In March 2022, 39-year-old Eric Richins was found unresponsive at his home in Kamas, Utah. Nearly a year after his “unexpected” death, his wife, Kouri Richins, self-published a children’s book titled Are You with Me? — centred on helping young readers, including her sons, process the death of a parent.
Two months later, the mother of three was charged with aggravated murder and three counts of possession of a controlled substance. On March 16, 2026, she was found guilty. Prosecutors allege that Richins slipped five times the lethal dose of a synthetic opioid into a cocktail her husband drank.
Investigators would later claim this wasn’t her first attempt. Weeks before Eric’s death, she had allegedly tried to poison him with a sandwich on Valentine’s Day. The suspected motive: financial gain.
But Kouri Richins is far from alone in the unsettling overlap between writing and real-life crime.
Nearly a decade before Eric Richins’ death, an American romance novelist published a blog post titled ‘How To Murder Your Husband,’ weighing motives and possible methods. “I find it is easier to wish people dead than to actually kill them,” she wrote, adding that “every one of us has it in him or herself when pushed far enough.” Years later, she was convicted of fatally shooting her husband of 26 years, Daniel Brophy, in a case tied to a $1.5-million life insurance payout.
In 2010, comic book creator Blake Leibel released Syndromea graphic novel featuring a sadistic doctor and a serial killer who murders a man by slitting his throat and hanging him upside down to bleed out. Six years later, Leibel’s fiancée, Iana Kasian, was found dead in their apartment in West Hollywood – mutilated and drained of blood. Leibel was convicted of first-degree murder, torture and aggravated mayhem.
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Sometimes, fiction doesn’t just mirror reality, it appears to precede it. Or sometimes, vice versa.
In 2000, fishermen in Poland discovered the body of a missing businessman, Dariusz Janiszewski, in the Oder River. The case went cold for years until private eye Jacek Wroblewski stepped into the scene. He got his hands on Amok by Krystian Bala. The book described a murder bearing eerie similarities to Janiszewski’s death. In 2007, Bala was sentenced to 25 years in prison, with investigators citing circumstantial evidence, including details from his own writing that aligned with the crime.
In another chilling case, Macedonian crime reporter Vlado Taneski built his reputation covering a serial killer targeting elderly women in the town of Kicevo. His reports stood out for their striking detail. The details were too precise. Eventually, authorities realised that Taneski himself was the killer. He died by suicide in prison shortly after being charged.
Then there’s Dutch writer Richard Klinkhamer. His manuscript, Wednesday Meat Day (Wednesday, Mince Day), was rejected for being excessively gruesome, detailing seven ways he might have killed his wife, Hannelore.
She had disappeared a year earlier in 1991. For years, Klinkhamer remained the prime suspect, but no evidence surfaced. That changed when new occupants of the house began renovations and discovered a skull buried beneath the shed. The remains were identified as Hannelore. Klinkhamer was arrested and later confessed to the murder.
Evil, in these cases, is familiar and documented. What emerges is not just a series of crime writings, but a disturbing overlap where ‘fiction’ intersects violence, and occasionally appears to foreshadow what follows.
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