Intimate Partner Poisoners

Kouri Richins is Going to Trial, Accused of Poisoning Her Husband with Fentanyl. The Allegations Echo a Pattern Found in Convicted Cases Nationwide.

On Monday, February 23, 2026, Kouri Richins will sit in a Summit County, Utah courtroom and face a jury for the alleged murder of her husband, Eric. The prosecution’s theory: she poisoned him with fentanyl, then collected on life insurance policies she had allegedly taken out without his knowledge. Then she published a children’s book about grief.

Are You With Me? featured Eric watching his sons from heaven as they carried on their daily lives. Richins held a book signing. She did interviews. She performed the role of a devastated young mother so convincingly that, for over a year, nobody thought to ask whether Eric’s death, initially chalked up to a possible overdose, might have been something else entirely.

Richins has pleaded not guilty, and her trial will determine whether the prosecution can prove its case. But what got lost in the headlines, regardless of the outcome, is who thirty-nine-year-old Eric Richins actually was.

He was born in Bountiful, Utah. He grew up working the family cattle ranch in Summit County, hauling hay and mending fences for his father. He built a stone masonry business with his best friend, Cody Wright; the two named it C&E Stone Masonry for their initials. He coached all three of his sons’ sports teams: soccer, baseball, and basketball. His family’s spokesperson, attorney Greg Skordas, was asked what Eric liked most in the world. “What he liked to do was be a father,” Skordas said. “That was his favorite thing.”

When asked why Eric stayed in a marriage that, according to prosecutors, was draining him financially and may have been killing him, Skordas replied: “I can give you three good reasons, and they’re all under the age of ten.”

Carter, Ashton, and Weston. Those were the reasons.

Linda King, who had worked with Kouri at Home Depot years earlier and introduced the couple, spoke to reporters after Kouri’s arrest. She fought back tears the whole time. What she said she’d miss most was Eric’s laugh. She called it the best laugh in town.

Nobody is laughing anymore. According to prosecutors, Eric knew something was wrong. He told his family that if anything happened to him, they should look at Kouri. He created a living trust and placed his estate under his sister’s control. When Kouri secretly changed his life insurance beneficiary to herself, Eric found out and reversed it. According to his sisters, he believed she might kill him for the money.

If the prosecution’s theory is correct, the person who took Eric from his boys also wrote a children’s book about how to cope with his absence.

Whether Richins is convicted or not, the case against her reads like a template. The allegations, poison disguised as overdose, secret insurance policies, grief performed in public, match a pattern I’ve seen repeated across dozens of intimate partner poisoning cases. The pattern looks something like this:

A man stirs a sports drink on the kitchen counter. He carries it to the bedroom. His wife takes it, thanks him, and finishes it over the course of the evening. By morning, she’s nauseated. Over the following weeks, she deteriorates. She goes to the emergency room twice, maybe three times. Doctors run panels. Nothing conclusive. Her husband drives her to every appointment, calls her mother with updates, and posts on social media asking friends to pray.

She dies in her sleep on a Tuesday. The death certificate reads “cardiac event, cause undetermined.” The husband plans a beautiful funeral. He collects the insurance. He remarries.

You’ve never heard this story. Neither has anyone else. That’s the point.

It’s a composite of the real-life cases you’ll read about below. The difference between the man in that paragraph and the people in this article is simple. They got caught. How many didn’t?

The Bulletin

In January 2026, an unusual document suggested the federal government is asking the same question. The Department of Homeland Security 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 is likely worse than it appears.

The bulletin came not from a domestic violence office but from DHS’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office, the division tasked with preventing chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats. Their usual beat is terrorism, not troubled marriages. The fact that they were weighing in on spousal poisoning tells you something about what caught their attention.

It wasn’t the raw numbers. The bulletin documented 17 cases between 2014 and 2025, with at least 11 deaths: roughly a case and a half per year. DHS assessed with “moderate confidence” that the trend was increasing, noting that more than half the cases had occurred in the most recent five years. Those are not epidemic numbers.

What alarmed CWMD was the how. The bulletin catalogued the substances domestic poisoners are reaching for: antifreeze, eye drops containing tetrahydrozoline, cyanide, thallium, colchicine, insulin, veterinary barbiturates, and fentanyl. These are chosen, the bulletin noted, for their ability to mimic natural illnesses, complicating detection and investigation. Several were sourced from online black markets or synthesized at home. And in the case of fentanyl, the poison comes with a ready-made cover story. In the middle of an overdose epidemic, a fentanyl death doesn’t raise eyebrows. It raises sympathy.

The CWMD angle also makes sense when you read the fine print: toxic agents used in homes can contaminate air, water, and surfaces, exposing children, neighbors, bystanders, and first responders. A spouse putting cyanide in protein shakes, as Colorado dentist James Craig did to his wife Angela, creates a chemical exposure event in a residential neighborhood. That’s CWMD’s lane.

The bulletin isn’t evidence of a new problem. It’s evidence that the system is beginning to notice an old one. Seventeen cases in eleven years is not a surge. It is, however, more than we used to catch. The bulletin’s own language points to why: these crimes “often initially present as natural illness,” and the toxins cause “delayed or nonspecific symptoms that complicate medical diagnosis and can obscure criminal intent.” The cases DHS flagged are the ones we detected. The question the bulletin can’t answer is how many we didn’t.

Proactive Staging

I’m a forensic psychologist and licensed private investigator who has spent nearly three decades evaluating violent offenders and consulting on suspicious deaths. When I looked beyond the DHS bulletin’s 17 cases to my own research into intimate partner poisoning prosecutions, what stands out isn’t just the poisoning. It’s the performance that surrounds it.

Most people familiar with crime scene staging think of it as something that happens after a murder. A husband strangles his wife, then hangs her body to make it look like suicide. A killer wipes down the scene, repositions the body, and plants a weapon. This is reactive staging: the offender commits the act and then scrambles to reshape the evidence.

Proactive staging is different. The murder method is the cover story. The two are fused from the start. When someone puts antifreeze in a spouse’s Gatorade, they haven’t just chosen a weapon. They’ve chosen a narrative. If the spouse dies, it will look like a sudden illness. If doctors can’t figure it out, it will look like an unexplained medical event. The staging doesn’t happen after the killing. The staging is the killing.

This distinction changes everything about detection. Reactive staging leaves traces: injuries that don’t match the supposed manner of death, forensic inconsistencies, a scene that doesn’t add up. Investigators are trained to look for these discrepancies. But proactive staging may leave nothing to find. There’s no crime scene in any traditional sense. There’s just a hospital bed, a baffled physician, and a spouse who seems heartbroken.

Forensic pathologist Dr. Paul Uribe put the problem precisely: “You’re not going to stumble across an insulin homicide. You have to have a suspect, and you have to look for it.”

Proactive staging is designed to ensure you never have a suspect and never think to look.

The Mind Behind the Method

The easy explanation for why killers choose poison is that it doesn’t require physical strength. You don’t have to overpower anyone. You can kill someone while making them breakfast. There’s truth to that, but it’s incomplete. It treats poison as a logistical workaround, and it feeds a persistent myth that poison is a “woman’s weapon.” It isn’t. Men commit the majority of poison homicides overall, roughly 60 percent according to DOJ data from 1980 to 2008. The myth survives because people remember the female cases and forget the male ones.

The logistical theory doesn’t explain the men in these cases. James Craig, a physically capable dentist, spent days researching exotic poisons online. Mark Jensen, who worked in financial services, spent weeks researching ethylene glycol on the family computer. Robert Ferrante, a medical researcher, ordered cyanide through his own university lab. Brian Mann, a chiropractor, gave his wife lead-laced capsules he called vitamins. Joshua Hunsucker, a flight paramedic, put eye drop solution in his wife’s beverages, knowing exactly what tetrahydrozoline would do to her cardiovascular system. Race Uto, an active-duty Navy electrician, downloaded The Poisoner’s Handbook to his phone and administered escalating doses of thallium to his wife’s food over five months. These men had the physical capacity for any kind of violence. They chose poison anyway.

What chronic poisoning requires is a specific set of psychological capacities: the ability to sustain deception over weeks or months, emotional detachment sufficient to watch suffering you’re causing without intervening, and entitlement sufficient to believe you deserve what your loved one’s death will provide.

I’ve sat across the table from people who can describe horrific acts with the flat composure of someone reviewing a spreadsheet. The affect is unmistakable once you’ve seen it, and it maps directly onto what these cases demand. The caregiver-poisoner isn’t just hiding a murder. They’re performing a role, the devoted spouse, while simultaneously enacting its opposite. That requires a kind of compartmentalization that is not available to most people.

Robert Ferrante told his wife the creatine drink he mixed for her would help them conceive a second child. He had laced it with cyanide ordered through his own lab. When she collapsed, he called 911 and played the doting husband role for three days at her hospital bedside while she died. Stacey Castor threw a pool party in the backyard while her daughter, whom she had poisoned and framed with a forged suicide note, lay comatose in the bedroom. Race Uto told investigators about his dying wife, “If I could trade places with her, I would,” while knowing he was the one administering the thallium. Erin Patterson maintained it was a “terrible accident.”

These details point to something beyond instrumental calculation. For some of these offenders, the deception itself appears to provide a sense of superiority: a private knowledge that feeds grandiosity. Everyone around them is performing the expected social rituals of concern and sympathy, and only the poisoner knows the truth. I’ve seen this dynamic in other forensic contexts; the thrill of having duped everyone, of operating behind a mask nobody sees through. It’s often a hallmark of narcissistic and psychopathic personality pathology, and it shows up in these cases with remarkable consistency.

The slow, indirect nature of poisoning also makes moral disengagement structurally easy. When you administer a substance gradually, the line between “making someone ill” and “killing someone” blurs. Convicted husband killer Lana Clayton said she “didn’t intend to kill him” after spiking his drinks with enough Visine to kill a Girl Scout troop. Several of these perpetrators appear to have maintained psychological distance from their deeds by minimizing consequences, displacing responsibility, and diffusing the causal chain. After all, they tell themselves, she [their victim] was the one who drank it.

This psychology is worth placing against the longer history of intimate partner poisoning. In Nagyrév, Hungary, between 1914 and 1929, a midwife named Zsuzsanna Fazekas sold arsenic extracted from boiled flypaper to women in her village. Her customers were mostly wives in marriages they had no legal means to escape: no divorce, no independent income, no shelters, no restraining orders. At least 45 people were poisoned over 18 years.

Whatever mix of motives drove each individual woman—desperation, greed, cruelty, opportunity—the Angel Makers of Nagyrév were murderers. But the world they lived in is relevant to what we’re seeing now, because the world has changed, and the psychological profile of the intimate partner poisoner cases has changed with it.

As legal and economic exits from abusive or unwanted marriages have expanded, research shows that female-perpetrated intimate partner homicide has broadly declined. Criminologist Rita Simon argued in 1975 that as women gain more freedom, their violence against intimate partners decreases. The pattern held. More exits, fewer killings.

But the exits didn’t eliminate intimate partner poisoning. It just shifted the psychology. Desperation becomes a less plausible explanation; dark personality traits become more.

Look at the convicted cases in this article. Natalie Cochran didn’t need her husband dead to leave him. She needed him dead to prevent him from discovering her $2.5 million Ponzi scheme. Mark Jensen could have left Julie for his mistress, but murder and a clean death certificate meant he kept the house, the children, and the assets a divorce would have split. Uto was having an affair and wanted to be free of his wife without the complications of a custody battle. Mann took out $1.3 million in life insurance on a 26-year-old schoolteacher and fed her lead for months. Turner collected $153,000 from her first husband’s death, then killed her boyfriend when she was in financial trouble again.

Cochran had a pharmacy license and a way out of her marriage at any point. What she didn’t have was a way out of a $2.5 million fraud without her husband noticing. Mann could have divorced a 26-year-old schoolteacher. Instead, he insured her for $1.3 million and fed her lead.

The modern intimate partner poisoner isn’t acting out of limited options. They’re staging out of entitlement; the desire to kill and get away with it, collect the money, perform grief, and start a new life. That distinction matters for investigators: the expectation should shape the investigation. Look for the financial motive, the insurance policy, the prior relationship that ended suspiciously, the pattern of control and deception that preceded the death.

Detection Failure

The FBI’s Expanded Homicide Data tables record between 5 and 16 poison homicides per year nationally. All relationships, all contexts, all perpetrators. It sounds like poison murder is vanishingly rare.

But that number counts only deaths that were classified as homicides. For a poison death to enter the FBI’s count, someone first has to suspect it’s a murder. A medical examiner has to order the right toxicology screen; not the standard panel that tests for common drugs and alcohol, but a targeted test for substances like thallium, tetrahydrozoline, or barium that no routine screen would catch. A detective has to decide whether the case warrants investigation rather than closure. Each of these steps is a gate, and at any one of them, a proactively staged poisoning can exit the system undetected.

The cases we have caught tell us about detection failure, not detection success. Every case in this article was eventually solved. But not one was solved by the system working as designed:

• Stacey Castor’s first husband, Michael Wallace, died in 2000 of what was ruled an acute myocardial infarction. It wasn’t until her second husband, David Castor, died of apparent antifreeze poisoning in 2005 that investigators looked back and realized Wallace had been poisoned too. Five years. Two dead husbands. The first was caught only because there was a second.

• Lynn Turner’s first husband, Glenn Turner, a police officer, died in 1995. The cause of death was ruled heart arrhythmia. Her boyfriend, Randy Thompson, died in 2001 with identical symptoms. It took a second death, six years later, before anyone tested Glenn’s preserved tissues and found ethylene glycol.

• Joshua Hunsucker’s wife, Stacy, died of apparent cardiac arrest in September 2018. Hunsucker, a flight paramedic, refused an autopsy, had her body cremated, and filed for her $250,000 life insurance policy within two days. The death would have stayed a heart attack indefinitely except for one accident of fate: Stacy was an organ donor, and a donation center had preserved a vial of her blood. When investigators finally tested it, they found tetrahydrozoline at 30-40 times the therapeutic level. Detection required a biological sample that the killer tried to ensure wouldn’t exist.

• Mark Jensen’s wife Julie died in their Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin home in December 1998. The initial autopsy was inconclusive. It took months for investigators to detect ethylene glycol in her system and years before the case was charged. What ultimately built the prosecution was Julie herself: she had given her neighbors a letter saying her husband should be the first suspect if anything happened to her. Even so, it took two trials and 25 years to secure a conviction.

• Joann Curley poisoned her husband, Robert, with thallium over nearly a year. He was hospitalized repeatedly with mysterious neurological symptoms. When he died in 1991, his death was attributed to Guillain-Barré syndrome. Only after his family pushed for additional testing, and a toxicologist found lethal levels of thallium, was the case reclassified as homicide.

• Natalie Cochran, a pharmacist convicted in January 2025, had poisoned her husband, Michael, with insulin in 2019. Insulin isn’t part of a standard toxicology screen. His death wasn’t classified as a homicide for nearly six years, until investigators, prompted by the circumstances of his death and a vial of insulin found in Cochran’s refrigerator, returned to the case.

• Race Uto was caught only because his wife, Brigida, after being examined at six hospitals over seven weeks without a diagnosis, survived long enough for doctors to finally test for thallium.

• Erin Patterson was caught because her estranged husband’s relatives died after a family lunch, and her husband, who had been invited but didn’t attend, was already suspicious.

Detection required a second victim. A persistent family. An organ donation protocol. A letter written by a woman who knew her husband wanted her dead. A wife who survived long enough for the right test. In every case, it took extraordinary circumstances for the truth to come to light.

This is the central paradox of proactive staging. The better the staging works, the less likely it is that the death enters the homicide statistics at all. It stays classified as natural, accidental, or undetermined. It becomes a line in the county coroner’s report rather than a case number in the FBI database.

How Proactive Staging Works

Intimate partner poisoning cases often share three additional similarities that go beyond the murder weapon:

Chronic, Incremental Administration: The killing isn’t an event. It’s a process. And a process that looks like declining health is nearly invisible to everyone outside the home.

James Craig put arsenic and cyanide in his wife Angela’s protein shakes over ten days, culminating in a lethal dose of cyanide at the hospital. Many of these cases stretch over months or longer. Joann Curley poisoned Robert with thallium over nearly a year. Race Uto administered three escalating doses to his wife over five months; when the first small dose didn’t kill her, he increased the amount fivefold. Brian Mann gave his wife Hannah lead-laced “vitamin pills” for months, telling her they would strengthen her immune system; by January 2022, her blood contained eight times the normal level of lead. Joshua Hunsucker allegedly put tetrahydrozoline in his wife’s drinks over a period of time, mimicking the cardiac problems she already had; he has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial. Mark Jensen poisoned Julie with antifreeze over several days while she grew increasingly ill, then suffocated her as she lay barely breathing.

The incremental approach serves the staging. A sudden death might prompt questions. A gradual decline prompts sympathy. By the time the victim dies, there is a documented medical history of unexplained illness—and that history becomes the explanation.

The Performance of Care: This is the element that, more than any other, distinguishes proactive staging from other forms of criminal concealment. These poisoners don’t just administer the toxin and wait. They nurse the victim. They drive to the emergency room. They sit at bedsides. They call family members with updates. They express worry to doctors. When the victim dies, they plan the funeral, accept condolences, and post on social media.

The caregiver role isn’t just cover. It’s the alibi. A spouse who brings a sick partner to the hospital four times doesn’t look like a killer. They look like someone who tried to save a life. The performance of devotion inoculates against suspicion in a way that no amount of evidence-cleaning can achieve. It also makes the investigation feel almost offensive. They lost their partner. They stood by them through the illness. How dare you suggest otherwise?

Jensen drove Julie to the doctors and pretended to be a confused, worried husband. Mann told his wife the pills he gave her were vitamins that would boost her immune system. Ferrante told his wife that the drink he had mixed for her would help them conceive a child. Uto told investigators he would trade places with his wife. Castor sat at hospital bedsides. The Richins prosecution alleges a similar dynamic: driving Eric to the emergency room, then later publishing a grief book.

I believe this may be the single biggest obstacle to detection. Not the toxicology gap, though that’s real. The social assumption that visible caregiving equals innocence. Proactive stagers don’t just exploit forensic blind spots. They exploit empathy.

Financial Motive Embedded in the Staging: In case after case, the poisoner stood to gain economically from a death that appeared natural and would have gained nothing from a divorce.

Mann had five life insurance policies on his wife totaling $1.3 million and had applied for two more worth an additional $1.5 million. Turner collected $153,000 from her husband’s death, then killed her boyfriend when she was in debt again. Cochran’s husband was about to discover her $2.5 million Ponzi scheme. Hunsucker allegedly cremated his wife’s body and filed for her $250,000 life insurance policy within 48 hours. Prosecutors allege Richins took out nearly $2 million in insurance policies without Eric’s knowledge.

A death that triggers an insurance payout requires a death that doesn’t trigger an investigation. The staging enables the financial motive. They are inseparable.

What Detection Would Require

The system that failed in these cases didn’t fail because individuals were incompetent. It failed because it was never designed to catch this kind of crime.

The Toxicology Gap

Standard toxicology screens test for common drugs, alcohol, and a limited panel of prescription medications. They do not routinely test for thallium, tetrahydrozoline, ethylene glycol, colchicine, or many plant-based toxins. They don’t test for insulin unless someone specifically requests it. So if you don’t have a suspect and you don’t know what you’re looking for, you won’t find it.

The remedy is expanded screening protocols for specific categories of death. When an otherwise healthy adult under 60 dies of sudden, unexplained cardiac or neurological symptoms, and that adult is married, and that adult is insured, the toxicology panel should go beyond the standard screen. This is not a call for universal expanded testing on every death; it’s a call for targeted protocols triggered by a combination of risk indicators. Medical examiners already make judgment calls about which tests to run. For a defined subset of cases, perhaps the screening panels should be expanded.

The Investigation Gap

First responders and medical examiners approach sudden deaths with baseline assumptions shaped by probability. Suicide is common. Accidental overdose is common. Heart attacks are common. Murder by intimate partner poisoning is rare. These base rates are accurate and, in most cases, serve investigators well. But they also create a cognitive vulnerability that proactive stagers exploit. When a scene looks like a natural death, an overdose, or a cardiac event, the path of least resistance is to close the case.

Compounding this, there is no national database tracking suspicious spousal deaths across jurisdictions. Turner killed in two different Georgia counties. Castor killed in the same county five years apart, and no one connected the cases until the second death. If a person’s spouse dies of a sudden, unexplained illness in one state and they remarry and a second spouse dies in another state, no system is designed to flag that pattern. The DHS bulletin implicitly acknowledged this by compiling 17 cases that had not previously been aggregated in a single document.

Training on proactive staging in unexpected deaths would introduce a specific counter-assumption into the investigative process. Not suspicion of every grieving spouse, but awareness of a documented pattern: that in some cases, the absence of a crime scene is the crime scene.

The concept is simple enough to teach in a single training module. Here are the most commonly used substances. This is how the timeline looks. These are the behavioral indicators: care performance, insurance policies, and cremation requests. When this pattern is present, push past the default assumptions and order the expanded screen.

A cross-jurisdictional tracking system for unexplained deaths within intimate partnerships, modeled on existing databases for serial crimes, would allow investigators to identify patterns that no single jurisdiction can see. It would not require new technology. It would require the decision to build it.

Behavioral red flags that should trigger additional scrutiny include a spouse who controls the victim’s food and medication, who resists or refuses autopsy, who pushes for rapid cremation, who has recently obtained or increased life insurance on the victim, or who has a prior spouse or partner who died of unexplained causes. None of these is proof of anything. Together, they are a reason to look harder.

What Families Can Do

The cases in this article were solved more often by families than by institutions.

If someone you love is experiencing unexplained, progressive illness and you have any reason to distrust their partner, document everything. Keep a written record of symptoms, timelines, and what the sick person ate and drank. Preserve biological samples if possible; blood draws, hair, anything a lab could later test. Tell someone outside the household what you suspect, in writing. Julie Jensen’s letter to her neighbors is the reason Mark Jensen was convicted. It is the single most important piece of evidence in a case that took 25 years to resolve.

Request an autopsy. If the death is sudden and unexplained, ask the medical examiner to test beyond the standard panel. Specifically ask about heavy metals, antifreeze metabolites, tetrahydrozoline, and insulin. If the surviving spouse is pushing for cremation, that urgency is itself a data point.

None of this is easy. Suspecting a family member’s partner of murder while that partner is performing the role of devoted caregiver feels paranoid and offensive. The social pressure to accept the grieving-spouse narrative is enormous. But in case after case, the people who broke through that pressure are the reason justice was eventually possible.

The Invisible Crime Scene

Richins goes to trial Monday. Patterson was convicted last July. Cochran was convicted last January. Jensen was convicted for a second time in 2023, a quarter century after Julie’s death. Hunsucker is still awaiting trial. The system got there, eventually, through persistent families, through digital forensics that didn’t exist a decade ago, through the accumulation of second and third victims that finally made the pattern impossible to ignore.

But these are the cases we know about. They’re the ones where someone was suspicious enough, or the killer was careless enough, or there were enough bodies that the odds finally caught up. They are the visible edge of something we cannot measure.

The lesson of proactive staging in intimate partner poisoning cases isn’t that poisoners are everywhere. It’s that when poison is the plan, detection depends on the one thing the staging is engineered to prevent: someone asking the right question before the answers are gone.

References

Government and Institutional Sources

Cooper, A., & Smith, E. L. (2011). Homicide trends in the United States, 1980–2008 (NCJ 236018). Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice. https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf

Department of Homeland Security, Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office, Intelligence Division. (2026, January). Intelligence note: Use of chemical and biological toxins in domestic partner violence (distributed to law enforcement agencies). First reported by Josh Margolin, ABC News, February 3, 2026. https://abcnews.go.com/US/dhs-warns-increasing-trend-domestic-partner-poisonings/story?id=129816364

Federal Bureau of Investigation. (n.d.). Expanded homicide data tables: Murder victims by weapon (annual). Uniform Crime Reports. U.S. Department of Justice.

Peer-Reviewed Research and Academic Sources

Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0303_3

Bandura, A. (2002). Selective moral disengagement in the exercise of moral agency. Journal of Moral Education, 31(2), 101–119. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057240220143221

Bandura, A., Barbaranelli, C., Caprara, G. V., & Pastorelli, C. (1996). Mechanisms of moral disengagement in the exercise of moral agency. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(2), 364–374. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.71.2.364

Bodó, B. (2002). Tiszazug: A social history of a murder epidemic. East European Monographs/Columbia University Press.

Farrell, M. (2017). Criminology of homicidal poisoning: Offenders, victims and detection. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59117-9

Simon, R. J. (1975). Women and crime. Lexington Books.

Trestrail, J. H., III. (2007). Criminal poisoning: Investigational guide for law enforcement, toxicologists, forensic scientists, and attorneys (2nd ed.). Humana Press.

Case References

Note: Media sources are included where court documents are not publicly accessible.

Kouri Richins (Pending)

State of Utah v. Kouri Darden Richins, No. 231500230 (3rd Dist. Ct., Summit County, Utah). Charges: aggravated murder, attempted murder, insurance fraud, forgery. Pleaded not guilty. Trial scheduled February 23, 2026.

Skordas, G. (2023). [Family spokesperson interviews]. FOX 13 Salt Lake City, May 14, 2023; Salt Lake Tribune, May 15, 2023; Court TV, May 19, 2023.

King, L. (2023). [Friend of Eric Richins interviews]. ABC4 News, May 12, 2023.

Eric Eugene Richins [Obituary]. (2022, March). Walker Mortuary, Coalville, UT. https://www.walker-mortuary.com/obituaries/eric-richins

Convicted or Adjudicated Cases

People v. James Craig (Arapahoe County, Colorado, 2025). Convicted of first-degree murder of wife Angela Craig by cyanide and tetrahydrozoline poisoning. Sentenced to life without parole.

People v. Stacey Castor (Onondaga County, New York, 2009). Convicted of second-degree murder of husband David Castor and attempted murder of daughter Ashley Wallace by antifreeze poisoning. First husband Michael Wallace’s death was reclassified as a homicide post-conviction.

State v. Lynn Turner (Cobb County, Georgia, 2004; Forsyth County, Georgia, 2007). Convicted of murdering husband Glenn Turner (2004) and boyfriend Randy Thompson (2007) by ethylene glycol poisoning.

Commonwealth v. Joann Curley (Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, 1997). Pleaded guilty to third-degree murder of husband Robert Curley by thallium poisoning.

State v. Natalie Cochran (Raleigh County, West Virginia, 2025). Convicted of first-degree murder of husband Michael Cochran by insulin poisoning. Sentenced to life without parole.

State v. Lana Clayton (York County, South Carolina, 2019). Pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter of husband Steven Clayton by tetrahydrozoline poisoning.

State of Wisconsin v. Mark Jensen (Kenosha County, Wisconsin, 2008/2023). Convicted of first-degree intentional homicide of wife Julie Jensen by ethylene glycol poisoning and suffocation. Sentenced to life without parole. First conviction (2008) overturned; reconvicted February 2023.

R v. Erin Patterson (Supreme Court of Victoria, Australia, 2025). Convicted July 7, 2025, of three counts of murder (Don Patterson, Gail Patterson, Heather Wilkinson) and one count of attempted murder (Ian Wilkinson) by death cap mushroom (Amanita phalloides) poisoning. Sentenced September 8, 2025, to life imprisonment with a 33-year non-parole period.

Commonwealth v. Robert Ferrante (Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, 2014). Convicted of first-degree murder of wife, Dr. Autumn Klein, by cyanide poisoning. Sentenced to life without parole.

State v. Brian Mann (Morgan County, Alabama, 2025). Convicted of attempted murder of wife Hannah Pettey by lead poisoning. Sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

People v. Race Remington Uto (San Diego County, California, 2019). Pleaded guilty to three counts of attempted premeditated murder of wife Brigida McInvale by thallium poisoning. Sentenced to 21 years to life.

Pending Cases

State v. Joshua Hunsucker (Gaston County, North Carolina, 2019–present). Charged with first-degree murder of wife Stacy Robinson Hunsucker by tetrahydrozoline poisoning; additional charges include insurance fraud, arson, and witness intimidation. Awaiting trial. Hunsucker has pleaded not guilty.

Forensic Expert Quoted

Uribe, P. (2025). [Quoted in coverage of the Cochran case and insulin homicide investigation]. Dienst, J., & Schapiro, R. (2025, April 26). With insulin killings, the murder weapon often is hiding in plain sight. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/michael-natalie-cochran-insulin-murder-rcna202685

Author’s Prior Work

Johnston, J. E. (2012, July 9). A psychological profile of a poisoner. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-human-equation/201207/a-psychological-profile-of-a-poisoner

Johnston, J. E. (2023). Serial killers: 101 questions true crime fans ask. Joni Johnston/Mind Detective Press.

Johnston, J. E. (2025, September 16). Toxic endings: When poison is the murder weapon. A&E True Crime. https://www.aetv.com/real-crime/murder-by-poison

As always, thank you for reading this issue of The Mind Detective. If you enjoyed it, please pass it along to a true crime friend or a forensic professional you think might enjoy it. I hope everyone had a wonderful Valentine’s Day and felt truly loved.