Kouri Richins Avoids Execution—P0!SONED Husband, Wrote a Book About His Death-Gets LIFE, NO PAROLE..

Newly released court documents reveal what prosecutors are asking for and include emotional statements from the couple’s three sons. Prosecutors are asking the court to sentence Richens to life without the possibility of parole. Their oldest son, now 13 years old, wrote, quote, “I miss my dad, but I don’t miss how life used to be. I don’t miss Corey.”

Their 11-year-old son said he does not want his mother released from prison and spoke about the milestones his father will never be there to see. The youngest child wrote that when people talk about Corey, he feels hateful and ashamed because, quote, “She took away my dad.” It was the 3rd of March, 2022 in Kamas, Utah, a ranching town at the mouth of a canyon about 40 miles from Salt Lake City.

It was a Thursday evening at the end of winter. The hay fields were still frozen, and the winter mountain stood dark behind the valley. Inside a house on the edge of town lived Eric Richens, 39 years old, a masonry contractor and the eldest son of one of the oldest families in Summit County along with his wife Corey and their three sons. There was something to celebrate that night.

A property deal had come together and Corey had made her husband a drink. She carried it to their bedroom and gave it to him there. By 3:00 in the morning, Eric Richens was dead on the floor at the foot of his own bed. The emergency call came in the middle of the night. Responders found him cold. They tried to revive him and could not.

To everyone who knew him, it made no sense. He was a man who worked cattle, ran a construction crew, and had survived every reckless thing he had ever done. He had no illness. He had no history with drugs. When the toxicology came back, it identified illicit fentanyl at five times a lethal concentration. He had swallowed it and his family already knew who to point at because Eric had told them.

He had warned his relatives that if anything ever happened to him, his wife was to blame. 3 weeks before he died on Valentine’s Day, he had eaten a sandwich she left in his truck and called two friends afterward to say he believed she had tried to poison him. Nobody had called the police. Not then. What came next made the case famous.

In the year after burying her husband, Corey Richens wrote a picture book about grief for young readers who had lost a father, put her husband’s face on the cover, and went on morning television to promote it. 4 weeks later, she was arrested and charged with his murder. But to understand how a real estate agent from a mountain town became the name attached to one of Utah’s most talked about murder cases, how a prenuptial agreement signed in a backyard in 2013 turned into a motive, and why a jury needed less than 3 hours to decide it, we have to go back.

Back to the 14th of February 2022 to a sandwich left on a truck seat with a love note. Back further to October 2020 when Eric Richens sat down with two lawyers and said he needed protection from his own wife. We go back to the very beginning. If you’re drawn to stories of money, betrayal, and the people who reach a point of no return, make sure to subscribe to No Way Out.

This is where true crime meets truth. Real cases, real consequences, the darkest corners of human decision broken down into tiny pieces so you can see every detail and reach your own conclusions. Corey Darden was born in Oklahoma on the 20th of April 1990. She was the daughter of Lisa Darden and a father who worked as an engineer. And for the first decade of her life, the family did not stay in one place.

Her parents’ work carried them from state to state and the household moved 17 times. 17 addresses, 17 sets of neighbors, 17 schools where she arrived after the year had already started and left before it finished. She learned early how to introduce herself to a room full of strangers, and she learned that whatever she built in a place would not last long enough to matter. Her father earned well.

She described him as a successful engineer and by the standard of the households around them, the family had money coming in. What it did not have was a permanent residence. The moves were tied to work and work kept relocating. A house was a temporary arrangement. So was a bedroom, a bus route, a best friend. Then the arrangement ended entirely.

Her father had been drinking. He got behind the wheel and passed out at it. The vehicle he was driving struck a police officer who was standing at the side of the road conducting a traffic stop. He was arrested, prosecuted, and sent to prison. Corey was 6 years old when he went in. Her parents divorced after that.

The engineer’s salary, which had been the one steady thing in a life of constant motion, was gone. So was the father. What remained was Lisa Darden, Corey, and her brother Ronnie. Lisa raised them alone. She had her own difficulty and it was not one that could be managed by working harder or moving again. Lisa Darden was a compulsive gambler.

The pattern was regular enough that Corey could describe it plainly. Weekends were spent in casino hotel rooms. Her mother played and Corey waited. Sometimes the waiting lasted hours, sometimes it lasted a whole weekend. The rooms were paid for by the casinos, which is standard practice for guests who spend at the tables. And the arithmetic of that arrangement was not complicated.

The room was free because the losses were not. The losses were substantial. Her mother lost money. She lost their house. She lost their cars. A gambling habit run over years does not take a household down in a single night. It takes it down in increments, one asset at a time, each one sold or surrendered to cover the last shortfall.

Corey watched the family’s possessions convert into chips and disappear across a table. She was not estranged from her mother by any of this. The opposite happened. Lisa Darden became the closest person in her life and Corey described her as her best friend. In 2000, the moving stopped. Lisa Darden took Corey and Ronnie to Utah and Utah is where they stayed.

Utah was not like Oklahoma or anywhere in between. Most people belong to the same church and it shaped daily life. Families were large and lived close together with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins all nearby. People stayed in the small towns east of Salt Lake City. Families had worked the same land for four and five generations. They buried their dead where their great-grandparents were buried. Some had been there so long their names were on the buildings in town.

Corey Darden had no such name. She arrived from out of state with a mother, a brother, and no property. What she did have was the skills she had been assembling since she was old enough to walk into a classroom mid-semester. She could talk to anyone. She could arrive somewhere unknown and make herself known quickly. She was warm, she was quick, and she was easy to like. And those qualities were not decoration.

For a girl who had moved 17 times, they were the working equipment of survival. She finished her schooling in Utah. Then she went to college and college was the first thing in her life that she chose rather than inherited. She called it a fresh start and she meant it as a break from what had come before, from the moving, from the casino rooms, from the collapse of a household she had watched happen from the inside. She paid her way through by working.

The job she took was a cashier’s position at a Home Depot in Summit County, the mountain county east of Salt Lake City that contained Park City and the ski resorts and the construction boom that served them. It was a large store with steady traffic. And the traffic was not mainly homeowners buying paint. It was contractors, builders, men who came in every day, sometimes twice a day, to pick up supplies for the houses going up all over the Wasatch back. Corey Darden stood at the register and rang them up.

She was in college paying her own way and the job fit around her classes. The work was repetitive and the hours were long, but it put her in front of hundreds of people a week and being in front of people was the thing she did well. Her co-workers noticed it. She was sociable, quick, and easy to be around, and she drew attention from the men who came through the store without appearing to work at drawing it. One of the women who worked alongside her, Linda King, watched it happen shift after shift.

Corey always had the attention of the men in the store. That was simply how the shifts went. In 2009, one of the contractors began coming in more than the others. He ran a masonry outfit and he needed supplies constantly, which meant he had a legitimate reason to be there every day. He came in for stone and pavers and tile and he came in whether the order was large or small. His employees came in too and it was one of them who gave the game away.

The man walked up to the counter one day and told Corey that his boss was outside in the truck and that his boss really liked her. It was said as a joke the way things get said between men who work together. It was also accurate. The employee went back out to the parking lot and the boss stayed in the truck and the message had been delivered. His name was Eric Richens. He did not ask her out immediately. He took his time about it.

He was a customer who came in every day and he had every opportunity and still it was a while before he did anything with it. Linda King watched that too. Corey was used to men making their interest obvious. This one hesitated. When he finally asked, she said yes. To the people who worked in the store, they made sense together. They were both young. They were both attractive. They were both, by the plain assessment of the people who saw them, kind.

Linda King thought they looked like the perfect couple, and she was not being sentimental about it. That was the impression they gave. They were also, in every way that could be measured, from opposite conditions. Corey had arrived in Utah 9 years earlier with a mother, a brother, and nothing else. She had no property, no family land, no name that meant anything in Summit County. She had a register job and tuition to pay. Eric Richens had all of it.

The Richens family was one of the oldest and largest in Summit County. They had been in those valleys for generations. There was a county building at Kimball Junction named after a Richens. There was a cattle ranch that the family owned and worked. There were cousins and uncles and in-laws spread across the towns. And when a Richens walked into a room in Kamas or Oakley, people knew which Richens he was and who his father was and what his family did. He also had his own business which he had built himself and it was doing well.

They started seeing each other. His parents were Jean Richens and Linda Carter Richens and they gave him the middle name Eugene. He was the eldest of three and the only son. Two sisters followed him, Katie and Amy, and being the first meant something in a household. It meant responsibility handed down early and permanently. The family had a cattle ranch, and the ranch set the shape of his years. Cattle do not observe weekends or holidays or school calendars.

They have to be fed in January when the ground is frozen and in August when the hay has to come in and the fences that hold them have to be walked and repaired because a broken fence means animals on the road. Eric worked all of it alongside his father. He hauled hay. He fed the animals. He mended fences. He learned to handle horses and cattle before he learned most other things. The family belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and church shaped the rest of his upbringing.

Sunday services, helping people who needed it, and the expectation that when he was old enough, he would spend 2 years abroad as a missionary, teaching people about the church. He finished at Woods Cross High School in Davis County. Then he left the country. The church sent him to Mexico City for 2 years. He went with classroom Spanish and came back fluent because a mission is not a language course. It is 2 years of speaking Spanish all day in a city of 20 million where nobody switches to English for a young American at the door.

It taught him two things that had nothing to do with religion. How to talk to strangers about something they had not asked to hear and how to keep doing it after being turned down. Those are the working skills of a salesman. He came home fluent and unafraid of rejection. He enrolled at the University of Utah studying international studies with a minor in Spanish. He was also by every account extremely good company, loud, funny, drawn to whatever was happening.

His family said there was never a dull moment around him. He hunted and he was serious about it the way people raised on land are. He was in the mountains constantly. He was loyal in a way his family talked about specifically. He led his sisters and defended them. He was a devoted son to Jean and Linda. When friends needed help, he gave it. And he gave to causes he cared about without telling anyone. That was the person. Physically reckless, socially fearless, bilingual, raised to work, fiercely attached to his family.

He graduated in 2011. By then, he had been running his own company for 2 years. While still enrolled, he went into business with a friend, and the two of them put their initials on the door. The friend was Cody Wright. The company was C&E Stonemasonry, and the letters were their first initials set side by side because the two of them built it as equals. They started it in 2009 while Eric was still enrolled at the University of Utah. The work was specialized. C&E did stone work and not the rough kind.

Intricate outdoor stone, pavers, and tile for high-end homes around Park City. That was the right market to be in. The houses going up in the mountains above Park City were not modest. Buyers wanted stone patios, stone walls, stone terraces cut into hillsides, and they wanted them installed precisely. Stone has to be selected, cut, and set so that it holds for decades against freeze and thaw at 7,000 feet. A bad job shows within two winters. A good one does not move. C&E did good work and the business grew.

Everything Eric had built up to that point fed into it. The Spanish mattered on job sites where much of the skilled masonry labor was Spanish-speaking. The door-knocking mattered because bidding for work is the same act, and the ranch mattered because he showed up and kept showing up. What his family and his crews both described was how he handled people. That was not a soft quality in his trade. Contractors get work through other contractors, through builders, through architects, through the client who liked the last job.

A masonry company survives on referrals. Eric collected people and the people sent him work. He passed the method on. He helped friends start their own companies and did not treat them as competition. By any measure that mattered, he was successful. Crews, equipment, and a steady book of work in one of the wealthiest construction markets in the state. His personal life had already taken one hard turn. Eric had married once before, and the marriage ended in divorce.

The record of it is thin. There is no reliable public account of who she was, how long it lasted, or why it failed. What is documented is the outcome. It ended and it ended before 2009. So, the man who had trouble asking a cashier to dinner was not approaching his first relationship. He was in his late 20s, divorced and running a company. When she said yes, the relationship moved at his usual pace. He brought her into his world and his world was crowded.

The Richens family gathered constantly. There was the ranch, the hunting trips, the vehicles, the noise, the relatives in every direction. Corey walked into all of it and made an impression. What Eric did not have was someone at home. The divorce had taken that. Corey filled it and she filled it fast. They stayed together through her college years and through the expansion of his company. C&E kept taking work. She kept working and studying and she started looking at business ideas of her own because her ambitions did not stop at a cashier’s position.

By 2013, they had been together roughly four years and they decided to marry. Before they did, a document was drawn up. It was a prenuptial agreement and both of them signed it. The terms were mutual. Each gave up any claim to businesses the other established. Whatever Eric built, Eric kept. Whatever Corey built, Corey kept. If the marriage ended in divorce, neither could reach across and take a share of the other’s company. For a man who had already been through one divorce and owned half a growing firm with a partner who held the other half, that was ordinary planning.

Cody Wright’s stake could not be exposed to Eric’s private life. The agreement contained one exception written into the same document. If Eric died while they were still married, his partnership interest transferred to his wife. That was not unusual either. Prenuptial agreements routinely separate the two events. Divorce is a decision and the agreement treats it as one. Death is not. A husband who wants his wife protected if he dies but not taking half the company if the marriage fails writes exactly that distinction into the contract. Eric wrote it.

In a divorce, she got nothing of the business. In a death, she got his half of it. They signed and on the 15th of June 2013, they married in the backyard of their home in Kamas. Kamas sits at the mouth of a canyon in a wide farming valley, 40 miles southeast of Salt Lake City and just over the ridge from Park City. Hayfields, irrigation ditches, cattle, and the winter mountains standing behind the town. The house was theirs the way most couples describe a house as theirs. They lived in it, paid the mortgage down, covered the utilities, and treated it as the family home.

The legal title said something narrower. The Kamas house was in Eric’s name. It had been bought in his name, and it stayed there. That was the second document shaping the marriage before it began, and it was the quieter one. A prenuptial agreement gets negotiated and read aloud. A deed just sits at the county recorder’s office saying who owns the property. They started a family immediately. Their first son was born in 2013. Two more followed. The house filled up. The years after had the shape of a successful young family.

C&E kept its steady work in the high-end market and the money was good. Eric was on job sites, then in the mountains. He hunted. He took his sons out. He coached. He kept the vehicles running and kept using them the way he always had. The cattle operation did not stop needing him either, and Gene was there and the sisters and the relatives in every direction. Corey moved through all of it as an outsider who had been led in. She was the wife of the eldest son.

She was young, capable, and ambitious, and she did not intend to be only that. She had watched money disappear from the inside once already. Now she was living in a house she did not own inside a family whose name was on a county building, married to a man whose business was written into a contract as his and not hers. She wanted her own money. Utah’s mountain corridor was one of the best places in the country to want it. Property values around Park City, Heber, Midway, and Kamas were climbing.

Buyers with money from out of state were arriving. Houses bought, renovated, and resold were producing returns that looked from the outside close to automatic. Corey Richens looked at that market and saw a way out of the position she had been raised in. In 2019, she registered a company. It was called K. Richens Realty LLC and she was licensed to sell real estate in Utah. The business model was house flipping. A flipper buys a property that is undervalued because it needs work, pays for the renovation, and sells it at a higher price.

The profit is the gap between the purchase price plus the cost of the work and the eventual sale price. In a rising market, that gap widens on its own while the work is being done, which is what makes the model attractive and what makes it dangerous. Corey Richens started buying, renovating, and reselling homes in the Wasatch back. And she moved at the high end of the market, not starter houses. Luxury properties around Park City, Midway, and Heber, where a single sale could carry a year of ambition.

She had a strong hand for it on the surface. She was married into a construction family with trade contacts across the county. Her husband ran a masonry company that worked on exactly this class of home and knew the builders, the suppliers, and the crews. She was personable. She photographed well, and she could sell. What she did not have was capital. That is the structural problem at the center of house flipping. And every flipper meets it.

Banks do not write conventional mortgages on properties bought to be resold in 6 months. The buyer is not going to live there. The property is often not habitable at the point of purchase. Conventional lending is built around a borrower with steady income buying a home to occupy over 30 years. And a flip is none of those things. So flippers use hard money. Hard money loans are short-term loans secured against the property itself rather than against the borrower’s income.

The lender is not making a judgment about whether the borrower can afford the payments over decades. The lender is making a judgment about whether the property, if seized and sold, would cover the debt. Because that risk is higher, the price is higher. Interest rates on hard money loans run several times what a conventional mortgage costs, and the terms are short, often 6 to 12 months. The whole instrument is built on one assumption. The borrower will sell the property quickly and pay the loan off out of the proceeds.

The arithmetic works only if the sale happens on schedule. A hard money loan does not wait. It accrues at its high rate every month the property sits unsold and if it comes due before the sale closes, the borrower must either pay it, refinance it, or lose the property. Corey Richens used hard money to buy. She also went after something much larger than a renovation project. In Midway, a town in the Heber Valley south of Park City, there was a manor of roughly 20,000 square feet, unfinished, valued at around 3 and 3/4 million dollars.

20,000 feet is not a house in the ordinary sense. It is a small hotel. An incomplete building at that scale requires enormous sums to finish, and until it is finished, it produces nothing at all. It simply consumes money and accrues interest. She took it on and put her mark on the property. From the outside, all of this looked like success. She was a young real estate agent with her own company, working luxury inventory in one of the strongest property markets in the country, married into a well-known local family, living in a house in Kamas with three sons.

The image was consistent and it was public. Neighbors saw it, clients saw it, her husband’s family saw it, her accounts were a separate matter, and they were not public. Every property carried debt at hard money rates that grew every month. It stayed unsold. Renovation costs ran over. As renovation costs grew, the Midway building took capital and returned nothing. Fees, commissions, and interest all arrived on their own schedule, whether or not a sale closed.

So, money began coming in from somewhere else. Eric had accounts, a company generating real revenue, credit cards with real limits, and a house with equity built up in it. He spent his days on job sites and his weekends in the mountains. He was not at a desk reading statements line by line. He trusted his wife and they ran a household together. Money started leaving. It left in ways that did not announce themselves. Cash out of the bank, charges on the cards, and a loan taken against the house, which requires paperwork, a lender, and a signature, but produces nothing a busy man would notice month to month.

For a while, none of it surfaced. Then, in 2020, Eric Richens sat down and went through his own finances. What he found was not a single unexplained charge. It was a pattern running across every account he had. At least $100,000 had been taken out of his bank accounts. More than $30,000 had been charged on his credit cards without his knowledge. And there was a home equity line of credit for $250,000 secured against the Kamas house opened without him being told.

There was a fourth category, and for a business owner, it was the most dangerous of the four: money set aside for federal and state quarterly tax payments had been diverted. The figure attached to that diversion was at least $134,346. So Eric Richens was looking at four separate holes. Cash gone from his accounts, debt run up on his cards, a quarter of a million dollars borrowed against his house, and a tax obligation that he had believed was paid, sitting unpaid, and accumulating penalties against his business.

He confronted his wife. The conversation is not recorded in any detail in the public file. What is recorded is how it ended. She agreed to pay him back. That is the ordinary resolution to a marital financial dispute. One spouse has taken money the other did not authorize. There is an argument. There is an accounting. There is a repayment plan and the marriage continues. Couples work through this constantly. It is embarrassing rather than fatal.

Eric did not accept it as a resolution. He had her promise and he did not treat the promise as sufficient. Something in what he had found or in how she had explained it told him that an agreement to repay was not protection. Consider what he was weighing. He was the eldest son of an old Summit County family. He had been raised in the church, married in his own backyard, and he had three sons in the house. He had already been divorced once. Everyone he had grown up with lived within 20 miles.

Whatever he did next would be visible to all of them. He also owned half of a company with a partner who had built it with him. And that company’s revenue had been the source of the money that was missing. A man in that position has strong reasons to accept the promise, patch the accounts, and keep the household intact. Eric Richens had all of those reasons available to him. He went a different way. He did not file for divorce. He did not throw her out of the house or call the sheriff or tell his family what he had found.

What he did was quieter than any of that and more deliberate. He began protecting himself. He treated the situation not as a marital argument to be settled, but as an exposure to be closed. His accounts were exposed. His house was exposed. His business interest was exposed. His estate, if anything happened to him, was exposed. Each of those was a separate structure with its own paperwork, and each one could be changed.

Changing them required professionals, and it required him to say out loud to a stranger what had been happening in his own house. He made two appointments. The first was with a divorce attorney. That was the direct route, and it meant he was considering ending the marriage. The second was with an estate planning lawyer, which was not about ending the marriage at all. Estate planning is about what happens to a person’s property after death. Who inherits? Who controls the assets? Who is named on the policies? Who is named in the will?

He sat down with both of them in October 2020. To the estate planning lawyer, he was explicit about why he was there. He said he wanted to protect himself from financial abuse that he had recently discovered and that was ongoing. Those are careful words. Recently discovered means he had only just learned of it. Ongoing means he did not believe it had stopped. He was not describing a mistake settled by a promise. He was describing something still in motion in his own house. And he was asking a lawyer how to build a wall around what was left.

The lawyer’s answer would have been the standard one because the tools are standard. A will directs who inherits. A trust holds assets under a named trustee and keeps them out of anyone else’s reach. Beneficiary designations on life insurance sit outside the will entirely and pay whoever is named on the form. Each instrument is separate. Each has to be changed on its own. The following month, Eric began changing them. In November 2020, he removed Corey as beneficiary. He took her out of his will.

He redirected his estate to his sister and placed his assets in a living trust with Katie as trustee. He took his wife off a life insurance policy worth $500,000. Corey Richens was not in a position to absorb that. Her company ran on borrowed money against properties that had to sell on schedule. And when the schedule slipped, his accounts had covered the difference. That supply was being shut off in the same months her obligations were growing. The unfinished manor still needed capital. The renovation still needed capital.

The loans still came due on their own dates. However, she had one asset that had not changed. If Eric died while they were married, his partnership interest in C&E Stonemasonry transferred to his wife. That clause was not only his to rewrite. It was a contract between two parties and it carried her signature as well as his. Life inside the house carried on. School runs, meals, holidays, a masonry company to run and a real estate company to run. To almost everyone around them, the Richens marriage looked like what it had always looked like.

Two people knew otherwise. Eric knew what he had found and what he had done about it. Corey knew he had done it. Neither of them told anyone. The year turned and the pressure on K. Richens Realty began to leave a paper trail. On the 29th of June 2021, a bank statement went to a lender called Ironbridge Financial in support of a loan application. The statement showed a balance of more than $210,000. The money was not there. The statement had been falsified.

A statement showing $210,000 in reserve tells the lender that this borrower can absorb an overrun, cover several months of interest, and finish the job. It is the single document that turns a risky applicant into an acceptable one. The loan went through. On the 2nd of August, 2021, the same thing happened with a different lender, Boomerang Finance. Another falsified bank statement was submitted. 10 days later, on the 12th of August, a falsified personal bank statement went to Excel Financial Services.

On the 13th of October, another falsified bank statement was submitted in support of mortgage lending. On the 23rd of November, further falsified bank documentation went out. Five separate submissions across 5 months to multiple lenders. Each one presenting a financial position that did not exist. Each one produced a loan. Each loan produced a property. Each property produced more debt at hard money rates. By the end of 2021, Corey Richens stood on the edge of total financial collapse.

And on the 30th of November, she bought three more properties. She closed on all three the same day, adding $1,100,000 in high-interest debt to a load that was already unserviceable. On its face, that makes no sense. A business that cannot cover what it owes does not improve by acquiring three more properties at hard money rates. It worsens immediately. But it is the logic of any position that has gone too far to unwind. Selling out meant admitting the company was finished. Buying meant three more chances at a large sale.

And in a market that had been climbing for years, a large sale was the only event that could close the gap. The alternative was collapse. In December, the purchase pushed it forward. The year ended. K. Richens Realty entered 2022 owing more than it could pay against properties that had not sold on loans obtained with statements that were not true. Then January arrived and the activity moved off the property market and onto her husband’s life. On the 1st of January, the beneficiary on a $2 million policy covering Eric Richens was changed to his wife.

He did not authorize it and he did not know. 14 months earlier, he had sat with lawyers closing exactly this kind of door. On the first day of 2022, one of them was quietly reopened, and it took nothing more than a login and a form. That was not the only policy touched that month. Eric and Cody Wright held a joint policy through C&E Stonemasonry, each named as the other’s beneficiary. That is standard between partners. If one dies, the payout lets the survivor buy the deceased partner’s share from his family.

So, the business does not end up split between a widow and a stranger to the trade. In January 2022, someone logged into that policy. Both men were removed. Corey Richens was named sole beneficiary. Then, a new application went in for $100,000 on Eric’s life. The signature on it was forged. None of this was the start of her interest in insuring her husband. Between 2015 and 2017, she had bought four policies on his life worth more than $1.9 million together. What changed in January was the direction of the money.

While that was happening, the realty company kept pulling in cash from wherever it could be found. A close friend sent money for a mortgage down payment. It went to other debts instead. The friend was later evicted. That was not a lender in another state reading a file. That was somebody who knew her handing over money for a home. She was also talking about her marriage. She told people she wanted out and that getting out was not going to be easy. She said her husband would be better off dead.

If the marriage ended in divorce, she left with nothing and her creditors were waiting. In February 2022, she made a phone call to a woman who cleaned her houses. Her name was Carmen Lauer. She worked for the Richens family on and off, and she had a history with drugs the courts already knew about. She was in a drug court program, a supervised alternative to jail that required check-ins, testing, and community service hours. Corey asked whether she could reach somebody for pain medication, and explained who it was for, an investor she knew.

That framing did a lot of work. It made the request a favor. It put the user at a distance, someone she would never meet. It fitted a world where investors and buyers moved through Corey’s business constantly, and it gave Lauer a reason to say yes without thinking too hard about it. Lauer said she would see what she could do, and she got pills. Then came a second request and with it a change. The investor needed something stronger. That sentence came back a third time and a fourth.

Across four occasions between December 2021 and March 2022, the request escalated. Whatever was delivered, the next call asked for more. The money came from Corey. Once Lauer collected $1,000 in cash from a house in Midway. Another exchange happened in Lauer’s own driveway in Heber City with Corey driving out to meet her. Ordinary places in daylight between two women who knew each other through housework. On the 11th of February 2022, Lauer reached a dealer in Ogden and obtained fentanyl.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid used in hospitals for severe pain, effective in doses measured in millionths of a gram. The pills on the street in Utah that winter were made to no standard at all, pressed to look like prescription tablets with contents that varied from pill to pill. It was killing Americans faster than any other drug. People who used street opioids in 2022 knew that fentanyl was the thing that killed you. It was hard to get precisely because everyone was afraid of it.

Corey had asked for something stronger. By February, she had a way of asking for it. She told Lauer she wanted the Michael Jackson stuff. Lauer did not know what that meant and had to look it up. Michael Jackson had died in 2009 from drugs given to him in his own home and the case had been covered worldwide. That was the reference Corey reached for. Not a chemical name, not a street name, the name of a famous man who died from what he was handed. Lauer went and got it.

She was not the only one being asked. Corey also spoke to Hayden Jeffs, a handyman who worked for her. A woman named Anna Isbel was present during one of those calls, close enough to hear Corey’s side of it, and what she heard was a request for the Michael Jackson drug. Isbel took it to mean a muscle relaxant. Two people, same request, same words, same weeks. Lauer meanwhile was falling behind on the community service her program required because she was spending that time on errands for Corey.

Corey helped her get letters certifying hours she had not worked. The letters did not hold up and Lauer spent a day in jail. By the middle of February, the pills were in Corey Richens’s possession. The 14th was Valentine’s Day. That morning, Corey prepared a sandwich for Eric. It came from a local diner and it was his favorite. She left it on the seat of his truck with a love note. Then she left the house. Eric ate part of it.

Shortly afterward, he broke out in hives and began having difficulty breathing. He reached for what was in the house. His son had an EpiPen for allergies and Eric used it. He took Benadryl. Both treat allergic reactions, which is what the symptoms looked like to him. Then he slept for several hours. Before that, he texted his wife. He told her he was not feeling good and that if it did not pass, he was going to the hospital. She replied and told him to take a nap.

A husband says he may need an emergency room. The answer is to lie down. No offer to come home, no call, no suggestion he see a doctor. She was not there because she had gone to see someone else. His name was Robert Joshua Grossman and the affair had been running through the marriage. Eric had suspected for some time that his wife was involved with somebody and had said so to people close to him. Eric slept. Then he woke up and made two phone calls.

He called his closest friends. He described the sandwich, the note, and what happened after he ate it. To one, he said, “You almost lost me.” That friend could hear the fear in his voice. To the other, he said it plainly, “I think my wife tried to poison me.” That is not a sentence a man says lightly about the woman he lives with and shares three sons with. He said it twice in one afternoon, hours after eating food she had left for him. He did not call the police.

He did not go to the hospital either, which meant no blood draw, no toxicology screen, no medical record of what had been in him that day. He treated it at home and slept it off and whatever was in his system passed through and was gone. The following day, Corey sent a message about her husband. If he could just go away, she wrote, “Life would be so perfect.” Eric went back to work. He was on job sites in the mountains at the ranch with his father.

The family gathered as it always did, and not one of them was told what he had said on Valentine’s Day. The marriage continued. Within days, Corey Richens made another call to Carmen Lauer. The message was the one she had used before. The investor needed something stronger. Lauer went back to the same source and got more. It was late February, the third time she had gone out since December. Through the rest of February, life in Kamas ran on and Eric said nothing further to anyone.

She was still seeing Grossman and she was still working the property market because a large sale remained the only ordinary event that could change anything. At the beginning of March, she had one. A house flipping deal came together. The public record does not lay out the transaction, but it was significant enough to mark. On the evening of the 3rd of March, 2022, Eric and Corey Richens were at home together celebrating it. It was a Thursday. Their three sons were in the house, an ordinary evening at the end of winter with the hay fields still frozen.

Eric had a shot of alcohol. He had a cannabis gummy, a legal market product and a common enough thing for an adult at the end of a working day. And his wife made him a Moscow mule. A Moscow mule is vodka, ginger beer, and lime served over ice in a copper mug. The ginger is sharp and the lime is sour, and between them they overwhelm most of what could be put into it. She carried it to their bedroom and gave it to him there. He drank it. Afterward by her account, she did not stay in the room.

One of their sons was having a night terror and she went to sleep in his bedroom instead. Night terrors are common in young sleepers. They are not nightmares. The sleeper wakes partially distressed and disoriented and is difficult to settle and a parent will often stay in the room until it passes. It is an ordinary domestic reason to spend a night in another bed. So, the house went quiet. A husband asleep in the main bedroom. A wife in a son’s room down the hall. Three sons in the house. A copper mug somewhere.

Corey Richens said she came back to the bedroom at around 3:00 in the morning on the 4th of March. She said Eric was cold to the touch. She said he was not breathing. She called 911. Emergency responders came out to the house in Kamas in the early hours. They found Eric Richens on the floor at the foot of the bed on his side of the room. They attempted life-saving measures. The measures did not work. He was pronounced dead at the scene. He was 39 years old.

According to the responders who arrived, Corey Richens had not attempted resuscitation before they got there. Deputies from the Summit County Sheriff’s Office came to the house because a sudden death of a healthy man in his 30s brings law enforcement whether or not anything appears wrong. They spoke to the wife. She told them what the evening had been. A celebration of a house flipping deal. A shot of alcohol, a cannabis gummy, a mixed vodka drink she had made and brought to him in bed.

Then the son’s night terror, the other bedroom, the return at 3, and the cold. She also said something to police that did not follow from any of that. She told them he didn’t just die in his sleep. That statement stands out because nobody had suggested he did. A man in his 30s had been found dead at home in the early hours and no cause had been established. The default assumption in the room was that something medical had happened.

A heart problem, an undetected condition, the kind of event that takes fit men in their prime without warning and leaves a family with no explanation. His wife told the deputies it was not that. The news moved through Summit County within hours because that is how a county works when the family involved has lived in it for generations. Gene Richens was told his eldest son was dead. Katie and Amy were told their brother was dead. Cody Wright was told his business partner was dead.

The crews at C&E Stonemasonry were told. The church community was told. Friends who had known him for 20 years were told. The reaction across all of them was the same. And it was disbelief. Eric Richens was not a man anyone expected to lose this way. He was physically robust to the point of recklessness. He had survived rolling motorized vehicles across open ground and taken 200 stitches to his face in a single incident and gone straight back out. He worked outdoors.

He hunted. He hauled hay. He ran a construction crew. He was the loudest person in most rooms he entered. The family began making arrangements. Corey Richens was now a widow with three sons and a real estate company that owed more each month than it earned in five. She was also under paperwork submitted in January, the named beneficiary of a $2 million policy, the sole beneficiary of the partnership policy that had protected Cody Wright and the applicant on a new policy carrying a signature Eric had not written.

The state of Utah, meanwhile, had a duty that applied to any sudden death of a person that age. The office of the medical examiner took the body. Three days after Eric died, his wife hired a locksmith. There was a safe in the house. It belonged to Eric and it held cash. The amount inside was between $125,000 and $165,000. Corey did not have the combination, so she brought in a locksmith to open it. Amy Richens came to her brother’s house and found this in progress.

Amy knew things about her brother’s affairs that his wife may not have known she knew. She was aware that Eric had removed Corey from his $500,000 life insurance policy. She was aware that he had taken her out of his will. She told Corey that she had no right to the funds in the safe. She also asked a simple question. Why had Corey not just asked Gene Richens for the code? Eric’s father was alive. He was nearby and he was the obvious person to ask.

A widow opening her late husband’s safe with the family’s knowledge does not need a locksmith. She needs a phone call. The response was not an answer. Corey began screaming and told Amy to get out of her house. Then she struck her. Amy Richens reported being punched. A charge of assault, a class B misdemeanor, was filed over the incident in June of that year. The family took note of it, and they were already taking note of other things.

The medical examiner’s office, meanwhile, was doing its work. A sudden death of a man of 39 with no known illness requires an autopsy and a full toxicology screen, and toxicology takes weeks. Samples go to a laboratory. They are tested against a panel of substances, and the results come back with concentrations measured precisely. When the results came back, they identified fentanyl. The concentration in Eric Richens’s blood was five times the amount considered lethal.

The report established two further points. The fentanyl was illicit rather than medical grade, meaning it had not come from a pharmacy or a hospital, and it had been ingested orally. He had swallowed it. That finding changed everything about how the death was understood, and it made no sense to anyone who had known him. Eric Richens had no history of drug abuse. He was not an opioid user. There was nothing in his life, his work, his medical history, or his behavior that pointed toward it.

He was a man who ran a construction business, worked a cattle ranch, hunted, coached his sons, and got up early. The people closest to him rejected the finding immediately as an explanation of who he was. His family did not treat it as an accident, and they did not wait to be asked. They went to the Summit County Sheriff’s Office and told investigators to look at his wife. They had a specific reason for saying so, and it came from Eric himself.

They told investigators that he had warned them. He had told them that if anything happened to him, she was to blame. There was more, and it went back years. One of his sisters told investigators about a trip Eric and Corey had taken to Greece. During that trip, after his wife gave him a drink, Eric became violently ill. He telephoned his sister from overseas and told her he believed his wife had tried to kill him. And there was Valentine’s Day.

Eric’s family told authorities that he had been in fear for his life after the incident with the sandwich. The two friends he had called that afternoon had heard it directly. He had told one of them he had almost died. He had told the other he thought his wife had tried to poison him. None of that had been reported at the time. All of it arrived at the sheriff’s office at once after the toxicology came back from a family that was certain.

The Summit County Sheriff’s Office opened an investigation into the death of Eric Richens. The detective assigned to lead it was Jeff O’Driscoll. What he had at the start was a dead man with illicit fentanyl in his system, a widow who had made him a drink and then slept in another room, a family making direct accusations, and a set of financial documents that nobody had yet examined. He began with the phone. Investigators took her phone and what came off it fell into two categories.

What she had searched for and what was missing. The searches came first. In the weeks after her husband’s death, she had looked up the Utah State Prison, whether police can see deleted messages, how long life insurance companies take to pay out, whether the cause of death can be changed on a death certificate, whether police can force a person to take a lie detector test. She had searched the phrase luxury prisons for the rich in America. She had searched what counts as a non-natural manner of death.

She had searched her own name alongside the words Kamas and net worth. She had searched more than once whether her family had made donations to the Summit County police. She had opened articles, too. One on the signs a person is under federal investigation. Another on delayed insurance payouts when a death certificate lists the causes pending. One at a time. Several of those have innocent readings. A widow might reasonably want to know how long an insurer takes.

A woman being interviewed by detectives might look up what police can compel. Together, they map a single set of concerns. What the police can recover, what can be forced, what a death certificate can be made to say, how long the money takes, what prison is like. Then O’Driscoll looked at what had been removed. Messages and call logs had been deleted, and the deletions were not indiscriminate. They covered specific people. One of them was Carmen Lauer.

Location data survived and it placed her movements against the calendar, including where she went on the 14th of February. Her messages with Robert Joshua Grossman were recovered intact. The call history showed she and her mother spoke almost daily and that in those conversations, Lisa Darden expressed dislike toward Eric Richens. Then the investigation moved to the paperwork and the paperwork gave the case its shape.

The insurance file laid out the four policies bought between 2015 and 2017. The beneficiary change made on New Year’s Day 2022. The partnership policy stripped of both partners and the application carrying a signature Eric never wrote. The estate file gave the other half. Two lawyers in October 2020. A man describing financial abuse he had recently discovered and believed was ongoing. Every document rewritten the following month. The bank records gave the motive in numbers.

Then they went to the people, the two friends Eric called on Valentine’s Day. The sister he telephoned from Greece, the relatives he had warned, Cody Wright, employees, acquaintances who had heard her say she wanted out, that it would not be easy, and that her husband would be better off dead. And Carmen Lauer. Lauer spoke to investigators with no immunity protecting her. She did it because of what she had been told. When they said Eric had died of an overdose, she said it hit her hard and if that was what had happened, she needed to step up and take accountability for her part in it.

She described four occasions. The request for something stronger, the money, the pickups, and the phrase about the Michael Jackson stuff. The investigation ran for more than a year. While it ran, Corey Richens was writing a book. The idea came in March 2023. She said her sons could not sleep, that nights were the hardest, and that she had gone looking on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble for something to read to them. She said she could not find anything that fitted, so she decided to write one.

It was called Are You With Me? A picture book about a young reader whose father has died, built on the idea that a parent who is gone is still present in the ordinary details of a household. The cover was an illustration of Eric Richens smiling down from a cloud. She dedicated it to him, to her amazing husband and a wonderful father. She self-published it and listed it on Amazon at $14.99. The description called it essential reading for any young person who had known the pain of loss.

She said she and her sons had written it together. They had not. A ghostwriter produced it and in messages with her own family, she made that plain. What went out under her name, presented as the joint work of a grieving widow and her three sons, was a commissioned product. Then she went looking for an audience. She wrote to the executive producer of Good Things Utah, a morning program on the Salt Lake City station, KTVX. The email was warm with exclamation marks and a heart.

She supplied exactly what a producer needs, talking points about grief and a promotional code for viewers who wanted to buy a copy. They booked her. On the 6th of April, 2023, she sat down with the hosts, Dina Manzanares and Sarah Chen. She spoke softly. She said her husband had passed away unexpectedly the year before, that he was 39, and that it had taken them all by shock. She said she and her sons had written the book about the stages of grief they had gone through over the last year and that she had researched how to grieve as a widow and how to help her sons.

Then she walked the hosts through what she called three principles. Connection, continuity, and care. Connection was the most important. It meant teaching young people that the spirit of the person they lost was always alive in the home by bringing up memories and doing the things that person had loved. Continuity meant keeping a routine. Care meant showing love and affirming their feelings. Just because he is not present here with us physically, she said, that does not mean his presence is not here with us.

Dad is still here. It is just in a different way. The camera held on the cover while she spoke. The hosts were on her side throughout, which is what a morning program does. A local woman had lost her husband and turned it into something to help other families. Manzanares came away with an impression she could not place. Sitting across from her, they both felt she was a little cold, not particularly emotional, but that was the sort of thing you set aside because the job is to show a guest in her best light.

After the camera stopped, Manzanares asked what she thought had happened to her husband. Corey Richens said she believed it was COVID-related. She said Eric had a lung issue. That was 13 months after a medical examiner had recorded illicit fentanyl at five times a lethal concentration swallowed in a man with no history of drug use. 6 days later, she was at KPCW, the public radio station in Park City, saying she and her sons had written the book and hoping it would bring comfort to other families going through the same thing.

That was the public position through the spring of 2023. A young widow raising three sons alone who had turned the worst year of her life into a book. She was on television. She was on the radio. She was selling copies through a code she had supplied herself. Meanwhile, none of the investigation was public. On the 8th of May, 2023, deputies came for her. Corey Richens was arrested at her home in Kamas and booked into the Summit County Jail.

It was a Monday, 14 months after her husband died and roughly a month after she had appeared on television to talk about grief. The charge was aggravated murder in Utah. That is the most serious offense in the criminal code. It applies when a homicide is committed under specified circumstances and one of those circumstances is killing for financial gain. It is the only charge in the state carrying a possible death sentence stringency and its lesser penalties are a life without parole or 25 years to life.

Alongside it came three counts of possession with intent to distribute and financial charges from the same investigation. The story left Utah within a day. It traveled because of the book. A woman had been charged with poisoning her husband, and in the year between his death and her arrest, she had written and promoted a picture book to help young readers cope with losing a father. Editors on three continents saw what they had. Are You With Me? came off Amazon the following morning.

At KTVX, the two hosts who had interviewed her a month earlier watched it unfold. Chen said she felt they had been duped. Manzanares went back over the interview in her mind and the coldness she had noticed and set aside settled into a different shape. Corey Richens retained a defense attorney, Sky Lazaro, and moved to be released. The detention hearing was held on the 12th of June, 2023. Lazaro argued there was no substantial evidence behind the charges.

On the searches, she argued the history was simply a reaction to an investigation the whole family knew was happening. That argument had a defensible core and lawyers watching from outside said so. One of them, Clayton Simms, said the searches were not insignificant, that her state of mind could matter, but that nothing in them indicated guilt. The state had the family. Amy Richens provided a statement and it was read aloud in the courtroom.

She called her sister-in-law desperate, greedy, and extremely manipulative and asked how anyone could value human life so cheaply. The judge denied bail. The filings from that hearing became public, and the searches went into newspapers and broadcasts around the world. On the 9th of June 2023, 1 month after her arrest, Corey Richens filed a lawsuit. She sued her late husband’s estate. The claim asked for two things.

The first was the house. Her lawyers argued that although the title had always been in Eric’s name, the couple had bought it together, paid the mortgage down together, and treated it in every respect as a marital asset. So, she was entitled to half the equity, or at least half the increase in value since the marriage. The house was worth around $1.9 million. The second claim was for roughly $2 million from the sale of C&E Stonemasonry, and it rested entirely on the exception Eric had written into the prenuptial agreement.

The document he had drafted to protect his partner from a divorce was now the instrument his widow was using to claim half his company from a jail cell. The Richens family answered in kind. Katie Richens Benson as representative of the estate and trustee of the trust sued Corey, her mother Lisa Darden, her brother Ronnie Darden, and K. Richens Realty. The family’s action sought more than $13 million. In August 2023, a court ruled on one piece of it: the insurance money attached to Eric’s business would go to his family.

Both civil actions were assigned to the same judge handling the criminal case and both were put on hold while it proceeded. There was a third front and it mattered most. A juvenile court took up the question of who would raise the three sons. It gave custody to Eric’s family. The boys went to their paternal relatives and stayed there. Then on the 14th of September, deputies searched her cell block. They found a six-page handwritten letter addressed to her mother.

The letter gave instructions. It said the defense wanted to link Eric getting drugs and pills from Mexico to the fentanyl that killed him. And it set out a line for her brother Ronnie to repeat: that Eric had told him he got pain pills and fentanyl from Mexico from workers at the ranch. It told her mother to reward it however he needed, but to include it all and said he would probably have to testify to it. It told Lisa Darden to deliver the message in person because Corey was worried her mother’s house and phone were bugged.

It went further than the brother. It gave instructions for an upcoming television interview involving friends of hers, specifying what they should say. One passage directed someone to mention that Eric had not been to church in the 13 years she had known him and that he used to boast about how much he drank in high school. Another supplied a line for a friend that Eric always wanted Corey to go down for him. Prosecutors moved to bar her from contacting her mother and brother and called the letter witness tampering.

They disclosed a second incident, too. The day before the search, during a video call, Corey had held up a letter for her mother to read silently. That one was never recovered, and prosecutors believed it had been destroyed. The defense gave a different account of the six pages. In a phone call to her brother, Corey said the document was part of a 65-page novel she had been writing in custody. Her attorney said the same in court, describing it as fiction about an imagined stay in a Mexican prison and said, “You could tell from reading it that the whole thing was a story.”

Then they went on the offensive. They argued that by filing the letter publicly, prosecutors had breached the gag order, poisoned the jury pool, and destroyed her chance of a fair trial in Summit County. They asked for dismissal. Failing that, a move to Salt Lake County. On the 3rd of November 2023, Judge Richard Mrazik heard the matter. He denied the state’s request for a no contact order. His reasoning was practical. Her communications with everyone except her lawyer were already monitored, and the court was in no position to make the state’s job easier than that.

That same month, he ordered prosecutors to separate several of the alleged financial crimes from the murder case so they would not be tried together. The defense pressed the letter into a broader claim, arguing it had been improper to call the document witness tampering when no such charge had been filed and that doing so made a fair trial in the county impossible. They asked again for dismissal. A much smaller case was still open. The assault charge over the safe had been settled in February 2023 by a plea in abeyance.

She pleaded no contest with 90 days to complete grief counseling and until January 2024 to pay $1,015. Meet the terms and the charge disappeared. Miss them and the conviction stood. Prosecutors said she had done neither. In March 2024, she appeared by video from jail to answer for it. Her attorney said she had completed the counseling but never obtained the report and that a week before the deadline she had been arrested for her husband’s murder.

That same month, prosecutors filed a new charge in the murder case: attempted aggravated murder covering Valentine’s Day 2022. And that same month, a search warrant was unsealed containing material about her mother. O’Driscoll had looked into Lisa Darden’s past. He wrote that in 2006 she had been living with a woman she was romantically involved with and that in April of that year the partner died unexpectedly. An autopsy gave the cause as an oxycodone overdose. Darden had been the beneficiary of her partner’s life insurance.

Given her proximity to that death and her closeness to her daughter, he wrote it was possible she had been involved in planning Eric’s death. Sky Lazaro answered publicly. Opioid overdose was widespread across the country, she said. Being the beneficiary of a partner’s policy is not unusual, and the suggestion was a baseless conspiracy theory. Lisa Darden was never charged in connection with either death, and nothing from that warrant reached a courtroom.

In late August 2024 came the preliminary hearing where a judge decides whether there is enough evidence to send a defendant to trial. O’Driscoll testified to what Lauer had told police, including that Corey had asked for stronger fentanyl after Valentine’s Day failed. Brad Bloodworth summarized the state’s position. She had learned, he said, that putting it in a sandwich where Eric could take one bite and set it down was not the way to administer a fatal dose. She had learned that it takes a truckload to kill him.

Mrazik found probable cause and bound her over on all 11 felony counts. She pleaded not guilty to every one. In November, he granted her request to try the mortgage fraud charges separately and refused to reconsider bail. That same month, a juvenile court confirmed custody of the three boys would stay with Eric’s family. On the 7th of November 2024, a crime scene team went back to the house in Kamas on a warrant. They were there to collect a letter and the letter was lying on the floor at the foot of the bed on Eric’s side of the room.

It had not been there on the night he died. It had not been there during any of the searches conducted since. The crime scene investigator who collected it, Chelsea Gibson, confirmed that a document had appeared in a house that had been searched repeatedly in the exact spot where Eric Richens was found 2 years and 8 months after his death. The case moved into 2025 and it moved slowly. The defense kept trying to get the trial out of Summit County.

In March 2025, her attorneys asked again for the case to be moved to Salt Lake County, arguing that coverage in the county had been so widespread that no impartial jury could be seated there. Mrazik denied it. He also granted a delay. The trial had been scheduled for April 2025, and in April, he pushed it back. Both sides then went to the Utah Supreme Court with an unusual joint request. They wanted the jury pool expanded beyond the county. The justices rejected it unanimously in June 2025.

The trial was still not close because a dispute had opened up about evidence. A box of documents existed that the defense said the state had withheld. Her attorneys argued that prosecutors had kept back information about an interview with a witness and that the material undercut the prosecution case. On the 20th of June 2025, Mrazik granted a defense motion to continue the proceedings over it. The new trial date was February 2026.

One week later, on the 27th of June, 2025, prosecutors filed 26 new felony charges against her in a separate case. The counts covered the financial conduct that had been severed from the murder case in 2023, and they were extensive: five counts of mortgage fraud, seven counts of money laundering, one count of communications fraud, one count of engaging in a pattern of unlawful activity. All of those were second-degree felonies. Alongside them were five counts of forgery and seven counts of issuing a bad check, third-degree felonies.

The charging documents laid out the arithmetic that had been assembled from her bank and lending records. They stated that by the end of 2021, she stood at the edge of total financial collapse. They stated that in the 5 months before Eric’s death, K. Richens Realty took in $170,000 in revenue while its monthly debt service exceeded $250,000. They described the falsified bank statements sent to lenders, the properties bought on hard money in November 2021, and the money taken from a close friend for a down payment and used on other debts.

The pattern of unlawful activity count tied the financial conduct to the death itself. It covered the fraudulent life insurance application, the attempt on Eric’s life, the killing, and the insurance benefits claimed afterward. Her attorneys, Kathy Nester and Wendy Lewis, issued a statement calling the timing of the charges troubling given that the parties were trying to seat an impartial jury in Summit County. Prosecutors declined to comment. The defense continued to work on the state’s witnesses.

At one point, Corey Richens sought release on bail after a prosecution witness withdrew part of his account. That did not succeed. In October 2025, her lawyers filed a motion aimed at the other side of the family. They demanded full financial transparency from Eric’s estate and they alleged that his sister, who oversaw the trust, might have been paying witnesses involved in the case. They asked the court to compel the records. The allegation was never established. Nothing came of it in court.

Prosecutors, meanwhile, filed amended charging documents after Mrazik ordered parts of the case restructured. By the end of 2025, the case had been running for 2 and a half years since the arrest and nearly 4 years since the death. Corey Richens had been in custody the entire time. Jury selection began in early 2026, and it was difficult in exactly the way the defense had predicted. The court fought over the wording of the questionnaire, concerned about how questions were phrased in relation to what jurors remembered from media coverage.

Summit County had lived with this story since the arrest. The book, the television interview, the letter in the cell, the searches, the safe, all of it had been public for years. They seated a jury anyway. On the 23rd of February 2026 at the Summit County Courthouse in Park City, the trial of Corey Richens began. The defense case was that Eric Richens had taken the drugs himself. Nester and Lewis told the jury he had health problems, including Lyme disease and a painkiller addiction.

They argued the investigation had been sloppy, that detectives settled on an answer early and shaped everything after it to fit. That was the whole architecture. If Eric used pills, his death becomes the kind of accident killing tens of thousands of Americans a year. And if the investigation was biased, its witnesses could not be trusted. The state began with the house. Chelsea Gibson, a crime scene technician, testified about what was collected there.

On cross-examination, she confirmed the sequence on the letter. The team went back on a warrant. It was at the foot of Eric’s side of the bed. It had not been there the night he died or during any earlier search. Then the state called the toxicologist. Dr. Briana Peterson testified that a lethal concentration of fentanyl can be as low as 3 nanograms per milliliter. Eric Richens had 15, illicit, not medical grade, not from a pharmacy or a hospital, and taken by mouth.

Those figures did the structural work. This was not a user misjudging a dose and it established the route: something he swallowed. Then came the witness the trial turned on. Carmen Lauer took the stand under grants of immunity, meaning the state agreed not to prosecute her for what she described. That is standard for a witness who must admit crimes to give evidence. And it is the first thing a defense lawyer attacks. She began with why she came forward.

She had talked to investigators before any immunity existed because she felt responsible. When they told her Eric died of an overdose, she said it hit hard. And if that was what happened, she needed to step up and take accountability for her part in it. Then she walked the jury through the four occasions and added what the file had not carried. On the second run, she asked a friend whether anyone had opiate pills and was told fentanyl was available. She took the cash, got a ride, bought the pills, and buried them in the fire pit at the Midway property until Corey came for them.

There was a fourth occasion, and it came after Eric was already dead. Then she described confronting Corey afterward. She said she told her, “Please tell me these pills were not for him.” Corey Richens, she testified, said, “No.” She said he died of a brain aneurysm. Then the prosecution moved to the paper and the paper was where the case became hard to answer. Jurors saw the deleted messages and call logs and one she sent after her husband’s death saying they would not take from her what was hers.

They saw the insurance file policy by policy ending with the forged application and they were shown the book, her emails to the producers with the talking points and the promotional code. Then the messages to her own family which made clear a ghostwriter had produced it. On the 13th of March, Corey Richens waived her right to testify. Brad Bloodworth, the chief prosecutor for Summit County, built his closing around a single phrase. Corey Richens was a suburban mother and a real estate agent.

She did not know much about the illicit street drug world, but she knew Michael Jackson had died from taking drugs. She did not know how to order a street drug, he said. But she knew she wanted the Michael Jackson stuff. She wanted it because it was lethal. It was fatal. It killed. That answered the problem at the center of the state’s case. She had no supplier, no vocabulary, no experience. What she had was a famous death to point at. He took the jury through the rest: the debts, the insurance, the forged signature, the partner removed from his own policy, the agreement that paid out on a death and nothing on a divorce.

Then the attempt and the 17 days after it. Wendy Lewis, who had led the defense alongside Kathy Nester, went at the witness the state could not do without. Carmen Lauer, the housekeeper who said she had bought the pills, could not tell the jury she bought fentanyl. Detectives put the word in her mouth, Lewis said, and Lauer ran with it because she had everything to lose. The case went to the jury on the 16th of March, 2026. They deliberated for less than 3 hours.

Guilty of first-degree aggravated murder. Guilty of attempted aggravated murder. Guilty of forgery, guilty of insurance fraud, guilty on every count. Aggravated murder in Utah carries three possible sentences: death, life without parole, or 25 years to life. Prosecutors had not sought the death penalty. Sentencing was set for the 13th of May, which would have been Eric Richens’s 44th birthday. Corey Richens spoke at length that day and directed most of it at her sons.

She told them she did not abandon them and never would. She told them she and their father had once been in love. She told them to take care of one another and to choose forgiveness. She told them to be like their dad, that one day she would come home and that she would love them forever. Then she said she would appeal and would fight the charges however long it took. Her sons were not in the room. Their statements were read aloud by three therapists.

The eldest said he missed his dad but did not miss how his life used to be and did not miss her. The middle son said she had taken everything away. The youngest said he wanted his mother to go to prison forever and that he was afraid of being taken from the aunt and uncle raising him. Judge Richard Mrazik, who had presided over the case since her first appearance in 2023, gave his ruling. Corey Richens had been convicted, he said, unanimously and beyond a reasonable doubt of attempting to murder her husband and the father of their three sons.

A person convicted of those things was simply too dangerous. He imposed the maximum life without the possibility of parole. She was taken from the courtroom to the Utah State Prison where she is serving that sentence now. She has appealed and she maintains her innocence. Her three sons are being raised by their father’s family. Eric Richens was buried in Utah. He was only 39. If you made it this far, do us a favor and hit that subscribe button and turn on the bell so you don’t miss what’s coming next.

Every case we cover takes weeks of digging through court records, and your support is what keeps that work going. Tell us in the comments what you think Eric should have done differently. He knew, he told two friends, and he told his family. He never told the police. What would you have done? This is No Way Out. We’ll see you in the next one.