They wrote about grisly crimes, then were accused of murder
A murder trial in Utah hinges on whether the defendant’s notes were to coach witnesses or sketch out a mystery novel. It is not the first time death has appeared to imitate art.
The scrawled handwriting across six pages of notes contained sordid details of drug use, trips to ranches owned by cartels and the tale of an innocent mother caught in the spiral of her partner’s addiction.
Kouri Richins, 34, already the published author of a children’s book about grief inspired by the death of her husband, claimed the notes were an extract from her second book, a mystery novel set in a Mexican prison.
But to prosecutors, the notes found in Richins’ Utah jail cell are proof she was coaching witnesses in a trial for the murder of her husband, Eric, trying to paint him as a drug user who died of an accidental overdose. The notes could be among key evidence presented in court next year when she stands trial for murder, after a judge ruled last week that the case was going to proceed.. The ruling made Richins the latest writer whose own words may come back to haunt them in court.
-Throughout history, there are cases of writers who have used their craft to try to cover up crimes – or given themselves away when fiction aligned too closely with fact.
David Wilson, emeritus professor of criminology at the UK’s Birmingham City University and expert on the links between crime and fiction, said there was an element of narcissism in many writers whose crime ended up in the pages of their books.
“There’s the sense in which people start to believe that somehow they can outwit and be cleverer than the criminal justice system,” Wilson said. In some cases, those books end up as evidence. Richins published Are You With Me?, a picture book to help children deal with grief, a year after her husband died unexpectedly in March 2022. A few months after the book came out, she was arrested and charged with poisoning him by putting the opioid fentanyl in a cocktail.
Her book may end up as evidence in the trial next year, as prosecutors aim to portray Richins as seeking to financially benefit from her husband’s death.
Another potential piece of evidence is the letter found in Richins’ jail cell addressed to her mother and appearing to instruct her to coach her brother on what to say in court. But Richins is attempting to use her craft to explain away this potentially incriminating evidence. “Me and dad went to Mexico to find these drugs … You can tell the whole thing is very much a story,” prosecutors claimed Richins said in a phone call with her mother.
This has echoes of the case of Nancy Brophy, a romance mystery writer who in 2011 penned a blog titled How to Murder Your Husband, in which she wrote that she spent a lot of time “thinking about murder, and consequently, about police procedure”.
In a classic example of life imitating art, Brophy was found guilty in May 2022 of shooting her husband, Daniel, to collect his life insurance.
During the trial, Brophy claimed that internet searches about gun components were research for a novel. Her books featured women in bad marriages who shoot their husbands and get away with it, and one former acquaintance believes Brophy thought she could do the same.
“Nancy had main character energy – she was absolutely the heroine in her own story,” said Heidi Joy Tretheway, a former romance novelist who knew Brophy and narrates the Happily Never After podcast about the crime. “I do think that Nancy believed in her heart of hearts that she could orchestrate a murder in the same way that she plotted her books.”
The How to Murder Your Husband blog was, however, excluded from evidence at trial on the grounds that it could prejudice the jury.
Rosanna Cavallaro, who teaches a course in law and literature at Suffolk University in Boston, said in many cases a person’s creative output would be inadmissable.
“The question is what inference do you draw from a piece of fiction in which somebody creates a character who digs a hole and puts the body in it – that’s not the same as a confession,” she said. “This whole dynamic of a work of fiction or even a diary that’s not explicitly factual poses a real dilemma, because it’s running the risk of allowing the jury to pretend that they are reading the character of the accused, rather than rationally evaluating evidence that they committed this crime.”
Yet there are cases where the parallels are too obvious to ignore.
When Richard Klinkhamer, a Dutch mystery author, submitted a manuscript in 1992, his publisher rejected it. Woensdag Gehaktdag (Wednesday, Mincemeat Day) was too gruesome, and his publisher also considered a novel detailing seven ways in which Klinkhamer may have killed his wife to be in bad taste: Klinkhamer’s wife had been missing for a year.
Despite police being made aware of the manuscript, it was not until 2000 that a body was discovered, and Klinkhamer confessed to murder. Woensdag Gehaktdag was published in the Netherlands seven years later.
Chinese crime author Liu Yongbiao wrote books including The Guilty Secret and was working on a follow-up, The Beautiful Writer Who Killed, when he was arrested in 2017 for a cold case dating back to 1995, when four people were killed in a robbery that went wrong. “I’ve been waiting for you here all this time,” he told police when they found him via DNA.
Wilson thinks cases such as these show a person trying to work through their guilt via fiction. “It was the subconscious working its way through into reality,” he said. “They were desperate to tell people what they had done.”
Klinkhamer and Liu both confessed to their crimes, so there was no need to present their books as evidence. But the case against Krystian Bala, a Polish author, rested on his work of fiction. In 2003, he published Amok, a grisly pulp fiction novel about a group of sadists. It featured the murder of a woman whose body was found with her feet flexed behind her and bound to her neck.
A detective read the book and noticed similarities with a real-life torture and murder case he was working on in which the victim, Dariusz Janiszewski, was found in a river bound in the same way. He discovered Bala’s former wife knew the victim, and uncovered other evidence linking him to the crime.
Bala maintained his innocence, claiming it was unfair that police “drew the wrong conclusion from an innocent work of fiction”, but was convicted in 2007 for orchestrating the murder of Janiszewski and sentenced to 25 years in jail.
THE TIMES