519 - Death Before Divorce: The Kouri Richins Case

In February of 2026, weeks before Corey Richen's trial began, the Department of Homeland Security's Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office, the division tasked with protecting America from chemical, biological, and nuclear threats, issued an intelligence bulletin to law enforcement agencies across the country warning that domestic partners are using chemical and biological toxins to kill their spouses and that the problem was almost certainly much larger than the documented cases suggest. Between 2014 and 2025, the DHS documented 17 such cases with at least 11 deaths. More than half of those cases occurred in the last five years of that window. The substances being used range from antifreeze to eyedrops, insulin to cyanide, and veterinary barbiturates to fentanyl. These substances were chosen, the bulletin noted, for their ability to mimic natural illnesses and complicate detection. These cases are hard to prosecute for the same reason they are easy to commit. Today's subject, Corey Richen's, would be caught, but the bulletin's central concern was how many others are not. The fear is that this method of murder might be far, far more common than anyone realizes. So, how much do you trust your partner? Enough to accept any meal made by them to be toxin-free, or at least free from any toxins that they have added? When you're not feeling well, when you're surprised that you're sick again and still fighting some mysterious link between you and your partner, once again dealing with some confusing digestive issues, does it ever cross your mind that the person behind your illness might be the same person you have trusted to have your back and take care of you more than anyone else in this world? The 2022 murder of Eric Richens, a murder that received widespread national and international media attention due to the circumstances surrounding the killing and the subsequent publication of the children's grief book, Are You With Me?, authored by his now-convicted killer, on this week's How Well Do You Know the Person? You Sleep Next To at Night edition of Time Suck. This is Michael McDonald, and you're listening to Time Suck. You're listening to Time Suck. Happy Monday, and welcome, or welcome back, to the Cult of the Curious. I'm Dan Cummins, the Suckmaster guy who is very aware of the risks of fast food and processed food, ultra-protein, and dairy products. Processed food, but still sometimes really, really craves Taco Bell's Mexican pizza. And Kraft mac and cheese with sliced-up hot dogs in it. And a box of a half a dozen Franz old-fashioned donuts. Oh, so many chemicals, plus so much sugar, equals so much joy. You are not listening to a podcast right now that just goes over delicious but shitty comfort food. You are listening to Time Suck, okay? Hail Nimrod, hail Lusafina, praise be to good boy Bojangles, and glory be to Triple M, okay? Let's get started, okay? Okay, let's talk about something absolutely tragic and be glad it's not us, okay? Let's laugh. It's our way to cope with and downplay the darkness that is never far away, okay? Okay? Okay? I'm not going to say okay all the time today, okay? On the morning of March 4th, 2022 in a beautiful home in the little town of Francis, Utah, a 39-year-old man and his wife, a man named Eric Richens, was found cold and unresponsive in his bed. He was a rancher, a stonemason, a father of three young boys, and by all accounts, one of the most energetic, hardworking men anyone who knew him had ever met. The last thing Eric did before going to bed was celebrate. His wife, Corey, a realtor and owner of the brokerage K. Richens Realty, had just closed on the sale of a new property, her biggest yet, and they were toasting to that. But then hours later, she was calling 911. First responders initially suspected a brain aneurysm, and that was what she would repeat. Before I go further, close on the purchase. I probably wrote that down wrong. She purchased a new property to flip, to be accurate. But first responders initially suspected a brain aneurysm, and that is what she would repeat, what she would say to investigators, her house cleaner, family, friends, and other associates. She said there was no other logical explanation for how Eric died. A blood vessel in his brain must have ruptured. He just died in his sleep, right? So sad, brain aneurysms. It can affect anyone of any age. There can be no warning. You can go to bed young and healthy and never wake up. A lot of you listening will probably have a brain aneurysm and die in the next 15, you know, 20 minutes. I don't think you'll make it, a lot of you, to the end of the episode, you know? Just statistically. Most people get brain aneurysms from wearing headphones. They take out five to 10 million otherwise healthy Americans every single day. Single week. It is the leading cause of death in the lie that I've just shared. But for real, they can't affect anyone. You can be healthy, you can have one. Eric was healthy. He'd had COVID not long before, but so had damn near everybody back then. He'd had Lyme disease as well, but he'd recovered. Years of physical work had certainly taken a toll on his back, but that doesn't kill you like it killed him. A lot of people live very long lives with very bad backs. Overall, Eric was very fit, very healthy, full of life, but now he was dead. How? Sometimes, shit just happens. It can happen to the best of us. And because of that, no one suspected foul play, not right away. Not in the minutes after this. And why would they? Eric and his wife, a self-made real estate entrepreneur, appeared to be wildly successful. And again, from the outside, you know, it's the best their marriage had ever been, according to some friends. But within hours of Eric's death, Eric's two sisters started to get pretty suspicious of Corey. She was acting so strange. So focused, not on grief, but on money. Eric's money and her business dealings. And they'd had concerns about her for years. And then when the toxicology results came back, showing a lethal dose of fentanyl, five times the lethal dose were in Eric's system, his sisters were convinced that that was how she'd killed him. But most people still weren't. His death was still not being investigated by the police as a homicide. Corey was doing a great job in most people's eyes of playing the victim. She seemed the most shocked, devout of anybody, that he was the healthiest man she'd ever known. How could this happen, you know, she openly wondered. She told everybody who would listen that he didn't do drugs, that he didn't even smoke, that he was the healthiest man she'd ever known. But she wondered, did he have secrets? Did he have some secret addiction that she just didn't know about? You know, people have those. A private investigator hired by one of Eric's sisters also had questions. And when they looked into the private details of the couple's relationship, those questions became concerns. Concerns about a lot of debt. Concerns about a secret affair Corey had with a lot of people. A live-in handyman, Robert Josh Grossman. Concerns about the Richens' house cleaner, Carbon Lobber, uh, Carmen, excuse me, Lobber, uh, who maybe had sold pills to Corey. These concerns would be shared with detectives who would soon add more to the list, such as concerns about a series of deleted internet searches that included what is a lethal dose of fentanyl? Recovered by forensic software. Who was the lady, really, who had just written a children's book about dealing with grief, published a year after her husband had died? Was she a grieving widow? Or a manipulative, secretive, and murderous black widow? Let's jump into today's timeline. Find out. Okay? And learn how Corey Richens, okay, uh, went from the woman who seemed to have it all, okay, to a woman who will almost certainly spend the rest of her, uh, probably very long life behind bars. Okay? I want to jump into this timeline, okay? So let's do it. Okay. Trap on those boots, soldier. We're marching down a time-sucked timeline. Uh, if not just flat out lied there, engineers don't actually tend to move around nearly that much for their jobs. Not any engineer I've fucking ever known. But that's what this convicted liar has claimed. Okay? Oh, and me saying, okay, is a nod to a recent episode. If you're just like, did he break? Did something break with him this week? What's going on? Okay? Corey also claims something happened in 1996 when she was just five or six that changed all the moving around. Apparently, yeah, those 17 states she lived in, most of that happened before the age of six. Get the fuck out of here. Corey was still just a little kid in 1996 when her father allegedly got behind the wheel after drinking heavily, passed out, and then hit a police officer who had pulled over on the side of the road. Not sure how badly he was hurt. Her dad supposedly was arrested, then went to prison for the next six and a half years. Not sure if he kept in touch with Corey after that. Online speculation is that he may have died to something related to alcoholism, but I can't confirm that with any public records. Whatever happened, he seems to have disappeared from Corey's life. And while he was in prison, two years later in 1998, Corey's mother, Lisa, filed for divorce. Once the divorce was settled, she packed up her kids, including Corey and her brothers, DJ and Ronnie. And then she wanted to be closer to her sister out in Utah. Sounds like there were a few step-siblings that moved with them as well, including Corey's step-sister, Renee. Again, not a lot of good source information on all of this. But as a single mom, Lisa was reportedly hardly ever home, working long hours, hard hours. The responsibility of raising Corey and her brothers fell largely to Renee. Corey wrote that Renee helped looking after them until she, Renee, turned 18, and she packed up her shit and left. Turns out Renee was feeling bitter about having to do all the child rearing, which is fair. She resented Corey and her brothers for having to look after them and to give up on her own childhood. And sometime after she left, Renee dropped all contact with her siblings, according again to Corey. If true, that sucks. Sounds like Renee had the right to be angry, but maybe took her anger out on the wrong people. Not the kid's fault, but the dad. Yeah. Ended up in prison and mom had to work all the time to keep food on the table, lights on, roof over everyone's heads. Shitty situation for all. At least this is how it looked at first glance. But was mom really working all the time? Is that the real reason Renee was watching the kids? Doesn't seem to be. Seems like mom was blowing a lot of their family's money at the casino and neglecting her kids and adding unnecessary financial problems to her life at the same time. Corey claimed Lisa was a compulsive gambler and that much of her childhood was spent at weekends, in casino hotel rooms, sitting around worried about money that her mom was going to lose, you know? Again, if true, no wonder Renee wanted to get the fuck away from her. Jumping a decade ahead now. Now we have better sources for a lot of this. In 2006, when Corey was around 16, likely still living at home, I assume, her mom Lisa's romantic partner died unexpectedly. This woman is not named in news sources, just referenced, but the cause of her death was ruled a drug poisoning, specifically an overdose, of oxycodone. The deceased woman did have prescriptions for oxycodone and was reportedly struggling with abusing her medication, so the whole thing was treated as a tragic but not uncommon case amidst a nationwide opioid epidemic and the case was closed and stayed closed for many years. But then, Summit County Sheriff's Office detective, Jeff O'Driscoll, and this did happen in Summit County, the lead detective in the Corey Richens case, decided to take another look and he found that Lisa Darden had been named the beneficiary of her partner's estate, very shortly before she died. Not a total cause of concern on its own, people do name their partners as beneficiaries all the time, but in light of what he was investigating regarding Corey, you know, it looks shady as hell. Did Lisa kill her partner and then, years later, help her daughter kill her husband in the same way? Did she tell her daughter something along the lines of, well, if you want to get rid of somebody, make a bunch of money in the process, I mean, you know what worked for me, right? You remember how I did it? Despite having her daughter killed, and prescriptions for oxycodone, and a history of medication abuse, this unnamed partner was not in recovery at the time they died. She, however, was not in a state of recovery from addiction at the time of her death. The detective wrote, based on my training experience, this would likely rule out the possibility of an accidental overdose. Basically, he figured that if she was using regularly, she had built her tolerance back up, she knew how much she could handle in all likelihood. And that now led investigators to suspect foul play rather than accidental overdose. Detective O'Driscoll also wrote, based on Lisa Darden's proximity to her partner's suspicious overdose death and her relationship with Corey, it is possible she was involved in planning and orchestrating Eric's death. Lisa still not charged with anything as of this recording, as far as I can tell. I've tried a variety of searches to figure that out. Who knows what might be coming down the pipe though. Corey's then attorney, Sky Lazaro, called this a baseless conspiracy theory and said, Lisa's partner was simply one of the millions who have suffered from and ultimately succumbed to opioid addiction. Also around 2006, Corey was going to Wasatch High School while living in Heber City, Utah. Heber City, less than an hour's drive southeast of downtown Salt Lake City, when there's no traffic. More of a town than a city, which has under 17,000 people there as of the 2020 census. Heavily LDS, unsurprisingly, about 70% of the people there are. But Corey grew up in a non-LDS household. According to the LDS, according to several sources, despite all the moving around, Corey mentioned in her third-person bio, most of her childhood, the formative years were spent in Heber City. While she was in high school there, Corey made two friends, who'd end up being two of the most important people in her life, Allie Staking and Chelsea Barney. Alice went with Corey to that Sedona, or Allie, excuse me, I just fucking threw Alice in there. And there's another person, Alice. Don't even worry about her. Allie went with Corey to that Sedona treat, retreat, I mentioned earlier. I'm still figuring out how to speak. These three went with Corey to that Sedona retreat, These women would stay close through marriages, through kids, and it sounds like they stood by her even after Corey's arrest, truly not believing she was capable of anything like murder. I don't know that they're friends with her today. I don't think so. At least not Allie, based on her demeanor at Corey's trial and a few things she said. Around the time she graduated high school, Corey will say that her first taste of real money came from cleaning people's homes, who had money, right? Big, nice homes, big, expensive homes. Corey said she got a job cleaning houses for wealthy people in Park City, less than 20 miles from here. 20 miles north of Heber City. And she told herself, one day, I'm going to own one of these houses. Uh-oh. This kind of shit does tend to make me a bit nervous. Certain people. I mean, there's nothing wrong with wanting a nice house. Nothing wrong with wanting to have a lot of money. But sometimes when I come across somebody who, it's like their driving desire is just to be rich in this kind of almost like an abstract sense. Rather than say, like, have a strong desire to be a surgeon because they want to help people live or feel better while also getting rich. Or they want to be, they want to be a financial advisor because, you know, they're good with numbers and they like to work with money and they can be a fucking hedge fund manager or whatever. They have a talent for it and they want to build others' wealth while also getting rich. When it's not something specific like that, like, oh, this passion of mine could also get me rich. It is a bit of a red flag for me. Not always a big deal. Not even usually a big deal, probably. But when someone's primary motivation in life just becomes, again, there's like this vague desire to just be rich. One of my first internal questions is, what are you willing to do to get rich? How far? How far will your moral compass bend? And I tend to think probably quite a bit in that scenario. And also, why do you need that? Why do you feel like you need that? Like, what hole do you think a big house in Park City will fill inside of you? How important is status to you? How important is it to keep up with and impress the Joneses? You know, because chasing status, I just think a lot of people do a lot of dumb shit for that. And in my observation, it tends to not make them happier, actually. They seem to get more miserable. Seems like a hollow, vapid dream. Anyway, 2009, a year after Corey graduated from high school, she was working at a Home Depot in Park City, Utah. Paid better than the other stuff she was doing, like cleaning houses. Maybe she was there because she wanted to meet people, too. Meet a certain kind of guy, I think. Some sources say she was already going to Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, but that is not what she wrote on her LinkedIn profile. I don't think she was going to school at this time. I think she was just, honestly, I think she was looking for a husband with money. According to the best news sources I could find, Corey got a job working at Home Depot as a cashier. at the contractor checkout, where all the tradesmen, carpenters, would come to check out their orders, where a lot of big general contractors making a lot of big general contractor money, building those big-ass Park City homes were coming through. I don't think she took this job by accident at all. And I'm not even mad, you know, at people if that's the truth in some of these situations, right? Not necessarily the best indicator of character, though. I can speak to, you know, a deep-rooted desire, again, just to be rich. I'm going to pick somebody to get rich. Linda King, who worked alongside her, later described her as a gorgeous and sweet co-worker. According to Linda, Corey was the kind of girl that all the contractors were crushing on, right? She was flirty. One customer was crushing extra hard on her. A customer she flirted back with, 27-year-old Eric Richens. He was a regular at Home Depot. He was working as a stonemason. He was becoming a lot more of a regular after he met Corey. Flirted with a 19-year-old for a while before he finally worked up the courage to ask her out. Asked for her number. She happily gave it to him. According to Linda, all the Home Depot co-workers thought it was the sweetest thing. And from that point on, Corey and Eric were inseparable. Linda also described Eric as having an unforgettable laugh. She said she would try to say funny things just so she could hear it. She said he was the kind of guy who would wait an hour in the contractor line while everybody else was bitching, impatient, complaining about the wait. He would laugh it off and chat with people waiting around. Just kind of an affable, laid-back dude. So now that we've been introduced to Eric Richens, let's get to know him before moving forward. forward in the timeline. line uh eric eugene richens was born may 13th 1982 to eugene and linda richens in bountiful utah bountiful is a city named after the devil the great deceiver of many names satan lucifer the great serpent with seven heads and ten horns bountiful bountiful is a town that was never founded it was conjured in 1666 bountiful rose straight up from hell after being conjured by six necromancers and then six legions of demons waited centuries six inch well that isn't mathism anyway six for six families to set hoof to soil with six horses okay and now six dairy queens sit atop bountiful six most important cities in the world bountiful is a city named after eugene and linda richens important intersections okay each staffed by six horny teenagers trying to provo float six dicks okay into six virgins front butts okay well six teams of six perverts bounce to six mattresses six times for six premature ejaculations okay uh or instead of all that fucking nonsense uh bountiful is a city whose name is derived from its reputation as a great place for gardening so i was kind of close you know satan guardian uh and because bountiful is the name of a city in the book of mormon or jesus christ for sure 100 definitely appeared to the nephites uh bountiful is actually utah's second settlement first salt lake city then bountiful just 12 miles north the latter-day saints began to settle salt lake city in july of 1847 bountiful settled just two months later in september by mormon pioneer peregrine sessions god such a common name if i had a fucking nickel for every time i heard about a new peregrine sessions i'd have a nickel uh in the early years peregrine pretty much took it upon himself to be the only man needed to help populate bountiful dude had eight wives and fathered 55 children that dirty dingled mother trucker gosh dang oh my heck he's busy all right uh for decades bountiful was a sleepy farming community full of more than the average number of cousin fuckers thanks to so many people having the same daddy and then grandpappy uh by the 1950s its proximity to salt lake city made it a suburban destination for professionals doctors lawyers educators commuting into the city uh still a very lds centric place and the richens uh were mormon eric grew up in a close-knit financially comfortable lds family in a town of about 33 000 at that time eugene eric's father owned a cattle ranch 44 miles away up in hennifer about a 45 about a 40 minute drive excuse me from where eric would eventually settle and raise his own family on the stand eugene painted a picture of the family grew up in family came first in the rich's household they did everything together education was non-negotiable hard work was expected and their faith was the backbone of all of it eric was the eldest of three he took uh being a big brother very seriously really looked out for his two younger sisters katie and amy the three siblings very close uh growing up eric who at some point became known to friends and family as rico spent countless hours in the family ranch hauling hay feeding animals and mending fences like literally mending actual fences uh not just apologizing in some kind of country song sort of way uh not sure where rico comes from maybe from uncle rico from napoleon dynamite i fucking hope so uh such a good character in such a good movie back in 82 i used to be able to throw a pigskin a quarter mile are you serious i'm dead serious are you serious uh rico went i'd never get tired of clips that movie uh rico went to woods cross high school just south of bountiful in woods cross utah where he was a serious athlete participating sometimes excelling in cross-country basketball baseball and soccer uh woods cross named after daniel wood another old perv uh an early lds pioneer uh mr wood uh aptly named had 10 wives some sources say 11 uh 32 kids so uh glory be to gilead okay after high school rico went to the university of utah where he graduated with a degree in international studies with a minor in spanish uh spanish would come in handy as a member of the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints rico served a two-year mission in mexico city where he became truly fluent in spanish when he got back the young industrious guy took up work as a hot tender tough-ass job very physically demanding high demand construction job that involves supporting bricklayers and stonemasons out on job sites working with heavy material in the hot summer not for the faint of heart he worked there with his high school buddy cody who showed him the ropes and they kind of moved up in the fucking stonemason you know hierarchy uh cody and eric bonded over amongst other things hunting they were two hard-working easy-going guys who love the outdoors according to cody we became good friends through the hunting world he was a rancher i liked hard work he loved hard work in 2010 rico and cody decided not to just work together uh but to truly go into business together they started the stonemasonry company c and e stonemasonry e for eric c for cody as i'm sure many of you have already assumed uh and they specialize in high-end paving stone and tile work working largely on big expensive custom homes across central and northern utah cody handled the tile side most of the paperwork eric probably uh easier just refer to him eric since that's the name uh used for him in court transcripts in most sources he handled the stonework there were 50 50 partners uh cody described eric as feisty and hard-working said he could be the life of the party and the kind of guy who could make you feel great but also tell you exactly what you did wrong and made sure you knew it so you'd correct your behavior and improve right a straight shooter eric like cory ambitious uh serious about business serious about growing the business making a bunch of money uh he had seen how hard work can pay off his parents and he wanted to replicate much of what they had done uh you know for himself and now we've caught up on our timeline to when eric and cory met okay uh they started dating and in 2011 cory enrolled at weaver state university working towards a bachelor of science and health care administration then in 2012 the couple moved into a big beautiful home in the little town of francis utah 43 miles east of salt lake city just two miles from camas media reports almost always say fucking liars liars i cast anathema upon you all uh almost true though the zip code is the same between the towns they're practically touching uh francis and camas uh only uh about 15 miles from heber city where again cory grew up 55 miles from bountiful where eric grew up so same general area uh house is a beauty has an oversized three-car garage plus another detached garage sits on a half acre lot it's on real estate sites right now for sale that's five bedrooms four to two hundred square feet was bought for around 400 grand back then it seems now on the market with an asking price of uh 1 million 295 thousand dollars eric made the down payment as he was earning around a million dollars a year in revenue from his company back in 2012 and it just kept getting better dude was crushing it uh so now cory living in the kind of house you know more or less that she had dreamed of living back when she was cleaning those uh houses when she just five or six years earlier i mean she wanted something bigger still but this was very nice uh she and eric they're in love they're not just provo float neither no sirree they're having regular sex sin sex gentile sex heathen humping and in 2012 cory became pregnant with her first son carter around that same time eric proposed it doesn't seem that their pregnancy was planned at all and less than a year later on june 15th 2013 cory darden 23 years old marries eric richards 31 years old in the backyard of their home in utah uh and on the big day of their wedding cory got a little surprise that must have come as a big shock did i mention that eric had been married once before i did not but he was uh he had married his first wife julie jorgensen back in 2005 when he was 23 she was a year and change younger julie had grown up in idaho falls in that area uh also had went to the university of utah where she had met eric where she studied child development got married to eric and then graduated as a member of the kappa kappa gamma sorority in 2006 uh while still in highs uh excuse me while still in school he was married to a woman named not in high school well in college uh she also started her career at mccann world group a salt lake city advertising agency and then she quickly moved up the ladder to become a senior account executive uh she was like him very athletic active in soccer dance basketball and skiing both had a real passion for physical fitness in the outdoors unfortunately the whirlwind college romance quickly fizzled and they were divorced just four years later in 2009 according to a lot of web speculation it was a very messy divorce and she was married to a man named eric jorgensen and allegedly julie cheated on him uh to be clear this is just internet gossip from places like facebook and reddit where a lot of people both those who claim to have known some of the people involved and total strangers have weighed in uh heavily on all of this and then eric at least according to his friends and family got the short end of the stick financially when assets were divided between the two uh one more thing about julie just a few years after the divorce was finalized eric's ex-wife would tragically die in a horrific car crash while sitting in a red light he was rearing to buy a pickup truck that crashed into her at approximately 70 miles an hour the driver high as fuck it was a frosty january day his windshield covered in frost he had not bothered to wait for it to defrost before he sped off he would go to prison and despite eric and julie no longer being together at the time you know this broke eric's heart now that last part does not factor into this story julie's death but i felt weird not mentioning it and i shared the messy divorce part because it supposedly led directly to eric's death and julie's death and julie's death what happened on cory's wedding day and before i share what the wedding day surprise was time for today's first two mid-show sponsor breaks if you don't want to hear these ads ever again please sign up to be a space lizard on patreon help us make monthly charitable contributions get the catalog ad free uh get episodes three days early get your mom's phone number and more now let's return to eric and cory's wedding date and find out what that surprise was eric's mother linda handed cory a document a prenuptial agreement and according to testimony from her trial cory did not know she was going to be forced to sign this prenup until it was presented to her on her wedding day approximately 10 minutes before she was set to walk down the aisle and uh she said linda made it clear that the wedding would not take place unless she signed this document and if that is how it actually happened and it seems like it might be that's fucking crazy why would you wait until the wedding day to do that that is cruel and why again if this is true why would eric not do that himself right why are you having your mom do that uh that is a sneaky kind of conniving way to do it uh i i just don't understand the actions of so many humans uh constantly so so now obviously cory was faced with the choice of either signing this or being humiliated on her wedding day in front of friends and family and excuse me having a contentious relationship with the father of her child and his family uh the terms of the prenup outline that eric would retain rights to his business income property and other assets meaning if cory were to ever leave eric she would also be walking away from most of his money there however one exception if eric were to die while the two were lawfully married his 50% stake in his very profitable becoming more profitable all the time stone masonry business cne masonry would transfer over to cory eric will secretly change this exception later though uh i will address that when it comes up in the timeline before moving forward once i got more familiar with this story uh the prenup did make more sense to me i i wonder if eric's mom saw right through cory that if it wasn't necessarily about the fact that cory was going to be married to cory it was more about the the first divorce and more about cory uh and i think maybe eric had concerns too maybe if she hadn't gotten pregnant they would have gotten wouldn't have gotten married at all i don't know just just speculating uh back to the june 15 2013 wedding date cory head over heels in love with eric signed the prenup walked down the aisle and cory darden became cory richards if she had any massive resentment over how that uh shit went down on her wedding day uh she didn't show it uh it seemed like their marriage to most outsiders was pretty fantastic over the next few years their family would grow cory would give birth to two more sons ashton and then weston uh they will raise their three boys in francis utah in that five-bedroom house on 282 willow court i already mentioned located in summit county summit county seems like a very nice place to raise kids it leads all utah counties in percentage of residents with a college degree and has the highest median household income in the state uh notably cory would give birth to two more sons ashton and chrysler will be about one in three households in the county currently earn over two hundred thousand dollars annually uh trees line a lot of the streets shade most of the yards the uinta mountains rise to the north rounded and pale and vast extending out into colorado wyoming uh the medium home value just over a million bucks it's the wealthiest county in utah boasts some of the highest life expectancy in the country at around 85 and a half years very low crime by almost any measure you can think of it's one of the best places in america to live located in summit county is park city uh home to famed ski resorts deer valley and park city mountain uh sundance film festival found its home in park city 1985 the twin communities of camas and francis camas has about 2 000 people francis has about 1500 and again their borders practically touched separated by uh looks on the map like about a thousand feet or less uh friendly tightly connected little communities uh the area has long been known as the gateway to the uintas is often used as a supplies a supply station for people passing by the uinta mountains passing through on their way to the uintas mountains uh park city just 20 miles away land between these towns dotted with multi-million dollar estates on huge chunks of land a lot of the homes are second homes owned by people who can afford to have a 5 10 even 20 million you know dollar plus second home uh you know to retreat to uh when they want to escape into the wilderness get out of the city but also still have a personal chef uh prepare their meals that kind of thing uh so this is the world that eric and cory's son started to grow up in uh one that must have seemed ideal surrounded by scenic natural beauty and affluence eric was a super involved dad coached all their soccer basketball and baseball teams as his father eugene said eric was their coach their father but most important was their very very best friend the rich and boys were and still are very close to papa eugene as well uh their paternal grandfather and uh their paternal aunties katie and amy spending lots of time at the rich's ranch learning to rope and riding around four-wheelers that kind of thing in addition to being an incredible present hands-on dad eric was also a super successful businessman as i mentioned c&e stone masonry's business was steadily increasing growing year after year employing close to 90 people by the early 2020s that's what the source said i don't know if that's like subcontractors who work for them sometimes or if they you know just typically were running enough job sites to keep 90 people or close to it like steadily employed uh i mean sounds like a great area to be a gifted contractor in the high-end construction game the money was good very good eric and cory able to travel a lot they were able to vacation in costa rica greece and mexico but cory wanted more uh most who knew her said the uh or say the same thing about her very very ambitious just a hustler through and through always was uh not built to be a stay-at-home mom content with a million dollar home she always wanted more according to cory's mother lisa eric didn't want cory to work he wanted her to be a stay-at-home mom and that wasn't going to happen eric while most speculation seems to uh uh be that he wasn't that religious was still raised mormon raised in a culture where most women run the home and the men provide and by some accounts that is what he wanted and so friction develops in their marriage uh which based on the prenup you know i do understand uh i do understand or i understand you know what cory's desire to like want to go work and have that lead to friction i do think it's pretty fucked up to have somebody sign a prenup saying that you don't get any part of the business that i'm building a business that you will be helping me build by raising my kids so i can continue to focus on work uh but a business that if we get divorced you're 100 cut out from but also i don't want you to ever establish your own business i don't want you to work during our marriage and be able to uh you know build up your own financial situation so that if we part ways you don't drown financially you know either be a team and work together for everything or agree that yeah uh you're only truly partners where the kids are concerned and outside of that each person's gonna work on their own shit make their own money have their own bank accounts etc which you know you know works for some people uh in april of 2019 cory uh started up on her own real estate company k rich's realty a house flipping venture started buying homes fixing them up flipping them according to her friend and employee k rich's realty marketing director greg hall cory loved flipping houses and was quote very successful at it at the peak of her career she was working at three on three houses at once so how did she get the money to get that company off the ground more on that in a bit okay uh and hint it's pretty shady Okay. From the outside, the Richens truly look like they had it all back in 2019. Beautiful family, handsome and successful contractor, husband, beautiful and ambitious wife, two young fit people with three healthy kids building the construction of real estate empire. And as they entered the 2020s, it seemed like things just continued to get better. You know, just a, just a, oh my gosh, I got to, there's a button I have to hit. Things were moving on up. How did I almost forget this? Only one of my favorite songs ever. So it felt like life was like for them. Full fucking Jefferson smoke. Corey, you know, was again, you're continuing to build her business into the 2020s. Eric continuing to build his, but behind the scenes, things are fraying to the seams. One of those things is Eric's love for hunting. Apparently Eric could not get enough of hunting, but Corey was starting to get sick of it. Starting to hate it. According to those who knew him, hunting was one of Eric's greatest passions in life. Second, only to his boys, which of true says something right. Three boys. First hunting to close. Second wife, maybe distant. Third, uh, Eric would take off on big game hunting trips all across North America, hunting stuff like elk bear, the pronghorn, which for most of my life, I thought was an antelope. It's even called the pronghorn, a pronghorn antelope. A lot of the time. No, sir. Uh, resembles an antelope actually its own thing. Uh, random. In fact, pronghorns are much more closely related to giraffes than they are to either antelopes or deer. If you remember one thing from this episode, I want you to remember pronghorns. Anyway, according to Corey's brother, Ronnie, Eric and his friends, Cody included, uh, would disappear on hunting trips for weeks at a time. Then these trips were becoming more and more frequent and it was starting to wear on Corey. She wanted her husband home and his absence had become a real point of tension between them. In response, Corey poured herself further into work. But there was a problem with her business that Eric didn't know about. Uh, she had secretly used his business to launch her business. Essentially she had stolen from him. Uh, Corey would later complain to friends that Eric never believed in her, that he never gave her a chance, but he did. He just, he didn't realize it. Uh, back in early 2019, Corey had taken out a $250,000 home equity line of credit on their house, uh, their house that Eric had purchased before they were married. Uh, and because of the. Clean up agreement, it was not their house. It was his house. Still, she had taken out a HELOC loan against it, a home equity line of credit, which meant she was borrowing against the value of their home. Uh, and because of that, she had taken out a HELOC loan against it, a home equity line His home, the loan taken out in Eric's name, signed by Corey. She had used a fraudulent power of attorney powers she did not actually have and without his knowledge. Power of attorney is a legal document that allows you the principal to appoint someone else, the agent or the attorney, in fact, to make decisions or take some legal actions on your behalf. It's risky. I have done it, though. As it became busier and busier, creating content, it got harder and harder for me to be as involved as I had been before. Managing financial decisions. So I did end up granting Lindsay power of attorney powers. Could she fuck me over with those powers? Yeah. Yeah. Theoretically, how do I feel OK about this? I don't. OK, actually, I took care of it just yesterday. Well, it took care of itself. I took care of itself. That's what I meant to say. Just yesterday, after reflecting on this decision, after I started to think about what a fool I've been, I invited Lindsay to go on a little hike with me. It happened to be, you know, happened to take place along the edge. It's a very crazy, steep cliff where the drop is, you know, straight down. And, you know, it's like a 500 feet and the rocks at the bottom are quite jagged. And we talked near the top. And then we argued. And then she felt insulted that I decided to revoke her power of attorney. And then wouldn't you know it? She slipped. If she won't submit, she slips. Best marriage advice I've ever gotten from my dad. She actually more than slipped. She started to slip. And then when I reached for her, trying to save her life, obviously. She was so mad at me that she jumped so I couldn't touch her, which is why she landed at the bottom. A good, I don't know, 20 or so feet from the base of the cliff. And it's sad. And I've been super fucking sad about it. Okay. Just this morning, I was talking to my new girlfriend about it right after she moved in. We met last night and I asked her if I should still record this podcast so soon after Lindsay's passing. And she told me that I should. And she promised to check in with me and see how I was holding up after she was done with classes for today. She's a freshman. In college. Totally legal. Fully above board. But for real now. That was absurd. And I can't wait for it to get back to Lindsay. And I hope you don't hear this chair starting to fucking squeak all of a sudden today. Lindsay does have power of attorney, but we both meet regularly with our bookkeeper, you know, financial advisor. I'm well aware of what assets and debts are in my name. Thanks to checking my credit report, you know, other financial info on a monthly basis. I do trust her, but I don't trust anyone blindly enough to never check on them. It doesn't seem Eric did this for quite some time. For over a year. He had no fucking idea that his wife had used swindled money to fund the early operations of a real estate building. Things like startup costs and initial renovations. Yeah. He didn't know that if she didn't pay the secret loan back, she could have lost his house. Before we continue, let's rewind now to that prenup. The stated everything would go to Corey if Eric died. Well, not anymore. Not quite. Back in 2018, before Corey took out that secret HELOC loan, Eric and his business partner, Cody Wright, set up what is called a buy-sell agreement for C&E. Stone masonry. As 50-50 partners, Eric and Cody wanted a way to look out for their family should something happen to either of them. So they took out a mutual life insurance policies. They took out, you know, policies on each other for $2 million each. If one partner were to die, the surviving partner would receive the life insurance payout and use that money to buy out the deceased partner's share from the estate. Very smart. The family being bought out gets a ton of cash to live on. The surviving partner gets full ownership of the business and everybody gets taken care of. Pretty complicated. Pretty common setup for 50-50 business partners. Eric didn't know yet that he was going to need that. And then in October of 2020, he found out what Corey had done regarding that HELOC. And he was not fucking happy. Can you imagine? Eric felt this was the ultimate betrayal. And he wasn't wrong. He was furious about Corey's lack of communication and rightfully so because her actions meant their family home in Francis now on the line if she can't pay off that credit. Financial infidelity. So terrible. Like worse for a lot of people. And sexual infidelity. When Eric confronted her, Corey promised him she was going to pay it back. Eric, though, not confident that she would be able to. Doesn't trust her, obviously. Whether he believed her or not, right? The damage is already done. So now he has to take steps to protect himself and his kids. And on October 13th, 2020, just days after he discovered that HELOC, Eric picked up the phone, called an estate planning lawyer, told them that he needed their help to protect himself from, to quote the legal documents, recently discovered an ongoing abuse and misuse of finances by his wife. He wanted to make sure that no matter what happened to him, Corey would never, ever be in a position to crawl to control his assets or his children's futures. And now Eric will place a big financial secret of his own inside the marriage in early November. So just shortly after this, he sets up the Eric Richens Trust and he transfers all of his assets into this trust and then appoints his sister Katie as the trustee. Then he remote removes Corey as the beneficiary of his life insurance entirely. Does all of this behind Corey's back? Uh, then he meets with a divorce lawyer, but decides not to take things further because of three and only three reasons. And they were all under the age of 10, his boys. Uh, according to Greg Skordas, the Richens family spokesperson following Eric's death, Eric would have done whatever it took to make the marriage work for the sake of his boys. Uh, before the end of 2020 towards that end, uh, he and Corey started to undergo marriage counseling. And after a while, their friends and employees started to notice a shift. Uh, things seem to have changed. Things seem better between them. The tension in their marriage started to lift, at least on the surface. But did it really? Eh, not necessarily. Uh, while Eric may have been trying to save his marriage for the kids genuinely, Corey started to make plans for a new life for herself with somebody else. This is all a fucking facade with her. She started flirting with a guy named Robert Grossman, who goes by Josh. Corey and Josh had met for the first time the previous year in 2019, it seems, when Josh answered a help wanted ad for one of her house flipping projects all the way out in South Carolina. I don't think that's the case, it's not entirely clear. I think they came across each other online while he was living in South Carolina, and she wanted him to move to Utah to work with her and more. Do some construction on her houses, and also put in some manual labor on her pussy. Check it out, see if anything needs to be leveled, demoed, rebuilt, uh, give her a nice makeover. They may have met even earlier, uh, some sources say they met as early as 2017 through Corey's house flipping venture. But, I don't know how that could be if she didn't start her house flipping company until early 2019. Regardless, they know each other now. Josh was a handyman, he moved to Utah in 2020, started living in one of the properties Corey was renovating in Heber City, uh, where she grew up. Just down the road from where she lived now, and the two arranged a sort of live-in deal. Josh would work on the house in exchange for free rent and occasional cash whenever Corey could manage it. There was no salary, no regular wage, just a loose promise that she would pay him when she could. And he was fine with that, because as he testified on the stand, he loved her and thought she loved him. And also, come on, because they were definitely already fucking. Get out of here, come on. They had to have already been fucking. Uh, by December of 2021, to the outside eye, Kay Richin's realty looked like it was thriving. And now Corey decided to go bigger than she'd ever gone before on a potential flip. For years, locals driving through the little town of Midway, Utah, just another town a few miles outside of Heber City, so same area, uh, had slowed down to stare at the same thing. A big ol' unfinished 22,000-plus-square-feet mansion sittin' on an 8.75-acre lot off of State Route 113. Lookin' like somebody had once dreamed real big and then walked away. Uh, locals called it the Midway Mansion. Ground had initially broken the project back in 2017. The initial owner, Doug Roylance, once had big ol' plans for it. He was hoping to build a communal space for rent with eight bedrooms, 12 bathrooms, two kitchens, a swimming pool, a golf simulator, and a rock-climbing wall. All included within the property. But Roylance's enthusiasm faded somewhere between the stalled permit applications and the news that somebody had died inside the half-built shell of his dream project. Uh, and in 2019, the Midway Mansion was largely abandoned. And I'm not sure why the death spooked him, but that's what the source says. Uh, now, one may hear unfinished and mansion and picture something with an unpaved driveway, just some missing light fixtures. You know, maybe a house needs some work, but has good bones, uh, can be polished up relatively quickly. Midway Mansion was not that. Far from a simple fixer-upper with a ton of potential. Uh, it was an obvious fuckin' money pit to almost anybody thinking about taking it on. According to the contract addendum, the Midway Mansion had experienced, quote, extensive vandalism, theft of materials, significant structural damage, and likely had a variety of animals living inside its ventilation system. There's a whole fuckin' habitat in there. Uh, the property wasn't even connected to the sewage system, and some wetlands on the property had not been yet evaluated to confirm whether or not it was even safe, or legal to develop portions of this land. Several environmental agencies had to be commissioned to come out and inspect the wetlands. The house was, undeniably, a shitshow. A total mess. Uh, the contract stated that the buyer, so, you know, Corey, would have to accept the property in its, quote, unfinished, disassembled, unrepaired, damaged state. Uh, the forensic accountant who later reviewed this deal said that she had never seen, not once in her career, a purchase contract with that many problems disclosed up front. And the asking price for all these problems was, $2.9 million. Uh, $50,000 deposit was due up front, money Corey didn't actually have, that she would have to borrow. Uh, the settlement deadline to purchase the property was, uh, March 4th, 2022. Eric thought this was fuckin' insane. He thought it was way too expensive, too much of a problem. He, he hadn't even wanted Corey to look at it. But she wasn't gonna listen to him. She was absolutely convinced that if anybody could take that wreck of a property and turn it around and turn it into something worth, you know, twice or more what she paid for it, it was gonna be her. This was gonna be her. her ticket to taking her business to the next level, building millions of dollars without his help towards i believe making enough money to leave him unsurprisingly they fought about this uh and then cory shared with her friends a secret she'd been keeping that her relationship with josh grossman had crossed a line and now they were romantically involved but they had come on they'd been involved for quite a while uh she will later lie to her friends about ending the relationship and i'm certain that she lied about when it began also while all this drama was going on on new year's day 2022 somebody logged into eric's new york life insurance portal using his credentials and changed the beneficiary on that two million dollar life insurance policy that insured his business partner cody wright changed it to cory that's weird who who was that who did that uh brian freckleton eric's insurance agent got the alert almost immediately through his agent portal tried to reach both eric and cody but neither picked up uh he eventually got through to new york life directly had the changes reversed still the site logged both the ip address and the client id used to make the change and who this was will later be debated in court but it's fucking cory uh was she already planning to murder him but then the next month on february of 2022 it seemed to many like things might have been improving and eric and cory's marriage according to their friends looked like uh they were doing better than they've been doing in years uh chelsea cory's best friend said she couldn't remember the last time cory had called to complain about eric being an asshole uh ally staking cory's other best friend testified that around the same time cory told her that her affair with josh was over right her and eric are in love uh to a lot of people now the richard's marriage starting to look like a good comeback story two people on the edge of divorce they went to counseling they fucking worked it out and now they've they found their way back to one another but then on the morning of valentine's day cory ordered a bagel sandwich from mirror lake diner and camas left it for eric on the front seat of his truck along with a tender love note eric instead of waiting to eat it for lunch he just don't want to eat it for lunch so he drove right in and almost immediately almost died uh broke out in hives but very quickly he could barely breathe he ended up grabbing his son's epi pen injecting himself and pounded a bottle of benadryl hours later eric told his two of his friends he felt like he genuinely was going to die after eating that sandwich according to court documents quote i think my wife tried to poison me later that day eric richards texted his wife i'm gonna go lay down for a bit if i don't start getting better i'm gonna head to the hospital as scary as this was by the next weekend it seemed to become nothing more than a funny story for the couple and their friends eric and cory were with some of these friends and eric brought it up the way ali staking remembered it she would later testify that he was laughing when he told this story when he said cory had tried to poison him and somebody in the group shot back you know with well don't even cory feeds you uh cory laughed it off just a weird reaction she said ah it's not a big deal ali's overwhelming memory that day was not one of concern or suspicion it was uh how good the two seemed together but eric said i'm gonna go lay down for a bit i'm gonna go lay down for a bit but this is still just a facade a front eric's business partner cody wright had a very different story to tell the jury he remembered a phone call around two in the afternoon on that valentine's day eric called him and while he was not allowed to tell the jury what eric had said he testified that eric sounded frantic and afraid cody said that the only other times he had heard that kind of fear in eric's voice was when eric called him to tell him uh his mom had died linda unfortunately died in 2018 from something not publicly disclosed at the age of 59 eric also sounded like that once serious car accident when he uh worried that he had killed somebody but eric did not push his suspicions any further after that meanwhile around the same time uh cory richards texted josh grossman her uh lover quote if he could just go away and you could just be here life would be so perfect i love you so no clearly they're not broken up on march 2nd 2022 two days before eric would be found dead josh texted cory asked if she wanted to grab lunch she responded she couldn't make it as she could they meet for a celebratory drink soon josh wrote back okay love you and cory wrote back love you what did cory plan on celebrating time to jump ahead to the big day now okay time to stop fucking around with this story and share some dirt okay spill the tea okay take the main skeleton out of the main closet okay and do that in a uh uh you know not flippant not disrespectful manner okay uh for real it's now march 3rd 2022 and this is what cory richards will say happened the night leading up to the 9-1-1 call around 9 p.m cory and eric said good night to their boys tucked him into bed cory then made eric a drink a moscow mule vodka and ginger beer maybe some lime juice which she served in a copper mug and because cory was in an ultra celebratory way she also made lemon drop shots with vodka simple syrup and lemon juice uh midway mansion was closing soon she wanted to drink to that she also made eric's drink a little stronger than it should have been maybe like dozens of times or a hundred or a thousand times a year stronger earlier that evening cory's lover josh grossman had sent a gif of two people kissing with the caption love you gross uh the two had plans to meet for brunch but cory had rain checked later uh in the week telling josh can i try friday give me a few days right they're still texting back and forth a bunch hang in there until then please she says uh she's planning on having her schedule really open up soon uh sometime around 9 15 that night eric and cory climbed into bed according to phone records presented at trial eric was still active on his phone until 10 p.m texting with work associates uh but then one of their sons cried out ashton their seven-year-old have been suffering from night terrors lately so cory got up went to him climbed into his bed and fell asleep then at some point after that she uh awoke and went back to their room and i'll share what happened next after our second and two mid-show sponsor breaks thanks for listening to those sponsors i hope you heard deals you liked hope you use our uh codes and landing pages so our sponsors know we sent you and you get some good deals and now let's return to the fateful night the early hours of march 4th 2022 when cory got into bed and reached for eric he was cold what she pushed him but he didn't respond then she got up and maybe did a little celebratory jig maybe tossed on some music or maybe it was more like this vibe oh psycho killer eskisei yeah probably more like that uh who knows she for sure at 3 21 a.m early friday morning march 4th called 9-1-1 digital forensics will later show that cory's phone was unlocked and active at 3 06 a.m uh but that she did not dial 9-1-1 until approximately 15 minutes later it's all kind of speculation about that make of that what you will uh hopefully it wasn't some fucking horrible situation where she was where he was still alive and she was waiting for him to die uh the 9-1-1 recording was played in court uh i'll play you what some of the jury heard now okay what's the address 282 low court 28 low court okay what's the good phone number in case we get disconnected it's going to be in francis okay tell me exactly what happened it's kind of hard to hear i feel like it's kind of hard to hear and without captions um pretty rough i just want to give you a little sample of her her tone uh she told the operator that her husband's body was cold and that he wasn't breathing uh her voice would come out of her mouth come through high and frantic when she said you know i i don't know what to do uh the operator asked if she could perform cpr and then cory kind of got snappy and she's like yeah obviously i'm not stupid okay but i don't want to okay he struggles with sinus drainage and it makes his breath bad okay uh no no she said she didn't know how the operator said uh that you know she would walk her through it but first she needed to get eric off of the bed and onto the floor and then cory was just adamant that she she couldn't possibly move him that he that she couldn't touch him the operator told her that she had to that she needed to calm down that she could do it the the you know she could be guided through cpr for several minutes cory insisted i i can't i can't move his body uh she tells her kids uh or or kid at one point not to come into the room i i can't move it it's it's dead weight she told the operator at one point referring to her husband's body as it eventually she pulled herself together enough to get him to the floor approximately seven full minutes into the call that's that's feels absurd uh then they counted compressions together starting at seven minutes 43 seconds into the call i mean if he had been alive when the call had started her hesitation here would have killed him uh the call continued until first responders arrived took over when first responders and the police show up to the house cory is there to greet them uh the ambulance and medics go straight to eric's room they attempt to resuscitate him it's a lost cause uh as soon as they begin cpr they reported that blood started gushing from his mouth first responder margaret offritt was working part-time for the park city police department and the police department was working part-time for the park city police department and the police department was working part-time for the park city police department and the police department was working part-time for the park city police department and the police department was working part-time for the park city police department and the police department part-time for the park city police department and the police department part-time for the park city fire district the night she was dispatched to 282 willow court upon walking into the rich's bedroom she said she found eric face up on the floor and that his body was down by the foot of the bed not by the side of it and she found that unusual why because when paramedics drag somebody to the floor for cpr off a bed it's almost always off the side of the bed it's much less of a pull eric was also lying quote very straight uh when margaret would have expected his arms to be flailed or his body to be at an angle it was like he had been just carefully posed a police officer took cory away from the mayhem began questioning her you know what had happened tonight body cam was rolling the entire time they spoke cory told the officer that eric had lyme disease and had been getting allergies shots which was a lie that's what she said but not true right out the gate she's lying uh she said his chest had been hurting before he went to bed and she hadn't thought it was anything serious though just probably wasn't drinking enough water officer asked about any drug use prescription or otherwise cory mentioned he sometimes took thc gummies at night to help sleep and that he had taken pills way back in high school but nothing like that since cory asked if she could call her mother and then she did lisa darden possible rumored murderer herself uh arrived soon thereafter the officer's body camera was still recording when lisa sat down on the couch and began speculating calmly about eric's allergy shots which he again did not take so why is mom lying along with daughter here did she coach cory through this uh lisa told the officer that eric had not looked so good last night when she had seen him earlier in the evening other people won't uh corroborate that meanwhile cory was uh uh sitting on the couch and she said her face in her hands summit county sheriff's deputy vincent winn uh would later testify that quote every time i spoke to mrs richards it just seemed like her face was in her hands and i couldn't see her face uh and he found that uh just a little abnormal he said despite life-saving efforts for emergency services richards was of course pronounced dead at 4 58 a.m i mean he had been dead emts and firefighters testified that when they first arrived he was already quote cold to the touch flatline with no heartbeat of course first responders on scene talked amongst themselves one suspected eric had died of a brain aneurysm how else could they explain a fit healthy young father dropping dead all of a sudden in the middle of the night uh just days earlier he'd been running around in the sun soccer game and what about that Moscow uh Moscow mule he drank did anyone get a look at that no uh because this was initially not investigated as a homicide no search the premises was made specifically looking for in cataloging you know any potential evidence so at some point during the night the copper mug that held eric's last drink ended up in the kitchen sink next morning the family's nanny put in the dishwasher and any possible evidence was washed away back to the night of the murder the sheriff told cory about what was going to happen next she listened her head still in her hands as the sheriff explained that since eric was young and by all accounts in good health medical examiner would be coming to conduct their investigation and they would likely take his body away to be examined and when he said that cory began licking her lips and tapping her foot and wailing oh my god oh my god meanwhile her poor sons are hiding their rooms against the door lisa then told cory that the boys already knew that their father was gone they'd heard her from one of the officers lisa said and that she uh had then sent them back to sleep which feels a little odd to me hopefully there's more to it than that grandma grandma's daddy dead yes he is and you know what that's true but what's also true it's still past your bedtime get to bed right now before i give you something to cry about something else something else to cry about okay uh moments later katie one of eric's sisters arrived along with her husband clint and their daughters katie burst the door hysterically made a beeline straight for her nephews uh then outside the home she pulled investigators aside and told him i'm his everything for his will and everything i'm his power of attorney i'm his every why is she fucking talking about power of attorney and will at this point that's weird uh katie embraced cory the two women sat on the floor hugging and crying cory kept telling her over and over i don't know what happened we were celebrating just hours ago we were laughing uh he was active he didn't just uh she said uh eugene eric's father uh was already in the car driving over from the family ranch inside the house investigators were moving through the rooms there was no obvious sign of what had killed eric richard's uh they uh noticed white specks on the nightstand beside the bed found an old hydrocodone bottle from 2016 but again since no foul play was suspected at this moment neither the specs nor the bottle were tested uh crystal bowman carter or bowman carter excuse me who helped eric richard set up a trust testified that she received a call from an officer who then passed the phone to cory richards to talk with her crazy that cory wants to figure out the exact nature of what she's gonna get in the will before some of the officers who have come to her house because her husband has just died have even left not even gonna take a fucking day to start moving towards that money crystal told cory that their home belonged to a trust she later said that it seemed richards was unaware of that quote she was livid she was upset and she said what is wrong with you people by that night a lot of family and friends had gathered at the house and rallied around cory and her kids people were drinking talking about eric dancing playing with the kids trying to put a brave face on for the kids uh ally staking was there she later testified that cory seemed distraught when she arrived you know like someone grieving like any normal person would grieve uh but the following morning saturday march 5th with people still sleeping over from the night before cory announced less than 36 hours after she had found eric dead in their bed that she had to go she had to get to work amy richards looked at her eric's sister was like go where exactly well to close a deal on the midway mansion amy responded quote you can't tell me you're going to close on the midway mansion when my brother just died and cory looked back at her matter of fact and said yeah absolutely he has nothing to do with it the money's already gone through it's all my business i'm going to and then she left fucking weird if she really said it's all my business hey this is my business all right if it was his business i would grieve but it's mine so i'm not like what the fuck uh also uh amy testified that cory had started to talk about the deal the day before had taken a phone call about it with one of her sons on her lap like hours within eric dying uh and uh you know with like maybe within like like within 12 hours she's fucking talking about selling their house amy would also later testify that cory had told the family she was too distraught to help plan eric's funeral and yet again within 36 hours of his death she's uh closing on this two million dollar home hiring a real estate agent retaining an architect to drop renovation plans instructing a lawyer to can do all that right away can't help with this funeral more on some of this in a moment uh the following morning sunday march 6th there's snow on the ground it had been snowing most of the night uh amy is uh at the house uh still helping out getting ready to leave and she notices a truck in the driveway she clocks the logo on the side runs into the garage uh where uh inside she finds eric's detached garage is a locksmith and cory's brother uh the locksmith is drilling into eric's gun safe which uh turns out hell is going on and cory's brother is drilling into eric's gun safe which uh turns out held between 125 and 165 thousand dollars in cash goddamn uh already without consulting an attorney uh about the will and the trust she's getting eric's cash and speaking of the will a signed copy is supposed to be in that gun safe uh she had tried and tried to get in with the combination but didn't know the code very telling that her husband didn't share the code to this gun safe with her amy asked cory multiple times why couldn't she just call their dad eugene for the combo because he knew it uh amy couldn't understand why cory was into and destroying eric's safe rather than just like getting the code from her from her dad amy asked her again and again can you can you please just call eugene for the code cory continued to refuse to answer and then things began to escalate and soon the two women started to scream at each other according to amy's victim statement cory hurled out insults that were not appropriate for her to repeat in court then she screamed at amy get out of my house that was when amy stopped her because amy knew that legally not your fucking house psycho didn't you hear amy told the house belongs to eric's trust and now that eric was gone eric and amy's sister katie was the trustee so it was her call really who stays in the house cory had been cut out entirely reportedly losing this house came as a total shock to cory uh cory then quote became enraged and punched eric richard's sister in the face and neck according to court documents it took four people to pull her off and the police had to be called when officers arrived at the scene uh they then called eric richard's estate planning lawyer who confirmed the existence of this uh living trust the beneficiary being katie so cory didn't have the authority to fucking kick this uh lady out of here cory because uh because of all this will later be charged with assault on june 9th and then in february of 2023 she will enter a plea in abeyance and agree to pay a 1105 fee and complete a grief counseling course in exchange for the charges eventually being dismissed but then she will never pay that fee will never submit receipts uh receipts for the course she will never go to and she will be found guilty of misdemeanor assault in may of 2024 uh before the funeral cory opened a new bank account and asked everybody grieving to send money there instead of flowers or cards about eric that feels shameless uh she just got all that fucking cash from the safe uh viewings are held at the hennifer lds chapel now near eric's father's ranch the funeral followed at 11 a.m friday march 11th also held in hennifer at the service itself the divide was impossible to miss uh the richens remained on one side of the chapel the dark side of the chapel was held on the other side of the chapel the dark gardens on the other not much intermingling it's getting real cold between these two groups already uh two weeks after eric died cory listed the midway mansion online with an asking price of about 4.8 million uh-huh uh then a little over a week later march 28th she sues eric's sister katie for control of the estate claiming their prenuptial agreement had actually entitled her to the family home and his assets katie's legal team filed back their response noted uh amongst other things something cory may not have considered that utah has what's called a statute that if you kill somebody you do not get to inherit from them so shots fired and now it's civil war truly between the two families eric's sister will claim she made it very difficult for anyone to visit the kids and tried to poison her son's minds against eric's family now a jury will later hear a phone call cory made to bryce eric's close friend with chelsea standing beside her around this time cory got livid on this call as well she told bryce that she knows his loyalty is with the richens but that she has something she needs to get on with her family and she's off her chest she starts with her 250 000 heloc line of credit drama which bryce already knew about uh but cory wanted to get set the record straight eric had never believed in her she said he never let her work and quote, he just never gave me a fucking chance, Bryce. So she took one on herself and that $250,000. Well, she had turned it into, don't you know, $11 million worth of real estate in just two years. Corey tells Bryce, she doesn't care about the rest of the money. She doesn't need it. She doesn't want the trust or the life insurance. She wants the $3 million in the life insurance money to go to her kids. All she cares about on principle is the house, right? The house, which according to Corey, she put $80,000 towards the mortgage. She paid $60,000 cash out of her, out of her money to build a pool. It's not Eric's house. It's their house. Chelsea was sitting with Corey during this call jumps in. She's like, you know, affirming all this. She tells Bryce that Amy and Katie are refusing to settle anything until the autopsy comes back because Amy thinks Corey has something to do with Eric's death. Then the call goes quiet. Bryce thinks, man, this is crazy. This is crazy. He can't imagine Corey having anything to do with, you know, uh, killing Eric. Uh, she just doesn't have it in her. And Chelsea agrees by this point, Katie and Amy have, they, they have made up their minds about Corey. Uh, they think she is an incompetent mother. They've told her so, and they think she's killed Eric, but not everybody in the Richens family is sharing in that assessment. Eugene staying out of it entirely. He's team Switzerland. As far as anybody can tell. I mean, he's probably just fucking worried about how, uh, you know, uh, Corey is going to, uh, take, take this out on, you know, his ability to see the grandkids if he, if he interjects, but the Richens sisters, they want to take Corey down. They are, they are going to take Corey down. They are going to take Corey down. They are fucking fierce, relentless. May we all have siblings like Amy and Katie, uh, hail Lucifina to these warriors. Corey, meanwhile, telling anybody who will listen the same thing on repeat, Eric didn't do drugs. He didn't smoke. Uh, he was running around at a soccer game two days before he died. Uh, she's pushing for more testing, more answers, right? She got nothing to hide. It can't be COVID. She keeps insisting. The man was in better shape than anybody she knew. And then the autopsy results come back in April, a little over a month after his death. Dr. Pamela Sue Ulmer had morning after Eric had died. She found no heart disease, no stroke, no natural cause of death. His ribs were fractured almost certainly from CPR. His lungs had white nodules from years of stone masonry work. But apart from that, every major organ looked normal. There wasn't even any THC in his system, no hydrocodone either. There was some Tylenol. Oh, and one more thing. There was kind of like a, a little bit of fentanyl, uh, a little lethal dose of fentanyl. Five times lethal dose was found in his system, literally overkill. He was shot and killed. Also, the fentanyl that killed Eric was not medical grade fentanyl. It was street fentanyl, right? The kind sold, uh, you know, by fucking, you know, your average drug dealer. Ulmer retired in 2023 before the investigation concluded and left the matter of death, accident, homicide, suicide, natural as undetermined. She simply didn't have enough information to make that call, she felt. But it sure fucking looked a lot like murder. Now investigators have something new to try and explain. No fentanyl had been found anywhere in the house, no paraphernalia, no pills, no messages on his phone, nothing that would explain how he died. He was in a coma. He was in a coma. He was in a coma. He was in a coma. He was in a coma. He was in a coma. He was in a coma. He was in a coma. He was in a coma. He was in a coma. He was in a coma. He was in a coma. He was in a coma. So much fentanyl had got into Eric's system. And then one of Eric's sisters told investigators something else that a few years earlier, Eric had called her from Greece where he and Corey had gone to on vacation and where a drink that Corey specifically had handed him had made him violently ill. Corey would later say that Eric just got sick in Greece because the restaurant mixed alcohol into his drink. Although he ordered a non-alcoholic one, that doesn't make any fucking sense. He was not allergic to alcohol. He drank alcohol regularly, not expecting alcohol. To be in one drink you're drinking might make you buzzed, might make you drunk, not going to make you sick, right? Unless you've had problems with alcohol before, which he did not. According to Eric's sisters, Eric believed that Corey tried to kill him. Eric's sisters also told investigators that Eric had told them, quote, if anything happens to me, Corey did it. So that's pretty damning. A lot of circumstantial evidence is mounting up. So the question investigators now have to answer is whether Katie or Amy, excuse me, if you're looking for someone, anyone to blame, or if the woman crying in the house when they first went there that day that they found Eric's body was not a grieving widow, but a cold-blooded killer. And if it was the latter, where the hell had Corey Richens gotten so much fentanyl? Also, you know, they are trying to figure out who Eric is. You know, what kind of man was he behind closed doors? The two families could not agree on that. On the stand, Cody Wright, Eric's best friend, described Eric as a cowboy who never stayed home long or complained when dealing with sickness or illness. He said, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't her pain, that he loved to work, loved to be outside, that he pushed through COVID and through back pain. He testified under oath that he had never seen Eric take over-the-counter drugs, prescription drugs or illicit drugs, no drugs, just toughed it out. The defense would later attempt to impeach Wright's testimony, though, thanks to a previous statement he had made in which he said he had heard that Eric was popping pain pills and, quote, red devils, which he understood to be Sudafed. The rest of Eric's family stated that, to their knowledge, Eric did not use drugs at all. Corey's mother, Lisa, said she recalled Eric asking about or asking around for pain pills, though, that he did this when he went to Mexico. And Corey's brother, Ronnie, told investigators that on trips he had taken with Eric down to Mexico, he had bought weed gummies from people off the street. But had they been coached to tell that story? There's evidence that points to that. That'll come up at the trial later. Right now, investigators had Eric's side saying he's not a drug user. This doesn't smell right. Somebody did this to him. And they had Corey's side saying. Eric is when he's in pain, he takes things sometimes. And this must have been a terrible accident. The argument that Eric was a manual laborer, an outdoorsman who had suffered for years with chronic back pain and went out looking for relief and got something laced. That'll become the foundation for Corey's entire defense strategy. By the fall of 2022, all suspicion did surround Eric's death. And there were obvious concerns about Corey's possible involvement. The criminal investigation had all but stalled. The sheriff's office had run out of momentum, didn't have the smoking gun they needed to make an arrest. Uh, but the Richens family not ready to give up on bringing Corey to justice. Within weeks of Eric's passing, an attorney named Crystal Bowman Carter had reached out to a PI, a private investigator named Todd Gabler on behalf of Eric's sister, Katie Richens Benson. Fuck yeah, Katie. Uh, the person named trustee of Eric's estate who is now deep in civil litigation with Corey and this team still fighting. Todd Gabler had 34 years of experience, had worked on approximately a hundred homicide cases, and he would be handing all over his findings or handing over all of his findings. To the sheriff's office on April 1st, 2022, less than a month after Eric died, uh, Gabler met with Katie and her husband, Clint at their home in summit County and was officially hired over the following months. He interviewed 40 to 50 people, placed GPS trackers on vehicles used by Corey, her mom and her brother as a private investigator. He was not bound by the same rules as law enforcement, which meant he could move faster and look harder in certain ways. Uh, he went back to and through the Richens house. And when he found things that the sheriff's office had missed, he flagged them. Uh, Gabler also dug into phone records. He got hold of Corey and Eric's phone billing records through C and E stone masonry, which paid their Verizon bills. He pulled multiple batches from January of 2022 through May of 2022 and from May of 2022 through February of 2023. Now billing records don't show the actual content of texts or phone calls. Uh, what Todd managed to pull, uh, instead, well, the numbers connected to each phone. And from there, he could decode each number to a name, fill in every instance, the number appears and start counting contacts. The first thing he heard from all that was a picture of who Corey was talking to and how often she was talking to them. Her most frequent contact was her mom followed by Eric, followed by a woman named Carmen Lauber, uh, Lauber. We, uh, heard her name earlier had been cleaning the Richens house every other week for years. She worked for her aunt's cleaning company and the Richens were on her regular rotation. Carmen, Eric, and Corey had all been on good terms. Uh, Gabler found hundreds of text messages between Corey and Carmen in the months leading up to Eric's death. And as Gabler dug around further, he found out that Carmen had a pretty extensive criminal record as a Todd gather would later testify in the stand quote. Well, it was immediately apparent to me that Carmen had a very extensive criminal record involving drug use and potentially drug sales. He noted that Carmen had a dirty urine analysis, meaning that she tested positive for prohibited drugs in her drug court around the time of Eric's death. I was very concerned about the high number of contacts he said in the criminal history for Carmen. And I alerted the sheriff's office about that. This name, Carmen Lobber, will soon become one of the most important names in this case. Also, this private detective seems like he's really good at his job, right? I love this dude. Uh, a year after Eric's death in March of 2023, while PI Gabler kept digging, Corey was still walking free. She was still in counseling. So were her boys. And she was also promoting a new book. She'd hired a ghostwriter months earlier, and she just self-published a book called Are You With Me? The story followed a child who lost his father, but is reminded that his presence still exists all around. In the book, Eric is an angel, always close by. He says on one page, yes, I am with you on Christmas. You can't see my smile, but it's there. I'm here and we're together. Corey's family said the book genuinely helped that the boys seemed happier, that it felt for the first time like they might actually be able to move forward. Is that why Corey wrote it? To help her boys and others? Uh, no. No, she wanted to make a bunch of money. She wanted to sell 100,000 copies by the end of the year. That was her goal. She was making $5.35. Since the book, through Amazon Print-on-Demand, was already looking into launching her own website to sell from and keep a larger share of the profit. The next month, in April, Corey would appear on a local morning show called Good Things Utah to promote this book. Parent, a sibling, or a friend, talking about loss with kids can be a tricky subject. Joining us now is author of Are You With Me? Corey Richens to share her three C's to helping kids cope with grief. And Corey, I want to start with your story. What happened? What happened in your personal life? So, my husband passed away unexpectedly last year. It's March 4th was a one-year anniversary for us, and he was 39. It completely took us all by shock. And we have three little boys, 10, 9, and 6. She's so calm. And, you know, we kind of, my kids and I kind of wrote this book on the different emotions and grieving processes that we've experienced last year. And, you know, hoping that it can kind of help other kids, you know, deal with this and kind of, you know, find happiness some way or another. And to make sense and process, I'm sure. And I'm sure. So she goes on, you know, it's a lengthy interview. She tells the interviewer at one point, she went looking on Amazon and Barnes & Noble for something she could read to her boys at night, who had kept asking her, you know, is dad with us at birthday parties? Is dad with us at Christmas? She couldn't find anything. It brought them comfort. So she decided to write a book herself. Reviews for this now pretty much impossible to find book at goodreads.com are pretty epic. I want to share a few with you just because they're very entertaining. Dremacraft left a one-star review writing, this book should be flagged on Goodreads. I don't know what the flag would be, except when someone murders her husband and writes a book, there should be a flag. Jonathan, somebody, user Jonathan also gave it a one-star writing, this book is a killer. It will take your breath away. So good that it's simply murder. The author clearly knows all about death on a deeply intimate level. When I finished, I felt like I've been poisoned to death with fentanyl by a loved one. It's that powerful. I can honestly say it kicks harder than a Moscow mule. Fuck. And then a user named Courtney also gave it a one-star review writing, what did I just read? This book was horrific. The first half is so terribly depressing that I can't imagine anyone would ever read this to a grieving child in good faith. And the illustrations are so bad. The angel dad looks like he is. Haunting the kid. Nothing about him looks warm or comforting. Oh, also consider that the author just got charged with murdering the husband who inspired this book. There are so many other witty one-star reviews. Well done, internet. Prosecutors will later use this book promotion to build their case. If Corey could hire a ghostwriter, go on television and call me a lie about writing a children's book, which she didn't write that book with her kids. She fucking hired somebody to write it. What else could she lie about? Meanwhile, private investigator Todd Gabler is racking up a lot of investigative hours. Clint Benson, Katie's husband. Footed the bill by the time, uh, by the end of the investigation, excuse me, Gabler would bill 936.3 hours at between 125 and $200 per hour, uh, making well over a hundred thousand dollars, man. They really invested hard in this, uh, but it seemed to be worth it. Uh, Gabler had just flagged that Carmen Lobber, the housekeeper, the woman whose number appeared hundreds of times in Corey's phone records now on the ropes in drug court. Now would be the perfect time to talk to her. Gabler told investigators she was primed to spill everything. Just so she could keep herself out of prison and detectives agreed, uh, backing up a little to reconnect with Carmen on March 27th. She'd been pulled over for driving on a suspended license and booked into the Wasatch County jail. And then after what they had learned from Gabler investigators looked further into Carmen and found out that the day Eric died, somebody had overheard her on the phone saying she made a bunch of money buying illicit street drugs. Uh, detectives got a warrant, searched her home. They found THC products, drug paraphernalia, and under her bed, a firearm, uh, Carmen was a convicted felon, a firearm meant an automatic felony charge, and then pinned to her bedroom mirror right in the center of a collage of inspirational quotes and photos of people she loved was Eric Richen's obituary. Pretty strange, right? Detective O'Driscoll would later testify that when he saw that obituary, he had a strong feeling that Carmen was carrying guilt over Eric's death and guilty people in his experience tended to talk. So detectives talked to her for over 10 hours, spread out over six interviews. And in every single one of these interviews, Carmen Lauber stuck with the same story. She didn't touch fentanyl and she didn't deal it. Her own daughter had nearly died from fentanyl overdose, and she was terrified of the stuff and we'll pause there and then come back to Carmen during the trial. Uh, despite her initial denial, detectives still felt she supplied Corey with fentanyl and investigators felt like they had enough to make an arrest on May 8th, 2023. After her boys had left for school, Corey Richens was arrested outside of Salt Lake City business. Uh, the Summit County attorney's office charged her with Eric's death, believing she had given him a lethal dose of fentanyl. She was refused bail and held in Summit County jail. And now they work to gather more evidence and assemble a case for the district attorney. Four months after her arrest, a routine sweep of Corey's cell turned up a six-page handwritten letter tucked inside an LSAT prep book. At the top of the first page in large letters, Corey had written, Walk the dog, but take vague notes so you remember. Odd, right? Uh, this letter was addressed to her mother, Lisa. Detectives seized it before it was sent though. And when Corey found out about this, she called her mom. Uh, insisting that those pages were not a letter at all, but rather part of a 65-page mystery fiction novel she'd been working on. You know, it's a little story she'd been working on. Uh, just half the story she had, it was true. You know, she hired a ghostwriter to write the kid's book, but this book she was going to write on her own. She, she can write. She just didn't want to that one time. Uh, Corey's defense will soon fight hard to keep this away from the jury because it is incriminating as fuck. Uh, prosecutors argued it was written to encourage family members to give false testimony. Specifically, they said Corey was instructing her mom to coach her brother, Ronnie, into telling a particular story. Uh, her defense argued that any allegations of witness tampering would be a surefire way to kill Corey's right to a fair trial. We will come back to what was in this. Uh, according to Park City News, while awaiting trial, Richens began pursuing various educational activities while in jail, including enrolling in both a paralegal studies program and an MBA. Uh, nothing to slow her down. You know, she clearly believed she was going to be back out soon and kicking ass. In November of 2023, Corey's brother, Ronnie, uh, spoke to reporters. He said he was certain she was innocent. An accidental overdose, he believed, was the most likely explanation. After all, his sister, you know, couldn't even squash a spider. Uh, she also loved Eric and her family more than anything. Corey Richens' trial finally began this year, February 23rd, 2026, nearly four years after Eric was found cold and unresponsive in their bed. Uh, the prosecution led by Deputy Summit County Attorney Brad Bloodworth, fucking prosecutor Bloodworth. Incredible. Uh, they had one little problem. A lack of evidence. There was no murder weapon, no fentanyl found anywhere in the house, no surveillance footage, no fingerprints, no DNA that pointed towards murder. Uh, Detective O'Driscoll confirmed on the stand that across 10 search warrants and three years of investigation, not a single cup, glass, or straw from the Richens' home testified positive for fentanyl. So, prosecutors were relying largely on circumstantial, uh, evidence. Prosecutors would argue that Corey was a woman drowning in debt who wanted to run off, and start a new life with her lover, and falsely believe she would inherit Eric's estate, which was worth in total about $5 million at the time of the, uh, of the, of his death. Uh, she administered a lethal dose of fentanyl to her husband on the night of March 3rd, 2022, and she did it for the money. The defense team, Kathy Nestor, Wendy Lewis, and Alexander Ramos held a counter to all of this that Eric was a man with a secret, a rancher and an outdoorsman who had spent months every year hunting in rural Mexico, a man who, according to the defense, quietly developed a habit of buying pain pills. Off of the street down there, that fentanyl killed Eric, yes, but that Corey did not put it there. This was nothing but a tragic accidental overdose, the kind that had been killing people across Utah and America, North America, for years. Interestingly, the defense called no witnesses, which in a murder trial can mean one of two things, usually. Either they have, uh, nothing, they have fucking no case at all to defend themselves with, or they're so confident in their case, uh, so confident that the prosecution will fail to, uh, you know, make their case, that putting anybody on the stand, they're not going to be a waste of everybody's time. Uh, they really thought they had this in the back, it seems. Every day of the trial, Corey walked into a court with minimal makeup, her hair slicked into a low bun, gone were the sundresses and the cardigans and blouses buttoned right to the top were in their place. Uh, one true crime analyst watching the coverage put it plainly, she looks meek, not polished, not somebody I would assume is cutthroat in business, definitely a mom in your community. Uh, people said the clothing choices reminded them of Casey Anthony, which isn't great. Uh, day one openings. Statements were read. The jury heard from Eric's loved ones who described who he was, how he lived, how his death had impacted the people around him. Days two through four, first responders and medical examiners took the stand. Uh, the jury heard about the scene at 282 Willow Court, the position of Eric's body, the blood gushed out from his mouth when CPR began. Uh, days five and six brought Carmen, uh, Lobber, but before we get there, let's talk about phone records. Prosecutors called a digital forensic analyst, uh, named Chris Kotradimos to walk the jury through what Corey Richlands had been doing on her iPhone at 829 in the morning, March 4th, 2022, the same morning, Eric's body was being wheeled out of their home. Just a few hours later, the phone's forensic log showed that three gift memes were accessed on Corey's phone. Uh, one showed Kevin Spacey in a suit with the, uh, caption idiots, idiots everywhere. Another showed somebody wiping their eyes with cash. Oh, and the third was a clip of Donald Trump saying I'm really rich. So that's, that's not good. It's not a good look just hours after Eric is dead. Uh, she's like, so, you know, not the best look defense pushback on a legitimate technical point here though. Uh, when Kotradimos said that the gifts were accessed, he wasn't saying Corey sat down and had a laugh at memes while her husband's body was being removed from the bedroom in forensics terms, uh, forensic terms accessed means the files were downloaded to the device in the background where an iMessage containing a gift was received the phone logs. Uh, the times the phone logs, excuse me, the timestamp, regardless of whether anyone ever opened the message or looked at the screen, the gifts, the defense argued. could have well been cached in a group chat. My God, that Corey hadn't even checked. The log tells you the file was on the device, but there was no evidence that Corey even looked at it or sent them herself. So who knows? But still kind of looks bad. Like, was she getting messages like this at this time? Not a great look. Next, a jury were shown a series of internet searches shortly after Eric died. Corey acquired a second phone. Items on that phone had been erased, including internet searches, but forensic software was used to recover those deleted searches. So this isn't good. Because not only did she search for this stuff, but she had bought a second phone to do it with and then tried to delete it all. Here's a partial list of what came back. How to change account passwords or delete iCloud information remotely. Whether or not law, or whether law enforcement can recover deleted messages. She must've panicked when the results for that search came back. Yeah, oh yeah, all that shit can be recovered. Other searches were whether police can force you to take a lie detector test. How long it takes for life insurance to pay out. Whether the manner of death on a death certificate can be changed after the fact. The definition of white collar crime. If someone is poisoned, what does it go down on the death certificate as? Luxury prisons for the rich in America. She also read an article titled cause, or yeah, titled cause of death usually does not impact life insurance payment. Corey's defense argued all of this was consistent with somebody who had just learned that she was a murder suspect. That Corey, was simply trying to understand the legal process and the investigation. And according to her defense, there was nothing there that indicates guilt. Then Josh Grossman took the stand. Corey's lover, the man Corey had told her closest friends the affair was over with at least nine months before Eric died. But of course the affair had not ended then. In fact, it continued for six to eight months after Eric had died. But now he is Corey's ex-boyfriend and testifying against her. Josh wept at the witness stand at one point as the jury were shown their texts. The guy seemed very torn up about the whole thing. He testified that the affair ended when Corey and him had some sort of falling out. He said things were never the same between the two of them after Eric's death. Less than a month before Eric died, Corey sent Josh a text that read, if I was divorced right now and asked you to marry me tomorrow, you would? And Josh wrote back, yes, in love with Y-O-U. Of course I would. She'd also been texting him about Midway Mansion. The plan as she laid it out was simple. She wrote, I have a crazy dream. You quit your job. I divorce and come up with millions and millions. We buy Midway and live in the guest house and rent out the huge house as a big event center. $15,000 a day like the charge down the street or like they charge down the road. Maybe $12,000 a day to stay competitive. And we just run the event center as our daily job and hang out every day, raise some kids, have a little farm. Deal? About two weeks after Eric died, Corey and Josh drove up into the Uinta Mountains together, just the two of them. Sometime on the trip, Eric's death came up in conversation. Of course, it did. He's just been laid underground. Josh testified that he never once suspected Corey had anything to do with Eric's death, that she did not seem relieved. He said she seemed like she was grieving. But on that same trip, Corey asked Josh, have you ever killed anyone? Josh had served in Iraq and he told her that, yeah, he had. And then Corey asked him how that felt. So that's a little weird. That's suspicious. Next, the prosecution called forensic accountant, Brooke Carrington to the stand. And if you've been, keeping track of Corey's version of her finances, the $250,000 HELOC turned into $11 million in equity via the house flipping empire in just like two years. Well, Carrington is where that story falls apart. Carrington went to the actual books. She reviewed quote, thousands of documents, including property deeds, loans, emails, the couple's premarital agreement. In addition to interviewing accountants, realtors, and insurance providers, she found that Corey Richards had started to overdraft her accounts by late 2021. Remember, Eric died March 4th, 2022. With more than $300,000 in bounce checks written to contractors. Carrington said part of the issue may have been the rapid expansion of the business, which handled just one project in 2019, but was attempting to manage 15 different renovations simultaneously in 2021. Just two years later, roughly simultaneously across the five months before Eric died, Kay Richardson's Realty brought in $170,000 in revenue, but Corey's monthly debt payments across all the properties, all those loans, all the lines, your credit, she was juggling that exceeded $250,000 a month. So she made $170,000 in five months, but lost $250,000 a month, which if you're not good at math, that means she was fucking hemorrhaging money, drowning in debt. Things are not going well at fucking all. It's a situation that would cause most people to panic. Carrington laid out the truth about Corey's financial situation to the jury. She had around $6 million in assets on the other side of that sound around. It sat around $8 million in liability. So $2 million roughly in debt and getting further in debt quickly all the time. Every property she owned was worth less than what she still owed on it. Corey had also maxed out every line of credit and credit card in her name. She didn't even have the $50,000 deposit needed for the midway mansion. She'd had to borrow that as well. Prosecutor Brad Bloodworth asked Carrington one question. Now as a forensic accountant, have you formed an option on Corey Richardson's financial position or opinion, excuse me, on the day Eric died? Yes. Carrington said, what is your opinion? Bloodworth asked as of the date that Eric Richardson died, Corey Richardson was in financial distress and her financial enterprise was collapsing, had been collapsing. And, but for a significant infusion of cash and capital would have continued to collapse. It was imploding. That's quite the quote. Corey Richardson's net worth on the day Eric Richardson's died was a negative. This is approximate $1.6 million between 2015 and 2017. Uh, she had also taken out four separate life insurance policies in Eric's life with a total value of just under 2 million enough to cover her debt, which I guess, yeah, 1.6 million. I guess I don't know why some sources rounded up to two. Uh, but maybe that wouldn't be enough to cover her debt because the defense pushed back on this. They said the calculations didn't make sense as a motive to kill because even with the life insurance, Corey's debts were growing so fast at such a quick rate that the death actually wouldn't have saved her. If money really was the motive she had miscalculated badly by the time she got all that insurance money, she would still be, she would still be heavily in debt. Yeah, but she also thought she was getting $5 million from his business and the house. And she clearly wasn't fucking great at math because this is a complete shit show. Uh, the prosecution now had motive. They had the phone searches. They had Josh Grossman and the text. They had Brooke Carrington and the imploding finances, but there was still a problem. Who put the fentanyl in Eric Richardson's body? Where had it come from? If Corey did that, if she actually poisoned her husband, how did she get it? Well, she would have needed a source, which brings us back to Carmen Lauber. But real quick, right before we get into what Carmen said on the stand, let's deal with something. The defense raised her in the trial. If Corey poisoned her husband with fentanyl, why did she spend the following year telling everybody that Eric never touched drugs, that he was the healthiest man she'd ever known. According to the defense, the smarter play, arguably the more obvious play would have been to do the complete opposite. If Corey had simply told investigators, Eric had been struggling with pain pills or buying his gummies from dodgy sources. The whole thing might've been written off as a tragic accident. Well, the defense pointed out to the jury that Corey's insistence on Eric, a clean image actually worked against the idea that she had planned any of this. If she truly poisoned her husband and wanted to get away with it, she would have seeded the narrative differently. Or she got a little too smart for herself or she maybe thought she was playing chess and she was trying to make it look like her actions were the actions of an innocent person. Now back to Carmen. Carmen Lauber had been struggling with drugs her entire adult life. By early 2022, she was enrolled in Wasatch County drug court, a program designed to keep low-level drug offenders out of prison if they can stay clean and comply. But Carmen, she relapsed with the drug court violations and the gun they found under the bed, her bed investigators had everything they needed to put her away for quite some time. But detectives told her they weren't there to jam her up. They just wanted to talk. They told her about how Eric Richens had died of a fentanyl overdose. She seemed surprised. She later testified. This was the first time she'd heard that that's how he died. She learned about Eric's death separately as it happened and immediately reached out to Corey stating, please tell me the pills weren't for him. She said, Corey told her, no, he died of a brain aneurysm. Jumping ahead to the trial. Now under oath, Carmen said that Corey had first approached her asking if she knew anyone who could get pain pills for an inventor for our investors. Excuse me, friend and inventor. She knew a random inventor, uh, no, an investor friend of hers with a bad back. Uh, Corey told Carmen that other pills she'd gotten him were quote, not strong enough. Carmen agreed to look, reached out to a friend who connected her with a drug dealer. Carmen said, do you have any pain pills for sale? The dealer said he had fentanyl. Uh, Carmen texted Corey back that he had a, she had a hookup for the pills, but they were, they were fentanyl. And Corey replied, okay, go ahead and get them. Corey then left out cash for Carmen who picked up the pills. Corey said to just drop them off in the house, but Carmen didn't want to leave them out in the open. So she dug a hole by the fire pit, put the pills in it and covered it up with gravel around the end of February, 2022, just days before Eric died. Corey came back to Carmen with another request. She said the pills still hadn't been strong enough. Uh-huh. Sounds like she had crushed up that first batch and given them to him. Uh, that Valentine's day. When he had gotten sick after eating the food, she gave him, uh, she said she now needed something stronger. And this time she had a specific reference point, the Michael Jackson stuff. Carmen had no idea what that meant. So she did a quick Google search, learned that the Michael Jackson stuff likely referred to propofol, this powerful anesthetic that had killed MJ. So, uh, Carmen called up her dealer, relayed the request, uh, what the dealer actually supplied. Carmen didn't know. She picked up the small clear baggie, the same 15 to 20 round pills, darker blue this time. And Corey came to her driveway to collect them. Okay, the jury also learned while carmen was struggling to keep up with her drug court obligations cory had helped her obtain fake community service letters because she was too busy driving down provo canyon picking up drugs for cory the defense took aim at the interrogation wendy lewis reminded the jury the detectives had shown up with a gun charge hanging over carmen's head had left her with the strong impression that not only cooperating but specifically implicating cory was her get out of jail free card lewis then pointed to the immunity deals and the inconsistencies between what carmen had told investigators initially when she was actively on drugs and struggling to remember details and what she was now saying on the stand three years later in 2026 if carmen had everything to gain by giving them what they wanted how much was her testimony actually worth right fair fair point but then the jury heard all about that walk the dog letter that cory wrote while she sat in a cell the letter addressed to her mom but never sent the one that found that was found tucked inside an lsat prep book during a routine cell sweep in september of 23 at the top of the first page in larry's book the jury heard all about that walk the dog letter that cory wrote while she sat in letters cory had again written walk the dog but take vague notes so you remember beneath that she wrote so you remember here's what i'm thinking but you have to talk to ronnie right her brother he would probably have to testify to this but it's super short not a lot to it he will need to tell sky at the meeting next week a year prior to eric's death ronnie was over watching football one sunday and eric and ronnie were chatting about eric's mexico trips eric told ronnie he gets pain pills and fentanyl from mexico from the workers at the ranch not to tell me because i would get mad because i always said he just gets high every night he won't help take care of the kids there are pictures of my phone of eric passed out on the floor or on the in the chair ronnie should have texts from eric talking about getting high as well eric told ronnie he keeps him in an allergy pill bottle in his work truck so i wouldn't find them ronnie never told me about this conversation eric finally told me and asked if carmen could get him some eric never wanted anyone to know he had an issue especially get caught he always wanted cory to go down there uh go down for him when they traveled to eric's house he was told he was going to get caught he was going to get caught he was traveled eric would put his drugs in course weird that she's writing about herself in the third person but put drugs in cory's bag at the airlines right before they board it that way if they were caught cory got in trouble not him once they got to wherever they were going eric would pull the drugs out of her bag and it would cause a huge fight she was pissed he would risk her going to jail for his drug use he would just laugh about it eric couldn't ruin his image that he had drug issues so he would do whatever he had to cory had never done any type of pills didn't like them rarely would consume thc only if eric begged her because it was a special occasion reword this however he needs to to make the point just include it all the connection has to be made with mexico and drugs ronnie will have the messages to prove eric confided in him about getting high it can be shortened to the point but it has to be done they never found pain pills or fentanyl in my house because he hid it in an allergy bottle in the work truck and cody emptied out the work truck within a week so they were never found when you talk to ronnie about this meet up with him in person i worry sometimes your house and phone are bugged maybe drive down to sl salt lake and meet him after work without brie tell ronnie don't over analyze it it was a quick two-minute conversation tell him i need him to do this bring me home and then we will get those damn hyphen also please text lotto or call tell him not to text me anything about us doing things together ever like church skiing trips nothing that puts us together it doesn't look good we're so close to the end let's push through i'm not sure a lot of is uh have uh the conversation with ronnie before he meets her and she's like i don't know what to do with sky then tell him to tell sky at the meeting about the conversation hang in there we're almost there love you to the moon take vague notes of all this so you remember before you walk the dog not sure exactly what that code means definitely something inside uh cory maintained that this was a mystery novel she was writing oh it's a mystery novel with a bunch of the names of the people you know in real life and like a bunch of like real things and things that pertain to your court case it's a mystery novel that you're gonna write even though you didn't write the kids book all right uh the prosecution argued that uh reword this however he needs to make the point is not something an innocent person writing a novel would write one more thing worth understanding before we share the verdict or before i share it medical testimony at the trial explained that opioids can trigger what are called pseudo allergic reactions where the drug directly stimulates certain cells to produce allergy-like symptoms like hives right swelling potentially anaphylaxis in other words someone who had unknowingly ingested an opioid could present with every sign of a severe allergic reaction as eric did valentine's day 2022 uh so maybe after taking that first batch of pills uh you know unknowingly that had come from carmen that's when he had that allergy attack uh march 16 2026 after three hours of deliberation at summit county a summit county jury ultimately found cory richards guilty of aggravated murder for fatally poisoning her husband eric with a fentanyl laced cocktail she's 35 years old and the jury also found her guilty of attempted aggravated murder for a failed attempt to poison her husband on valentine's day just weeks before his death and guilty of two counts of insurance fraud uh cory richards bowed her head when it was read out loud outside the courthouse eric's family spoke to reporters his sister said they were all surprised the verdict came in so fast the family issued a short statement four years ago our family lost the brightest light eric is deeply loved and missed every single day we are grateful to everyone who has worked tirelessly to bring justice for eric our family lost the brightest light eric is deeply loved and missed every single day we are now on honoring eric's life and supporting his boys as we can all continue to heal on may 13th 2026 on what would have been eric richard's 44th birthday cory's sentencing took place judge richard mrozik not a dick seemingly but a solid judge sends cory richard's not good in this case to three years in prison un-fucking-believable good job no uh he sentenced her to a prison without the possibility of parole for the aggravated murder of her husband eric richard's nice work hail nimrod uh he said regarding his reasoning that she was quote simply too dangerous to ever be free cory barely flinched at the verdict no emotional reaction at all uh she was also given another five years to life in prison for attempted aggravated murder and one to 15 years in prison for each of the two counts of insurance fraud finally up to five years for forgery all sentences to be consecutive not concurrent hail nimrod unless she wins an appeal cory will almost certainly die in prison but she will not be able to live in prison for the rest of prison while standard parole is unavailable a unique provision under utah code allows a technical path for review the utah board of pardons and parole maintains the authority to release an individual serving a life without parole sends only if it is determined by clear and convincing evidence that the inmate is permanently incapable of being a threat to the safety of society given the judge's declaration that richard is simply too dangerous to ever be free actual release through this board is highly improbable as for her big midway mansion it foreclosed in may of 2023 more debt for cory not that that fucking matters to her now uh as for her three boys they've all been living with a member of eric's family since cory's arrest the state awarded this unnamed family member uh custody of them in november of 2024 after uh cory was arrested they talked with her mom twice a week through video calls early after she was arrested uh when she was found guilty maybe a bit before they no longer wanted to do that in court all three of the boys uh would have a their emotional joint victim impact statement read about losing their beloved father ahead of cory's may 2026 sentencing uh the son through uh you know they had people read this stuff for them asked the judge to give their mother the harshest sentencing out of fear i don't want my mother out of jail because i will not feel safe if she's out middle child ashton wrote in the memo with her in jail i will be able to continue to feel safe and live a happy and successful life without fear of her hurting me or anyone i love the youngest son weston added if she got out i will be so scared so fuck it and sad right those kids lost both their parents the good one is dead the bad ones in prison for life and for what all because cory richards just had to be rich she had to be she needed millions and millions to be happy she needed to live in a big old mansion the kind she used to clean toilets in in park city well how fucking happy is she now guessing in prison she has to clean her own toilet and the square footage and accommodations a little less stellar than what she had before she decided to kill her husband now let's get out of this timeline okay good job soldier you've made it back barely cory richards wanted money she wanted to date who she wanted to date she wanted to sleep who she wanted to sleep with pursue the dream she wanted to pursue and there's nothing wrong in a lot of circumstances with any of that was it shitty how the prenup seems to have been presented to her before her marriage yeah uh but what behavior may have she uh exhibited that led up to that did they really present the prenup right before the wedding or did she lie about that was it mentioned long before and she just kept brushing it off refusing to sign it even if it was presented in a terrible way she didn't have to sign it she didn't have to go through with the wedding she could have walked away tough choice what a choice she could have made she didn't have to have two more kids with eric if she didn't love him she could have you know walked away uh should he have uh supported her business dreams uh maybe was it okay for her to take out a loan against a house he owned and not tell him she had done that because he didn't support her no no she just stole from him and then she proved he was right not to believe in that particular dream because employing more ambition than brains put her in millions of dollars in debt in a very short amount of time almost two million dollars between one and a half and two million you know when she overextended herself she bounced several hundred thousands of dollars worth of checks at that point she could have chosen to come clean admit that she'd gotten in over her head asked for help but she still didn't and said she selfishly kept having an affair with someone she had hired kept lying to her friends decided to kill her children's dedicated father and then had the balls to hire a writer with his money to write a book. She would claim. She wrote with her kids about dealing with grief in the aftermath of his death. That really illustrates how little of a fuck she gave about him. She was talking about and going after his money almost immediately after his death. And she's admitted no guilt nor expressed any remorse for her actions in the years since. When her kids' impact statements were read at her sentencing, she expressed zero emotion. But she did express emotion, I noticed, when her brother Ronnie talked about how much he missed her in court when he portrayed her as a victim. Then she cried. She cried for herself. Truly sociopathic shit. Sometimes I think we forget that sociopaths, those with antisocial personality disorder, frequently do express emotion when they feel sorry for themselves. When things go wrong, they perceive themselves as the victims, even if they're the aggressor, obviously, to everybody else. They are deeply egocentric. They weep for themselves. It's empathy for others that they so badly struggle with. How did Corey become that person? Was she born that way? Or was she raised to be that person? A little of both. I wish we knew more about her mom, Lisa. Her affect also feels off to me in a few of the interviews I've watched of her. I think there's only a few out there. She still has not been charged with anything relating to Eric or to her former romantic partner's death. But in my gut, I think she's probably also a killer. A killer who created another killer. Just selfish fucking people. How did our species get so many of them? There's actually some interesting ideas about that out there. According to evolutionary theory, evolution did not shape the general human population to become sociopaths. Humanity is wired, in fact, overall for deep empathy, cooperation, conditions that have been essential for our survival. However, sociopathy, antisocial personality disorder, again, persists in a very small percentage of the population as an evolutionary conditional strategy that exploits cooperative networks for individual survival, gain, and reproduction. A small group of people cheat and take advantage of the kindness of others to enrich themselves and then never repay that kindness. That small percentage of the population enjoys, when they don't get caught and punished, something called the free rider advantage. Because the vast majority of humans are cooperative, altruistic, and trusting, they leave themselves vulnerable to exploitation by this small percentage of free riders, these fucking grifters. A minority of individuals utilizing manipulation and deceit without emotional restraint can secure a lot of resources, status, and mating opportunities. But the majority of people who are cooperative, can't secure a lot of resources, status, and mating opportunities. without actually contributing to the group. Right? These pieces of shit. How about that? Do any people come to mind? When you hear all this, I can think of many. Will there ever be a bunch of these people? According to evolutionary theory, not at the same time. Why there won't be is explained by something called the rarity constraint. This free fucking ride, cheating, selfish, shortcut strategy is only viable if sociopaths remain relatively rare, usually estimated at 1% to 3% of the population. If they were to become a part of the society, if they were to become too numerous, the social fabric of society overall would collapse. There would not be enough trusting people left for them to exploit. Right? Too many exploiters, not enough prey. It's like having too many hawks, not enough mice. Also keeping the percentage of sociopaths small, sociopaths small, is the rest of us evolving to stop them. Right? We cooperative humans can adapt by learning how to detect and isolate these fuckers, these cheaters, put these motherfuckers in prison cells whenever possible. I think that's partially why some of these stories, the part where they go to prison forever or to death row is so satisfying. Right? The rest of us see so many of these pricks just get away with their bullshit so often. Some of them enormously wealthy and powerful and famous public figures. You know, it can feel like we're the stupid ones sometimes. Why are we trying to play by the rules? When these cheaters just fucking skip the line, they just get ahead. It can feel like there's no justice in the world, but there is. Never enough, but always some. And when somebody like Corey Richens gets caught and locked up, I think it makes sense. I think it makes the rest of us feel like maybe there's still hope that some of the Corey type people we know in the world might get taken down someday as well. That there's nobility and not being one of these pieces of shit. That it's a good thing in many instances to color inside the lines, play by the rules, try to make your mark in the world without fucking over everybody around you. Time now for the takeaways. Time shock. Top five takeaways. Number one. In the early morning hours, on March 4th, 2022, 39-year-old Eric Richens was found cold and unresponsive in the bedroom of his home in Francis, Utah. His wife, Corey, called 911. After a while. He was pronounced dead. After that, initial responders suspected a brain aneurysm. But when toxicology results came back, they showed five times the lethal dose of fentanyl in his system. And it was illicitly manufactured fentanyl. Street stuff. The kind that comes from drug cartels, not from a medical setting. Number two. Lacking any substantial evidence, the prosecution's case rested on, three circumstantial pillars. Motive, means, and opportunity. Regarding motive, Corey Richens was, at the time of Eric's death, facing total and imminent financial collapse. Her real estate company, Katie Richens Realty, was losing money fast. And her net worth on the day Eric died was around negative 1.6 million. Regarding means, the prosecution's star witness, Carmen Lauber, the Richens' housekeeper, and a known drug user and dealer, testified that Corey had asked her on multiple occasions to source pills for an investment. With the bad back. And then on opportunity, Corey was the last person with Eric before he died. She made him a drink that night, and the glass was never tested. Number three. In September of 2023, four months after her arrest, a six-page letter was found tucked inside an LSAP prep book during a routine sweep of Corey's jail cell. Written in Corey's hand, addressed to her mother, Lisa, but never sent. At the top of the first page, in large letters, walk the dog. But take vague notes so you remember. What followed was a detailed set of instructions telling her mom to meet privately with her family, her brother, and coach him to tell Corey's lawyer a very specific story. That a year before Eric died, he and Eric talked about Eric getting pain pills and fentanyl from workers at a ranch in Mexico, hiding them in an allergy bottle in his work truck, and keeping it all from Corey. Corey maintained this was just a passage from a mystery novel she was writing. Uh-huh. Prosecution disagreed, pointing to the fact that Corey had literally wrote, reword this however he needs to make the point. Number four. After Eric died, Corey Richens acquired a second phone. At some point, she deleted its search history, and then forensic software analysts recovered it. Here is a partial list of what came back, how long it takes for life insurance to pay out, whether a manner of death on a death certificate can be changed after the fact, whether police can force you to take a lie detector test, whether law enforcement can recover deleted messages, if someone is poisoned, what does it go down on the death certificate as, the definition of white collar crime, luxury prisons for the rich in America, and she also read an article titled, Cause of Death Usually Does Not Impact Life Insurance Payment. The defense argued, this is all consistent with somebody who just found out they were a murder suspect. And the number five new info. If you don't already hate Corey Richens, maybe the following info will change your mind. Three social workers were the ones who read victim impact statements on behalf of her and Eric's three kids. Each son asked the court to sentence their mother to life in prison as we went over. I already referenced that, but here's some additional info. One of the boys described being locked in his room by Corey for long periods of time with his older brother Ashton, sliding him food under the door. Another described Corey forcing them to watch videos of kids starving in war zones after they refused to eat some undercooked lasagna. The boys described a household where animals suffered regularly and died through neglect, where the family dog was not allowed outside very often, ignored when it did need to go out, when it then pissed and shit indoors. What was it supposed to do? It was punished by Corey hitting the dog in the head as hard as she could. Corey also would not let the boys bring in their new kitten inside the garage for safety overnight. And then it was eaten by a dog, Corey would not let them turn on some heater lamps for their chickens and rabbits, and overnight they froze to death. The family's goats nearly starved because Corey bought them moldy hay to eat, also didn't give them very much water. Seems that all that stuff took place after Eric's murder when Corey was not allowing Eric's family, including Papa Eugene, who the boys loved dearly, to see them hardly ever, but stating that she was open, you know, to them seeing him a lot more if they would hand the trust over to her. One of the boys wrote that when someone mentioned Corey's name now, it made him feel hateful and ashamed. He said he was scared that somebody from Corey's side of the family would come to his school and take him. He said that once she was gone for good, he would feel happy, safer, and able to trust people again. All three asked clearly and without ambiguity for their mother to go to prison forever. What kind of mom do you have to be to get that response from your kids? A fucking monster. Time suck, top five takeaways Death before divorce to Corey Richens' case has been sucked. Thank you to the Bad Magic Productions team for helping making Time Suck. Thanks to Queen of Bad Magic, Lindsay Cummins. Thanks to Logan Keith helping to publish this episode and designing merch for the store at badmagicproductions.com. Thank you to Laura Woods for her research. Also thanks to the All Seen Eyes moderating the Cult of the Curious private Facebook page. The Mod Squad making sure Discord keeps running smooth and everybody over on the Time Suck and Bad Magic subreddits. And now let's head on over to this week's Time Sucker Updates. Updates? Get your Time Sucker Updates. First up from proud papa sucker Alfonso Ruiz who wrote in with some patriotic love for his badass daughter in a message with the subject line of boot camp. Hi Master Sucker. My name is Alfonso and I work for a state police agency where I inspect school buses on the eastern side of our state. I spend many hours on the road and your podcast has been a wonderful companion through the long drive across our state's canyons, forests, and deserts. I especially enjoyed. listening to the serial killer episodes during my four-hour drive to the academy in sheldon recently the podcast has taken on a deeper meaning for me my 18 year old daughter left for navy boot camp on june 30th and thanks for the kind words by the way uh while we are incredibly proud it has been a difficult adjustment and my wife has experienced the reality of empty nest depression your recent episode about fort hood really impacted me having a daughter in boot camp made me tear up thinking about the pain and frustration those parents faced while fighting for justice i want to thank you for giving a voice to those who went quiet and for keeping me company during this challenging and lonely time without my daughter if possible could you please give a shout out to my wife and my 13 year old daughter for holding down the fort and taking care of our other two daughters ages six and seven i love them all so much uh and they are the reason i do what i do thank you again for everything and long live triple m hafonzo ah fonzo man uh i love that you love your family so much and uh yeah definitely a big shout out to your wife and your 13 year old daughter and just uh your whole fam and yeah man my first kid leaving the house uh two and a few months you know you you love them so much even at moments when you drive the when they drive you crazy uh i feel bad for your wife you know missing her so deeply it does get a little better in time but you know it's it's still hard when they're gone but you know the pain is a sign of being a good parent right you know what kind of father mother would you be if they left and you're just like eh just kind of shrugged went on with your day ah fuck it didn't care so i don't know there's a beauty in that and uh thank god for modern technology and the ability to communicate with them in so many ways now and then regarding your daughter in boot camp you know first off i just want to thank her for her service and second you know i hope uh you know not to scare her but like i i hope you help empower her with facts right communicate the dangers of uh just being a young woman in the world which you probably already do right but especially when you're around a lot of guys uh there's a lot of facebook groups for the parents of women in the military i like that uh navy sexual assault prevention response training is now mandatory for all service members i guess it's been for quite some time uh i'm a big fan of krav maga mma classes would love to take them to the military i would love to take them to the with my daughter here soon right i don't know if you'll uh i know she'll be learning stuff in boot camp but if you get a chance to you know take some self-defense classes with her that'll be helpful um you know it's hard to be that right you want to follow your kids around protect them everywhere but you can't but you can't share a lot of info with them and try and teach them to be as street smart as possible and be realistic about the world around them all that said overwhelming odds are your daughter is going to be fine she's going to kick ass she's going to do great uh and she's going to have a fucking a amazing time in the service i hope she knows how proud of her her dad is keeping a good dude uh yeah thanks alfonso uh next up from another good dad sack an anonymous one who wrote with a subject line of abuser hey dan i've been listening to the podcast since 2019 and thoroughly enjoyed the dark humor in the hours of entertainment i've been a firefighter paramedic oh thank you uh for well over 20 years build and maintain mountain bike trails on my days off that's cool uh end up listening to time suck often while weed whacking or doing dirt work on the trail while catching up on episodes of the podcast i've been a firefighter paramedic i've been a firefighter paramedic i've been the last couple of weeks i was listening to the nova scotia 13 hours of terror and something caught my attention you asked why do all these guys end up hating their mother or women instead of their father slash abuser i instantly thought i can understand well long story uh well yeah yeah long story long i grew up with a father who was a constant negative reinforcer and was sometimes physically abusive but for sure was a mental abuser he would constantly belittle make fun of anything you did or were trying to do he would tell you that you're not good enough and if you ever did well in a sport or activities then there was something wrong with the teacher something wrong with the coach etc they didn't know how dumb you were how little you knew the kind of guy that would shoot your dog when you were at a friend's sleepover because he thought you didn't take care of it would wake you at 5 a.m and would work you like a dog in the woods till dark and then tell you that playing or doing fun stuff like other kids was doing was for morons and fools he would mentally break any young person so they would always do things his way or no way along with the threat of real physical punishment if he didn't ironically though he was also a kind of guy that everybody loved at gatherings my brother always said it was better to be his friend than his family we always wanted to have friends over to go places because he was a different guy a fun person at a good time when they left the monster came out when he took out all of his anger and whatever was going on with him on his family i remember many many times riding in the car with my mom and asking her why dad was the way he was she would always console us and tell us things were going to get better that she would talk to him she was the ally she was the one you needed to be with her and she was the one you needed to have a good time with her and she was she was never making things better she was probably trying to keep this guy from being a nut job uh was just sympathizing with you well i don't hate my mom or women i can empathize and have a sense of understanding as to your question why didn't mom do more why didn't she leave why didn't she why did she keep tolerating this guy mentally abusing her and her children those answers are complex and layered who knows all i know is that for years i struggled with pent-up rage that was almost always directed at my father or the constant voice in my head that was telling me i'm an idiot and need to work harder not good enough he met my college science instructor who told him i was one of the best students she'd ever had i thanked her and my dad smiled we got in the vehicle and he laughed and said that lady thinks you're smart she must be a fucking idiot so if your mom dealing with is dealing with a husband or dad like that and the kids are telling you please do something please get some help for yourself and your kids anyways there's a hundred more stories like that i have since become a father of four and found a positive reinforcement what a breath of fresh air i'm sad to say at times i do act like my father but god damn it i'm trying every day to not be the bad parts of that guy keep on sucking loyalist term well thanks for an honest message yeah you know i i guess i probably should have asked why don't those guys hate both their parents the abuser and the one who failed to protect them from the abuser because there are legitimate grounds to be enraged at both i mean i do feel much more sympathetic towards the person not protecting from the abuser who is also being abused but isn't your most important duty as a parent to protect your kids even if it comes with risk towards your own safety the hotline.org is a good website for people looking to get out of violent situations violent homes there's a phone number two one eight eight eight seven nine nine safe but it might be safe to go online and chat via typing and then clear your browser history they can connect you with local shelters attorneys financial aid so much more uh but yeah dads and moms do not give up on protecting your kids if you want to break the cycle of abuse be brave uh those kids lives might depend on it and their spirits certainly do and then one more message sent into bojangles at times like podcast.com from an anonymous sucker uh who's put an awkward as hell situation they sent in a message with an intriguing subject line of i didn't know he was serious about white power hey sock master been a fan since 2020 i've listened to you on my way to cleaning up some crime scenes that's a story for another day please keep my last name out of this i apologize for the length in advance this one is a fucking doozy i never thought i'd actually have to deal with it over the fourth july weekend my wife and i along with some friends went down to jacksonville to visit her friends diana and george they lived down there for about a year and we were excited to visit them for the first time we've been unsure of george for a while he's over 10 years older than diana has always been kind of annoying one of those drunks where you're not sure what he'll say or do who constantly challenges people to arm wrestling matches but we always shrugged and said yeah he's annoying but he really loves diana so he can deal friday night of the trip went off without a hitch so much fun great food great weather drinks flowing zero complaints saturday the fourth july was drastically different george started drinking and just never stopped for 12 hours straight he got progressively more fucked up and weirder by the hour he started getting annoyed with my wife and me because our big cooler scraped against his wall a bit why for to patch it up was met with silence we brushed it off got ready to go see fireworks downtown i love the fourth one of my favorite parts is seeing people of every color religion shape size and orientation coming together to watch the sky light up to me it's the best representation of the u.s a melting pot of people just enjoying the show well i did not realize george was not a fan of this prior to the fireworks we were at a bar grabbing drinks and dinner we got our drinks and wanted to make a toast and we agreed to toast to america's birthday we clink glasses and george immediately shouted white power holy fuck now i am a six foot three inch 300 pound pale white guy i'm talking milk white not a great look to have that shouted when i'm in everyone's direct line of vision so i immediately said nope not that shutting that shit down i was trying to close down what i assume was a highly unfunny joke i couldn't have been more wrong we tried to keep enjoying ourselves until we started to hear george shouting at deanna demanding an apology my wife took deanna to the bathroom asked why he was so mad at her turns out we had it backwards deanna told my wife that george was furious and wanted an apology from me for denouncing white supremacy i was stunned i genuinely didn't realize he was serious at that point i went from confused to furious i walked from table to the bar thinking fuck that and fuck him meanwhile george is telling everyone in the bar that i told him to shut the fuck up and is actively causing a scene honestly i wish i had said it he sucks uh deanna eventually came up to apologize to me i told her i had no idea he was actually a white supremacist and apologized that she had to deal with that kind of baggage but in what fucking universe am i going to apologize for opposing white power once again fuck that and fuck him i've never had to deal with an open proud racist i've never had to deal with an open proud racist i've never had to deal with an open proud racist in the wild before i still can't believe i had to genuinely denounce white supremacy at a fourth july dinner but i'll do it again in a heartbeat fuck george go team meat sack fuck white supremacists keep on sucking three out of five stars wouldn't change a thing uh well good on you anonymous team meat sack sucker for not just going along with it right worried about offending him uh yeah this shit is so fucking uncomfortable this kind of stuff uh my wife and i recently had talks about how no matter who it is close family member business person whatever if they say certain shit they're not going to change the world they're not going to change the world we're saying something back and not care. sharing how that affects the relationship not necessarily white but not even to that degree but other things you know they're just mad at us uh the weekend after the fourth we're out with friends drinking one of them said something i you know just wasn't gonna let slide called him out on it led to a 15 minute pretty intense discussion that definitely got awkward at times for some people but uh productive i actually kind of like awkward conversations sometimes and uh after we got home lindsey and i said if the that had gone the other way we wouldn't have given a fuck and we would have been cool with never hanging out with them again we just don't have tolerance for stupid shit anymore we have so many good people in our lives we have so many ideals that are thoroughly thought through that we care about for very good reasons and we're just fucking done tolerating some people's dumb shit um you know there's better friends to be made if the ones you have start to suck and also you know sometimes people just need a fucking wake-up call they don't realize how stupid they're being and maybe if they get one they'll change their behavior you know if that guy you called out runs into that a bunch more times well maybe he'll get tired of being shamed maybe do a bit of introspection and pull his head out of his ass or maybe the very least your friend will leave his dumb ass and not get dragged down with him i think the more of us who call out dumb fuckery in various ways it will bend the world more towards how we want it to be and it's important to do because the ignorant fucking assholes oh they never have a problem trying to bend the world in their direction dumb loud and opinionated those three things go together far too often and it's up to the rest of us to get our hands dirty and marginalize those voices that don't deserve to be heard plenty of voices should be marginalized because they're fucking ignorant uh good job dude and now even though i thought about closing out that rant by saying and you know white power just because it would be absurd uh i'm not gonna do that okay i don't need that sound bite edited out of context okay certainly not what i look like if you saw me without a shirt like i could play an aryan nations prison gang member okay okay okay next time suckers i needed that we all did thank you for listening to another bad magic productions podcast be sure and rate and review time sick if you haven't already uh please don't kill uh your spouse and their sleep for life insurance money this week and don't steal from them either just like try not to be a fucking piece of shit this week okay be a good herd member not a shifty free rider and keep on sucking did you guys knew uh do you guys know a uh excuse me a new michael mcdonald track came out this year actually keith urban released a yacht rock album titled flow state uh june 12th not that long ago 10 covers of classic yacht rock songs but uh also one new one a duet with none other than michael motherfucking mcdonald called we go back and you know what he's still got it check out a little taste i know i never should have let you go i was young and dumb and i messed it all up tell me that it's true right now is there somebody new around but what we've got is the one thing you'll never know we go back it's really good i was young and dumb and i messed it all up tell me that it's true get on the street how can you not smile when you hear stuff like this