“If he could just go away and you could just be here. Life would be so perfect.”
Kouri Richins typed those words to her boyfriend while her husband was still alive. And on the four-year anniversary of the morning Eric Richins was found dead in his own bed, a jury in Park City, Utah sat in a courtroom and heard that message read aloud.
Kouri Richins has pleaded not guilty to the murder of her husband. She maintains her innocence, and she is presumed innocent under the law. But the prosecution spent this day doing something the forensic accountants and cell tower maps couldn’t quite do — they made it human. They put a man on that stand who loved her, who read her words in front of strangers, who broke down more than once, and who told the jury that when Kouri asked him what it feels like to kill someone, he didn’t think anything of it.
We’ll get there.
First, you need to understand who Robert Josh Grossman is — because his testimony only lands if you know what this relationship actually was.
Grossman met Kouri about a decade ago in South Carolina. He answered a help-wanted ad for a house-flipping project. They stayed in contact on and off for years, and when Kouri’s real estate business started expanding, Grossman moved to Utah in 2020 to work for her. He lived rent-free in the homes she was flipping. She paid him when she could. She bought him two trucks. She booked him a birthday vacation to the island of Saint Martin. After Eric died, she paid him $25,000 for a house they’d flipped together.
He testified that he loved her. That he was, in his own words, the kind of man who goes “head over heels.” He said he thought she loved him too — though he probably loved her more.
This was not a fling. This was a years-long parallel life running alongside her marriage, financially tangled, emotionally loaded, and kept just below the surface. And in December 2021 — three months before Eric died — Kouri sent Grossman a text that the jury heard word for word. “I really enjoy my relationship and love for you,” she wrote, “but we both know this love triangle can’t go on forever. You don’t deserve it, I don’t deserve you. I can’t expect you to sit around for the day the trigger gets pulled.”
The trigger gets pulled.
That phrase is in evidence. The jury has it.
Now watch how the texts build from there, because the prosecution didn’t just show the jury a love affair. They showed them a timeline.
On January 9, 2022, Kouri texted Grossman asking if he’d ever done drugs besides marijuana, and how recently. She said the show “Dopesick” — about the prescription opioid epidemic — had put it on her mind. January 9, 2022. According to prosecutors, the first drug purchase from Carmen Lauber — the housekeeper who testified earlier in this trial to buying opiates for Kouri — happened in late January or early February of the same year. The jury can draw the line themselves.
Less than a month before Eric died, Kouri asked Grossman: “If I was divorced right now and ask you to marry me tomorrow, you would?” He responded: “Yes. In Love with Y O U! Of course I would.” A few days later she wrote, “I want you today, every day.”
Then came the dream text — February 23, 2022. Kouri told Grossman she’d had a dream. In it, he quit his job. She got divorced. They came up with millions. They bought the Midway Mansion together, rented it out for $12,000 a night, and started a farm. Grossman wrote back that it was a powerful dream and asked if he’d get to see the mansion. Three days later, according to prosecutors, the third and final drug purchase from Carmen Lauber took place — the batch that, according to prosecutors, contained the fentanyl used to kill Eric Richins on the morning of March 4, 2022.
The week Eric died, Kouri was texting Grossman about their Friday plans. Brunch. Mimosas. A celebration of the Midway mansion closing. She told him: “Can I try Friday? Give me a few days? Hang in there until then please?” The night before Eric died, Grossman texted back: “I will happily take any bit of time I get with you! But, if we’re going to celebrate, I want to celebrate! Blow up balloons, champagne, I wanna be there when the news comes in! Seeing and hearing your reaction! Waiting to pounce on you with the hugs and kisses, the confetti and the music!”
Friday morning, Kouri didn’t show up for brunch. Grossman texted to see what was going on. Eventually, three separate texts came back. “Eric passed away.” Then: “Talk later.” Later, she told him they thought it was an aneurysm.
Grossman sat on that stand and read all of it. At one point, the emotion was so visible that the judge called a recess. The prosecutor asked if Grossman needed a moment to stretch his legs. He said: “It ain’t the legs.”
That’s the moment that will stay with people who watched today.
Here’s the part that changes everything. About ten to fourteen days after Eric died, Kouri and Grossman drove out to the Uinta Mountains. They sat in her vehicle. They talked about Eric’s boys, about God, about bowhunting, about life and death and the supernatural. And then — according to Grossman’s testimony — Kouri asked him if he had ever killed anybody. Referring to his military service in Iraq. She asked how it made him feel.
At the time, he didn’t find it alarming. He thought she was exhausted. He thought she was looking for a way to shift the conversation toward him and away from herself. He said: “Never for a moment did I have a clue, a hint, not a fleeting thought that something intentionally might have happened to him, let alone from her.”
That was then.
After he learned she had been arrested, Grossman said he looked back at everything with, in his words, “a different set of goggles.” He reached out to Eric’s family. They connected him with their private investigator, who told him directly that he believed Kouri had done it. And that changed everything for Grossman. “If she did it, and I could help, that’s what I was gonna do.”
The texts after Eric’s death were also entered into evidence. On April 8, 2022 — one month after Eric died — Kouri texted Grossman: “I think I want you to be my husband one day.” On April 15, after police had searched her home for eight hours, she texted him: “I had 22 cops searching my damn house Wednesday for 8 hours. This shit just keeps getting worse and worse.” When Grossman asked why, she told him the toxicology report had come back and Eric had fentanyl in his system. She called it “freaking stupid and crazy.”
According to the texts entered into evidence, she was telling her boyfriend about the fentanyl in her husband’s blood. One month after Eric’s death. Two months after the text that said “if he could just go away.”
On cross-examination, defense attorney Wendy Lewis worked to reframe the relationship — noting it was more fantasy than expectation, that Grossman himself agreed being together was something he wanted but couldn’t quite picture becoming real. Lewis also established that Kouri had appeared sad and grieving after Eric’s death, and that Grossman himself acknowledged she seemed to change. Lewis asked directly whether Kouri seemed to be grieving. He said yes.
Those are real points. The jury will weigh them.
But before Grossman took the stand, the prosecution had already spent the morning revealing something else — something that reframes the entire picture of this marriage and what Eric Richins actually knew about his situation.
Eric was quietly preparing to protect himself. And almost nobody knew.
In late October 2020, Eric walked into the office of divorce attorney Christina Miller — referred by his brother-in-law Clint Benson, who told Miller the meeting was urgent. Eric spent two and a half hours discussing what a divorce would look like, how to protect his finances, and custody of his children. The custody conversation, Miller noted, was unusually brief. She gave Eric a to-do list at the end of the meeting — something she said she only does for clients who intend to proceed. Eric never filed. He asked that any future communications from Miller go through his brother-in-law directly — not through him.
Miller referred him to estate attorney Kristal Bowman-Carter. And what Bowman-Carter laid out on the stand was quietly devastating.
Eric came to her worried about his sons. He did not want to communicate by email because, he told her, he believed Kouri was reading them. He told Bowman-Carter that Kouri had misused his power of attorney to access $250,000 of his money. He wanted stronger protective language in the document. And then he stopped himself. He said: “She’s the mother of my children. I know she’s made mistakes and she needs more experience. For now I’m doing to do what I’m doing.” He did not revoke the power of attorney.
In November 2020, Eric signed a living trust. He named his sister, Katie Richins-Benson, as trustee upon his death — not Kouri. Bowman-Carter testified that choosing a sibling over a spouse as trustee was unusual. Kouri was not entirely cut out — she could access the trust for health, education, and support — but control of Eric’s estate would pass to Katie the moment he died. Eric’s total assets at the time were valued at $7.6 million.
Bowman-Carter opened probate just ten days after Eric died. She acknowledged that was not typical — normally she would wait a year. The reason she moved so quickly was to get Katie Richins-Benson in place to manage the estate and carry out Eric’s wishes as fast as possible.
When Kouri learned about the trust on the day Eric died — in a phone call put through by a sheriff’s deputy — her reaction was immediate. According to Bowman-Carter: “She was livid. She was upset. And she said, ‘What is wrong with you people?’ and handed the phone back to the officer.”
The defense disputes that this was the moment Kouri first learned of the trust. But the reaction is on record.
Eric had spent two years quietly building legal walls around himself and his children — walls he never told Kouri about — and on the morning she called 911 to report his death, she found out those walls existed.
The insurance picture also came into sharper focus. New York Life agent Lashawnda Rodgers testified that in January 2022, someone used Kouri’s email to attempt to change the beneficiary on Eric’s business partner Cody Wright’s life insurance policy — switching it from Eric to Kouri Richins. The change was reversed within days. The defense argued anyone could have been using Kouri’s email and confirmed that no final change went through. But the attempt happened in January 2022 — the same month Kouri asked Grossman about drug use, the same month the first alleged drug purchase occurred.
Two separate TruStage policies on Eric’s life also came into evidence. One for $250,000, one for $100,000. The $100,000 policy was purchased just one month before Eric died — and was contestable because he didn’t survive two years past the purchase date. The $250,000 policy would have paid an extra $50,000 had the fentanyl in Eric’s system been prescribed by a doctor. When Kouri called the insurer to inquire about the claims, she told them the fentanyl was not prescribed and said she didn’t know where it came from. Both policies paid out. Anne Coates of CMFG Life Insurance testified separately that Kouri had called her company numerous times asking about the status of payments.
The defense also moved for a mistrial today after learning that Carmen Lauber — the housekeeper who testified to purchasing drugs on Kouri’s behalf — had allegedly violated her drug court agreement involving an alcoholic beverage. Prosecutors said they believed the underlying information had been disclosed to the defense three weeks earlier. Judge Mrazik asked for the motion in writing. The defense also accused prosecutors of making faces at the jury during cross-examination. The judge dismissed it: “The only faces I’ve seen are counsel at me.”
A jury sat in a courtroom on the four-year anniversary of Eric Richins’ death and learned that Eric had known something was wrong. That he’d gone to a divorce attorney without telling Kouri. That he’d built a trust to protect his boys and keep control out of her hands. That he told his estate attorney she had taken a quarter million dollars of his money — and then chose not to act because she was the mother of his children. That he was afraid she was reading his emails.
Eric Richins was not blind. He was not passive. He was a man trying to protect himself from something he couldn’t fully name, taking quiet legal steps he hoped would be enough, holding back from the harder decision because he loved his kids and couldn’t bring himself to blow everything up.
And then the jury heard from the man Kouri was in love with — who moved to Utah for her, who broke down reading her texts, who drove into the mountains with her two weeks after Eric died and answered her question about what it feels like to take a life.
The trial continues. But today had a weight that spreadsheets don’t carry.
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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