In written testimony, two friends of Eric Richins recounted phone conversations from the day prosecutors say he was first poisoned by his wife of nine years. After injecting himself with his son’s EpiPen and chugging a bottle of Benadryl, he awoke from a deep sleep and told a friend, “I think my wife tried to poison me,” charging documents allege.

Housekeeper Carmen Lauber told police that Kouri Richins subsequently asked her to procure stronger fentanyl, Detective Jeff O’Driscoll said on the first day of the hearing on Monday.

“She learned that putting it in a sandwich, where Eric Richins could take a bite, feel the effects, set the sandwich down, was not the proper way to administer a fatal dose of fentanyl,” Bloodworth told the judge. “She learned that it takes a truckload to kill him.”

Days later, Kouri Richins called 911 in the middle of the night to report that she had found her husband “cold to the touch” at the foot of their bed, according to a police report. He was pronounced dead, and a medical examiner later found five times the lethal dosage of fentanyl in his system.

Defence attorneys Kathy Nester and Wendy Lewis argued that because police never found fentanyl in the Richinses’ home, detectives could not be certain that the drugs Kouri Richins bought from the housekeeper matched those found in Eric Richins’ system.

“These are great trial arguments,” Mrazik responded, but he wondered aloud whether any of their arguments were strong enough to make the case that there wasn’t probable cause for the charges.

“We are aware that the preliminary hearing stage favours the prosecution to an extraordinary degree and respect the court’s decision,” Nester and Lewis said in a joint statement after the hearing. “We firmly believe the charges against Kouri do not withstand thorough scrutiny and are confident that a jury will find the same.”

Mrazik recently appointed the pair of attorneys to represent Kouri Richins after he determined she was unable to continue paying for private lawyers. Prosecutors say she mistakenly believed she would inherit her husband’s estate under the terms of their prenuptial agreement, and had taken out life insurance policies on him without his knowledge that totalled nearly $US2 million.

Court records indicate Eric Richins met an attorney in October 2020 to discuss the possibility of filing for divorce, which he never did, and to quietly cut his wife out of his will.

In the months before her arrest in May 2023, the Utah mother self-published the children’s book Are You with Me? about a father with angel wings watching over his young son after passing away. The book could eventually play a key role for prosecutors in framing Eric Richins’ death as a calculated killing with an elaborate cover-up attempt.

The judge scheduled a pretrial conference on September 23 for the prosecution and defence to discuss jury selection.

AP

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