Utah News

From house wife to the big house.

Utah mom Kouri Richins — who fatally poisoned her husband, leaving their three sons effectively orphaned — is headed to the same prison where other notorious moms Ruby Franke and Megan Huntsman are housed.

Richins — who infamously wrote a children’s grief book after murdering her kids’ dad Eric Richins — will land at the Utah State Correctional Facility (USCF) within the next week after she was hit with a life sentence without the possibility of parole Wednesday, according to the state Department of Corrections.

A handful of notable inmates are serving sentences at the Beehive State prison complex — which opened in 2022 and houses both men and women at facilities of varying security levels.

Huntsman is serving a 15 years to life term at the facility located near the Salt Lake City International Airport after she pleaded guilty in 2015 to suffocating and strangling six of her newborn babies over the course of a decade.

The 51-year-old — who has three adult daughters — claims she was addicted to drugs and alcohol when she killed the babies, wrapping them in shirts, towel and plastic bags placed inside boxes in the garage of her Pleasant Grove, Utah home.

A seventh baby’s body was also found, but authorities believe it was stillborn.

Momfluencer Ruby Franke and Jodi Hildebrandt, who helped Franke torture her children, are also both serving hard time in the facility.

The 44-year-old host of now-defunct YouTube show “8 Passengers” pleaded guilty in 2023 to aggravated child abuse for starving and torturing two of her six kids by holding their heads under water. Hildebrandt — Franke’s former business partner — also pleaded guilty and is cooling her heels at USCF.

A few infamous men are also at the facility, including Dan Lafferty who is accused of killing his sister-in-law Brenda Lafferty and her 15-month-old daughter with the help of his brother Ron under the guise of a religious calling.

The murders are the basis for Jon Krakauer’s 2003 book “Under the Banner of Heaven” that inspired a Hulu show of the same name, starring Andrew Garfield.

Troy Michael Kell, a death row inmate and known white supremacist, is also in the facility for stabbing a fellow inmate 67 times, killing him. The 1994 murder was recorded on surveillance video, according to a report by KSL.

Richins was convicted of lacing Eric’s Moscow Mule with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl on March 4, 2022. She previously tried, but failed, to kill Eric two weeks prior by dosing his sandwich with the same drug.

Kouri and Eric’s three sons said they were terrified of their mom and begged a judge to keep her locked up for life in letters read to the court Wednesday.

Richins allegedly carried out the killing because she wrongfully believed she would inherit Eric’s $4 million estate, which would have cleared her real estate business debts and allowed her to start a new life with her handyman lover.

With Post wires

A Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband and was later found guilty of killing him has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Kouri Richins, 35, wearing a lime green uniform in court, stared ahead as the sentence was handed down on Wednesday, on what would have been her husband Eric Richins’s 44th birthday.

In March, Kouri Richins was convicted of aggravated murder in Eric’s 2022 death after prosecutors say she secretly slipped five times the lethal dose of fentanyl into a Moscow Mule cocktail she made for him. A year after the murder, Richins wrote a children’s book to help their three sons process the loss.

The 35-year-old real estate agent was millions in debt and planning a future with another man, prosecutors said during her trial. She had opened numerous life insurance policies on her husband without his knowledge, and falsely believed she would inherit his estate worth more than $4 million after he died.

The prosecution had urged the judge to impose a life sentence without the possibility of parole, saying Richins’ three sons “should never worry that they may one day encounter her.”

In an impact statement read to the court on Wednesday, Eric’s father Gene Richins said that his son’s death was a “permanent hole in our family that will never be filled.”

“No parent should ever have to bury their child,” he said. “It’s a loss that changes you forever.”

Katie Richins-Benson, Eric’s sister, sobbed as she told the court: “Nearly every aspect of our lives has been permanently changed, and we have no choice but to live with those changes and Eric’s loss forever.”

Richins’ case captivated true-crime enthusiasts when she was arrested in 2023 while promoting her children’s book “Are You with Me?” about a boy coping with the death of his father.

Richins’ mother, Lisa Darden, maintained that her daughter is not capable of murder and in court on Wednesday, asked, “from a mother’s heart, that Kouri be given a sentence that allows the possibility of a future.”

Sons say they are afraid of their mother

Eric Richins’ sister, Katie Richins-Benson, said her brother was taken from his sons, who are now in her care, by the person he should have been able to trust the most.

“They are not props for some twisted children’s book about grief and loss, and yet that is what they’ve been reduced to by Kouri,” Richins-Benson told the judge, her voice quavering.

The children have said Richins hit and threatened to kill their animals, showed them videos of famished children in war zones when they refused to eat their dinner and didn’t seem to care about their health.

At the sentencing hearing on Wednesday, licensed therapists read the children’s victim impact statements to the court.

One child talked about how Richins would “put us in the basement while she was with the neighbor.”

“I felt scared because I thought something really bad was happening again,” the child said in his statement. “She would take me to places that smelled really bad. Everything she did made me feel uncomfortable.”

Another child told Richins: “You took away everything from me and my brothers.”

The oldest boy, now 13, said he also felt like he had to take care of his siblings while in his mother’s care, but his younger brother “mostly took care of me, though, because I was locked in my room.” He said his mom would lock him inside “pretty much daily” after he pointed out that she was drunk.

The 13-year-old child said in his statement that he wanted Richins to get life in prison “because what she did is very sick.”

All three children have undergone intensive therapy and are being raised by Eric’s sister and her husband, according to the memo.

The trial

The trial was scheduled for five weeks but ended early when Richins waived her right to testify, and her legal team rested its case without calling any witnesses. Her attorneys said they were confident that prosecutors had not produced enough evidence to convict her of murder.

The jury deliberated for just under three hours before finding her guilty of all counts.

Jurors in Park City also found Richins guilty of four other felonies, including attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Valentine’s Day with a fentanyl-laced sandwich.

Throughout the trial, prosecutors portrayed the mother of three as a money-hungry killer. They showed the jury text messages between Richins and her lover in which she fantasized about leaving her husband and gaining millions in a divorce.

Prosecutors also displayed the internet search history from Richins’ phone, which included queries about the lethal dose of fentanyl, luxury prisons and how poisoning is marked on a death certificate.

The defense argued that Eric Richins was addicted to painkillers. Prosecutors countered by showing police body camera footage from the night of his death in which Kouri Richins tells an officer that her husband had no history of illicit drug use.

Defense attorneys also argued that the prosecution’s star witness, a housekeeper who claimed to have sold Kouri Richins fentanyl on multiple occasions, was motivated to lie for legal protection. The housekeeper was granted immunity for her cooperation in the case.

A Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband and was later found guilty of killing him will now receive her prison sentence.

Kouri Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing her husband’s cocktail with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022.

Prosecutors said Richins, a 35-year-old real estate agent with a house-flipping business, was millions in debt and planning a future with another man. She had opened numerous life insurance policies on her husband, Eric Richins, without his knowledge and falsely believed she would inherit his estate worth more than $4m after he died.

Jurors in Park City also found Richins guilty of four other felonies, including attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Valentine’s Day with a fentanyl-laced sandwich.

Her case captivated true-crime enthusiasts when she was arrested in 2023 while promoting her children’s book Are You With Me? about a boy coping with the death of his father.

Richins faces several decades to life in prison at her sentencing hearing, which falls on the day her husband would have turned 44. She wore a lime green jail uniform and chatted with her lawyers on Wednesday morning while Eric Richins’ family members passed around pocket-size packs of tissues. Her lawyers declined to comment before the hearing.

Eric Richins’ sister, Amy Richins, said after the verdict that she was “just very happy that we got justice for my brother” and could now focus solely on supporting his sons, who were ages nine, seven and five when their father died.

In a memo filed by prosecutors ahead of the hearing, the sons told the judge they would feel unsafe if their mother was ever released from prison.

“I’m afraid if she gets out, she will come after me and my brothers, my whole family,” said the oldest boy, who is now 13. “I think she would come and take us and not do good things to us, like hurt us.”

The middle child, now 11, said he was sad that his dad won’t be present for major milestones. With his mother behind bars, he said he can “live a happy and successful life without fear of [her] hurting me or anyone I love”.

The youngest said he would be “so scared” if his mother was released.

Judges in Utah typically impose sentences as a broad range rather than a fixed number of years.

The most serious charge, aggravated murder, is punishable by 25 years to life in prison, or a life sentence without parole. Prosecutors did not push for the death penalty.

The Utah grief author convicted of murder after prosecutors said she laced her husband’s cocktail with a fatal dose of fentanyl is expected to be sentenced Wednesday, on what would have been his 44th birthday.

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Kouri Richins, 36, was found guilty in March of aggravated murder, attempted aggravated murder, fraud, and forgery in the March 4, 2022, death of Eric Richins. She told investigators that they had been celebrating a business deal when she found him unresponsive in the bedroom of their home.

A medical examiner determined that Eric had five times the lethal dose of fentanyl in his system — illicit, not medical-grade — and that it had been orally ingested.

Prosecutors requested that Richins be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the aggravated murder charge, according to a sentencing memorandum filed Monday. They also asked for a standing protective order covering Eric’s family members, including the couple’s three children.

Judge Richard Mrazik said he could not issue the order because of how the law is written.

In the sentencing memo, the children said they would be fearful if Richins were ever released.

“I’m afraid if she gets out, she will come after me and my brothers, my whole family,” one son, who is now 13, said, according to the memo. “I think she would come and take us and not do good things to us, like hurt us. … I miss my dad, but I do not miss how my life used to be, I don’t miss Kouri, I will tell you that.”

Another son recalled the night of the murder, saying he was put to bed early without a bath — unusual for the family. When he tried to enter his parents’ bedroom that night, his mother yelled at him to go away, according to the memo. He also said his mother did not sleep in his room that night, contradicting what she had previously told investigators.

“I will not feel safe” if she is released, he said.

“With [her] in jail, I will be able to continue to feel safe and live a happy and successful life without fear of [her] hurting me or anyone I love,” the son said.

The third son, who was in preschool at the time of Eric’s death, said he felt scared that night and wet his pants, the memo states. The child said whenever someone talks about his mother, “it makes me feel hateful and ashamed,” according to the memo.

“She took away my dad,” the son said, according to the memo, adding, “if she got out I would be so scared. … I’m worried that she would take me away. … Once she is gone I will feel happy and I will feel safer and relaxed and trust people more.”

All three children have undergone intensive therapy and are being raised by Eric’s sister and her husband, the memo states.

Gene Richins, Eric’s father, said in an impact statement that his son’s death was a “permanent hole in our family that will never be filled.”

“No parent should ever have to bury their child,” he said. “It’s a loss that changes you forever.”

Eric’s sister, Katie Richins-Benson, cried and said her brother’s death has been “devastating.”

“Nearly every aspect of our lives has been permanently changed, and we have no choice but to live with those changes and Eric’s loss forever,” she said.

Richins stared at her sister-in-law and made faces as she spoke about Richins allegedly trying to take Eric’s money after his death. At one point, Richins leaned over to whisper to her attorney.

Richins was arrested in May 2023, shortly after she appeared on a local television station to promote a children’s book she wrote about grief. In the book titled “Are You With Me?,” a child loses his father and questions whether he is still with him for special moments in his life.

Richins dedicated the book to “my amazing husband and a wonderful father.” The book was eventually removed from Amazon.

During her weekslong trial, friends of Richins and Eric described how the couple had moments of material strife and struggled with infidelity. Allison Wright, whose husband owned a stone masonry business with Eric, testified about a time Richins told her that she felt “trapped” in her marriage because of a prenuptial agreement.

Wright told the courtroom that Richins worried that Eric would be “financially secure, and her the opposite” if they divorced. Richins also had concerns about “how she would be represented by him in the community,” Wright testified.

Another friend, Becky Lloyd, testified that Richins had confided in her about feeling stuck in the marriage.

“She said that in many ways it would be better if he were dead,” Lloyd testified.

Richins’ attorneys tried to undermine Lloyd’s testimony by playing a recording of Lloyd telling someone that she could not confidently say on the stand that Richins wanted her husband dead.

Other friends testified about a time Eric told them how he got sick after he ate a sandwich his wife had made him on Valentine’s Day 2022. One of the charges against Richins is connected to this incident after prosecutors accused her of poisoning his sandwich in an attempt to kill him. Court documents state that Eric broke out in hives after taking a bite of the sandwich, used his son’s EpiPen, and then took a nap.

Richins’ friend Allie Staking told the court that Eric did not seem upset about what happened. But Eric’s friend, Josh Kraze, testified that Eric was “somber” and “very serious” when he called and told him about the situation. Cody Wright, Eric’s business partner and friend, said Eric had “fear in his voice” when he told him about it.

Richins’ former boyfriend, Robert Josh Grossman, also took the stand, occasionally getting emotional as he talked about the “guilt” and “sorrow” he had about their affair. He told the court that the relationship ended a few months after Eric’s death.

One of the most pivotal testimonies came from Richins’ housekeeper, Carmen Lauber, who testified about purchasing illicit pills for her in early 2022. Lauber told the courtroom that Richins asked for pills on three occasions, including days before Valentine’s Day 2022.

After Eric’s death, Lauber said she spoke to Richins over the phone.

“I said, ‘Please tell me these pills were not for him,’” Lauber testified. “She said, no they were not. Eric passed away from a brain aneurysm.”

Richins did not testify at her trial, and her defense team rested without calling any witnesses.

The young sons of Utah author Kouri Richins said ahead of her sentencing hearing Wednesday that they would feel unsafe if their mother was ever released from prison after she was found guilty in March of killing their father, and one of the boys recalled highly unusual circumstances on the night his father died.

Richins, 35, faces several decades to life in prison on five felony convictions, including aggravated murder.

Prosecutors said she laced her husband Eric Richins’ cocktail with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl in March 2022 at their home near the ski town of Park City.

She then self-published a children’s book titled “Are You With Me?” about a boy coping with the death of his father shortly before her arrest in May 2023. She even promoted the book on a local Utah television news program.

In the book, Eric Richins is portrayed as an angel who is always close by.

“Yes, I am with you on Christmas,” Kouri Richins writes, “You can’t see my smile but it’s there. I’m here, and we’re together.”

Kouri Richins’ attorneys declined to comment Tuesday before her sentencing hearing, which falls on the day her husband would have turned 44.

The statements from their sons, who were ages 9, 7 and 5 when their father died, came in a memo from prosecutors urging Judge Richard Mrazik to sentence Richins to life without parole.

The oldest child, now 13, said he wants the court to know that he does not miss his mom.

“I’m afraid if she gets out, she will come after me and my brothers, my whole family,” he said. “I think she would come and take us and not do good things to us, like hurt us.”

Prosecutors allege that the boy suffered emotional and physical abuse from Kouri Richins after his father’s death, which they say is supported by findings from the Utah Division of Child and Family Services that are contained in a sealed court document.

Kouri Richins was a real estate agent with a house-flipping business who was millions in debt and planning a future with another man, prosecutors said. She had opened numerous life insurance policies on her husband without his knowledge and falsely believed she would inherit his estate worth more than $4 million after he died.

“He [Eric Richins] told his family, ‘If I die, you need to take a look at her because I think she’s trying to kill me,'” family spokesman Greg Skordas told “48 Hours” in a February 2024 interview.

Prosecutors alleged Kouri Richins had asked the family housekeeper to procure fentanyl for her in early 2022, and the housekeeper admitted to investigators that she had sold fentanyl to her, court documents obtained by “48 Hours” state.

“He wasn’t an opioid user…This doesn’t smell right,” Skordas told “48 Hours” of Eric Richins’ cause of death.   

Jurors also found Kouri Richins guilty of other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Valentine’s Day with a fentanyl-laced sandwich that made him black out.

And according to court documents, Eric Richins’ family suspected that his wife had also attempted to poison him in 2019 during a vacation in Greece, when he fell ill after she served him a drink.

Boy recalls unusual circumstances on night of dad’s death

The Richins’ middle child, now 11, refuted his mother’s claim that she slept in his bedroom with him on the night of his father’s death. He recalled unusual circumstances from that night, like being put to bed early without a bath, his parents’ bedroom being locked and the television blaring from inside. The boy said his mother yelled at him to go away after he used a broom to try to reach a key to their bedroom, where Richins later told a 911 operator she found her husband cold to the touch.

The 11-year-old told the judge he is sad that his dad can no longer take him camping and fishing, coach him in sports or be present for major milestones. Like his older brother, he said he would feel unsafe if his mom wasn’t behind bars.

“With (her) in jail, I will be able to continue to feel safe and live a happy and successful life without fear of (her) hurting me or anyone I love,” his statement read.

The youngest son said he feels “hateful and ashamed” when people talk about his mom because “she took away my dad.” He said he would be “so scared” if his mother got out of prison.

“Once she is gone I will feel happy and I will feel safer and relaxed and trust people more,” said the boy, whose current age was not provided in the memo.

Kouri Richins also faces more than two dozen money-related criminal charges in a separate case that has not yet gone to trial.

Her aggravated murder conviction alone is punishable either by a range of 25 years to life in prison, or a life sentence without parole. Prosecutors did not push for the death penalty.

A plan to create one of the world’s largest datacenters, a gargantuan project spanning an area more than twice the size of Manhattan, has provoked a furious public backlash in Utah amid concerns over its vast energy use and impact upon the state’s stressed water supplies.

The Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 sq miles) over three sites in Box Elder county in north-western Utah. The facility will require about 9GW of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes, and suck up a significant amount of water in an area that has been hit by severe drought in recent years.

Last week, the project was approved by the county’s commissioners, despite thousands of objections lodged by Utah residents. Environmentalists have warned that Stratos could imperil the Great Salt Lake ecosystem, including a critical migratory bird habitat, which is already under severe stress.

The lake is shrinking due to water diverted for agriculture and the impact of the climate crisis, placing inhabitants of the nearby Salt Lake City at possible risk of toxic dust clouds as the lake bed dries up.

“At a time when the Great Salt Lake is already in crisis, approving a project that will consume water and energy at this scale is irresponsible and dangerous,” said Franque Bains, director of the Sierra Club’s Utah chapter. “Utahns want to see the Great Salt Lake restored, not stripped.”

The proposed project is backed by Kevin O’Leary, the venture capitalist who appears on the TV show Shark Tank and recently played a villainous tycoon in the movie Marty Supreme. O’Leary has claimed Stratos will deliver thousands of jobs and help the US compete with China in the burgeoning AI industry.

“I don’t think there’s a bigger site in the world than this,” O’Leary told Fox News. “It shows the Chinese and the rest of the world we are not messing around, we are going to get this done, move it forward and provide the compute power to our AI companies that defend the country.”

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In an X post, O’Leary added: “We’re not gonna drain the Great Salt Lake. That’s ridiculous. We are gonna create incremental jobs.”

But these jobs will not outweigh the longer-term impacts to Utah and beyond, critics argue. Stratos is expected to raise the state’s planet-heating pollution by about 50% by consuming a huge amount of energy and water to power and cool itself, according to one impact analysis.

The network of industrial-scale fans needed to cool the datacenter’s hot pipes will result in so much waste heat that it could raise daytime temperatures in the surrounding Hansel valley by 2F to 5F (1.1C to 2.7C) and night-time temperatures by 8F to 12F (4.4C to 6.6C), according to an analysis by Rob Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University.

“The thermal load from the proposed Stratos project is extreme,” Davies said. “Of course it has effects. One of those effects is this: this facility imposes substantial drying on a watershed and ecosystem already in active collapse.”

O’Leary said the extra electricity demand won’t raise residents’ energy bills as new gas-fired generation will power the facility. “We are building power from scratch, from the pipeline,” he said. “We are going to burn it with turbines, clean,” he added, although gas is a fossil fuel that is dangerously overheating the world and isn’t clean.

Nearly 4,000 people have lodged objections to the project being approved, with this pushback leading to contentious public meetings that Lee Perry, the Box Elder county commissioner, said have left him feeling “physically sick” amid alleged death threats and false accusations.

O’Leary has claimed in social media posts that most of the protesters don’t live locally and have been paid to object to the project. “There are professional protesters that are paid by somebody, I don’t know who,” O’Leary said in a video posted to X last week. “They’re being bused in.”

Opponents of the project have rejected this accusation. On Monday, a group calling itself the Box Elder Accountability Referendum filed an application for a referendum to reverse the commissioners’ approval of Stratos. If the group is able to collect 5,422 signatures from registered voters in the county in the next 45 days, the project approval will go to a vote in November.

“Instead of speaking with us, Kevin O’Leary went on social media saying we were out-of-state, paid protesters, and we don’t want people from out-of-state making decisions for us,” said Brenna Williams, lead sponsor of the referendum push.

“The only thing he’s right about is that we don’t want him, an out-of-state billionaire, making decisions for us.”

Last week, there was a further twist when the developers withdrew their application to divert 1,900 acre-feet of water from ranching to the project. However, Stratos “fully intends to move forward” with a new application set to be lodged with state regulators, according to the developers.

This new process will invalidate the objections already raised by Utahns and require each person to pay $15 to file a new complaint. Opponents claim this move is aimed at skirting public disapproval of the project.

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“I keep trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, but this has all the hallmarks of an out-of-state megaproject with little to no concern for the local community,” said Ben Abbott, an ecologist at Brigham Young University and executive director of Grow the Flow, a group that aims to protect the Great Salt Lake.

The growth of datacenters across the US has been championed by Donald Trump’s administration and the AI industry, but has been met with local unrest. Anger at growing electricity bills and fears of water depletion have helped spur several local and state election victories for candidates skeptical of the AI sector’s unfettered growth.

Faced with a similar public backlash in Utah, Spencer Cox, the state’s governor, on Friday said he will require that the Stratos project doesn’t harm the Great Salt Lake or raise power bills. The developers will build the datacenter in phases, he said, initially spanning 2,000 acres before scaling up further subject to future reviews.

“Utahns should expect clear standards and accountability,” Cox said. Last year, the governor asked people in Utah to pray and fast to help break fierce drought conditions.

“Industry is our state’s motto,” Cox added on Friday. “And in our pursuit of economic strength, we must always ensure that development is thoughtful and in line with Utah values.”