The Utah mother going through fees for allegedly killing her husband and later publishing a kids’s e book on how to deal with grief was indicted Friday in reference to a sequence of monetary crimes associated to his dying.
Kouri Richins, 34, was charged in reference to greater than two dozen counts of mortgage fraud, forgery, issuing a nasty verify, cash laundering, communications fraud, and a sample of illegal exercise within the months earlier than her husband, Eric Richins, 39, was poisoned in 2022.
The brand new fees come greater than two years after the mom of three was arrested and charged in connection along with her husband’s killing, which she pleaded not responsible to.
In keeping with the indictment, Richins used an influence of legal professional in 2019 to acquire a $250,000 house fairness line of credit score (HELOC) on a home her husband owned earlier than they bought married with out his information. She then allegedly invested the cash in her actual property enterprise.
“The key origination and continued existence of the HELOC was a supply of pressure between the Defendant and Eric Richins,” the indictment says. “The Defendant knowledgeable Eric Richins that she would repay the mortgage and led Eric Richins to consider that she had repaid it. The HELOC was not paid off on the day of Eric Richins’ dying.”
Eric Richins then allegedly consulted an property planning lawyer in 2020 to “defend himself within the short-term from just lately found and ongoing abuse and misuse of his funds by the Defendants, and to guard his three kids within the long-term by guaranteeing that the Defendant would by no means be capable of handle his property after his dying,” the indictment alleges.
Richins can be accused of stealing greater than $100,000 from her husband’s enterprise and spending tens of 1000’s of {dollars} on his bank cards, the indictment says.
Kouri Richins’ attorneys, Kathy Nester and Wendy Lewis, mentioned the brand new fees have been “extraordinarily troubling.”
“This sudden push to file new fraud fees over two years later underscores the weak spot of the state’s pending homicide fees, since these fraud fees wouldn’t even come into play until they fail to safe a conviction,” the attorneys mentioned in an announcement.
Kouri Richins’ arrest gained nationwide consideration as a result of she revealed a kids’s e book titled “Are You with Me?”— which tells the story of a kid whose useless father watches over him as an angel — and promoted the e book on nationwide tv.
Eric Richins was discovered unresponsive within the pair’s Utah house — about 40 miles southeast of Salt Lake Metropolis — after having had a cocktail to rejoice his spouse’s enterprise deal.
5 occasions the deadly dose of “illicit,” non-medical-grade fentanyl was present in his system, in accordance with the native health worker’s workplace.
His homicide trial is scheduled to start in February 2026.
