Kouri Richins: Controlling the Narrative After the Murder — and the Victims Who Named Their Killers Before They Died
Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary
True Crime Today
3.3 • 908 Ratings
🗓️ 22 March 2026
⏱️ 30 minutes
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Summary
This week in Hidden Killers' Week in Review, two of the most revealing dimensions of the Kouri Richins case get the examination they deserve — the performance Kouri allegedly constructed in the aftermath of Eric's death, and the parallel cases that document what it looks like when a victim understands exactly what is happening and still cannot survive it.
After Eric Richins died, Kouri wrote a children's book about a father who becomes a firefly. She appeared on morning shows. Prosecutors say she killed him. Tony Brueski examines the narcissist's compulsion to control the narrative through the case that documents it most starkly — Nancy Crampton-Brophy, who published "How to Murder Your Husband" in 2011, discussing methods and motives under her real name, then shot her husband Daniel twice in the chest seven years later. The essay was excluded from trial. The jury convicted her anyway. She bought the gun traceably. She drove her own minivan to the crime scene. The need to be seen as clever overrides the need to stay invisible.
The second piece of this week's coverage examines the victims. Eric Richins told friends after Valentine's Day 2022 that he thought Kouri might be poisoning him. He had been violently ill. According to prosecutors, she made him a Moscow Mule with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl approximately a month later. He was dead by morning. Bobby Curley grabbed a nurse's arm in a hospital on September 22, 1991 and said: "Please help me. My wife is trying to kill me. She is not as she seems." His heart stopped the next morning. Joann Curley had been poisoning his iced tea with thallium for nearly a year. Hair analysis confirmed eleven months of exposure — nine hundred times the lethal dose. Two days before Bobby died, Joann collected a $1.7 million settlement. She needed him dead first.
Both men named what was happening. Neither survived it. The pattern the Kouri Richins conviction documents has been documented before.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the big breakdown. |
| 0:02.2 | A long look back at some of the biggest stories we're covering for you at the Hidden |
| 0:05.9 | Killers podcast and True Crime Today. |
| 0:09.1 | This is Hidden Killers with Tony Bruske. |
| 0:12.2 | Here now, Tony Bruske. |
| 0:15.5 | After Eric Richens died, Corey wrote a children's book, Are You With Me, the title? |
| 0:21.6 | About a father who dies and becomes a firefly, watching over his children from above. |
| 0:29.6 | A story about grief and healing and love that transcends death. |
| 0:35.6 | She went on morning shows to promote it. She sat across some hosts, talked about loss, about resilience, about helping her children through the hardest time of their lives. |
| 0:45.0 | Writing the book. |
| 0:46.8 | What an exercise it was in working through her grief. |
| 0:51.2 | She performed the grieving widow on national television, selling a book about the death she allegedly caused. |
| 1:01.3 | A book that she actually didn't write. |
| 1:04.6 | But she performed that she did. |
| 1:07.9 | And here's what gets me about the whole damn thing. |
| 1:10.3 | She put herself at the center. |
| 1:12.2 | Not Eric, not the children. |
| 1:14.8 | Her. |
| 1:15.9 | The devoted mother helping a family heal. |
| 1:18.8 | The author was something meaningful to say about loss. |
| 1:22.1 | The woman who found a way to turn tragedy into inspiration. |
| 1:26.9 | That takes a specific kind of mind, not just the ability |
... |
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