“What kind of doctor was dr. pepper,” Utah real estate agent Kouri Richins once asked a search engine. (Sadly, there was no actual Dr. Pepper.)
But it was Richins’ less innocuous online searches that helped a jury find her guilty of murdering her husband Eric via fentanyl overdose—and of hoping to collect life insurance policies she had opened in his name but without his knowledge.
Richins was yesterday sentenced to life in prison without parole; her Internet history played a key role in the trial. A few weeks after Utah police began their investigation into Eric’s March 2022 death, they seized Kouri’s iPhone. Comparisons with records from her cell phone provider suggested that numerous text messages around the time of Eric’s death had been deleted from the device. In addition, cell phone tower pings helped establish where Kouri had been in the days before Eric’s death, which were a key piece of evidence in the state’s case against her.
