Woman who wrote children’s book on grief charged with murdering husband

A woman who wrote a children’s book about how to cope with grief after her husband’s death has been charged with his murder.

Kouri Richins was arrested on Monday in Utah and is accused of using fentanyl to poison Eric Richins.

Two months ago, Richins promoted her grief book, Are You With Me? on local television, telling presenters that her husband’s death “completely took us all by shock”.

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“We have three little boys, ten, nine and six, and my kids and I kind of wrote this book on the different emotions and grieving processes that we’ve experienced in the last year,” she said. “I went on Amazon and Barnes & Noble to try to find something to help us cope at night; nights are the hardest. I just wanted some story to read to my kids at night and I couldn’t find anything that suited them, so I was like ‘let’s just write one’.”

After months of praise from local media for writing the book, however, “Richins’s story took a dark turn”, said The Washington Post.

According to court documents, some time before her husband’s death, she asked an acquaintance to help her get “some of the Michael Jackson stuff”. The unnamed person admitted to police to having sold her fentanyl, which is “a painkiller 100 times more potent than morphine”, Sky News explained.

Subsequently, Richins allegedly told police she’d been sharing some mixed vodka drinks with her husband to celebrate a successful house sale, but they were interrupted by one of her children who had called for her. When she got back her husband was “cold to the touch”, she reportedly told police.

Members of Eric Richins’s family said almost immediately after his death that they suspected his wife of having killed him. Warrants state that “he warned them that if anything happened to him, she was to blame”.

Kouri Richins’s lawyer, Skye Lazaro, declined to comment on the charges.