Hidden True Crime - Inside the Mind of Kouri Richins | Dr. John Breaks Down the Texts, Calls & Bodycam
Episode Date: March 9, 2026Dr. John has been busy keeping up with everything happening in the Kouri Richins trial, and he is finally ready to weigh in! From the bodycam, to the texts, to the recorded calls- what does it all say... about Kouri Richins? About Hidden True Crime What started as a simple conversation at their dinner table became a captivating podcast. Join the dynamic duo of Dr. John Matthias, a criminal psychologist, and Lauren Matthias, an investigative journalist, as they delve into the psychological facets of unthinkable crimes every week. Their unique perspectives and in-depth analysis offer a fresh take on true crime storytelling. Thank you for your support through sponsorships, subscribing, listening, and becoming a Patreon member at Patreon.com/HiddenTrueCrime Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Hello, Jens.
It's Lauren and John, Surprise and Lily, a lap dog for the show.
At least she thinks she's a lap dog.
If you have dreams, believe them and they can come true.
Oh, Lily.
Yeah.
Many of you, as we've followed along the Corey Richens trial together, have had questions.
And so have I.
Mostly being, who is Corey Richens?
The woman on trial charged with poisoning her husband, Eric Richens.
Murdering her husband is her charge, actually, as well as many other charges.
and lucky me, I'm married to a psychologist, and not just any psychologist, a forensic psychologist,
someone that assesses criminals, also a clinical psychologist.
And today, you're going to answer my many questions.
You have been studying all things, Corey Richens.
I know you can't look at me very easily.
No, yeah, this is, this was brilliant on the part of our producer because she's forced me to look
at the camera and not you.
and I'm used to looking at you.
Right.
So when we sit at our table, yeah.
So I.
Reassures you you're not married to Corey Richards.
Well, yes, that's true.
I don't think anybody would want to be,
I don't think anybody would be want to marry to Cory Rich.
Well, I can't drink that if you're drinking it,
then it implies that it's safe.
It's safe.
Okay.
Yeah.
So anyway,
you have been studying all things Corey Richens and I just want to know overall I know you have a lot to go through this is going to be an intense show for those of you know that no hidden true crime this is what we do we cover the hidden motives not just the paramour not just the money but deep down into why Corey Richens would do what she does not just the things she's charged with because you know we don't even
know she's guilty of those, but just everything we've seen from her. I mean, there's a lot there.
The recorded calls, the debt she was in, the lies she's told, whether or not she's guilty of
murder, she's certainly guilty of being a liar and a chameleon in my book. But where would you,
in other words, get settled in. We have a good show for you. And there goes my lap dog.
Lily's like, no, I'm out. I'm out. And I have questions and hit subscribe and hit notifications to follow all things hidden true crime. All right.
Yeah, there's a lot to cover. So why don't we start digging into it.
Okay. All right. So yeah. So there's a lot to cover. We will talk about the body cam. We'll talk about Josh. We'll talk about everything. But as you know, my goal is to look at the details.
within the context of the larger picture.
So the question I'm always interested in is the why.
Why did this happen?
How did we get to the point?
And why did we get to the point that a murder occurred?
Yeah.
So I think the place I want to start,
let's start with the broadest view here.
And the place I want to start is by asking the question,
what does Home represent to Corey Richens?
That's the question.
If you want to understand Corey Richens, and we're going to spend a lot of time unpacking this,
if you want to understand Corey Richens, you have to ask, what does Home mean to her?
What does it symbolize to Cory Richens?
I'm going to give you, so in the Bryce call?
Meaning the recent day nine recorded phone calls with Bryce that they played in court,
Day 9 trial recap, for those that missed it.
We listen to those?
Yes, the Bryce calls.
And the Bryce calls, these are a couple of the things she said in there.
Okay.
She said, quote, the house goes to the trust.
I just want the house.
They can have all the money.
Here's another quote.
They can have everything they want.
Just give me the house.
Right?
So this is a theme that comes up all the time.
Not only the house and the trust is she trying to get the mansion.
It's called the mansion.
The midway mansion.
The Midway Mansion.
Not only is she talking about that with Bryce and Chelsea and her friends, but she's talking about it with Josh.
A subject of a lot of the text is this house.
Midway Mansion.
Right?
A subject of she takes out a loan for the Midway Mansion.
Right?
The Midway Mansion is in some ways equally the star or a star player in this trial.
Yeah.
Right. And so the question is why all the focus on the Midway Mansion? And that gets to this issue of home. She's obsessed with this idea of finding a home. And so if you want to understand Corey Richens, you need to understand what does that mean to her. Right? That's what's driving this. I mean, there's more here that's driving it. But home is symbolic of something that we need to figure out. And then behind,
that, we're also going to talk about the psychology of greed. We're going to talk about
the body cam and what that suggests, right? We're going to talk about...
Eric Richens died.
We're going to talk about, we're going to talk about your question. Who is Corey Richens?
I guess the way I would reframe that is who isn't Cory Richens, right? Like, I mean,
so we want to figure out that too. That's part of this equation is trying to look at that
question of who Corey Richens is. So where do you want to start with all of that? Because you've been
sitting in the trial. So there's a lot of ways we can answer this question. We can answer it through
any of these avenues. And I don't know. Let's start with the body cam. The day Eric Richens died.
Does that work? I gave them a list of things that we were going to talk about. So my honey-do list.
No, it was actually your honey-do list, all of you and your mini-questions.
I delivered.
So you got them.
So let's talk about the body cam.
Yeah, let's start with the body cam.
I want to frame our discussion of the body cam with, this may seem unusual.
But in the Toshu-Goo Shrine in Niko, Japan, it's a beautiful shrine.
It goes up many layers.
And it's a famous shrine, by the way.
You'll find there's different panels of what are called the Three Wise Monkeys.
And the Three Wise Monkeys represent.
They're symbolic of three things.
And those three things are, one of the monkeys is covering its eyes.
And that that monkey represents the idea of see no evil.
the next monkey is covering its ears and that's hear no evil and then the final monkey is covering
its mouth and that means speak no evil the basic premise of the monkeys initially was it was
symbolic of moral restraint in other words if you don't let evil into your life then you
won't act evilly or you won't you won't enact you that you'll be more you'll represent good
right you won't enact evil because you're not speaking about evil
you're not listening to evil, right?
You're not acting in an evil way.
You're not acting in a malicious way.
That's how it originally began.
That was sort of the, in Buddhist culture, that was sort of the original idea.
It was about moral restraint and kind of staying the proper path and being good.
And one of the ways you can become good is don't fall into evil.
Don't say cruel things, right?
Don't listen to people that are malicious and saying cruel things.
But over time, of course, in Western culture, that evolved.
And it evolved into essentially this idea of, let's, in psychological terms of denial.
And when I say that, I mean like willfully ignoring wrongdoing, wrongdoing.
In other words, pretending not to see here or acknowledge.
what is bad or wrong or let's say even evil, right?
It's denial.
So it's essentially the monkeys now, to many of us,
represent this idea of turning away from unpleasant truths.
And so if you're looking at this body cam,
you're probably saying, what the hell does this have to do with the body cam, right?
I'm going to explain what it has to do with the body cam.
If you're watching this body cam, the most salient feature,
The most clearly behavioral element of the body cam is Corey Richens covering her eyes and covering her face, putting her head down.
Corey Richens is symbolic of the three wise monkeys and the sense that that's what she's doing.
Wow.
Corey Richens is largely turning away, I believe, I'm speculating here, is turning away from whatever unpleasant truths she's
confronting. Right? She is the three monkeys. She's showing you why those three monkeys are so
wise and are so important, right? And this is something you pointed out in your show, by the way,
and you were dead on. Way to go. Thank you. By the way, your shows are phenomenal. They're
excellent. They're back. They're evidence-based. They're entertaining. I love them. So thank you for,
Thank you for your great work on the shows.
Thanks for watching.
Yeah, you're really nailing down this trial really well.
And thank you guys for watching.
Lauren, she's doing an amazing job.
There's a moment.
So if you want to know,
if you want to know why I'm invoking the Three Monkeys
as a metaphor for Corey Richens,
I'm going to tell you why specifically.
There's a moment in the body cams
that you correctly point out where the officer tells her, and maybe we can play this again,
because it's such an important moment. And I wonder how the jury reacts to this moment. But there's a
moment when the officer tells her that his body is going to be sent to the medical examiner's office.
And look at her reaction. That's her most pronounced strongest reaction in the entire body camp.
She essentially, for lack of a better term, she freaks out.
She loses it.
She stands up, right?
She's been sitting the whole time.
She's been covering her eyes the whole time.
She doesn't want to see evil.
She doesn't want to hear evil.
There's times in this body cam where she's quite literally in the fetal position.
She's on the floor.
She's covering herself up, right?
It looks like she's in the fetal position.
But when she's sitting on the couch and the officer says, we're going to send Eric's body to the medical examiner and she loses it.
Right.
And her reaction, she starts saying, oh, my God, oh, my God.
And she stands up and she starts pacing and her anxiety goes through the roof.
She hangs her head down into her knees.
She covers her highs.
She's pacing.
So Alex Sinea what the process is right now.
I guess he was in good health and his age and everything like that.
Okay.
Our medical examiner is going to come and do their investigation real quick
and then also our detective just to make sure that everything's documented, you know, correctly.
And then from there, they'll explain to you what's going to happen.
Most likely what I'm thinking because, you know, he has no serious.
serious health problems or anything like that.
His age, most likely they're going to take his body to the medical examiners off just to make sure that, you know, there wasn't anything else.
Okay.
All right.
You have any questions for me right now?
No.
He had allergy shots yesterday.
Yeah, and then that's what she was saying.
When I was here.
What kind of allergy shots, you know?
I think it's weakly shots.
Hey man, his boy get weekly shots.
Like seasonal allergies?
Yeah.
Okay, season.
And where was that at?
Park City.
Family medical?
Uh-huh.
No.
Jeremy Ranch, Granger Medical.
Granger, okay.
I don't go on.
I did.
They're all watching TV.
I see you guys got to go back to sleep.
It's 4 o'clock in the morning.
And the question is, why is she doing that?
I knew about investing, but I really didn't know how to go about it.
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Right? What is it that she's so afraid of? Right? This is a question that, by the way, this is a question on the Bryce call that comes up all the time, which is, why is she trying to control this narrative before the medical examiner has any findings?
Yes. Right. Right.
What is she afraid of? Right. And so if somebody in theory, if somebody's innocent, they should have no concern.
about sending it to the medical examiner.
Right?
They actually want that.
They would want that.
Help me understand what happened.
But consistent with the wise monkeys, the wise monkeys have wisdom and presumably Corey Richens doesn't,
but putting that aside, the wise monkeys are a metaphor for moral restraint, which then becomes
translated in Western culture into essentially ignorance or denial turning away from the truth, right?
This, I think, is the reaction that's most important because it's an example of Corey Richens turning away from the unpleasant truth that she, presumably, allegedly knows exactly what happened.
And she knows that if that body goes to the medical examiner, they're going to find fentanyl in his body.
you have to presume, and again, I don't, a jury hasn't necessarily agreed with this, right,
but you presume that she's afraid.
And her reaction shows fear, right?
And so the question, the question in the body camp, so this is an interesting question.
The question that the defense attorney asks is, is Corey, she, oh, she doesn't ask, she tell,
the defense attorney tells us that the body cam actually shows a picture of a grieving widow, right?
Correct. That's what the defense tells.
But my question, I would reframe that question and say, okay, let's give her the benefit of the doubt, right?
As you watch the body cam, here's the question we should be asking. It's not, is this a picture of a grieving widow?
The question is, is this a grieving widow or is this an anxious, fearful widow?
Right.
Those are different interpretations.
Is that grief what we're seeing?
Right.
Right? Is that grief that we're seeing or is it something else?
Is it fear?
That's the question.
And so if the jury, obviously, if the jury thinks it's fear, that's a very different
interpretation than if they see that as grief. So I think in some ways the trial is going to hinge
on this question because the defense is going to argue that this is a grieving widow and the
prosecution is obviously going to dispute that and say no, this is someone who's not really
showing grief. She planned this, right? And she has knowledge of what occurred and she's
hiding it. She's covering it up. She becomes the monkey that's trying to cover its eyes and see no evil
because she literally, in this body camp, she literally doesn't want to look at the truth.
She doesn't.
She literally does not want to see evil if she did it.
Yeah. Right? She will not look. She will not look. She will not look. And if you think about,
if you think about, let's think about what that means.
Right. If I'm truly innocent and I'm grieving, right, I'm grieving the loss of a spouse and I'm shocked.
And a police officer or officers walk into my house, I'm going to be despondent.
And I'm going to want to connect with human beings.
Right. If I'm truly grieving, I'm going to want to look that police officer in the eyes.
Yeah.
And I'm going to want to say, I don't know what happened. I don't understand. I am, right?
I'm going to want to connect.
Now, putting aside the fact that Corey Richon struggles with connection and putting aside the fact that in her book, one of her three Cs was connection, right?
The irony of that.
Well, let me point out even more.
When you assess that book in Cory Richens years ago when she was first arrested, the one thing you pointed out in that interview with Good Things, Utah was that she said that she, too, was trying to learn how to grieve.
Yeah.
She wasn't just writing a book for her children.
She was saying that she was trying to learn how to grieve.
And so you're saying here that she's not grieving in this moment.
It doesn't appear to me she's grieving.
Nor connecting.
Because if I'm truly grieving and I have nothing to hide and I'm innocent, let's say,
when I'm experiencing grief, I'm going to want to connect.
I'm going to want to get help.
I'm going to want to get answers from people.
I'm going to be, right?
I'm not going to close, I'm not going to literally put my hands over my eyes
and pretend that the world doesn't exist
and pretend that what I'm seeing isn't real.
Right.
Right.
And she doesn't do that, obviously, at all.
Right.
So I think it's fascinating that she actually does quite the opposite in these moments, right?
That she's not looking to connect.
She's literally kind of turning internal.
She's she's closing her eyes.
She's seeing nothing.
And she's making this into some fantasy about herself.
That the police aren't going to see this.
Like there's an officer there, by the way, who he keeps coming back to the truth,
which is he recognizes the problem.
What he says to her.
So he asks, sir, does he have any medical,
problems. And this is another issue, by the way. So when you ask about medical problems and then you get a laundered list of like a hundred things or it's not a hundred, but you know, when you get a laundered list from someone about all the possible reasons that that person is deceased, that's not a good look either. That's desperation, right?
You know, I wrote, I wrote down some of the stuff. So here's her list of possibilities for why he died.
why Eric died that night. Pain pills, he did pain pills in high school. He looked pale the previous
night. His chest was hurting the previous night. He's dehydrated. He's tired because he had allergy
shots the previous night. So this was a reaction to allergy shots. He has Lyme disease. He did THC gummies.
He had an aneurysm. And I don't know. There's probably others. Those are the ones I wrote down.
But I mean, when you start throwing out explanations that seem desperate, it's probably not a good sign.
And again, I don't know if the jury's going to notice that.
But in spite of listing all of these possible problems, the police officer keeps coming back to the truth.
And he keeps saying, he's trying to be empathic, by the way.
Right?
He's giving her the benefit of the doubt.
He doesn't suspect fall play.
but he said what he says several times is because of his young age and the fact that she didn't
identify any major health problems like for example a defective heart right something that would have
or something that would have immediately kind of led to the possibility of a sudden death
that's what he keeps he says he was young he didn't seem to have any health problems so we're
calling the medical examiner right he knows this and that's what he's
what she doesn't want to see or hear. That's what she doesn't want him to speak. She doesn't
want the three monkeys to speak the truth, to see the truth, to hear the truth. Yeah. So that's why
she's acting the way she is. So I think that's the most important part of my analysis of the
body cam, but I actually want to go a step further.
So it's sort of like the
sort of like the infomercials where they say,
but wait, there's more.
Guess what?
There's more.
So I think that's the most interesting part of the body cam,
but there's more.
There's something.
So the question is,
if we're looking at grieving,
if we're looking at her grief and we're trying to assess.
So again, the question is,
this a grieving widow or is this an anxious widow? Is this a fearful widow? And those will lead us in
very different directions in terms of how we interpret this. Right. But she is crying, right? She is
acting. She's trying to act consistent with someone who's grieving. Right. And so let's look at that.
How do people develop the capacity to show emotions? So let's assume for the sake of argument,
that she knows what happened.
Yeah.
I don't know if she did, but let's assume for the moment that she did.
Yeah, we don't know the jury.
So somebody might say, some juror might say, well, wait a minute.
I mean, she was crying.
She was saying, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, right?
Like.
She wasn't giggling.
She wasn't happy.
She was emotional, right?
Does that show that she's grieving?
Like, should we, let's look at that?
Well, there's something in psychology called behavioral activation.
And I happen to know this quite well, by the way.
It's not necessarily an approach to treatment that I use in my own work or have used in my own work.
I rely on it sometimes.
But the basic idea in behavioral activation is it's especially,
pertinent to people with depression, by the way, but it applies to other things like post-traumatic
stress disorder, and I've worked with veterans with PTSD quite a bit.
Behavioral activation is the idea that, for example, I'll use myself as an example since I've
struggled with depression.
Okay.
So the people with depression tend to withdraw from the world.
They tend not to engage as much.
They tend to avoid because they're depressed and they don't feel good.
and right they feel sad quite often they might have more anxiety there's a tendency to withdraw from the world
there's a tendency to become more avoidant and you probably know so you know this from being married to me
for 10 years and so what behavioral activation involves is essentially engaging in behaviors
that are the opposite of that.
Engaging in behaviors that are meant to facilitate emotions
and in particular emotions and moods that are contrary to depression.
So in other words, if I'm feeling depressed,
maybe the best thing for me to do would be to get out of bed
and go on a hike or go to the gym, right?
Or to go on a date with you and have fun, right?
Like behavioral activation is the basic idea that behavior and action, they generate and evoke
emotions.
So in other words, it's the behavior that leads to change.
It's the behavior that leads to feeling something different.
So if I'm feeling sad, then behavioral activation says, engage in a behavior that will take you
out of that state of sadness and make you feel better, right?
There's this classic example in some psychology research about if you're feeling sad, smile.
Like literally smiling can help you feel better.
Or there's the famous example of the so-called power pose.
That's been disputed now.
But if you're going to go into an interview and you're in your shoulders are slumped and you're feeling bad, right, you're not going to do as well in that interview because you're not acting like you own the room.
So if you go in with the power pose and you stick your chest out and you're, you know, really confident, in theory, you're going to perform better.
That's behavioral activation.
Or pull a Stewart, what is it, Stuart Smalley?
Stuart Smalley.
I'm good enough.
I'm smart.
Darn it.
Yeah, you look in the mirror.
No, behavioral activation is a little different in the sense that it's not just an affirmation.
It's not an affirmation.
It's actually engaging in an action or a behavior that can, in theory, change your emotional state.
So that's the idea of behavioral activation.
I'm going to tie this together in a minute.
Okay.
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You know, and when I think about, I always think, what I think about behavioral activation,
I always think of something called method acting.
And method acting is when an actor essentially does something similar.
They engage in a behavior.
it's very similar.
They gauge in a behavior that makes them feel a certain way
so that they can perform that role better.
In other words, they step into that role
and they try to live that role.
So it's performative, right?
Actors do this all the time.
There's classic, there's actors that are,
I'm not sure if actors are trained in this as much,
but old school actors used to talk about method acting all the time.
I think so. I've heard it, yeah.
And so the question,
here, so if we take this idea of method acting and behavioral activation and we look at this in terms of Corey Richens, right? You see someone who keeps saying, oh my God, oh my God, and look at her behavior. Look at, she keeps stomping her legs, right? She's shaking. Like, she is arguably, she is engaging in actions that presumably,
could evoke grief.
In other words, by doing some of the things she's doing
behaviorally, by stomping her legs,
by shaking her, by showing agitation,
by saying, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, that's a behavior too.
By doing those things, she's now able to feel more grief.
brings more insight into the, I need to learn how to grieve from her, good things, Utah.
I think intuitively, I think intuitively she knows she needs to show grief in that moment.
Right.
So what she does, so the basic idea behind behavioral activation, which is a psychological principle and method acting, which is clearly a performative idea,
the basic idea is that our psyche follows our behaviors and our body into reality.
Our behaviors actually guide us to feel certain things and to show certain emotions.
So I'm not saying, I'm not necessarily saying that I know for sure this is what she's doing,
but what I'm saying is that if she
presumably if she knows that she poisoned her husband
that's a hypothesis if she knows that she poisoned her husband
the way that you show grief and express grief
is through behavioral activation and or method acting
in other words you perform as if you're grieving
and then you show grief
and so if the question is,
is if the question is, well, look, she's crying.
I mean, she's not crying.
You can argue whether she's authentically crying,
but she's crying.
She's agitated.
Her body's shaking.
She's stomping her legs like she can't,
like she's anxious, right?
That's grief, right?
Well, maybe yes, maybe no.
Yeah, you don't know.
It depends.
It depends.
Method acting.
Right.
So I think that.
That's a legitimate question.
Is it performative?
And again, it brings us back to is this grief or is this something else?
Is this grief or is this fear?
That's the body.
Yeah.
We're just warming up.
I know that I gave you a lot of questions and a lot of things to assess and our
gems have a lot of questions.
But I think if we can skip ahead a little bit, day nine was so interesting.
Yeah.
The calls with Eric Rich and the.
friend Bryce and Corey with Chelsea, her friend being on the calls as well, Chelsea Barney.
She was on the stand having to listen to those calls that I guess Corey and Chelsea recorded
or Corey recorded after Eric's death.
And I think the reason, honestly, for the calls was maybe she was concerned that the Richens
were calling her an incompetent mother and she was trying to get Eric's friend on her side.
but there were so many nuggets and things to talk about in these calls.
Can we skip to day nine and talk?
Yeah.
The Bryce calls.
Okay.
Yeah, let's, sure.
Let's jump ahead here.
Can't believe she recorded these, by the way.
Not a good one.
But go.
Yeah, I'm trying to figure out.
Yeah, I don't quite understand her motive.
I think she was clearly.
trying to persuade Bryce of her innocence, which she believed that Bryce would, I presume,
she believed that Bryce would talk to the Richens family.
Yeah.
Well, not just her innocence, but I think pity.
And it was trying to show that she's the victim here.
Correct.
That this is a good friend of the Richens family, but look what they're doing to her.
She wants her home.
They're kicking a single widow now out of a home.
They're calling her a bad mother.
So I think it was, yeah, to sort of persuade more of the rich inside to see her as the victim and the richens family as the bullies.
That's my guess.
Yeah.
So let's, so I already mentioned her that she's obsessed with keeping her house.
Right.
That's, that's an important part.
Yeah, she says she is.
Yeah.
I think that's that's one of the most interesting parts of the Bryce call is this notion.
Let me read it again because it's so important.
they, meaning the Richens family, they can have everything they want, just give me my house.
So again, this idea of home and the mansion, the Midway Mansion represents so much to her.
Symbolically and emotionally, that home is everything to Cory Richards.
But this is just her home where she has her kids.
Correct.
Yeah.
Well, she wants that too.
Right.
And we'll talk about that in a minute.
Yeah.
But the home she's referring to in the calls.
Is the home she's living in?
Right, I know. At a minimum, she wants that. And we'll get into that in a second.
So, you know, one of the things she said, let's just look at, let's start with some of the basics that we learn about Corey Richen from this call.
She says, she tells Bryce, quote, and Chelsea, she says, quote, the girls can have all the life insurance money, meaning Katie and Amy, Eric's sisters.
And so she talks about taking, she takes out a loan on.
the house, the house they're in for $250,000.
And then she says that she turned the $250,000 into $11 million.
She says, quote, we have $11 million today.
And she argues that who wouldn't want to turn $250,000 into $11 million?
We have $11 million dollars today.
I own 12 properties that are almost all paid off.
Notice the almost.
Almost, I think almost has new meaning.
Almost like almost like almost like not.
paid off.
Yeah.
So let's just start.
Let's start with that quote, right?
Like just the dishonesty, right?
Like it's so dishonest.
It's so deceptive.
I agree.
So like that $250,000 did not get turned into $11 million.
It got turned into negative.
I don't know how much.
How much was she in debt?
It's hard to know.
She was in debt.
She was in debt.
It turned into negative, I don't know what the number is.
Negative millions.
Negative millions, right.
I don't have a number.
It was negative.
of millions. If she sold all 11 or if she sold every single one of her properties,
the forensic accountant told us on the stand, she would still not be out of debt. She was in debt
millions of dollars. Millions and millions. Right. She went so, so I mean, you know,
at the very least, however you see this call, you have to see this as being wildly
deceptive and wildly dishonest, right? So this is someone who struggles. Again, let's go back to the
wise monkeys. This is someone who has her hands over her eyes. She has her hands over her ears and she has
her hands over her mouth. She's not speaking the truth. She's not hearing the truth, right? She's
not seeing the truth. She's lying. Yeah. And again, I don't know what the jury's thinking or,
you know, how they're going to interpret that. But I think it would be hard.
to argue after what the jury's heard and after hearing this call that this is someone who's
trustworthy and honest because clearly she's creating this fiction this fantasy around her money
arguing that she was quite successful and she made a lot of this money she didn't
right so you have you have this issue of deception you have this issue of the importance
of the house those are we'll get back to those in a minute and
And then there's a quote that you also picked up on in your show that is the most important part of the Bryce call.
And this will set the stage for everything else we're going to talk about today.
Quote, Eric would never let me work.
Eric never trusted me.
I know what I can do.
Eric never gave me a chance because he didn't believe in me
and the debt was paid off in seven months.
Well, the debt obviously wasn't made off.
It wasn't.
It wasn't.
But this whole idea of blaming this on Eric in some ways, right?
And that he won't let her work.
He didn't trust her.
He didn't believe in her.
This is going to be a persistent theme with Corey Richards.
Yes, it is.
This is going to define our analysis of Corey Richens. This is going to define our analysis of what Home means to her.
Okay.
He didn't believe in me.
Yeah.
Right. And so that's really important because what we're going to learn about Corey Richens is that there's never enough for Cory Richens.
that there's never enough money,
there's never enough love,
there's never enough of anything, right?
For Corey Richens,
everything is always the pot of gold
at the end of the rainbow
that doesn't exist because there's no leprechaun, right?
So she wants to find the leprechaun in the pot of gold.
So do I.
Well, yeah, I mean, we all do.
Well, no, I don't know if I do, by the way,
but, I mean, we'll talk about that.
So that quote is really important,
And you picked up on it.
You discussed it.
Did you want to mention anything about?
Well, I just, yeah, I think it says what she feels about herself.
That's what I caught too.
You know, he didn't believe in me.
Look what I can do, you know.
He didn't trust me.
If given a chance, look at me.
It goes along with some other texts to Josh, the paramour.
I love saying to paramo.
I've never, you know, the paramour, the lover, the secret lover,
where, you know, we'll get to.
that later, but where she says that she was cleaning
toilets of rich people's home. Yeah,
let me read that now as a matter of fact.
Okay, so we're jumping ahead. We're jumping ahead here because this is
important. This is, this is going to be a similar motif. So Corey Richen's
text to Josh Grossman or Robert Josh Grossman,
the Paramore secret lover who I've, I've talked to Josh now.
And this is a text from Corey to him.
Right. Go ahead. Yeah.
this is a text from
this is a text from lima bean
to pee in the pot.
So lima bean is
Corey
and he in the pod is Josh.
Here's the quote
and this isn't exact. It's pretty close but I had to
narrow it down a little bit.
And I want to, the reason I'm reading this is because I want to lump it together
with the previous quote about
Eric never trusting her, right?
These overlap.
So, Corey, in the tax, Corey says, quote,
when I was little, I grew up scrubbing other people's toilets.
I was always looked down upon.
Tomorrow I close on three properties.
It's never been about the money.
It's about being able to say, I too have properties in Park City.
And you're not better than anyone the way you treat people and I can prove it.
Yeah.
That text.
That text really, really gets us closer to understanding Corey Richens.
That text and her statement to Bryce about Eric not believing in her.
Those two overlap.
Okay.
Let me, so as long as we're talking about those ideas,
You had a bunch of notes on that text.
We're going to get back to that?
Yeah, we'll get back to it in a second.
I'm so close to you.
It's so fun to be this close to you on the couch,
but I can see everything.
And I'm like, but that, put that.
Okay, I'll wait patiently.
So I'm going to back up a little bit here,
and I'm going to do what I like to do,
which is to go from minutia to the 10,000-foot view, right,
the bird's eye view.
And in order to understand those texts,
I think we have to really kind of look at what I would call the psychology of grief.
The psychology of greed.
Of greed.
Of greed.
Right.
Because really, this is, not only is this a story about what home means to her, it's also a story about greed.
Yeah.
And what is greed?
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So at the simplest level, greed is not having enough.
Right?
It's it's accumulating stuff.
It's typically possessions, but it also can be people.
It can be love interest, right?
like Josh, it's, greed is never feeling like, never feeling satisfied, never feeling fulfilled,
never feeling like you have enough.
What's the goal of greed?
What's the goal of accumulation?
The goal is safety, feeling safer because you have more.
It's status, right?
We see this in the text.
Well, I can, I can compete.
I can compete with all those rich parks.
I'm cleaning their toilets, but watch.
this.
Greed is also about control.
Controlling your environment.
The more you accumulate, especially money,
the more control you have over your life
and over your environment.
It's about admiration.
People will look up to you if you're wealthy.
If you have all these properties in theory
because you have more status,
people will look up to you.
And most importantly for our discussion,
I think it's a way to attempt to relieve a sense of
inner emptiness.
Yeah.
That if you feel like you're not enough and you don't have enough and somehow you
accumulate all this stuff or you do all this stuff and you're so successful, then in
theory, you filled up that void.
You filled up that emptiness, right?
So I just, I wrote down some notes about different psychological components of greed that
I think are relevant to this discussion.
I'm just going to go through these quickly.
I think there's a bit of scare, what I would call.
scarcity psychology here, which is that when people feel that resources, love, recognition,
and safety are limited, then they become more occupied with accumulation.
So she feels, she certainly feels some measure of scarcity that she doesn't have enough,
so she needs more property, she needs more love, she needs more attention, right?
She needs more safety.
This idea of safety speaks to home.
If we think of home, so let's get back to that idea quickly.
I'll touch on that here.
We'll talk about it later.
Home should represent the place where we feel safe.
I agree.
Home should represent the place where we feel secure.
Yes.
Like right here, right now.
Right?
And so I do, by the way.
So.
But if you feel like you don't have enough,
then you believe that by accumulating more,
you will somehow fill up that void.
Right?
you feel like that accumulation is the way to solve that problem.
Greed is also related to a social comparison, right, which is status.
Yeah.
The one scrubbing the toilets versus the large home and the owner of the large home.
Right.
So a person may feel, they may feel like they have enough or they may feel fine until they
compare themselves to other people.
Other people who have more money or more power or more beauty or more.
influence. Keeping up with the Joneses. Right, because then enough feels inadequate.
Yeah. Right. And so this idea of comparison, social comparison or status comes into play here too, right? That's another reason why greed exists.
I also wrote down that it's about control and reducing anxiety, that if we accumulate wealth, influence, or possessions, we feel like we have some protection against uncertainty.
Makes sense.
So in that sense, greed functions as a defense mechanism against feeling helpless,
against feeling uncertainty.
By why hoarding is also a psychology.
I know that's a tangent, but that's helping me process hoarding a little bit too.
It's a sense of control, even though it looks like someone's out of control, but to them,
it's a protection.
Okay, anyway, keep going.
Sorry about that tangent.
I just had an aha moment.
So, okay.
So another thing I wrote down is that greed has a relationship.
to our identities and our self-worth.
A lot of people unconsciously equate the idea that having more means that they are more.
Having more means that they're more, right?
And so it enhances their sense of self-worth.
It becomes tied to their self-esteem.
They feel like more success means that they have more worth.
Yeah.
And so they feel like if they're not accumulating or something,
somehow falling behind and not keeping up with the challenges,
then that feels like losing.
That feels like declining, right?
And so that's another reason.
That's why people get on this treadmill of working more and more and more.
Because if they're not working more and more and they're not accumulating,
that feels like they're losing in the game of life.
And I think this is probably, for me, this is the existential one.
This is probably the one that I think is the most interesting because I'm,
as you know, I'm kind of a philosopher at heart.
I studied philosophy as undergraduate.
That part of me is never.
I love philosophy.
I think like a philosopher oftentimes.
My philosophizing football is playing a feminist,
but I called you when we met.
And so the final,
I think the final issue that greed tries to solve
is this issue of what I would call emotional emptiness.
Or let's call it loneliness.
Loneliness would be another way to do it.
to describe it. And the way that works psychologically is that greed becomes a substitute for
unmet emotional needs. So a person will chase acquisitions because they cannot tolerate being alone.
They can't tolerate vulnerability. And most importantly, they can't tolerate an inner sense of lack.
This idea of lack, by the way, like if we're talking philosophy, there's a psychoanalyst and he's a French
psychoanalyst. His name is Jacques Lacan. He's brilliant. He's also a philosopher. He had a
tremendous influence on the French philosopher's French school of thought for those who know
something about philosophy, specifically some of the postmodernists and French thought.
And Lacan, the basis of O'Conn's entire approach to psychoanalysis and philosophy is based on
this idea of lack. That human beings desire things. And desire by the
way is not bad desire is good because desire keeps this engaged with life if you don't desire
then in some ways you're disengaged from life you've checked out of life the issue is for
con at least the issue is that you can never fulfill your desires that in some ways it's the very
condition of life that you lack fulfillment that doesn't mean you can't chase fulfillment it means
that you could never finally absolutely reach a state where you're not lacking something.
Interesting.
And so this is going to bring me back.
So this is going to bring me full circle.
We started with the wise monkeys, which has its origins in Buddhist thought.
I'm going to return now to a Buddhist idea, which I always think about when I think about greed.
A lot of psychologists will talk about this idea when they talk about addiction, by the way.
But in Buddhist thought, there's this metaphor of what's called the hungry ghosts.
The hungry ghosts are exactly what you'd expect.
That if a ghost is going to eat and nourish itself, it's not going to last long.
Right?
The hungry ghost metaphor is that ghosts are always hungry.
Because a ghost can never be fully nourished.
So the ghost has to eat and the ghost seeks enrichment and nourishment,
but it will always remain unfulfilled.
Yeah.
Right.
And the metaphor in Buddhism is it's a metaphor for craving,
that human beings crave more and more and more.
So it's closely aligned with grief.
Right?
Human beings, they crave more and more and they think they're going to fill up
They think they're going to fill up this void in these buckets in the way that I just talked about.
Yeah.
But they fail.
They fail because there's simply, there's another idea.
So there's another idea in Buddhism that's important to talk about here, and that's the idea of impermanence.
The term that in Buddhism that is one of the terms I use all the time, well, not all the time, but it's a term that's near dear to my heart.
and it's called the term in Buddhism for impermanence is Anika, A-N-I-C-C.
And that means permanent impermanence.
In Buddhism, there's something called the three marks of existence.
The first one is suffering.
That's D-U-K-K-H-A.
Nika is impermanence, and Anada A-N-A-T-A means is the doctrine of no self.
But for our purposes, the one I want to focus on,
is this idea of anika or impermanence.
And impermanence is the idea that everything is transitory.
Everything is impermanent.
Everything changes.
Everything changes.
Everything's in flux.
We all age.
We all have limitations.
Right.
Right.
Everything we have will eventually go away.
In Buddhism, sometimes Buddhists say, everything that arises falls away.
Right.
Human beings don't like this idea very much.
Human beings want to think that things are stable, that they're solid, and they'll last forever.
Yeah, we do.
But this idea, so this is where this idea of lack comes in.
If you see the world as transitory and an impermanent, if you see everything as impermanent,
then whatever you chase, whatever you crave, whatever you seek, whatever you try to grasp,
it's going to be temporary.
So right now, this moment, we have this moment.
And we'll have this moment in memory, right?
But we can't grasp it.
We can't make this moment.
We're filming it.
We'll have it on film.
We'll have this moment on film,
but we're not going to ever recapture this moment as it is.
No.
Because we can't, right?
That's lack.
You can go to the store.
You can dream about buying an outfit for months and you can save enough money.
You go to the store.
You buy the outfit.
Right.
You think it's going to make you feel good.
You put it on.
You have a moment where it probably makes you feel great.
But it won't perpetually make you feel the same way.
That's lack.
Human beings, whether we like it or not, we live in lack.
We live with some sense of emptiness.
it's difficult.
We live with some sense of helplessness.
We live with some sense of vulnerability
because that's the human condition.
And so what, at the most fundamental philosophical level,
what Corey Richens is trying to do here
is she's trying to accumulate her greed through her greed
and her grasping.
She's like a hungry ghost.
She's trying to accumulate properties,
money, romantic partners like Josh, to fill that void, to fill that sense of emptiness,
to make herself feel better, to make herself feel like she's enough.
And that's why for those on the outside looking and thinking she had it all, right?
This handsome husband, a beautiful home, stability, a hardworking husband, all
these things and it wasn't enough. There was lack. It was Greek. There was there. There's,
there's, but there's always lack, right? We'll talk, we'll talk about the solution to that a little
later. I don't know if it's a solution. There's no final solution to feeling that, but,
this is also from, let's go back to the Bryce call here quickly, because this is going to take us
into some of her past. This is, this is going to be from the binding true.
self-retreat. Oh, in Sedona, Arizona.
Yeah. But before that. Right when I heard the name of that, too, I was like, that just sounds
hopey. But I mean, I love Sedona, but okay. Yeah, Sedona is beautiful. So let's go to,
this is another quote. This is from the Bryce call. According to Corey Richens,
this is what Eric would tell her, apparently. This is what Eric would say to her.
Quote, you're selfish, you're not enough, and you need me. Right. So that type of
quote, by the way, it's not going to help her, right? It's not going to help her feel like she's
enough. And I don't know if she said this, but you said this on the show. You said that she,
quote, had to chase happiness because she was never enough for her husband. Did she say that?
No. Is that your interpretation? That's my interpretation. She did not say that. That's my interpretation.
And we don't know if Eric ever really said to her, you're not enough. I think it's how she feels.
Well, she did, she said, right, but she did say in the call, she said that he told her.
Right.
That you're not enough.
You're selfish.
You're not enough.
And you need more.
You need me.
Right.
Yeah.
But even that it could be, it could be a lack of trust.
You know, I don't trust you.
You can't do this.
You know, rely on me.
And she's saying that he's saying that she's not enough.
Yes.
But yes, that's how she's interpreting whatever Eric is saying to her.
Right.
And so the, the, that's important.
All these quotes from her are important because it shows that the problem is not wanting too much.
It's an internal problem. The problem is that external acquisition,
will never resolve the internal feeling of instability, emptiness, and suffering.
And when I say external validation, I don't just mean stuff.
I just don't mean, I mean external validation from her husband, external validation from Josh,
external validation of any kind, right?
The problem here is that this is an internal struggle.
And this is this, again, this gets back to, for me, this gets back to psychology and Buddhism,
which is closely aligned with psychology in many ways,
that in Buddhism and in my field, therapy, psychology, forensic work,
clinical work, the goal largely is to get people,
to get human beings to see that it's not the external stuff that matters.
It's your internal world and how you react to things,
how you interpret the world, how you symbolize the world, right?
And that takes us back to this idea of home.
Yes.
What does home represent to Corey Richens?
Right.
Yeah.
Before I answer that question, we're going to have to get to the Sedona retreat.
Sedona, the true self.
The true self.
The true self retreat.
So the Sedona retreat is called Finding, Finding True Self Retreat, Sedona, 2021.
They were asked to write a third person autobiography, the person that talked about this true self-retreat.
And by the way.
Ali, Ali, Staking,
Ali Staking.
Her best friend.
As long as I'm talking about some of the,
if I'm talking about in Buddhism the three marks of existence,
remember that one of those marks is what's called anata.
Anata is the doctrine of true self, not true self, of no self.
So if you think about if life is, if you think about this idea of impermanence, right?
Buddhism essentially says that the self is an illusion in many ways.
Because if you look for the, like if you look for what the self is, you're not going to find something, right?
There's no thing that a self is.
I can't open your brain and say, oh, Lauren is this thing.
What I'll find are memories, right?
Memories hold your experiences.
What I'll find are, I mean, so essentially you'd have to say that the self is somehow tied to memory, right?
But memory fades.
memories imperfect.
If the self is some type of narrative
or some type of memories that we have,
then you'd have to argue.
And memories change, right?
Memories are reconstructive.
They're not permanent.
And as I can tell you, my dad's getting older
and he's forgetting everything.
I can tell you that like who my dad was 10 years ago
is not who he is now.
If there is this idea of a true self,
and Buddhism at least.
And I mean, we could debate this, right?
This would be a scholarly debate.
We could debate what the self is.
But Buddhism contests this idea that there is even a true self.
I would argue that there's something,
there's something maybe approaching the idea of authentic self,
which is that there's certain experiences and memories we have
that we feel like represent us and our values
and our commitments and our dreams and our hopes, right?
That would be some version of the self.
Right.
But is that permanent?
That's what scares me the most.
is to me the thing that matters most are my memories.
And I think that's the thing I'm most afraid of losing.
And we'll talk about that a little later, by the way,
in terms of when we do think of what really matters,
so if it's not greed and if it's not accumulation
and it's not houses and it's not money like Corey Richens thinks,
then what is it?
What is it that really matters?
And if everything's impermanent,
then what is it that matters, right?
Well, this is depressing.
No, it's not.
It's not really.
Well, why do you think I'm depressed?
All right.
So before we can answer this question at home,
I'm straying a little bit here,
but sorry, guys, this is getting really philosophical.
I warned you that I'm a philosopher at heart.
Okay.
But we really want to understand Corey Richens, right?
Am I helping with that?
That's the goal here.
You are.
Okay.
Okay.
Are we going to talk about, yeah.
So let's talk about this letter, she writes, this third person autobiography.
We need to understand this.
So here's a little bit of history.
She was born in Oklahoma.
Her brother is Ronnie.
She lived in 17 different states growing up.
So her father moved all the time.
This is according to the true self retreat.
The letter.
With Ali Staking.
The letter that she wrote about herself.
Okay.
Born in Oklahoma.
Brother Ronnie's
17.
Her father was an alcoholic
who was in an accident
where he apparently ran
into a police officer
and he spent six and a half years
in prison.
Wow.
Because of that.
Her mother was a compulsive gambler.
She was rarely home.
Their homes were foreclosed on
multiple times.
Their cars were repossessed
multiple times.
Her mother was always in debt.
Having a stable family
was her biggest dream.
Interesting.
Having a stable family
note that.
That's going to be important.
I've noted that having a stable family,
her biggest dream.
Again, confusing.
So she married in 2013 because she was pregnant and she wanted to have a stable family.
She went to graduate school because she, quote, thought it would make her, quote, make her happy, unquote.
She had more children because she thought her children would make her happy.
And again, that becomes another example of accumulation.
Right.
Right.
Like in some peculiar way, having more children, she thinks are going to make her happy.
But if we go back to this idea of hungry ghosts and greed and grasping and accumulation and lack,
children certainly are wonderful and they add value to our lives.
But will they make you happy?
There's actually a lot of research showing that children decrease happiness in marriages.
That's not to say, by the way,
that parents don't love their children.
It just means that parents make a lot of sacrifices for their kids.
So she got pregnant when she was 22 years old.
She, in college, she didn't expect to get pregnant, but she did.
She was married in 2013.
She believed that graduate school, so she went to get a master.
She believed that graduate school would make her happy.
And again, this idea of finding happiness through accumulation.
If I get a graduate degree, right?
That's accumulation.
Status.
All the things I've talked about.
If you just have these things, you will be happy.
If you have the mansion on the hill.
Right.
You'll be happy.
If you have all the money in the world, you'll be happy.
Right.
The reality is you won't.
But, but, hey, you know, for her, that's her belief.
Yeah.
Then she believes having more children will make her happy.
She learns at some point that her husband, Eric, has an emotional affair and she seeks counseling for her anxiety surrounding the emotional affair.
So that's what we know about from the assuming this letter's accurate.
Yeah, a letter she wrote at this retreat about herself.
Right. So this is what we know. This is what we learned about her history.
And I think there's some really fascinating stuff.
this history if it's accurate, right?
That a father who's an alcoholic.
And so basically you would, I can argue that her parents were both addicts of sorts,
although compulsive gambling isn't necessarily.
And I want to point out to this, I know not from this.
Her father did die of alleged alcoholism.
He died young with cirrhosis.
She was about 19-ish 20, I think.
Her dad died.
Yeah.
So I'm, I guess I'm saying this all makes sense.
Just looking quickly at her history, it seems reasonable.
It seems reasonable to speculate that there were probably some attachment issues.
That it's possible to think that she said her mother, you know, after her father died,
her mother was never home at all.
Had to work full time.
Right.
It's at the very least, you'd say that there's instability moving to these different states,
having homes foreclosed on repeatedly, cars foreclosed on, her mother being in debt.
this was not a stable childhood.
Growing up with parents that had different forms of addiction, right?
That's not, that's problematic.
And so it's easy to see, if we think about that,
it's easy to see why she's putting so much stock and faith in this idea of having the perfect home
and why she doesn't want to give her up her home?
Because her home, let's go back to this question now.
What does her home represent?
What does her home represent?
To her, it represents stability.
To her, it represents safety.
To her, it represents comfort.
To her, it represents security.
It represents all those things she never had in childhood.
Here's the problem.
This is a big problem.
I'm listening.
that because she was shaped in this environment,
unconsciously, she may want,
she grasps of this idea of the home as being a place of safety and security,
but she doesn't know how to create that.
She doesn't know how to achieve that.
And this is the irony, right?
This is the tremendous irony and tragedy
of Corey Richens is that she actually did the opposite. Instead of creating a home that was safe
and secure, she created a home that was dangerous. And it was a place where her husband
eventually was murdered. In his home. He was allegedly. Allegedly. In his home. In his home. In his
home. In his bed, in his home, allegedly. Right. And I think this is one of the reasons, by the way,
why this case is so interesting to a lot of people. Just this idea that there's danger lurking in the
place where we're supposed to feel the safest, right, that their danger exists, even our most
intimate and closest relationships. Great. I think that idea is really fascinating to a
lot of people.
I agree.
And, you know, if we think about why, why that's so problematic, I think that what I would say
is that there's some fundamental kind of what I would call them moral intuitions.
There's some fundamental moral intuitions that this idea of home violates.
one of those would be that we see the home as a place where we should be nurtured.
We should be cared for, right?
And what you have here is a home where there's harm.
Now, I don't know, it was mentioned, by the way, in the Bryce call,
there was some discussion that Eric had an anger management book that he wrote in every day.
Yeah.
I don't know what that's about.
Neither do I.
Was there domestic violence in this home?
I don't know.
You know?
She never mentioned it as in like physical.
She says, again, she says when she's talking about that to Bryce, she says, quote,
you just didn't believe in me.
She's talking about Eric.
She goes back to this theme about Eric not believing in her, Eric not trusting her, right?
Again, this is that idea of external values.
validation. It's never about her. It's always about what he can do for her.
Right.
But somehow if he believes in her, that she'll find more validation and she'll be happier, right?
I mean, but putting that aside, I, you know, that was a moment. That was sort of an interesting
moment for me because it suggests to me that the danger in this home might be deeper and wider than we know about.
You know, she's not arguing.
So this is another interesting issue that in most, they're called interpersonal homicides, IPHs.
That's what the research shows.
That's what the research calls them, IPH, interpersonal homicide.
In most interpersonal homicides, they're reactive.
They're reacting to abuse.
So women that kill their husbands, typically in the vast majority, like 80 plus percent,
the numbers differ depending on the study.
Most of those women,
and this is consistent with Lenora Walker's idea
of the battered women's syndrome
or the BWS battered women's syndrome,
which is sometimes used as offense
for women that murder their husbands.
Most of those homicides are committed
because of domestic violence
because there's some type of abuse in the home.
And she alludes to it here,
but obviously her defense,
maybe they're going to bring it up, but that's not her defense.
Well, she's denying she did it.
So, as long as we're talking about that, I think it's important to note that, you know,
I often talk about the difference, there's a difference between reactionary violence,
which is more trauma-centric, and it's based on abuse that is consistent with battered women's syndrome.
And then there's another type of violence which is called instrumental violence, which is more premeditated, right?
And this is a case of instrumental violence because there's planning.
Right.
If this is murder, there's planning.
Plotting.
There's plotting.
There's, it's quite goal directed, right?
Reactive violence is often impulsive.
It's self-defense.
It's, women are reacting to, typically they're reacting to their husbands, threatening them.
that does not seem to be the case at all here.
Well, no, the motive would be money.
Yes, exactly.
Would be money.
Exactly.
A love that isn't Eric, not a reaction to anything.
Right.
It's a plotting and a plating, planning,
especially when you throw in the attempted murder charge on Valentine's Day.
So women that kind of fit the trauma survival profile of battered women
and abusive women that react
impulsively and murder their husbands,
those women are less likely
to have, let's say, personality disorders.
The women that engage in
intimate partner homicide
that are more goal directed and based on finances
and money and insurance,
cashing and insurance policies,
are much more likely to be
predatory and to show
anti-social traits, by the way.
And I'm not saying, I'm not diagnosing here.
I'm just talking about the research in general.
The women who tend to fit this profile of financial crimes
and financial gain tend to have more personality disorders
and they tend to be more predatory
and they tend to show more antisocial traits.
So, but getting back to this idea of home being a place of safety,
which is how she sees it and how court
can't realize that.
I think it's interesting that she does mention this anger management workbook.
It makes me wonder if, and also, obviously, she took out a lot of loans behind Eric's
back.
Right.
So she violated his trust, right?
She's not creating.
No.
If her goal is to create a safe space and a secure space in the comfortable space in her home,
she's not doing that.
No, she's not.
And so this is where the discrepancy, by the way, between.
between what you think you want and the conscious elements of our lives versus the unconscious,
which is her past or unstable past or traumatic past, this is where those clash.
Yeah. Right.
You see her wanting consciously to have, she's obsessed with keeping this home.
She wants this, but she can't get it because her internal world is so chaotic, right?
her internal world is so dysfunctional in some ways that she doesn't know how to realize
this she doesn't know how to create this safe home but she clings to it so this this becomes
fantasy to a large degree because she clings to this idea that if she just has this home or just
has this mansion on the hill she'll be happy she'll be safe she'll be protected and yet the irony is
she's incapable of that, right?
We'll get to more of that dream of hers with her text with Josh,
because she talks a lot about her dreams with Josh, but yes.
So let me get back to,
so I'm getting back to this idea of the kind of the three,
the why we find this so fascinating, I think,
because there's three moral intuitions about home that we kind of rely on.
I mentioned care versus harm.
or nurturing versus harm. There's another one which is loyalty versus betrayal that we expect.
There's a tacit assumption that our spouses are going to be loyal and they're right, they're going to love us,
and they're not going to betray us. So marital trust is so important. If you have kids, the marital bond and
the marital trust is in many ways, right, it's sacred in some ways. And violating that, what she does,
She takes out loan.
She does all this financial stuff behind his back.
Right.
Not just the relationship, but also financially.
Betrays his trust.
Right.
She betrays his trust financially, romantically.
She's having an affair.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, I guess he had an emotional affair?
According to Corey.
According to Corey.
Okay.
So we don't know if that's real.
They brought up an alleged affair in court many times the defense has about Eric.
No one will confirm.
it. I think they're trying to avoid that in some way, but it sounds like they certainly allude to it,
and it sounds like there was perhaps an emotional affair on Eric's part. We don't know, though.
And the other moral tuition, I think that's really important here is what I would call
power versus empathy, or maybe the better way to describe that is power beneath intimacy.
In other words, we don't anticipate or we hope that the people we love are not going to somehow use power, use their power, to try to control us.
Right.
We want some degree of reciprocity, right?
And she's behind the scenes, right?
She's subverting his power.
And I think he senses that.
He doesn't, not only does he not trust her when he learned.
about the money, he consults a divorce attorney.
But he feels like he senses at some level that she's subversive.
Right.
And so, you know, you can say, oh, he said these things to her about, you know,
not trusting her, not right, all that stuff.
But maybe there's good reasons.
Yeah, right.
Maybe there's good reasons he doesn't trust her.
Sounds like it.
Yeah, I agree.
That's where I said, you know, I try to have empathy.
for her. You know, I don't know if I'd appreciate it if a guy just loved me because I was the
mother to his children. I said that, you know, I've tried to have empathy for her, right? I don't
know if I would like it if someone didn't trust me, you know, to go out and make dreams come true.
Thank you, babe. But, but, yeah, he has, she has given him reasons to not trust her.
Yeah. So, exactly. How can you hold that against?
So that's what I thought is interesting, too, is I have tried to give her empathy and the benefit of the doubt and thought, gee, you know, that would be hard.
But again, she hasn't helped him entrusting her.
Yeah.
And so I think this idea, this idea of home is so interesting here because, and again, if I'm going to go back to this idea, if we want to understand.
You can grab your water.
I saw you grab it.
Yeah, I know.
And I've got like so many different things.
I've got caffeine.
I've got tea, I've got a water.
Toast.
Yeah.
This is water.
To a long episode.
Okay.
So let's return.
So I said at the beginning, if we want to understand Corey Richens, we need to understand
this idea of home.
And so let's let me unpack this a little further.
So the basic premise here is that human beings in general,
including Corey Richens, ironically, we want to see our home as a safe place.
and we want to see our partner as a protector.
And we want to see our partner as someone we can trust
and someone that we're in a reciprocal relationship with us
that won't use power over us,
won't try to control us.
And we want to see our family, if we have kids,
we want to see our family as a place of safety and refugee.
In other words, right, we want our family to be safe
and comfortable and and harmonious and cohesive.
And to be accepted.
I think that's a big thing for me.
To be accepted just as I am.
Right, to be accepted.
But that's love.
Yeah.
So I think this is a case where all the betrayals and all the violations of trust,
they really kind of shatter those core expectations we have about home.
Even though Corey's adamant about the fact that that's what she wants more than anything.
Right.
She wants it more than anything and look what she's charged with.
Wild.
So I think what to me, like one of the things that's really interesting about this case is that the brain kind of says if if safety doesn't exist here, if safety doesn't exist between us and our home, then where does it exist?
Yeah.
Right.
It makes the world a place that's alarming.
It makes the world a place that we should be fearful of, right?
If we can't find some measure of happiness or safety and security in our home, where are we going to find it?
Right.
And I think that's the idea that Corey Richards is really trying to cling to.
She knows she intuits this.
The problem is she doesn't know how to create it and she doesn't know how to realize it and she doesn't know how to enact it.
She can't create the conditions for a safe space because she doesn't know how.
Yeah.
And it would be so basic to me.
Like just sit down, go to bed.
Don't kill your husband.
No, no Moscow meals allowed in our house.
Don't take out loans secretly.
You know, just basics, just basics.
But anyway, right.
Yeah, be honest.
Yeah.
So the person I say she doesn't know how, like just stop, just stop.
Yeah, a little honesty would help.
And by the way, and so now this kind of moves us over a little bit into this idea that you asked,
which is who is Corey Richards?
Yeah.
And this will take us into the idea of a false self versus an authentic self.
Okay.
So most of us have what I would describe.
Most of us wear masks at some point, you know, to some degree.
I mean, with different degrees, right?
But we have a public persona and a private persona.
And I think with Corey Richens, I think that's especially amplified.
Amplified, yeah.
Right.
It's especially amplified.
And I could argue that-
Because everybody acts different in different situations, right?
Yeah, right.
Context.
Yeah.
Context is everything.
Everyone, everyone acts differently with different friends or at work and a family or on a date.
Yeah.
And so.
And that's what you.
you mean by public and private personas?
Yeah, and I would argue, too, that if we...
Be careful with all the paper moving.
You're making white noise, literal, white noise.
I would argue with...
If we trust the research about the different types of interpersonal homicide
and that the vast majority of those are more reactive to abuse, right?
They're more victim.
victim-centric in the sense that the victims of abuse act out and to protect themselves
that shows that the small percentage of interpersonal homicides that occur based
that are more goal-directed and more financial in nature,
that there's more personality disorders among that small group,
right, then you have to start thinking, perhaps there could be a personality disorder here.
Yeah, I wonder.
And if there are certain conditions that Cory Richens, like Corey Richon experienced growing up,
which a lot of instability, there might be some personality disorders.
cluster B personality of disorders maybe that would would tend to explain some of those types of
behaviors right that the impulsiveness and the the lack of a stable cell so like for example one of a
diagnosis that relies heavily on the idea of instability and the idea of unstable affect and emotion and unstable
an unstable sense of self, in particular, that would be borderline personality disorder.
So I don't know.
I don't know if it applies to her.
Never interviewed her.
I've never met her.
But it might be the type of personality disorder that could have some relevance here
and would help explain potentially why someone like Corey Richens would wear so many masks.
have such an amplified varying degree of who she is.
Or lack a stable sense of self.
Yeah, because it's so extreme.
Very confusing.
Right.
And on that point, let's move to the medical examiner call.
Okay.
So this was another one of the homework assignments you gave me was to analyze this call.
And this was a recording with Dr. Christensen, who happens to have also,
done the autopsy for Tammy Debel, the Utah Chief Medical Examiner. It wasn't who did Eric Richens
autopsy, but he did take this call from Corey about the autopsy. And he did sign off on the
autopsy. Hey, this is Corey Richens. Hey, I just have some quick questions for you. I'm just trying to
understand the toxicology report. I promise I won't take up a ton of your time. Oh, you're fine. You're
Can you just kind of explain to me, I guess.
She was saying that this kind of supplemental report, I guess, was left out of the first autopsy,
and so nothing has really changed.
Do you have it in front of you?
I do.
I got the file here.
So can you?
So we issue supplemental reports, like if once the original report issued, if we do any additional reports issued,
if we do any additional microscopic examination,
anything like that, then we include that.
Okay, so it was just like extra testing done?
Extra tax testing, yeah.
So originally the testing, the only toxicology testing was done was on blood.
And so then this was additional tests.
Okay, and so is there a mean difference in that, I guess?
Well, did they just tell you, you know, what tells you, you know, was it, you know,
is it something they ate?
to just learn I would find it.
So does, I guess, so does this tell you, like, if he, if it was, like, injected, if he ate it,
if, I mean, is that what this, can you tell from this report?
Not definitively.
I mean, it seems like, you know, with what the amount that's there, that it probably was
ingested.
Okay, and so this, so the 15NG, like, is that, like, a substantial amount?
Is that, like, a trace?
That's a lot of fentanyl in the blood, yeah.
You know, people die with half that amount or less in their system.
Okay, so that's quite a bit.
Yeah.
So what's the next one down, the nor fentanyl?
It's just a metabolite of fentanyl.
It's what your body changes fentanyl into.
Oh, I gotcha.
Okay.
And then, sorry, it's just the third one, the acetyl?
I don't know how you say that.
Astille fentanyl.
Yeah, that's just a, it's a, it's a,
a form of, it's a variant of fentanyl that is usually only present in the setting.
It's manufactured, like a pharmacy?
No, no, no.
Like a lot of, most fentanyl that we see leading people to die these days.
Oh, good Lord.
So this is like more of like a cartel.
No, I mean, that's not what it is.
You call this the street street fentanyl as opposed to, you know,
prescription.
Okay, I see.
And then is this, so is the ethanol, is that alcohol?
That's alcohol.
Okay, and is that like the 279?
Is that kind of like a substantial amount?
Or is that like one drink?
Is that five drinks?
You can't tell how much it is.
And since this testing was sent, you know, quite a long time after the original autopsy,
most likely that's related to this morning change.
But it could be related to decontal, be related to,
stuff. Either way, what, you know, in the stomach kind of what that level means in terms of, I mean,
if that was a blood level, that would be the same as a 0.28, you know, which would be, that person would be
pretty substantially intoxicated. I mean, you know, you could in theory pull something out,
and it would be, you know, 100% ethanol, you know, depending on if they just drank a stomach full of,
if they just drank a bottle. So it doesn't really, it doesn't really tell you much about how much they
drank or what they drank or anything like that.
I got you.
I got you.
Okay.
So it's not present in the blood, just the gastric or whatever.
Okay.
And then just the last one, what is quatiapein?
Quatyapine is an antipsychotic medication.
It's called Syracquil.
Okay.
Medication.
I got you.
Okay.
And it has like 16,000,000, 1,000?
16,000 nanograms per miliolier.
Okay, and is that, I mean, quite a bit?
Yeah, I mean, that's a big, not very big.
Okay.
Is there, like, could those have been mixed, or is that not kind of a...
Could what be mixed?
Quatopine and, like, the fentanyl?
Or, I mean, is that, like, drug, a normal, I guess, drug thing?
I don't know.
Like, it's not, I mean, you know, whatever,
most of the time, if we see those together,
it's because taking quitoapine as a prescribed medication,
and they were abusing fentanyl.
But, you know, there's, there's, he was abusing fentanyl.
No, that's why all the list is just like,
what the heck is this and going on?
So I guess that's why I'm confused just about all of this, honestly.
So I'm, yeah, I don't know.
So, I mean, I know it doesn't mean anything now, but just kind of something for me to, you know, try and figure out, I guess.
Yeah.
And then I'm assuming the acetopian, is that like a aspirin or something?
At beta-minifin, that's just Tylenol.
Yeah.
Oh, that's fentanyl too?
No, that's Tylenol.
Oh, Tylenol.
I was like, holy shit.
Okay.
So just like Tylenol caffeine.
And then the naloxin, I'm assuming, is just something that they gave him while he was here.
Probably would be my guess.
It'd be, you know, somebody that's unresponsive.
It's very common thing for GMS to give people.
Okay.
Okay, no, that works.
I was just trying to figure out, you know,
if this is anything different, if we found out anything new.
Yeah, like she said, it doesn't really,
it doesn't change anything in the cause or manner of death.
It's still, you know, definitely, you know, death from fentanyl intoxication,
and we still don't know how we got it in.
how we got it into him.
Yeah.
And I mean, is that anything you could ever find out?
I mean, do people normally eat that, like take it?
Like, is that something you like shoot?
It's not usually something people eat.
Well, that's not even true anymore.
So with illicitly manufactured stuff, sometimes people take pills that have that.
So yeah, these days you can't really tell.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I appreciate your time.
I do.
Thank you very much.
If you have other questions, don't hesitate to give me a call.
Okay, awesome. What was your name?
Dr. Christensen.
Oh, Christensen. Okay, perfect. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Okay. Okay, you're welcome.
So I listened to this call, and my first question was, why is she making this call?
Right.
Right? I mean...
I think we're all wondering that.
Yeah. I mean, does she need to make this call? I mean, clearly she's trying to get information.
Right.
And, you know, presumably she wants to...
to feel in control of the situation.
She's,
she's clearly anxious about whatever the findings are going to be, right?
I think that's what the prosecutors tried to show.
Yeah.
That she's,
she's making this call because she's desperate.
There's some desperation here.
She's desperate to figure out what the court,
what the medical examiner knows.
Well,
and the Richens family,
I think,
is suspecting her and she realizes that.
The life insurance is doing an automatic investigation
into things because it had been open just a month
before he died.
So even without a police investigation,
she already has some people, you know,
suspecting her yet.
But, but, you know, if you're innocent,
just let it take its course, right?
Just let the medical examiner do its thing.
Right.
She's not going to change what they find.
And so if you look at it, what you have,
I think what this shows is largely what I would call
narrative manipulation. And narrative manipulation is the idea that we want to exert some control over
how events get interpreted. Right. And that's what you see with Bryce, right? That's clear
narrative manipulation. That's what you see with Chelsea, right? That's what you see. That's what you see
with the police to some degree. Like from the minute the police come in, all the way through until now,
you have this narrative manipulation, which is trying to control the interpretation of events.
Yes.
And so it's a version of impression management, but it's a little deeper than that.
It goes deeper than that.
And what's fascinating about this call with the medical examiner is kind of,
I don't know how else to describe this except to say, like, she kind of plays Dom, right?
Like she kind of plays like she plays kind of this innocent,
naive, ignorant, unknowing person that's like, you know, like an example of that is,
so I didn't know this, but, you know, Syracill, by the way,
Syracill is an antipsychotic.
I know the drug well because when I was working on inpatient wards,
one of my first assignments when I worked at the VA,
I was a pre-doctoral intern at the VA many, many years ago.
And my first assignment was on the inpatient ward at the VA.
And man, that was fascinating, let me tell you.
But Syracquil was handed out like candy.
And the reason that it was prescribed so much on the inpatient ward was because it's a sedative.
So they would just, you know, it depends on how much you give someone, obviously.
But they would give these guys like a ton of Syracquil and they'd just knock them out.
because these guys would come in agitated and psychotic.
It's an antipsychotic.
And it's mainly used to try to balance certain neurotransmitters, serotonin and dopamine.
But it's the, I would know, you know, it was given to these guys all the time, right?
And so Sarah Quill, I didn't know this until I listened to the medical examiner.
And then you explained to me that she had a prescription.
Correct.
It was her prescription.
For Sarah Quill.
Correct.
But she plays dumb like she doesn't, oh, what's Sarah Quill?
I know.
What's Syracquel?
She has a prescription.
She has a, it's a towel.
I know.
What's Syracquil?
I know, that's a mask.
That's not just like a public and private persona anymore.
Right.
It's a mask.
It's a mask.
She has it.
It's given to her.
At the very least, the pharmacist would be like, hey, by the way, this is Sarah Quill.
And this is what it's for.
Or, you know, I don't know why she's getting it.
Is she getting it because sometimes it could be anxiety?
It depends, right?
I don't know.
I don't know why she's getting it.
But she clearly knows what it is because she's been prescribed syracool.
And then the most interesting part was when he mentions, she says, what's a sit,
I don't know, she mispronounces acetaminophen, which is Tylenol.
Everybody, most people, if you've taken Tylenol at all.
If you have a child.
Right.
I mean, and she has three.
Right.
You give him child's Tylenol.
Children's Tylenol.
You know what Tylenol is.
Cetamine.
What's a set?
How do you pronounce a set of what?
And he's like, oh, yeah, that's Tylenol.
Oh, it's like.
I know.
Give me a break.
Like, clearly this is, so yes, this is a mask.
It's a mask.
This is about narrative manipulation.
Another way to describe that would be impression management.
But surely, she probably doesn't anticipate that this call is going to be played at a murder trial.
No.
No.
But if you take the medical examiner call and you take the body cam footage and you take the call to Bryce and you take the text to Josh, right?
If you look at, if you line all these things up, you see different masks.
You see different impressions that she's trying to create.
You see different personas.
And all of that, by the way, would suggest that this is somewhat.
who fundamentally doesn't know who they are.
This is someone who fundamentally probably has a very unstable sense of self.
And that would also explain part of this issue around greed.
Because if you don't know who you are and you don't know what you value,
then you're almost certainly going to grasp more for things that you don't want,
like material possessions or affairs and relationships and romances
where you get validation that you're seeking.
In other words, the idea of the hungry ghost comes back into place.
play here because it's endless.
Right.
There's no limits, right?
The problem with the,
the idea or one of the ideas behind the hungry ghosts
is that hungry ghosts know no limits.
There's no amount of nourishment you can give a hungry ghost
that's going to satisfy them or fill them up.
Yeah.
Life is limits.
Whether we like it or not, we deal with limits.
Yeah.
That's the way it is.
That's reality.
It's the way it is.
Yeah.
And so part of this is these different masks, right, they show not only does she not know herself,
but she's exceeding all these limits to try to get something that she doesn't even know she wants.
Right?
She doesn't know what she wants.
She doesn't know how to get it.
And so she's falling back on kind of these things that she thinks that she should want,
that the culture is telling her are important.
wealth. She lives in Park City.
She's trying to keep up with the Joneses. She thinks all of this is going to make her happy.
And behind all of that is this fundamental fantasy, and this is going to take us full circle,
is this fundamental fantasy about how this fictional representation or this fantasy of home
is going to somehow save her and rescue her. And that's why she clings so.
desperately to keeping that home, not only her existing home, but this is also why she's in
real estate. Well, it's also a question that I have about Chelsea, Barney. I mean, is this some
psychological thing? She has this best friend, right? Best friends since junior high, ride or die.
Okay. Chelsea, she's on the Bryce calls. And she helps Chelsea get into her first home, her forever
home with her entire life savings. You know, first, I think she's trying to help her best friend,
right? Like, okay, she's like $45,000 down payment. This is Chelsea. It's her best friend.
Sounds like she's trying to help her. You can sign the deed. The house is yours. Just pay mortgage.
She wants it to be her forever home. She has three kids. She has a fourth child in the home.
She pays the mortgage every month. She's very responsible. Corey gets arrested.
And what happens? Turns out that Corey actually never sent in the paper.
work. So Chelsea never did sign the house. Even though she signed the deed, that isn't what they had.
And Corey had been taking out other loans from the house. It went into foreclosure. And Chelsea,
her best friend, is kicked out of her home, her forever home because of Corey. And I wondered if
there was something psychological there, too. Not only does she have to destroy her own home,
she has to destroy her best friend's home,
even though in the beginning it looks like all she wants
is a stable home for herself and a stable home for Chelsea
and maybe all of her BFFs that she was friends with
that maybe didn't have what the rich people in Park City had
and she's going to help them, right?
And then she does that to her.
Well, a couple of thoughts.
The idea, this fantasy of home only applies to Corey.
Okay.
Corey doesn't, even though this is her best friend, I think there's, there's probably an element of sabotage here.
Okay.
Because unconsciously of Corey's environment growing up, because of her own sense of instability, she's probably sabotaging her friend.
I think this is someone who my guess is doesn't have a lot of empathy.
Corey.
Yeah.
Corey.
Right.
Right.
And so in that sense, I think she's only.
concerned about her sense of home and her fantasy of home and creating that.
I don't think she really cares about, sure, it looks like she's helping her best friend.
But it's about, it's about Corey feeling good.
It's about Corey feeling good about herself, correct.
It's not trying to help her friend.
She's trying to help her own sense.
Her self-esteem.
Her own sense of self and her own sense of morality.
Yeah.
Right.
And if you go deep enough, I'd probably say that there's an element of sabotage there.
She's actually trying to harm her friend.
Right. Because she doesn't want her friend to be happy. And she doesn't want her friend to have the stable environment that she wants for herself and that she never had as a child.
She's going to make sure her friend the deed isn't under her name. Correct. Correct. So I would even argue that it's surface based. Yeah. She is making her feel good about herself. But the reality is that's not what she wants. What she really wants is to take care of herself. And she doesn't care if she harms her friend in the process. Yeah. It's serving Corey's ego for ego.
Correct. Correct. Her friend is a means to an end and the end is taking care of Corey.
Okay. Thanks for clearing that up because I thought that was a fascinating thing about home.
Yeah. Yeah.
I think that's going to kind of bring us, since we're kind of coming back to this idea of home,
I think it's going to bring us to some final thoughts. Can you believe it?
I don't know how long we've been doing this, but.
Well, I have a question, though, about Josh.
Yeah.
The text with Josh.
Okay.
This whole idea of home.
She says to Josh her dream in text that we haven't covered.
Okay, yeah, let's talk about that.
I want to bring that up.
She says, let's get married.
Let's live in the guest house of the Midway Mansion.
To me, this is really important, especially if we're talking about home.
Okay.
So this text to Josh that I thought was kind of important was her sort of sharing her plans
that she wants to live in the guest house.
So the Midway Mansion, it's a 4,000 square foot home.
So don't underestimate the guest house.
And run an event center, hardly have to work, just live off the money of the event center.
And she has a sort of whole plan, raise some kids.
And that's what the Midway Mansion, I think, kind of represents to her, too,
is this sort of whole other future.
So even though she wants the home that she lived in with Eric,
she's already planning another home and another life and another idea.
It gets, again, it gets to the idea of the hungry goes.
It gets to this idea of that if you find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,
you'll be done.
You'll be happy.
Everything will be fine.
Everything will be complete.
It's pure fantasy.
Josh is not a real person to her.
She thinks he is.
Josh exists in her fantasy world.
Josh is a prop.
I agree.
She says these things, but Josh could be anyone.
I agree.
And so in that sense, yes, she's, Josh is, is just a part of this drama that she's in that.
She's, he's, he's, he's a fictional character to her.
In her, in her fantasy.
She may, you know, there might have been a point where if, if the body was cremated and there
no investigation that if she walked away from all this, she may have married him. It's possible.
I don't think that marriage would have worked. No. Because it was based on a fantasy. It wasn't real.
None of this is real. This is someone who says she's worth $11 million. Right.
Who's multi-million dollars in debt. This is all a fiction. Right. To her. And by the way,
I mean, that's part of the reason this gets to the point of murder. Because when you
live in this type of fiction as fully and completely as she does.
Murder doesn't seem as real as it might to a normal person.
And the consequences of that don't seem as real.
And you believe if you're in this fantasy, you believe that you can do whatever you want.
You can walk away from murder and the police officer's not going to say to you,
hey, he's really young.
He didn't have any health problems.
We need to check this out.
she's astounded that the police officer says that.
She's like, what?
That's not how I played it out in my fantasy world.
What do you mean?
Like, don't take the body of the medical examiner.
Everything's fine.
Right.
Or talking to Bryce.
Like, I don't know how we, she says to Bryce, you know, maybe, I don't know how he died.
Maybe he drank too much water.
That was another explanation, by the way.
That one was what that.
Like he died from water poisoning.
That was a weird one.
Right.
I mean, like, how many explanations are we going to have to hear?
Yeah.
What's the jury hearing?
All of them.
All of them.
Right.
All of them.
But yeah, as far as Josh, I mean, I actually feel bad for the guy in the sense that, like, he's just a dupe.
Like, he just, he comes along and he's like a prop in her world.
She uses him.
I mean.
I think there was some using.
Well, okay.
True.
That's true.
I mean, I hear you, but.
But the important point is that this, this fantasy she has about home is not real, nor.
nor if we want to understand Corey, nor is she capable,
nor does she have the mental or emotional or psychological health to create a healthy home.
Yeah. Yeah. I agree. What the jury will see is to be determined. The jury is out.
Yeah. And so I think, I think I want to, let's talk about if she can't create a health
home then what is a healthy home right what what is love right i mean i know that's like oh my god
can't believe i said i feel like so i remember when i was a kid um my dad would he watched this thing
this show called the benny hill show which is this british crazy show and i remember the only
thing i remember about the bany hill show because i was little is my dad would put this show on
and i thought benny hill was like this ridiculous guy you probably don't even know bany hill
Nope, don't.
And Benny Hill, one of his little gags was he would always say,
what is this thing called love?
Right?
And they do variations on it.
Okay.
What is this, what is this thing called love?
What is this thing called love?
Right.
Now I feel like I do know who he is.
Okay.
Yeah.
So, you know, I don't know why I remember that.
But I feel like we're now, I just stepped into like,
I stepped into the realm of like comedy.
by asking what is love.
What is this thing called love?
What is the thing called love?
I don't know which one.
Maybe in terms of this discussion,
maybe the best way to think about love
is that the person sees the world
as not something to consume,
but as something to relate to.
And that's a big difference, right?
When you're consuming stuff,
you're doing it for your own benefit.
When you're relating to something, you're doing it because there's mutuality.
Yeah.
Right?
Like, I would say if you want to create a healthy home, maybe that's the place to start.
More relational interactions, more relationships, less consumption.
And that's not to say, I don't mean like every normal harm is going to consume.
When I say consumption, I mean Corey Richens type consumption.
consumption above and beyond what's necessary.
Consumption with the goal of somehow finding this end state that doesn't exist.
This functional consumption.
Yes.
Relate instead of consume.
I like that.
I wrote in my notes.
The greed, right?
Greed tries to fill the self by taking, whereas love enlarges the self by relating.
I want to see these no.
I like it.
The problem is not simply wanting too much.
The problem is the external acquisition.
Cannot reliably resolve internal instability, emptiness or something.
I know you talk about it.
I just like reading your notes.
Yes.
Love is what helps the person stop treating the world as something to consume and start inhabiting it as something to relate to.
Greed tries to fill the sylph by taking.
Love enlarges the self by relating.
Dr. John Matthias.
Greed says, I must take in order to survive.
Love says, I can receive, give, and remain real.
Love is surrender, reciprocity, empathy, and care.
Those are all things that are lacking in the rich and home.
Well, maybe not all.
Eric, I'm sure, brought some of those elements.
Corey may have brought some of those elements at certain times, but not consistently.
Definitely not consistently.
Right, right, exactly, because she was so focused on the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, which never existed.
And that, by the way, if this is murder, if she did commit this murder, that's why.
Well, thank you.
Thank you.
We start back up on covering the trial again Monday.
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow.
And then later this week or next week, I'll be a part of something more.
We'll share that more later.
And so thank you.
Thank you for coming here.
And as the evidence comes down in the Corey Richens case, I'll be keeping you posted.
The defense, or not the defense, excuse me, the prosecution is supposed to end either late tomorrow.
or Tuesday, according to the prosecution.
They're going to rest.
Okay.
And then it's the defense's turn.
So we'll see.
We'll see.
So it's, it sounds like it's well ahead of schedule.
Yeah.
And the defense,
the defense has some things on their side.
There is no murder weapon.
There is no fentanyl.
Right.
I know.
There's no damning one single damning text.
There's a lot of texts that as a whole do not look good.
Yeah.
But there's no tech.
text from Corey or communication that they have an evidence that says, I'm going to do this.
Let's kill Eric.
Yeah.
There's no accomplice that knows exactly what she was doing, that she told this to.
You know, this is a lot of circumstantial evidence in this case.
Right.
It's not necessarily a slam dunk.
Right.
Of many of the cases we've covered, this one has more, I think it has more uncertainty.
I agree. I mean, I think when you put, when you line up all the pieces, and if you pay really close attention to the stuff we talked about today, it doesn't look good.
No. And I put the pieces together as I do these recaps sort of. And I'm laying it out and thinking, oh, yeah, they're connecting all the puzzle pieces for me. And of course, that's what the jury will do at the end is, and that's the question is, will they connect it all? We don't know. But I've sort of
had those moments where I think, oh, yeah, okay, I'm really seeing this. But, but, you know,
then you kind of go back the next day and you think, is every juror going to do that? Are they going to
see this? Will they see? And this, this is one of those questions I asked much earlier in the show.
will they see her as a grieving widow, right?
Or will they see her as a fearful widow as someone who has something to hide?
Or maybe not even something to hide, someone who clearly is hiding something,
or has tried to hide something.
Right.
We'll see.
So thank you, everyone, for joining us today.
Thank you.
Thanks, guys.
Good night.
Good night.
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