Kouri Richins Under Scrutiny: What Investigators Found in the Bedroom Raises New Questions Bodycam footage and scene details reveal something subtle but unsettling

A botched Valentine’s Day plot allegedly involving a poisoned sandwich.

A curious jailhouse letter, journal entries and a ghostwritten children’s book about grief.

A stash of deleted texts, internet searches and cell phone evidence that she believed would never see the light of day.

Now, the final evidence has been shown to jurors. The last witnesses have spoken. And the fate of 35-year-old mom-of-three Kouri Richins will soon be decided.

In a move that took everyone by surprise, Richins’s defense suddenly rested without calling a single witness in her trial for the murder of her husband Eric Richins.

Right up until that moment, her team had indicated plans to summon multiple witnesses to the stand inside Summit County Courthouse in the ski town of Park City, Utah. Five weeks were set aside for the trial, with expectations it would end around March 27.

But it was the state’s final witness, lead investigator Detective Jeff O’Driscoll, who closed out all testimony on Thursday, detailing how the net ultimately closed in on the woman allegedly falsely masquerading as a grieving widow.

Inside the courtroom, where the Daily Mail sat just feet from Richins for several days, it remains a mystery where the jury now stands.

Over 13 days, the panel of six men and six women watched and listened attentively, took notes and leant forward in their seats to closely eye the wealth of evidence during testimony about extramarital affairs, financial woes, family rifts and drug deals.

Richins’s reactions, meanwhile, were easier to read.

Shackled at the defense table each day, the former real estate agent’s face told a story. She raised her eyebrows, pulled faces and stared down witnesses as friends, family and experts testified about her alleged comments, behavior and actions up to and around the time of her husband’s death.

If the constant reminders of her husband’s last moments triggered sadness, she didn’t show it.

There was no flicker of emotion when the fraught 911 call from the night of Eric’s death was played nor when her ex-lover was reduced to tears on the stand as he was faced with their romantic messages and plans for a future life that never was.

Prosecutors allege that Richins murdered the father of her three children by poisoning him with a fentanyl-laced Moscow Mule cocktail on March 4, 2022.

An autopsy found that Eric, a 39-year-old successful stonemason, died from a fentanyl overdose, with more than five times the lethal limit in his system.

At the time of his sudden death, Richins’s finances were ‘imploding,’ her real estate business was in tatters and she owed a staggering $7.5 million in debt to more than 20 payday loan and high-interest lenders.

The mom-of-three was also having an affair with handyman and military veteran Robert Josh Grossmann. In texts before Eric’s death, she spoke of her dream that they could be together. In the days after, of her wish to make him her new husband and their upcoming vacation to a luxury Caribbean resort.

She had allegedly confided in friends about feeling ‘trapped’ in her marriage, with one close friend, Becky Lloyd, testifying that Richins said she felt ‘in many ways it would be better if [Eric] were dead.’

With her husband gone, prosecutors allege Richins believed she could finally start afresh with her lover and also get her hands on a much-needed cash injection from her husband’s $4 million estate.

Richins denies the allegations and has pleaded not guilty.

She is charged with five felonies: aggravated murder, aggravated attempted murder, two counts of insurance fraud and forgery. If convicted, she faces life in prison.

At the heart of the case is the star witness Carmen Lauber, the Richins’s housekeeper who testified that she provided Richins with the fentanyl that killed Eric.

Lauber told the court she sold drugs to Richins four times around the time of Eric’s death.

Richins first asked her to buy drugs for her – on behalf of an ‘investor’ – in late January or early February 2022, Lauber testified. When Richins said those drugs weren’t strong enough, Lauber allegedly contacted drug dealer Robert Crozier who said he could get some fentanyl pills. Richins allegedly green-lit the purchase.

On February 11, Lauber allegedly picked up $1,000 cash from a home Richins was flipping in Midway, bought pills from Crozier at a gas station, and then placed the pills back at the Midway home for Richins to collect.

Three days later, on Valentine’s Day, Richins is accused of making her first botched attempt to kill Eric by lacing his sandwich with drugs. Eric fell ill and allegedly told friends he feared his wife was trying to poison him.

After this failed plot, Richins requested more powerful fentanyl – asking Lauber for ‘the Michael Jackson stuff,’ according to prosecutors.

A $1,000 deal was allegedly done for a bag of pills on February 26.

Within days, Eric was dead.

On March 9, days after Eric’s death, Lauber said she made her fourth and final drug purchase for Richins.

Whether or not the jury believes Lauber will prove critical to the verdict.

Lauber is the sole witness to testify to where the fentanyl came from. No fentanyl was ever found at the Richins’s home and the defense has tried to suggest Eric bought it on a recent trip to Mexico.

The defense has pushed the narrative that Lauber is not a credible witness. She has a criminal record for drug possession and distribution and was granted immunity in exchange for her truthful trial testimony.

But stunning cell phone evidence appeared to corroborate her version of events.

According to digital forensics expert Chris Kotrodimos, Richins had three cell numbers, one of which was predominantly used to contact Grossmann. She began using a third number one month after Eric’s death.

Richins appeared to go to great lengths to erase evidence from her phone, deleting her history of texts, images, calls and internet searches from the months leading up to and around the time of Eric’s death.

Despite these efforts, a vast amount of data was recovered – revealing a pattern that appears to match the testimony of the state’s star witness.

Cell phone evidence shows that Lauber and Richins started communicating in December 2021. Quickly, Lauber became one of her most contacted people, second only to Eric and her mother Lisa Darden.

Because Lauber also deleted their messages, the contents could not be recovered but the volume, timestamps and location data, along with the duration and timings of calls, could.

In the three months up to Eric’s March death, the two women exchanged around 800 texts – equating to an average of 10 to 11 every day. This fell to an average of just three a day between mid-March and the end of 2022.

Graphics shown to the jury revealed distinct patterns of communication on certain days: Richins initiating contact with Lauber, Lauber contacting Crozier, Lauber and Richins repeatedly communicating over the following few hours and Lauber and Crozier repeatedly communicating within the very same timeframe.

Cell tower mapping also showed Lauber and Crozier’s cell phones traveling to the same location during that time.

The timings and movements matched the days that Lauber testified she had bought drugs from Crozier on behalf of Richins.

The dates also matched the timelines of both the attempted murder and murder allegations – coming three days before Valentine’s Day and five days before the alleged successful poisoning on the night of March 3.

To prosecutors, this data tells a story: Richins asks Lauber to buy drugs on her behalf, Lauber arranges to buy drugs from Crozier, Lauber and Crozier meet to exchange the money and drugs and Lauber delivers them to a drop-off point for Richins to collect.

On February 11, Richins first called Lauber at 3.42pm. Between then and 9.02pm that day, Lauber and Richins texted 34 times.

During that same timeframe, Lauber and Crozier exchanged 50 texts and six calls.

At 7.21pm, Lauber and Crozier’s phones connected to the same cell tower next to a Maverik gas station in Draper.

A map revealed a similar pattern of activity between Richins, Lauber and Crozier on February 26 and March 9.

Richins fidgeted and sipped water while the graphics were blown up on the screen inside the courtroom. Several notes were passed among her legal team.

The only times Lauber and Crozier’s phones hit the same cell tower – placing them in the same location at the same time – were the dates of the three alleged drug deals.

Through this evidence, prosecutors painted a picture of a killer who had meticulously plotted to murder her husband and then went to great lengths to cover her tracks. Internet searches recovered from Richins’s phone included: ‘Can deleted text messages be retrieved’ and ‘Can cops uncover deleted messages iphone.’

Also recovered were three GIFs either sent from or received on Richins’s device at around 8.30am on March 4 – five hours after she allegedly found Eric died – including a Trump meme with the slogan ‘I’m rich’, a person wiping their nose on money, and a meme that reads: ‘Idiots. Idiots everywhere.’

Richins was left to sit shaking her head at the revelations.

Several witnesses gave testimony regarding the Valentine’s Day incident – though their accounts varied.

That morning, Richins placed a to-go order with local restaurant Mirror Lake Diner for a Greek omelet and a hot bagel sandwich, which contained bacon, fried over hard egg, pepperjack cheese, avocado and tomato in a New York plain bagel, accompanied by hash browns.

She collected the food at 9.07am, records show.

At 2.11pm, Eric called his close friend Josh Kaze.

Kaze testified that it was ‘unlike any other conversation I’d had with Eric.’

Due to hearsay rules, Kaze could not testify to what Eric said. What he could say was that the call stood out to him because of both the topic of the conversation and Eric’s emotions.

His longtime friend sounded somber, very serious, and sincere – a departure from their typical jokey conversations.

Eric also called Cody Wright, his friend and business partner at C&E Stone Masonry. Wright testified that he remembered the ‘fear in his voice, the urgency of the situation, the seriousness of what was going on.’

He had only ever heard Eric sound like that twice before: on the day Eric’s mom died and when he was rear-ended in a serious car accident.

But a friend of Richins gave an alternate account.

Allie Staking testified that, on the weekend of February 20, Eric had brought up the fact he was sick on Valentine’s Day. He had joked to her, Richins and some other friends that Richins poisoned him. They all laughed, she testified.

By her recollection, it was nothing but a joke.

The couple’s friends have played a major role in the trial, with several giving testimony related to the alleged motives, including Richins’s crumbling real estate business, tattered finances and their marital problems.

Some were also grilled about Eric’s potential drug use – something that the defense and prosecution were at odds over.

As defense attorney Kathy Nester argued to the judge, if Eric abused drugs then ‘Ms Richins is innocent.’

Texts between Eric and Richins show the couple discussed taking THC gummies together – but there is no evidence of Eric taking illicit drugs such as fentanyl.

In their opening statement, the defense argued that Eric’s family – who have filled an entire row in the courtroom each day – wanted to blame Richins because they could not accept the possibility that he took drugs.

The family’s rift with Richins has repeatedly cropped up in the courtroom and to this day, they are locked in a civil battle over Eric’s estate, which Eric’s sister Katie Richins-Benson was made trustee of.

While behind bars, Richins wrote a six-page, handwritten letter to her mother in which she made several claims, including that her brother Ronny would need to testify that Eric confided in him about buying fentanyl from Mexico.

Dubbed the ‘Walk the dog’ letter, it was found in a book inside her jail cell in September 2023 and seized.

Prosecutors alleged it was an attempt to coach her family and friends on what to testify. The defense alleged it was part of a fiction book she was writing.

The letter and Richins’s personal journal – including a detailed timeline for the night of Eric’s death including ‘brushing teeth, Moscow mules, funeral, kids bed’ – were some of the last pieces of evidence presented at trial

The mom-of-three’s writings have long been central to the case.

Before her arrest, Richins famously published a children’s book about grief, titled Are You With Me? and appeared on local TV to promote it.

Texts presented in court revealed that a ghostwriter – and not Richins – authored the book.

A copy of the book was sent to the sheriff’s office along with an anonymous note, Det O’Driscoll testified.

‘There are two sides to every story. This is a true Kouri, a devoted wife and adoring mother. Thought you should know. From Anonymous.’

The package was traced to an Amazon account belonging to Richins’s mother.

There are indeed two sides to every story.

Which side is true will soon be up to the jury to decide.