utah, and how to remotely delete data from an iPhone.
In January 2022 she had applied for a $100,000 term life policy and forged Eric's signature on the application. In total, his life was insured for roughly $2.2 million. She was arrested on May 8, 2023, and held without bail through nearly three years of pretrial proceedings.
The trial opened in Park City on February 23, 2026, and ran about three weeks. The Summit County Attorney's Office called more than 40 witnesses across 13 days of testimony, including Eric's family, a forensic accountant, a private investigator hired by his relatives, and Robert Josh Grossman, the man with whom Kouri had been having an affair. Grossman has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
The state's key witness was Carmen Lauber, a housecleaner who testified she sold illicit pills to Kouri several times in early 2022. Cell phone data placed Lauber near the pickup location on dates close to both the Valentine's Day incident and the fatal poisoning.
The defense rested without calling a single witness. Kouri Richins declined to testify. On March 16, 2026, the jury convicted her on all five counts: aggravated murder, attempted aggravated murder, forgery, and two counts of insurance fraud.
Further Reading
On May 13, 2026, what would have been Eric's 44th birthday, Judge Richard Mrazik sentenced her to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Her three sons submitted statements saying they would not feel safe if she were released. She spoke for roughly 30 minutes, maintaining her innocence and telling her sons she would keep fighting to come home.
Her attorneys filed notice of appeal on May 26, and the case was referred to the Utah Court of Appeals the next day. On June 30 they filed a motion for a new trial, arguing that the volume of financial crime evidence admitted at trial created undue prejudice. Judge Mrazik disqualified himself from ruling on that motion on July 1, 2026. A separate case charging her with 26 felonies related to mortgage fraud, money laundering, and forgery remains unresolved.
The home sits in the Wild Willow subdivision in the Kamas Valley, a stretch of ranchland and newer subdivisions southeast of Park City along the route toward the Mirror Lake Highway. Kamas itself is a small town of a few thousand people, best known as a gateway to the Uinta Mountains.
In August 2024, Judge Mrazik ruled that the house belonged to Eric Richins' estate, since his was the only name on the title. KPCW reported at that time that no one was living in the house full-time, though investigators had searched it in the run-up to trial. Its current occupancy status has not been publicly reported.
This is private property held for the benefit of three children who lost their father inside it. Anyone visiting the area should stay on public roads, take nothing beyond a look from a distance, and make no attempt to approach the house, contact anyone connected to the family, or knock on neighbors' doors. The Kamas Valley is a small community that lived through this case closely.
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