Why Couldn't Kouri Richins Stop Performing The Grieving Widow?

After Eric Richins died, Kouri did something that still unsettles people: she put out a children's book about a father who dies and watches over his children, then went on morning television and performed the grieving widow for a national audience. Prosecutors said she killed him. This look back sits with that need to control the story — and pairs it with one of the eeriest parallels in true crime.

Oregon novelist Nancy Crampton-Brophy took the same impulse to its furthest edge. Years before her husband Daniel was shot and killed at the culinary school where he taught, she published an essay titled "How to Murder Your Husband" — surveying methods, musing that a killing meant to free her shouldn't cost her jail time. The essay was kept out of her trial for being too old, and a jury convicted her of second-degree murder anyway. She'd owned the same model of gun used in the killing, driven her own minivan past the scene, and published her fascination with spousal murder under her real name.

The throughline this segment draws is uncomfortable: the person who needs to be seen as clever, or sympathetic, or in control of the narrative often can't stay invisible. Kouri wrote herself as the grieving mother. Nancy wrote herself as the murder expert. Both stepped into spotlights that ultimately helped expose them. We revisit where the Richins case stood at the time of our reporting and treat both convictions as the legal findings they are — while sitting with the strange, recurring pull these cases share toward self-exposure.

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This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.

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