Transcription
A person convicted of those things is simply too dangerous to ever be free. Accordingly, Ms. Richens, based on your conviction on count one, first-degree felony aggravated murder, the court hereby sentences you to life without parole.
Okay. So, May 13th, 2026, Park City, Utah. Now, the Summit County Courthouse on most days is a quiet building, unremarkable. It sits against the mountains of northern Utah, ski slopes in the background, open sky above it. Nothing about it screams drama. But on this day, this day was different. The room was packed, cameras were rolling, people were holding each other, and a judge, Judge Richard Morazzic, was about to speak words that would travel across the entire country.
So Corey Richens is sitting at the defense table. She is 35 years old, handcuffed at the front, wearing a neon green t-shirt over a long-sleeved gray shirt. And if you didn't know why she was there if no one had told you, you might have looked at her and thought soccer mom, PTA president, someone's neighbor. But you did know. And so did everyone else in that room.
The judge looked out at the courtroom. He had been through three weeks of testimony, 13 days of witnesses, more than 40 people taking that stand. All of them there to piece together what happened on the night of March 4th, 2022 at a house in Kamas, Utah. He had heard all of it, and now it was time.
"A person convicted of those things," he said, his voice measured, deliberate, "is simply too dangerous to ever be free." He paused. The room went silent. "Accordingly, Miss Richens, based on your conviction on count one, first-degree felony aggravated murder, the court hereby sentences you to life without parole."
Life without parole, four words. Four years in the making. Now, before we go back to the beginning, I need you to understand something. Before we talk about the marriage, the debt, the affair, the pills, the Moscow mule. Before we get to the children's book she published after her husband died, before the phone searches, the forged signatures. The emergency call to law enforcement the prosecutor said did not sound like a wife becoming a widow. Here is what I need you to hold on to.
Eric Richens saw this coming. He told his family. He warned them. He said the words out loud, and those words sounded almost too dark to be real. "If I die, look at her." He said that, and then he died. And the question that took four years and a full criminal trial to answer was whether the woman who handed him his last drink was the same woman who put the poison in it. Now we know. Let's go back to where it all started.
Okay. So before any of this, before the trial, before the arrest, before the children's book with the angel on the cover, there was Corey and Eric Richens. And by every outward appearance, they had built something beautiful. They got married on June 15th, 2013. Eric, hardworking guy from Utah, the kind of man who built things with his hands. He ran a stonemasonry business, C and E Stonemasonry. And he was the kind of person you'd find described in an obituary as devoted to his work, to his family, to his three boys. Those boys were everything to him. They were nine, seven, and five at the time of his death.
Now, Corey worked in real estate. She was an investor, a house flipper, someone who moved between properties and deals with the kind of confidence that people mistake for success. She seemed successful. Her friends thought she was successful. She talked like someone who had it all figured out. But here's the thing. There were cracks forming long before anyone could see them.
So, according to trial testimony, as far back as 2015, 2016, Corey had begun experiencing serious financial trouble. And according to a petition later filed by Eric's sister, Katie Richens-Gibson, Corey had allegedly started taking money from Eric to cover her losses in the house-flipping business. The debt was growing quietly and in ways that Eric may not have fully grasped yet.
Now, they had a prenuptial agreement signed when they got married. It outlined financial arrangements, said that several assets would remain Eric's in the event of a divorce. Key word there: divorce. Because if Eric died while they were still married, the calculus changed entirely. His assets, the masonry business, the equipment, the vehicles would transfer. Hold on to that.
Because by the time 2020 rolled around, something had shifted in this marriage. Something significant. Eric Richens, a man who loved his children deeply, who stayed in a troubled marriage partly for their sake, did something that told you everything about how bad things had gotten. He consulted a divorce attorney. Then he went to an estate planning attorney. And then, quietly, carefully, deliberately, he opened the Eric Richens Living Trust so that in the event of his death, his estate would be controlled by his sister for the benefit of his three children. He also moved his business interests into that trust. Think about that. Eric Richens at some point in 2020 looked at his life and made a legal decision to protect his estate from his own wife. That is not something people do casually. That is something people do when they are afraid. And he was not finished being afraid.
So here is where the marriage fractures completely. And here is where Corey Richens starts making decisions that prosecutors would later argue were the beginning of a calculated plan. In 2020, according to testimony at trial, Corey began an affair. His name was Robert Josh Grossman, a man who had served in the US military during the Iraq War. Corey and Josh worked together flipping houses. They talked about their futures. They talked about being together. And Corey sent him text messages. Text messages that, when read aloud in a courtroom four years later, left very little to the imagination.
Now listen to this. She wrote to Grossman roughly two weeks before Eric's death, "I do want a future together. I do want you. Figure life out together." Okay. And then this one: "If he could just go away and you could just be here, life would be so perfect. I love you. If he could just go away."
Now, look, people say things in the heat of romance. People send dramatic messages they don't actually mean. Is that possible here? The defense would argue exactly that. That these were the exaggerations of a woman caught up in an affair, not a murderer laying out her plan. Fair point. We'll give them that. But let's keep going because those messages, those are just the beginning.
So, a forensic accountant testified at trial, and this accountant painted a picture of Corey's business that was starkly different from the image she showed the world. She was not succeeding. She was drowning. Her real estate operation was, and this is the accountant's word, "imploding." She owed lenders more than $1.8 million. Caught in a relentless debt cycle with no real way out, she needed money. A lot of it.
And then here's where the insurance policies come in. According to prosecutors, Corey had taken out multiple life insurance policies on Eric without his knowledge, totaling approximately $2.2 million. One of those policies, which she was later convicted of applying for fraudulently, came into effect on a very specific date. And within weeks of that policy activating, Eric Richens was dead. That timing. You cannot explain away that timing.
So, let's draw the picture that prosecutors drew for the jury. A woman deeply in debt, in love with another man, who secretly insured her husband's life for millions of dollars, who had recently been cut out of his estate planning. What does that woman do next? The prosecution said she starts acquiring drugs. Pay attention here. Okay, this is where the case gets built piece by piece in a way that becomes very hard to dismiss.
So, in early 2022, investigators say Corey began reaching out to an acquaintance. She wanted medication. At first, she's asking about hydrocodone pills. She said they were for, and I want you to hear this, "an investor." But then she escalated. She told this acquaintance she wanted something stronger. She allegedly used a phrase. She called it "the Michael Jackson stuff." Now, crude reference, infamous one. Michael Jackson, as most people know, died from a lethal dose of propofol. The "milk of amnesia," some called it. Corey wasn't asking for propofol specifically, but the message was clear. She wanted something powerful, something dangerous, something that worked.
And that trail led straight to her housekeeper, a woman named Carmen Lobber. So Carmen Lobber takes the stand, and she testifies that Corey asked her to acquire drugs on four separate occasions. She says she purchased fentanyl pills for Corey, that Corey gave her permission to do it, and that she handed those pills over in a direct hand-to-hand exchange on or around February 11th or 12th, 2022.
Now, the defense attacked Lobber's credibility hard. They pointed out that she had changed her story multiple times about the drug transactions. And that is a fair point. Witnesses who change their stories are legitimate targets for cross-examination. Okay. But here's what the defense could not walk away from. Cell phone data.
Investigators got data from Corey's phone. It showed she had been in contact with her drug source multiple times in January of 2022. And then, critically, investigators found that Corey had deleted data from her phone. Data from January 2nd, 2022 through shortly after Eric's death. She deleted it. Now, why? Why would an innocent woman delete months of messages from her phone? The prosecution had an answer for that. The defense did not have a good one.
And then, and then there were the Google searches, found on Corey Richens' cell phone. "What is a lethal dose of fentanyl?" She misspelled fentanyl. She searched for it anyway. "Corey Richens' net worth." She searched her own net worth. And then this one, read it slowly: "If someone is poisoned, what does it go down on the death certificate as?"
Okay, stop. That is not a search a grieving widow runs after her husband dies unexpectedly. That is not something an innocent person types into a search bar. That is a search a person runs when they are actively thinking about what happens when poison kills someone and what the paperwork looks like afterward.
February 14th, 2022. Eric Richens called two friends that day. He told them he felt like he was going to die. He had eaten a sandwich, a sandwich his wife made him, and now he was breaking out in hives. He was having difficulty breathing. He did not go to the hospital. He recovered. But he told people. He told his family. He said Corey had been trying to poison him. And he even recounted the Valentine's Day incident to friends. And here is the part that stops you cold. One of those friends recalled Eric telling it almost like a dark, uncomfortable story. A funny story, one witness said, about Corey trying to poison him on Valentine's Day. There is nothing funny about that, but that is how people process fear when they cannot fully face it.
Now, one of Corey's own friends testified at trial. And this friend said that Corey had told her out loud, directly, that things would simply be better if Eric were dead. She said that. And Eric, for his part, had told his family in no uncertain terms, "If I die, you need to take a look at her because I think she is trying to kill me." A family spokesperson later said Eric stayed in the marriage because of the children. He loved those boys. He was not going to upend their world over his fears. So, he stayed.
And he was right to be afraid because, according to prosecutors, what happened on Valentine's Day 2022 was not an accident. It was the first attempt, the one that failed. The one that told her whatever she was doing, the dosage was not right. The timing was not right. She would need to try again. She had 17 days.
The judge at sentencing put it plainly. Corey Richens had been convicted of attempting to murder Eric Richens, her husband, the father of her three children, and then, having failed in that first effort, of spending the next 17 days not changing course, not having a change of heart, doubling down, preparing to try again. 17 days, not a moment of hesitation.
Prosecutors alleged she contacted her source again on February 26th, 12 days after the failed Valentine's Day attempt. She asked for another $900 worth of fentanyl pills, and she got them.
March 3rd, 2022. A night, by Corey's own account, worth celebrating. She had closed on a house for her real estate business. Good deal. She and Eric should mark the occasion. So, she made him a drink. A Moscow mule, vodka and ginger beer, served in those copper mugs, tart and cold. She brought it to him in the bedroom. He drank it in bed. He also took a THC gummy that night, something the defense would later point to as a complicating factor. And then Corey said one of their sons had a nightmare, so she went to sleep in the child's room around 9:30 in the evening. She told police she simply fell asleep. She was just a mother looking after her boy. That's her story.
Now, at around 3:22 in the morning on March 4th, 2022, Corey Richens placed an emergency call to law enforcement. She said she had woken up, gone back to the master bedroom, and found Eric cold at the foot of their bed.
>> What happened today?
>> He was just fine. We were fine.
>> When you said we were fine, what what what time did you see him when he was alert?
>> We had a drink together at 9 to celebrate something at work tomorrow.
>> Okay.
>> We went to bed. I went to bed with my kids. He went to bed in our bed.
>> What time did you guys go to bed?
>> 9:30.
>> 9:30. Okay.
>> 9:45.
>> And then what what uh what alleg... I just woke up. I when I sleep in my kids, I wake up and I go back in my own bed and I just crawled over on his side.
That emergency call was played in court, and prosecutors pointed to it not as evidence of grief, but as evidence of its absence. Prosecutor Brad Borthwick told the jury what they were hearing was not, and I want you to hear this line, "the sound of a wife becoming a widow. It's the sound of a wife becoming a black widow."
An autopsy was performed. The medical examiner's conclusion was not ambiguous. Eric Richens, 39 years old, father of three, had died of fentanyl intoxication taken orally, and the amount in his system was not a trace, not something explainable by accident, not recreational use. It was approximately five times the lethal dosage. Five times. Eric had no prior history of illicit drug use, no prescription drug abuse. The medical examiner found no signs of heart disease, no stroke, no natural cause of death, nothing except a catastrophic amount of synthetic opioid in his blood. The question was, how did it get there? And the answer prosecutors gave was that it was put there in a drink by the woman who made it.
Now, here is the part of this story that made the whole country stop and stare. Corey Richens did not retreat from public life after her husband died. She did not lay low. She did not grieve quietly. She did not act in any observable way like a woman with something to hide. In March of 2023, exactly one year after Eric's death, Corey Richens self-published a children's book. It was called "Are You With Me?" Okay. So, the book follows a young boy. He is grappling with the loss of his father. And in the story, the father is portrayed as an angel, always close, always watching. The book was positioned as a grief resource, something to help children process the death of a parent.
And Corey promoted it. She appeared on a local Utah lifestyle television program called "Good Things Utah." She sat on that couch. She smiled. She told the hosts warmly that she wrote it to help her children cope with, and this is the word she chose, "the unexpected death of their father." She talked about loss. She talked about healing. She thanked people for their support. And the public believed her. The book generated sympathy. It generated sales. People rallied around this grief-stricken widow and her little children's book about the angel dad.
And then two months later, on May 8th, 2023, law enforcement arrived at her door. Corey Richens was arrested for the murder of her husband. And just like that, everything shifted. The book felt different. The television appearance felt different. That word, "unexpected," felt like a tell. The whole performance came into a new, terrible focus.
Eric Richens had been dead for a year, and his killer, according to the Summit County Attorney's Office, had spent that entire year building a public image. A grieving mother, a children's book author, a widow who wrote about angels. She had appeared on television. She had mourned loudly and publicly a man the state alleged she had poisoned. And while all of that was happening, investigators had been quietly building a case.
February 2026, Park City, Utah, Summit County Courthouse. The trial of Corey Richens began four years after Eric's death. Three weeks, 13 days of testimony, more than 40 witnesses called by the prosecution. And the defense, the defense rested its case without calling a single witness. Not one. Corey Richens waived her right to testify. She sat at that table. She watched prosecutors dismantle her story piece by piece, and she said nothing.
Now, the prosecution built this case in layers. Layer one, the financial motive, the insurance policies, the debt, the forensic accountant who showed the jury exactly how badly Corey's business was failing and how desperately she needed Eric's life insurance money. Layer two, the affair. Josh Grossman on the stand, becoming emotional as his text messages with Corey were displayed in court. The message about wanting Eric to just go away. The message about how perfect life would be. And then Grossman testified about something else. Something that happened roughly two weeks after Eric's death. Corey had asked him a question. She asked him how it felt to kill someone. He had served in the Iraq War. She framed it as curiosity. He said at the time he didn't think much of it. The jury thought plenty of it.
Layer three, the drug acquisition, Carmen Lobber's testimony, the phone records, the deleted data, and the searches. Those searches, the jury heard them read aloud. "What is a lethal dose of fentanyl?" "If someone is poisoned, what does it go down on the death certificate as?" Those searches were sitting inside Corey Richens' phone, and they could not be explained away.
And then there was the letter found in Corey's jail cell after her arrest. Six handwritten pages addressed to her brother, asking him to tell investigators that Eric had been buying drugs from Mexico. Witness tampering. Prosecutors laid it out in front of the jury.
Now, the defense argued throughout the trial that there was no direct evidence, no video, no eyewitness, no one who watched Corey put fentanyl into that drink. And defense attorney Wendy Lewis told the jury plainly, "The state had not proven their case."
Okay, so the jury got the case. They deliberated for approximately three hours. Three hours. On March 16th, 2026, they came back guilty. Aggravated murder, attempted aggravated murder, two counts of fraudulent insurance claims, forgery. Unanimous on all of it. Eric's family embraced in that courtroom. People wept. Some of them had been waiting for this moment for four years.
May 13th, 2026. Eric Richens would have been 44 years old today. His sister Katie Richens-Gibson stood before the judge and said exactly that. She stood before the court because her brother could not. "Today is Eric's birthday," she said. "I stand before you because he can't." And then she said something that cut right through that room. She talked about what Corey had done not just to Eric but to those boys, the three sons, nine, seven, and five, when their father was killed. Now teenagers navigating a world without their dad, living with their aunt and her husband, growing up inside a story that no child should ever have to live.
Katie described how Corey, in the months after Eric's death, had cut those children off from Eric's family, completely isolated them, used them as leverage, threatening to withhold access to the boys' grandfather unless Corey got what she wanted from Eric's estate. And she had filled those boys' heads with things, stories about Eric's family that weren't true. So when the Division of Child and Family Services took custody of the boys following Corey's arrest and asked the children where they wanted to go, those boys expressed fear of Eric's family. Not because of anything that family had done, but because of what they had been told. Corey's selfishness and cruelty, Katie told the court, did not end with Eric's murder. In the time after Eric's death, Corey has done nothing but isolate, manipulate, deceive, and do harm to those boys.
Now, each of the three boys submitted impact statements. They were read aloud by counselors because the boys did not want to speak in front of their mother. One son, identified in court by the initials A.R., said he would not feel safe if she were ever out of prison. Another son, R.R., accused Corey of killing almost all of his pets, and then, and this is the detail that stopped the room cold, he said he believed she may have tried to poison him too. That she had caused him to have a seizure. These children are not peripheral to this case. They are at the center of it. They lost their father to poison and then they spent years in the care of the woman prosecutors say gave it to him.
So then Corey spoke. She spoke for approximately 30 minutes, mostly addressing her sons. She said she knew they didn't want to hear from her. She said she understood if they hated her. She said she would be waiting when they were ready. She told them she loved them. And then she said this: "Murder? No, absolutely not. I will not accept that. I will not be blamed for something I did not do." She maintained her innocence from that chair. She said, "God put her in this world to give life, not take it." Her attorneys announced they would appeal.
And then Judge Morazzic spoke. He talked about the sequence of what Corey had done, the attempted murder on Valentine's Day, the 17 days, the doubling down, and what it means to convict someone of those acts in that way. "A person convicted of those things is simply too dangerous to ever be free." He sentenced Corey Richens to life without the possibility of parole, additional consecutive sentences on the remaining four counts: forgery, fraud, attempted murder. She will never walk out of a prison. Not unless an appeal overturns a unanimous jury verdict. And that, as of this writing, is the end of the legal road for Corey Richens.
But here is what stays with you. After you have read every filing, every witness statement, every piece of testimony in this case, Eric Richens knew. He told people, he named her. He said the words. And yet, because he loved his sons, because he could not bring himself to tear that family apart, he stayed. He made a drink. He got into bed. And he trusted one last time the woman who handed it to him.
Somewhere there was a children's book about an angel dad. A little boy who wonders if his father is still close by. He is. He was always close by. He just needed four years and a jury of eight people to speak for him. Happy birthday, Eric.