PARK CITY, Utah (Court TV) — Kouri Richins’ lover took the stand on Wednesday to tell the jury about the couple’s illicit affair and how things changed after Richins’ husband, Eric, was killed.
Kouri Richins sits in court during her trial on Feb. 27, 2026. Richins is standing trial for the murder of her husband, Eric Richins. (Court TV)
Kouri Richins is charged with murder after allegedly poisoning her husband’s cocktail with a lethal dose of fentanyl. Prosecutors say she killed him for his life insurance money while she was having an affair with another man, Robert Joshua Grossman.
Grossman described the couple’s relationship, which began with working on houses she was flipping. The relationship soon turned romantic, and the jury saw text messages the two exchanged over the weeks and months before Eric Richins’ death, in which they professed their love for one another.
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“I’m in love with a man that’s not my husband,” Kouri Richins wrote after Grossman wrote to her, “It’s draining to love you and pretend to be an idiot.”
Robert Josh Grossman, Kouri Richins’ paramour, puts his head down while testifying in Richins’ murder trial on March 4, 2026. (Court TV)
After Eric Richins died, Kouri Richins texted her paramour, “No words. Turning phone off. Eric passed away last night.” Days later, she told him, “They think an aneurysm.” One month after Eric Richins’ death, Kouri Richins texted her lover, “I think I want you to be my husband one day.”
Grossman told the jury that when he met up with Kouri Richins for the first time after her husband’s death, she asked an odd question. “She asked if I had ever killed anybody,” Grossman told the jury. Grossman, who had served overseas, said that he had taken lives in Iraq. “She asked how it made me feel, or something along those lines. And then I answered her.”
It wasn’t until the defendant published a children’s book on grief and went on television to do an interview about it that Grossman began questioning what happened to Eric Richins. “Never for a moment did I have a clue, a hint, not a fleeting thought that something intentionally might have happened to him,” Grossman said. “Let alone from her.”
But when Grossman reached out to the Richins family to tell them about his relationship with Kouri, he was put in touch with the family’s private investigator. “He told me that Kouri had done it, that she was guilty,” Grossman testified. “He couldn’t tell me why, but…that changed everything for me. I was blown away and then I’m like, looking at everything in our past with a different set of goggles on, through different lenses and I was trying to figure out if she did it.”
Kouri Richins has pleaded not guilty to all charges; her trial is expected to continue for several more weeks.
