An American woman who wrote a children’s book about grief after poisoning her husband has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. American media report this.
Kouri Richins, 36, was found guilty of murder in March. According to the judge, the mother of three children is ‘too dangerous to ever be released again’.
Richins reacted visibly shocked to the verdict in court. She has always maintained that she is innocent. Her lawyers have announced they will appeal. On Wednesday, Richins responded by saying the verdict was “an absolute lie.”
Deadly fentanyl
According to prosecutors, Richins killed her husband Eric Richins in 2022 by serving him a cocktail containing five times the lethal dose of fentanyl, allowing her to inherit $4 million and receive another $2 million from life insurance policies she secretly took out in his name. She would have envisioned a future with another man.
In addition to murder, the jury also found her guilty of four other crimes, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder, because she had tried to poison her husband with a fentanyl sandwich a few weeks earlier, on Valentine’s Day.
Richins wrote a children’s book after the death of her husband, entitled Are you with me?in her own words to help her three sons cope. The children were 9, 7 and 5 years old when their father died. They had statements read out in court that they were afraid of their mother.
Eric Richins’ father, Eugene Richins, had asked the judge to impose a life sentence without the possibility of parole to protect his grandsons. “This sentence is important so that Eric’s three sons never have to live in fear that the person responsible for their father’s death could ever harm them again,” he said.
