Let’s start with the defense’s official position, because you need to hear it before you hear anything else.
The six-page letter at the center of this conversation — the one with state evidence numbers stamped across every page, the one prosecutors say is one of the most damning documents in this entire case — is not a letter, according to Kouri Richins’ attorneys. It’s fiction. Part of a 65-page mystery manuscript she was writing while in jail. The six pages everyone has been talking about are, per the defense, a creative exercise. A character study. A chapter in a book.
Hold that thought. Because here is where the letter was found.
Not in a writing folder. Not in a stack of manuscript pages. It was found hidden inside a book during a search of her jail cell. And here is how it opens — the very first line, before any story, before any character, before any plot:
“Walk The Dog!! But take vague notes so you remember.”
That’s the title. That’s the instruction. Memorize what’s in here, then walk the dog — meaning get up, go outside, make the letter disappear before anyone finds it. She built the cover-up into the first sentence.
Ask yourself: does that sound like a novelist setting a scene? Or does it sound like someone telling another person to destroy the evidence?
Because here’s the thing about fiction — it doesn’t need a destruction instruction. This letter came with its own cover story baked in. And that tells you everything you need to know before we read a single word of the actual content.
Kouri Richins has pleaded not guilty to all charges and is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. But we’re going to go through this letter — all six pages — and decode exactly what she was trying to communicate, who she was communicating it to, and why prosecutors believe every word of it points in the same direction.
So first — who are these people?
Kouri Richins is a Utah real estate agent and mother of three, currently on trial for the alleged murder of her husband Eric Richins. Eric was 39 years old. He died in March of 2022 in their home in Kamas, Utah. The medical examiner determined he died of a lethal fentanyl overdose. Prosecutors say Kouri put it there. She says she didn’t. She has pleaded not guilty to aggravated murder, attempted murder, insurance fraud, and forgery. After Eric died, she wrote a children’s book about coping with grief. That detail matters for context — it tells you something about how she processes, or performs, loss.
The letter is written to her mother, Lisa Darden. That’s the recipient. That’s who she’s talking to across these six pages — the woman she closes the letter by calling “the best mom in the whole world.” Also referenced: her brother, who she calls Ronney throughout; her defense attorney Skye Lazaro, referred to simply as “Skye”; a man she calls “Lotto”; Eric’s sister Katie Richins-Bensen, who filed a wrongful death civil suit against Kouri after the criminal charges were filed; and several women she assigns specific speaking roles to for a national television appearance.
Every single one of those people is real. Every single one of them is being handed a task. Keep that in mind as we go through this.
Page one. She opens by telling her mother that Skye — her defense attorney — is worried about a specific prosecution argument. The theory is that even if fentanyl was found in gummies in the home, prosecutors will argue Kouri put it there. So the defense needs a counter-narrative. They need a way to show that Eric had his own independent source of fentanyl — something that has nothing to do with Kouri, something that explains how fentanyl ended up in his body without her involvement.
And Kouri, sitting in her jail cell, has already solved that problem. The solution is her brother.
Here’s what she tells her mother to do. Meet Ronney in person — not by phone, not by text, because she fears the house and phones are being monitored. Once you’re with him, pass along this story: approximately one year before Eric’s death, Ronney was at their house watching football on a Sunday. Eric and Ronney started talking. Eric told him that he gets pills and fentanyl from workers at a ranch in Mexico — and asked Ronney to keep it secret from Kouri, because she’d get mad. Eric told him he kept the drugs hidden in an allergy pill bottle inside his work truck so she wouldn’t find them.
Now stop. Read that back knowing she is writing it from jail.
She writes the setting. Football Sunday. She writes the duration — she specifically tells her mother to tell Ronney it was a quick, two-minute conversation, don’t overanalyze it. She writes the dialogue. She writes the emotional motivation — Eric wanted secrecy because of what Kouri would think. She writes the physical hiding spot for the drugs. And then she tells her mother to get this story to Ronney before he meets with Skye, so that when her own brother sits down with her own defense attorney, the story is already locked in.
She even reaches for legal framing to package it. She writes “upon information and belief” — a phrase used in legal filings to introduce testimony that isn’t firsthand knowledge. And then, immediately after writing it, she adds: “LOL.”
That LOL is not a throwaway. That LOL tells you she knows exactly what she’s doing. She’s using legal language deliberately, as a wrapper to make a fabricated story sound like legitimate testimony — and she’s so comfortable with what she’s constructing that she’s laughing at herself while she does it.
She closes this section with a line that removes any remaining ambiguity: “Reword this however he needs to, to make the point. Just include it all.”
That is not a memory. That is a script with editorial notes attached.
And understand why the script needs to exist. If her brother testifies that Eric told him a year before his death that he was getting fentanyl from a Mexico ranch — that creates an alternative pathway. It means fentanyl was already in Eric’s life, independently, before Kouri allegedly introduced it. It means reasonable doubt. That’s what she’s building, page by page, from a jail cell, using her own brother as the instrument.
But she doesn’t stop there. Woven through the same pages is a second narrative she wants distributed across multiple witnesses. The claim that Eric used to hide drugs in her luggage at airports — right before boarding — so that if security found anything, Kouri would take the fall, not him. Once they landed, she writes, he’d pull the drugs back out of her bag and they’d fight about it. He’d laugh. She was furious.
Here’s the decode: she’s not sharing this as a memory. She’s pre-loading it into the record through multiple mouths. If drug evidence surfaces at trial that implicates her, she wants witnesses already on record saying Eric used to set her up for exactly this. She’s building a rebuttal before the prosecution finishes making their argument. That’s not grief. That’s architecture.
Page three. She tells her mother to contact a man she refers to throughout as “Lotto.” The message is simple: do not text anything that puts the two of them together. Not church. Not skiing. Not trips. Nothing. Her exact words: “it doesn’t look good.”
During this trial, testimony has emerged about Kouri’s alleged boyfriend — a relationship the prosecution has argued as part of the financial motive case. Lotto is almost certainly a reference to that person or someone in a similar role. What she’s doing here is trying to erase a relationship from the documentary trail while sitting in jail. No texts. No record. No connection. Because it doesn’t look good.
She’s managing evidence. Actively. From custody.
Page four is where it gets darker in a specific way. She tells her mother to go through her phone and find photos of Katie’s daughters. Print them. Mail them anonymously to media companies. The goal: make Katie “livid.” She adds — almost cheerfully — “if not, no worries.”
Katie is Katie Richins-Bensen. Eric’s sister. The woman who filed a wrongful death civil lawsuit against Kouri after the criminal charges were filed. She is not just a grieving family member — she is a legal adversary. And what Kouri is describing is targeted retaliation against that adversary, routed through her children’s images, executed anonymously to avoid being traced back.
The “if not, no worries” is what you need to sit with. She’s not suggesting this in a panic. She’s not desperate. She’s offering it as a casual option — something to get to when there’s a free moment between coordinating GMA appearances and scripting brother testimony. The offhandedness is the tell. She’s thought through the method, the routing, and the deniability. This isn’t impulsive. It’s calculated enough to include an escape hatch.
Pages five and six. She coordinates a Good Morning America interview being arranged by her defense team. And she doesn’t just encourage the women involved to share their perspectives — she assigns them lines.
One is told to bring up that Eric hadn’t been to church in the thirteen years she’d known him. One is instructed to deliver the airport drug narrative — specifically, verbatim — including the detail that Eric would laugh about it and say “well, I can’t get in trouble.” One is told to describe an incident in Spain where Eric allegedly couldn’t drink and spent the trip looking for drugs instead. One is assigned the angle that Eric’s sisters were always jealous of Kouri — her career, her home, her success — and that this whole case comes down to jealousy, money, and an accidental overdose.
That last line is worth repeating. She writes: “This comes down to jealousy, money, and Eric’s partying that they don’t want to acknowledge, and sadly an accidental overdose.”
That is the conclusion she wants delivered on national television, assigned to a specific person, before a jury is seated. She’s not asking these women to tell their truth. She’s distributing a narrative with assigned roles, specific talking points, and a predetermined conclusion. That’s not a support network. That’s a production.
And then, at the end of page six, after all of it — the brother’s scripted testimony, the airport drug counter-narrative, the erased relationship, the retaliation against Eric’s sister through her children, the coordinated television strategy — she asks her mother to smuggle Crest whitening strips into her jail cell through her attorney’s envelope.
Her teeth have gotten yellow. Too much coffee and tea.
She’s managing her smile. For the cameras she’s already booked. She is thinking, at the end of six pages of what prosecutors call a witness tampering scheme, about what she’s going to look like on the other side of this. Not whether she’ll get there. What she’ll look like when she does.
The letter closes: “I love you, I love you, I love you. Hang in there. We’re getting there, slowly. You’re the best mom in the whole world.”
We’re getting there.
Now. Back to the defense’s position. This is fiction. A 65-page manuscript. A creative exercise. Here is why prosecutors say that argument falls apart under its own weight: it was hidden inside a book in her jail cell, not organized with manuscript pages. The title is a destruction instruction — novelists don’t tell their readers to burn chapter one. It is addressed to her real mother, by implication, and references her real attorney by name. It contains accurate, specific details about her actual legal strategy and her real case. And it ends with “I love you, I love you, I love you” — which is, to anyone paying attention, a hell of a way to close a chapter of fiction.
A twelve-person jury is now looking at this letter. They are looking at it in a courtroom where — because of legal constraints around Kouri’s detention — they’re not even supposed to know it came from a jail cell. Prosecutors are actively working through how to present it without revealing that detail. The letter that was supposed to disappear on a dog walk is now the subject of courtroom arguments about how best to show it to the people who will decide her fate.
Eric Richins was 39 years old. He died in his home. His children grew up without him. And if prosecutors are right, the person who allegedly put fentanyl in his system spent the years that followed using her mother as a courier, her brother as a witness, her friends as a media team, and a stranger’s children as leverage — all from a jail cell, all while worrying about her teeth.
She called it “Walk the Dog.” She thought it would vanish.
Twelve people are reading it right now.
This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.
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