Kouri Richins New Details from Preliminary Hearing. Headed to trial for Murder.

today we are going to court live for the coverage of the Corey richens preliminary hearing if you remember Corey richens is Accused by the state of poisoning her husband she wasn't arrested till over a year after his death in Utah she had written a children's book about grief but that's not all she wrote she also wrote the walk the dog letter that I have covered on this channel she also wrote quite a lot of letters from custody saying that those were another novel um and they were not in fact her telling Witnesses what they should testify to and then the state brought more charges so today we are here for the preliminary hearing on all of the charges murder attempted murder for a prior incident where her husband ate what the state has alleged to be a laced sandwich on Valentine's Day prior to his death in early March and they have also charged her with bank fraud mortgage fraud and a couple other frauds a note about preliminary hearing preliminary hearings are just to determine if there's probable cause to hold someone to answer for trial this is not a full trial there is no jury present the judge is the finder of facts the judge determines if the state has proven each charge the court reaches the following determinations first for the reasons described at the detention hearing which remain valid today the court has sorry the the uh prosecution has shown probable CS the count one aggravated murder and count three dist distribution of a controlled substance both of which uh relate to events that are alleged to have occurred onor about March 3rd and 4th 2022 are supported by probable cause m richens is bound over for trial on counts one and three with respect to count two attempted aggravated murder alleged to have occurred on February 14 of 2022 the prosecution has admitted evidence sufficient to support a reasonable belief of the following facts and events that in January of 2022 Corey richens secured a life insurance policy of her husband's death or her husband's life through fraudulent that she had a significant financial incentive to secure his death because she would do better under the premar agreement if you were dead and her businesses were highly leveraged that on February 14th she purchased food for them both including him she described as lunch in her text message to her friend in June she was not honest about where she was going that day or what she was doing doing after she left the family home Eric had a significant reaction to something that day sufficient to make him consider going to the hospital these state has admitted evidence that fenel can cause a serious reaction there's significant evidence at least to support a prob cause finding that M richens had secured fentanyl by February 11th and that on her about February 26 she contacted her Source again and said she needed something stronger these facts taken together would support issuance of a search warrant to investigate whether Miss richens had attempted to cause the death of her husband they would support issuance of an arrest warrant for her arrest un attempted murder and they are sufficient to support bind over under the probable cause standard uh for attempted aggravated herder on February 14 2022 the court makes this determination without considering the probable cause that indicates that M rich actually caused the death of her husband on March 4th and so while the court is considering evidence of statements made by m richens and actions taken by m richens after February 14th it is not that action that is the alleged successful completion of the attempt rather the actions and statements the court is considering that occurred after February 14 off her text messages to repair more to the effect of I wish he would just go away or if my husband would just go away her contact with her source of control substances seeking something stronger which leads to a reasonable inference that the stuff she got before did not give her the results she wanted and her statements on June 18 2022 to her best friend uh that she provided a lunch and this of course includes the evidence from the morning of February 14 that she did in fact buy from Mir Lake D taken together viewed in the evidence in the light most reasonable to the state drawing all reasonable inferences in the state's favor this evidence supports a non-speculative inference that M richens attempted to murder her husband with enel on February 14th having drawn that determination uh it also requires the court to find her over for trial on count 4 which is the distribution charge related to February 14 we pause there before we get to the financial charges Mr Bloodworth did need any clarification of cour ruling so far no honor thank you no okay all right count six and seven mortgage fraud with respect to the Iron Bridge Loan and the boomerang finance loan respectively are bound over counts seven and8 insurance fraud with respect to the $250,000 true stage policy and then a scheme uh with respect to the $100,000 true save life insurance poliy respectively are val over what's that I think you just said six and seven and seven and eight and you skipped five my apologies five and six are Iron Bridge of boomerang respectively seven and8 are the $250,000 two stage policy and the one the scheme related to the $100,000 true stage policy respectively 9 10 11 are fory counts related to the altered America First Credit Union uh account statement submitted in respect to the Iron Bridge and Boomerang finance loans and with number 11 the forged signature on the $100,000 true stage life insurance application Mr Bloodworth any clarification okay at the end of the Corey Richard's preliminary hearing the judge held her to answer and bound her over for trial on all of the charges against her this was not a surprise by any means the defense and prosecution did spend a good portion of day two arguing over whether or not the standard of probable cause had been met at one point I was not persuaded as the defense started waiting into whether or not the incident on Valentine's day was in fact an attempted murder because you know everybody eats their egg sandwiches right away and and if you don't he he didn't start feeling badly then so you don't know that she laced his uh egg sandwich with something on Valentine's Day so the attempted murder charge should be thrown out and the judge made a very thorough record about the circumstances leading up to and after that attempted murder charge on February 14th Corey richens is also charged with aggravated murder numerous counts of distribution for giving fentanyl uh to her husband Eric richens numerous counts of forgery mortgage fraud and insurance fraud those all Loop into the motives and the things that were going on with her running into massive financial troubles as her rapidly expanding house flipping business was in deep and dire and drastic Financial Straits we heard a lot in this preliminary hearing that we had not heard before including more about text messages between Corey and who the prosecution calls her Paramore her lover her side piece her boyfriend whatever you want to call it there was another dude in Corey's life and she was texting him things like you know if I could just get rid of my husband dot dot dot things would be perfect yes the prosecution said dot dot dot not ellipses we're letting it go also she texted him things are about to change if you can just hang on till Friday and Friday was uh the day that Eric richens was dead so the texting of the boyfriend things are going to change just hang in there till Friday when your spouse is then found dead on a Friday is not going to be helpful when you get to trial and we had not heard some of those text messages before that was new information we also heard from a forensic accountant who had information from Eric Rich's divorce attorney Eric richens met with a divorce attorney in October 2020 ahead of his death in March 2022 what it seems that Cory richens did not know is that Eric took all of his assets and his estate and moved it into a living trust the beneficiary of that trust being his children the executive of that trust being his sister not Cory meaning the house she was living in that was in her husband's name the business that he had that was thriving and everything else else that he had would go to his kids and not to her we heard that in that conversation with his defense attorney because those divorce attorney notes were reviewed by the forensic accountant showing that Eric had told the divorce attorney that Corey had taken out a home equity line of credit on the home that is only in Eric's name and that he had not taken that out well Eric's signature was on that home equity line of credit and and so it was uh suspected that that might have been a forged loan it is not one of the charged forged loans also she took out a life insurance policy on Eric on January 29th 2022 that life insurance policy went into effect February 2nd the attempted murder is from February 14th and after the February 14th incident where Eric ate a sandwich that Corey had provided to him after she had asked Cel for uh fentanyl or some Michael Jackson stuff after he had gotten very sick and texted his friends that he thought he might need to go to the hospital texted her that he thought he might need to go to the hospital which she responded take a nap we saw that she reached out to C again and said she was going to need some stronger stuff and then when the murder happened we heard that it was not in fact a laced Moscow Mule but it was a lemon shot that was provided to Eric and that Corey had made journal entries about this indicating that she was going to need a truckload of fentanyl to kill Eric seeming to learn from the attempted murder on February 14th there are still a lot of details in this case that we're not going to know yet there are the binder of exhibits the cell phone dumps and the rest of it are going to be telling but what is incredibly telling about the cell phone evidence is how much of it's deleted off of Corey's phone and how much of it still existed on Eric's phone on the Paramore's phone on the bestie's phone and on other phones so it's very telling what was extracted from other phones and no longer existed on Corey's phone quite a lot of deleted information but the phone was not rehomed the SIM card was not destroyed and we know that after uh the investigation started knocking on Corey's door that she was Googling things like luxury presents for rich people and Googling information about how police might be able to recover information off of cell phones so it's clearly something that she was worried about it will be very interesting to see this go to trial and the court did set a trial date jury selection is supposed to start on April 28th 2025 and the trial is anticipated to run through May 22nd of 2025 for deep dives into the stories that I covered here you can find them on my YouTube channel at the m D Baker and the Emily Show podcast I stream every Tuesday and Thursday the podcast goes live on Wednesdays and if you want to stay in the loop with everything I'm doing receive the fastest notifications out there and get more law nerd Community join me at laer app.com our free app for IOS and Android d [Applause]