Officials searched the jail cell of Kouri Richins, the Utah widow accused of killing her husband with a fentanyl overdose and then writing a children’s book about grief, and found a letter to her mother with instructions for her brother to “testify falsely,” CNN reports. Richins is now accused of witness tampering along with the previous murder and drug charges for allegedly poisoning Eric Richins. On September 14, authorities searched Kouri Richins’ jail cell and discovered a six-page handwritten letter to her mother, Lisa Darden, with the instructions for her brother. “The letter instructs Lisa Darden to induce the Defendant’s brother, Ronald Darden, who is Lisa Darden’s son, to testify falsely in this matter,” the court document states. “The letter claims that defense counsel, ‘wants to link Eric (Richins) getting drugs and pills from Mexico’ to the fentanyl that caused his death.”
Richins’ defense filed a separate motion arguing that the state’s public filing of the alleged handwritten letter was improper and violated the gag order in the case. Eric Richins, 39, was found dead at the foot of the couple’s bed in March 2022. An autopsy and toxicology report showed he had about five times the lethal dosage of fentanyl in his system. Richins told investigators at the time that she brought her husband a Moscow Mule cocktail in the bedroom of their Kamas, Utah, home, then left to sleep with their son in his room. She said she returned around 3 a.m. to find her husband lying on the floor, cold to the touch. Around a year to the day after her husband died, Richins published a children’s book, “Are You With Me?” about navigating grief after the loss of a loved one.
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