Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Killer Wife? Mom Writes Grief Book After Hubby’s Death, Now Charged With Murder!

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

Nancy Grace sits down with Forensics professor and host of “Body Bags” Joseph Scott Morgan, to break down what would have happened to Eric Richins after drinking the fentanyl laced ‘Moscow Mule��� his wife Kouri Richins poured for him. Is an opioid overdose a peaceful death? Can first responders determine if Richins performed CPR on her husband? Join us to hear Joseph Scott Morgan’s thoughts. Be sure to check out Body Bags on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/body-bags-with-joseph-scott-morgan/id1587763116See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. The so-called Moscow mule victim's wife believes she was about to rake in $3.6 million life insurance. Just let that sink in. $3.6 million in her back pocket. Minus the funeral expenses for her husband, that is. Thanks for being with us.

I'm Nancy Grayson. Joining me is a renowned expert, professor of forensics at Jacksonville State University, author of Blood Beneath My Feet on Amazon, and star of a new You hit series Body Bags podcast, Joseph Scott Morgan. Joseph Scott, thank you for taking time away from your teaching and your research at Jacksonville State University to join us. I'm talking about the victim in this case, Eric Rishens. I almost said he never saw it coming, but you know what?

He did. There have been two prior occasions, Joe Scott Morgan, that he, at least one of the occasions, laughingly said, hey, I think she's trying to kill me for the money, man. Well, according to prosecutors, she did. I want to talk about multiple attempts on Eric Richens' life. It's not just about him, Joe Scott. It's about his three little boys that are left behind. Three boys, nine, seven, and five at the time daddy is murdered. If mommy's convicted, they will be orphans.

Now lay out the facts to me as you understand them, please. The wife had agreed to prepare a celebratory drink for Mr. Richens. And it was, you know, a Moscow Mule. I was actually just looking at the recipe for it, Nancy. Yes, I looked it up. It's ginger beer. Right. Do you know what I found out?

A lot of drinks that claim that they're ginger are not. So I was looking up drinks that had real ginger in it from my son, John David. You know, he's been nauseous, had a whole lot of issues because he had that. He was at track and field. Just got to think I told you this. And some kid practicing discus and some kid came up behind him and started practicing discus. That's like being at a shooting range and somebody's standing right in front of you no anyway he got hit in the head with a steel discus level three concussion you lived through that with me anyway i wanted

something with ginger to help him with nausea and i had to research online what drinks actually really have ginger in them and i found ginger beer non-alcoholic and he loves it and it did work but it's really strong tasting and that is the main ingredient in a moscow mule yeah ginger beer you know it's got lime juice in it. And for the alcohol version, two ounces of vodka. But you know what it doesn't include, Nancy? It's fentanyl. Fentanyl, yeah. And in this particular case, his drink, this Moscow Mule. You're right about that.

You're right about that, Professor. It was laced with fentanyl, which is an absolute scourge on our country. Hey, hey, can I tell you something before you get on the scourge? Yeah. It's evil genius what she did right there, even though she, of course, got caught. But nobody is going to taste ground up fentanyl when it's mixed in with ginger beer. Yeah, ginger. I guess it's ginger beer and vodka and lime.

You're not going to taste it. No, it's going to be easily masked. And for those that don't know, you know, fentanyl is, it falls into the opiate family, which, you know, you begin to think things like morphine and heroin and all of that. But I think of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Remember when she was skipping across the big field of poppies from which you make opiates, heroin, and they all fall asleep? Yeah, and then they're awakened by snow, which is another interesting aspect. But we won't go down that road.

I think I already did, but go ahead. With this particular case, though, you begin to think about, you know, how do you get access to this? Well, fentanyl is, it's just, it's like a massive infection in our country. It's, you can come across it. It's, you know, it's been used as pain relief for years and years, but it's a synthetic substance. It's created in a laboratory. Is it oxy? And it's highly lethal. I'm sorry. Is it oxy?

Yes, yes. Similar in the same fashion, in the same fashion, but you can't get it there. But oxycodone, oxycontin is not actually fentanyl, right? No, it's not. But it falls within the same family of opiates, if you will. Okay. So at a base elemental level, it's going to have many of the same effects. And we all know what an overdose, say, for instance, of heroin or morphine can do, where it begins to suppress the system.

People can go into a comatose state. And it's all dependent upon how much of this that they're exposed to in their system. And it can kill you. It can send you into cardiac arrest. Because everything goes to sleep, including your brain and your lungs and your heart. Yeah, it does. It's a particularly nasty way to die from this perspective, is that what happens is that the mechanism here it leads to a congestive failure and the lungs get very very heavy you have to struggle you mean full of fluid full of fluid many times we'll actually see in in cases involving ods you'll actually begin to see a similar finding to what you have in drownings.

Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. OD on fentanyl, how does that make your lungs heavy? What do you mean by heavy lungs? I've never heard that before. Yeah, it's a congestive failure where your lungs are beginning to fill up with fluid as a result of not being able to produce or to actually breathe to circulate oxygen through your body. So they progressively become more and more heavy. As a matter of fact, at autopsy, you know, we have to remove them. I was just going to ask you, what do the lungs look like at autopsy? Well, when you touch them, they're very tense, heavy.

You can tell that they're congested. When we take them out, they're going to weigh, they're going to weigh in some circumstances almost twice their normal weight. So you figure if a normal male's lung, adult male is say 450 grams, that's on the right lung, which of course is the heaviest because it has three lobes. Wait, can you... Increase that number by two. Well, grams, that's the weight that we measure it in as opposed to ounces or pounds. I know, but can you convert that to ounces, pounds?

Not off the top of my head. Oh, dear Lord. Did you say 450 grams yeah 450 hey siri how many pounds how many ounces is 450 grams 450 grams is equal to 35.27 ounces. Wait, yes, something like that. Just under a pound. Just under a pound.

Yeah, and there's 16 ounces in a pound, I think. Yes, yes. So they're very, very heavy. Well, multiply that by two, and you'll get the weight. So it increases by that factor so essentially you have an individual that is uh compromised their airway is compromised it's almost like a drowning if you will and guess what happens many times with these individuals you'll see this kind of frothy edematous cone it's pink It looks like the head of a beer, only it's pink, and it'll begin to produce out of the nose and out of the mouth. So you exhale pink froth,

which is the fluid from the lungs mixed with blood particles? Yeah, it'll be tinged with blood, and that's what gives it that kind of pink hue. So let me cut through the heavy lungs and the frothy blood at the nose and mouth. Because you know what? That you, you, Joe Scott, are why we need death investigators and medical examiners to take the stand. Because a lot of people people when they hear this what happened to eric riches they went oh she put fentanyl in his moscow mule and he just

went to sleep and never woke up that's not what happened you basically have internal drowning and you're trying to breathe and the bloody froth is coming out of your nose and your mouth. And that's what happens. Yes, it's an absolutely horrific death, Nancy. And he would have felt himself slipping away. You know, this kind of uncontrollable dizziness. There would have been disorientation. And all along, and you don't know what his level of awareness would have been. It

would have been slipping away, but there would have been real struggling. As he was there, and you were witnessing this, Nancy, from her perspective, she could have seen him, her own husband, by the way, struggling to take up air, to intake air in order for it to process. And his brain is actually screaming out, I need oxygen, I need oxygen. And there was nothing there for him to uptake at that point in time. And the drug itself is pressing him deeper and deeper and deeper into this comatose state till eventually, eventually he's going to go into cardio respiratory arrest. You know, Joe Scott, why did I have to have some type of a minor surgery anyway? They put me under. And the last thing I thought about, I visualized John David, my son,

Lucy, my daughter, David, my husband. And then everything went black. And I'm just thinking about his last moments, the victim here, because you know what, Joe Scott, and I am guilty of this. You know, you and I have done it together. We deal with death and murder and the most horrific acts that people commit on each other. And it's heavy to carry around. So sometimes we laugh. I laugh about stupid criminals. Like, you murder your husband, and then you go on TV to sell your children's grief book,

talking about how much you're grieving about the husband that you killed. The irony of that? You know, when criminals leave a trail a mile wide, we can sit back and ha ha ha. But when you describe what this victim went through, and I just wonder if his last thoughts were about his little children, Carter, Ashton, and Weston, three very little boys. Let's just be brutally honest, Joe Scott. You got one that's five. By the time he's's 21 he probably won't even remember very much about daddy at all he's going to end up being raised by relatives or someone that adopts them i wonder if those were the last thoughts that eric richards had And I want to talk to you now, no more

about the COD and what he endured, but about the trail. The electronic trail and the evidentiary trail that this woman left behind. And I want to start with something I really love. Okay. Of course, there's text messages. There's her buying $900 worth of fentanyl before Valentine's Day, where he had another similar incident. He had food and beverage with his wife and then he had a horrible allergic reaction and had to use Benadryl and an EpiPen and he somehow miraculously lived. So based on text messages, she goes back

to the doper who happens to be a CI confidential informant and says, hey, I need another 900 bucks of fentanyl. Give me the Michael Jackson stuff. That time, right after she buys more fentanyl, he dies of fentanyl overdose. And they're Mormon. My Mormon friends do not even drink chocolate milk because they think it's a stimulant, which it is, much less fentanyl. This guy was not on fentanyl, and he had five times a lethal dosage of fentanyl in his system. But there's the text messages back and forth to the CI timed during his last two, leading up to his last two murder attempts on his life, her last two murder attempts on his life, there was also a third attempt when they went to Greece and he's with her again. And he has a horrible medical reaction after having food and beverage with her. And he actually calls his sister in the States and has the sister change his will. He changed his will. Now, we know that

he also had his life insurance policy changed because his wife, expecting the $3.6 million after his death, had changed the life insurance policy beneficiary to her and not his business partner, he found out and fixed that. So she didn't get that. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. So there's three attempts on his life. I want to talk about the text messages and specifically her phone. She talked too much.

She told cops the night of the death of her husband that her phone had been plugged up in their bedroom and she had not been using it. But then, as you know, Joe Scott, her phone reveals it was locked and unlocked several times where she was texting and then those texts were deleted. Let's start with that. The locking and unlocking kind of reminds me of the Alex Murdock case where the, this was awesome, where the car manufacturer could tell the state everything the car did where it was traveling how quickly it was traveling the mph and the opening and the shutting of doors of his alex marnock's car which shows he was lying let's talk about her phone. Locking, unlocking. Yeah. You think about how this thing operates. It's curious, isn't it, Nancy? Because many times people will say, you know what, when they're talking about criminal cases, they'll say, we're not tracking the person, we're tracking the phone. Okay, I'll give you that. They could say the phone is moving in a car, somebody's

placing it in a car, you don't know if the person has it. You say potato, I say potato. We're talking about her being at home though. We're talking about her being at home inside of their domicile and the phone being unlocked there. So unless the phone has developed a life of its own, you can track or you can make note of these little electronic breadcrumbs that are, you know, that are filling in the blanks for this. You know, when she's trying to alibi herself in this particular case, perhaps you can state that definitively. That's some alibi. It reminds me of caught mom, Lori Vallow. Oh, yeah.

When JJ was taken and murdered, I wasn't there. She was three doors down in her apartment. Stop. And here she's saying her alibi. Corey Richens is saying her alibi was she went and slept with her son that night up until 3 a.m., comes back in and finds her husband cold to the touch. Her alibi is she's like eight feet down the hall. Really?

Yep. Yeah. And in this case, she claimed that, you know, like you had said, that the phone was plugged in, that it was in a static position, that it wasn't moving. That's not what investigators uncovered here. This phone moved. It actually moved.

She said that she never took the phone into the kids' room. Well, they were able, Nancy, in this particular case, to give a specific pinpoint location that the phone was active in the kids' rooms when she said that she hadn't touched the damn thing. But the case is, the fact is, she's moving around. And you know what that leads to? I mean, you're a former prosecutor. That means somebody's lying. You're not telling us the truth. And so with that bit of information in hand, they know that they've got somebody that's a deceptive person. Oh, gosh.

You remember, Joe Scott, I think I've told you this before. After my fiance, Keith, was murdered shortly before our wedding, I couldn't even think straight. I really actually just wanted to go outside and howl like an animal. I didn't want to see anybody. I didn't want to talk to anybody. I dropped out of school. I couldn't think straight. And she has the wherewithal. Her husband is lying dead on the floor and she's lying about her phone that takes nerves of steel and a lot of calculation yeah certainly does it also takes a lot it certainly takes a certain level of boldness to write a book about grief in the wake of what police are alleging is a murder on her part. And you think about that just for a second.

Let that sink in. You know, you and I have both grieved. You know, we've talked about it publicly. I've lost a child with the death of Keith for you. We understand that pain, you know, that you experienced during that period of time. And how is it that this can be so systematically planned out? And she's got, you know, you mentioned she's got these babies, and they're babies to me. I mean, these beautiful children that she has that are now fatherless.

How is it that you can be thinking in these specific terms where you're attempting to deceive in order to achieve a long-term goal? And you're not placing the appropriate amount of grief. You're not going through the process that you have to go through to get on with your life. She was getting on with her life all right, and it seems like it's been well planned out on her part. This is one of the most callous things I've heard about in recent years. And so far we haven't heard about a boyfriend or a lover. We've heard a lot about money, changing the life insurance policy

so she would get the $3.6 million, and he found out, the victim found out and changed it back. I want to point out one more thing. Not only will her phone show that it was locked and unlocked multiple times where she said it was plugged in and or off in the husband and her bedroom, so she was using it, text messages back and forth during that time period were deleted. I looked down, Joe Scott, while you were talking to see I have 3,137 unread emails. Repeat, 3,137 emails. Okay. Obviously.

I've been meaning to talk to you about that, Nancy. People say, didn't you get my email? I'm like, totally no. And so she takes time to delete texts while her husband is lying there with red pink froth coming out of his mouth and nose. And I wonder who she's texting because we're going to find out. You can bet your bottom dollar on that. She was dumb enough to text her CI, confidential informant, doper. So I can't wait to find out who she's texting. So the phone can tell us locked, unlocked multiple times, text back and forth during this period of time while her husband

is dying with his lungs so heavy. He's like breathing out aspirating bloody foam and movement can we tell if the phone was moved about the house according to the authorities they can't you know because she actually you know she had she had stated i don't know if they ask her this directly but somehow they determined that that phone was not, again, in one single place. That that phone, during the period of time which she alleges that it was locked down, that it was charging or whatever circumstance there was, that phone somehow migrated to the children's bedroom where it was unlocked. What are you doing in the children's bedroom at this point in time? She claims that she's found her husband lying on the floor

and he's cold to the touch. Well, when was the last time you actually saw your husband, ma'am? If you're saying that this is some kind of natural event that has occurred, he's lying on the bedroom floor cold. So if that's the case, are you moving back and forth across his body while you're toting this phone back and forth? It's supposed to be static and it's being open. And by the way, you're probably the only person that knows how to unlock it because you know the code. We all have a security code for it. So you show that it's unlocked. You're going down the

hallway. You're in the kid's room. What was she doing? Is she contemplating as she's walking up and down the hallway trying to determine what the next move is? Because now at this point, she probably has some kind of awareness that, you know what? I've just facilitated the death of the man that I'm married to. Who are they going to look at? They always look at the spouse. But for some reason, she didn't necessarily panic. I would certainly be in a state of panic. Joe Scott, do you know that they had a prenup? They had a prenup that was

signed on the day of their wedding, and he, Eric Richens, was worth more to her, Corey Richens, dead than alive. Can I ask you something else that happened factually? She told cops that she performed CPR on her husband. I find that very difficult to believe if pink bloody froth was still coming out or had come out of his nose and mouth and it was still on him in that fashion when first responders got there. What does that tell you that it's still there? This is what can happen. I'm just giving you the scientific facts here. If he is presenting with this pink frothy cone, this can be exacerbated. And this is what would probably be argued.

This can be exacerbated by chest compressions. I think the key here, though, is, you know, those first responding officers, the EMTs, when they're talking to her, if she's done mouth-to-mouth, if she's done chest compressions on him, I think the question that I would ask them, what did you observe on her person? Was there anything on her that some kind of contact that had leached back onto her, say for instance, because it would stain the mouth, if she did mouth-to-mouth, it would be on her, potentially on her hands, that she's trying to open the airway. You know, that's how we do CPR. You got to clear the airway. You got to open it up. But I'd like

to know to what extent this cone was presenting, if in fact it did, which is normal in these circumstances when you have a fentanyl OD. So you're telling me that when the cops got in there and they say he still has the bloody foam coming out of his mouth and nose, you think it was possible she had performed CPR on him? I'm not saying it's possible she performed CPR, but what can happen though is if you are in this status after you've OD'd or been OD'd on fentanyl, it will continue. People don't believe this, but I've actually seen it happen. It will continue to present and actually come out of the body for a protracted period of time. It's going to be further exacerbated by the fact that you're doing chest compressions.

You know, so you're compressing the lungs. You're pushing more and more out all the while. So she could have performed CPR and then the foam continued to come out of his nose and mouth. If you're doing mouth-to-mouth on somebody, how would that work? Well, there would be a sensation that this is traveling. You know, you're actually sharing this with the body. It would go back into her mouth. It would be on her face. There would

be a ring around her face, perhaps. But, you know, you don't know if she took time to clean up, if she did, in fact, attempt CPR. So we need to know her presentation, how she presented when cops got there, what she looked like in regular talk, what she looked like. Yeah, absolutely. And you want to know, and one of the things that we also look like is, or one of the things we also look for in individuals that are the reporters of death, those that discover the dead, is are they presenting with an appropriate amount of grief? Are they, you know, are they in hysterical state? I've seen people go catatonic, you know, where you can't get any information out of them.

But then you got those that just kind of hit that kind of flat plane where they're just kind of talking to you as if, oh, it's another day. deadly dosage of fentanyl in his system and prophetic words telling his sister, she might just kill me for the money. We wait as justice unfolds. Joe Scott, you're awesome. Thank you for being with us.