Kouri Richins Trial: Eric Richins Knew Something Was Wrong — Bobby Curley Grabbed a Nurse. Neither Survived.

0:00This is Hidden Killers with Tony Brusky. Here now, Tony Brusky. After Valentine's Day of 2022, Eric Richens told friends something that sticks to me. He been violently ill, the kind of sick that puts you on the bathroom floor, that empties you out completely. That makes you wonder if you should go to the hospital or just hope the sweet veil of death slowly falls over you. You know that feel like when you're just so ill, so much in pain, so sick on the bathroom, like just that feeling, God, it came out of nowhere and I hit him like a freight train. And afterward, once he could stand up again, once the worst had passed, he said something to people close to him. He said it, he's laughing.

1:00The way you say things that are too dark to take seriously, you're too dark to process because it's just like there's no way or is there. I think Corey might be poisoning me. A joke, kind of, the kind of joke that isn't really a joke, the kind that comes from a place you don't want to visit. I thought you can't fully form a suspicion. You have to wrap in humor because saying it's straight would mean you actually believe it. A month later, Eric Richens was dead. And I keep coming back to that moment, not the death, the joke, the fraction of a second where Eric's brain connected dots, he didn't want to connect when something in him instinct, observation, pattern recognition, whatever you want to call it, sent up a signal. Something is wrong here,

2:01something is wrong with her. And he laughed it off because what else do you do? Can't walk around your own house, believing your wife is trying to kill you. You can't function with that thought in your head. So you make it a joke and everyone laughs. And you go home and eat dinner across from the same woman. You just semi-accused of poisoning you. And you drink what she gives you. Because the alternative is rather unthinkable. This is part two of the perfect wife. And this one is for anyone who's ever known, something was wrong and talked themselves out of it who caught a lie and let it go. Who felt something in their gut and told themselves they were being paranoid. And then curious to get your thoughts and feelings in the comments section on YouTube and sub-stack. I'd love for you to weigh in, especially if you have your own personal story you want

3:04to share. Please do. We have a great community here. Very supportive. A lot of folks have joined us here who've been through these sort of things. Not just watching these true crime stories viscerally and going, well, that's horrible. But like, oh God, feeling it in their bones because they've been there. If you've been there and you're finding some of this unfortunately familiar, no, you're not alone. There's a lot of other folks who have done the exact same thing. Bobby Curly didn't make a joke. Bobby Curly grabbed a nurse's arm with his dying strength and said the words out loud without any humor and all, please help me. My wife is trying to kill me. She is not as she seems. 12 hours later, he was dead anyway. I want to put you inside Bobby Curly's experience, not the facts

4:04of it, the feeling of it, what it was like to live through, what he lived through. You're 32 years old. You just got married last August to a woman named Joanne. She's been through hell. Her first husband was killed in a car accident, decapitated when a tractor trailer hit him. She has a daughter from that marriage. She's wounded in ways you can see in ways you can't. You want to be the good guy. The one who gives her a fresh start, you make her the beneficiary of your $300,000 life insurance policy because that's what husbands do. You're building a life together. And by early 1991, you start feeling off. It's nothing dramatic at first. Fatigue little nausea. You've been working hard. You're an electrician, physical labor, long hours, chuck it up to exhaustion to stress to the adjustment of being newly married, but it doesn't go away.

5:06The nausea gets worse. You start losing weight, not on purpose. You just can't keep food down. Your hands start tingling, then burning. The soles of your feet feel like they're on fire. You go to the doctor, they run tests. They don't know what's wrong. Maybe some kind of auto-immune thing, maybe neurological. Jillian Bar syndrome gets mentioned. They're not sure. Meanwhile, Jillian is your life by your side. She drives you to the appointment. She makes your meal. She packs your thermos for work. Ice tea the way you like it. When you're two week to do things yourself, she does them for you. She's attentive and she is worried. And you're getting sicker. Your hair starts falling out, not just thinning, falling out in clumps in the shower on your pillow. In your brush, you're looking the mirror and you don't recognize yourself anymore. Your face is gone. Your eyes are sunken. Your body is betraying you in ways. You don't understand.

6:10The burning in your hands and feet becomes constant. It's not a mild discomfort. It's agony. It keeps you up at night. You can't hold things properly. You can't walk without paying your 32 years old and you feel like you're dying because you are. Thalium. Your wife is putting it in your iced tea. What is thalium? It's odorless and tasteless. It dissolves clear. It kills slowly. Weeks, months, depending on the dose and the symptoms look like a hundred other things. Doctors chase diagnoses while the poison accumulates in your tissues and your bones and your hair. Every morning, Joanne makes your thermos every morning. She hands it to you with a smile. And every morning, you thank her and drink it. We're almost a year. Day after day, while your organs fail and your hair falls out in the doctor's shake, their heads and run more tests. You thank you for taking such good care of you. You tell people how lucky you are to have a wife who loves you this much. And somewhere, maybe deep down,

7:16maybe not so deep, something starts to nod you. Why do I feel better when I'm away from home? Why do the symptoms ease when I'm in the hospital but come back when I'm discharged? Why does everything get worse after Joanne visits? You don't want to think it. The thought is monstrous. It's the kind of thought that belongs in movies and crime shows and stories about other people, not your life, not your wife. But the body knows. The body keeps track and your body is sending you signals you can't ignore forever. In September of 1991, your hospitalized first at the facility then transferred to Hershey Medical Center as your condition worsens and something strange happens. Once you're in the hospital away from home, away from Joanne's cooking, you start to stabilize your body finally getting a break from the poison. Begins to fight back. The symptoms don't disappear but they stop accelerating. You're still weak, still sick, but you're not actively dying anymore.

8:17The doctors are cautiously optimistic. Maybe they finally figured out what's wrong? Maybe turn to corner. Maybe you're going to be okay. Then Joanne comes to visit. She brings pizza. She brings iced tea and a thermos, the same thermos she's been making your drinks and for months, she sits by your bed and holds your hand and tells you everything is going to be fine. And that night, September 22nd, 1991, you do something that should have saved your life. You grab a nurse by the arm. You can barely sit up, but your grip is tight because you need her to understand. You need someone to finally hear what you've been afraid to say out loud. Please help me. My wife is trying to kill me. She's not as she seems. You say the words, your name, you name, your killer, you explain exactly what's happening. You do

9:17everything right. And then you die anyway. I think you just sit with that moment with Bobby Curly because this is where the story should have ended differently. He figured it out after months of denial, after explaining away every red flag after telling himself he was paranoid, he knew he overcame every psychological barrier, every instant to protect his marriage, every voice in his head telling him this couldn't be real. He said it out loud to a medical professional in a hospital with phones and security and all the resources of modern medicine arms reach. He named his killer. He explained the mechanism. He begged for help and it wasn't enough. What happened after Bobby spoke those words? I don't know exactly. The historical record is rather unclear. Did the nurse believe him? Did she dismiss it as the ramblings of his sick man? Did she write it in the chart that no one read? Did she tell anyone? I know Joanne collected her

10:20thermos and left. I know Bobby was dead by morning. His heart stopped sometime in the early hours of September 23rd, 12 hours. He had 12 hours between speaking the truth and dying from it. We tell ourselves stories about situations like this. We tell ourselves that if we were in danger, we'd fight, we'd run, we'd tell someone and they would help us. But what if you can't run? What if you can barely move? What if you're lying in a hospital bed, depending on the others for everything and the person who's killing you is the same person who's supposed to be taking care of you? What if you tell someone and they don't believe you? Or what if they do believe you? But there's nothing they can do in time. Bobby Curly told the truth. He named his killer. He did the impossible thing. He set out loud. What no one wants to believe about someone they married and he died anyway. The investigation took five years. Joanne covered her tracks well. Bobby had worked at Wilkes University where Thalium was stored in a lab. Investigators initially thought

11:21he might have been accidentally exposed at work. That theory held up for a while. But Bobby sister Susan never stopped pushing. She determined they exhumed his body. She thought, she fought for new tests, new analysis, anything that might prove what she suspected. Year after year, while people told her to move on, while people suggested her grief was making her seek conspiracies and weren't there to keep finding. And when they finally finally analyzed Bobby's hair, which we've been saying about the story of Cory Richards for a while now, they told the story itself. Hair as a timeline, as it grows, it captures whatever's in your bloodstream. You can read someone's exposure history by examining segments from root to tip, like rings on a tree. Each section representing a different period of time. Bobby's hair showed repeated poisoning over 10 to 11 months. The doses spiked when he was home. They dropped when he was hospitalized. They

12:24spiked again when Joanne visited 900 times. The lethal dose of Thalium. That's so much accumulated in the system by the end. Nearly a year of daily poisoning tracked in the dead cells of his own hair. And here's a detail that makes me want to put my head through a wall. Two days before Bobby died, two days before his heart stopped in the hospital bed, Joanne, won a $1.7 million settlement from her first husband's death. The wrongful death lawsuit she'd been fighting for years finally came through. She knew the money was coming. She needed Bobby dead before he could spend any of it. He died on a Tuesday. The settlement came through on a Sunday. She'd been patient for years, slowly poisoning him, managing the timeline. And she almost ran out the clock perfectly almost. Joanne pleaded guilty in 1997 to avoid the death penalty. Third degree

13:27murder, 20 years. She never showed remorse, not as sentencing, not as sentencing, not at parole hearings, not once in two decades of incarceration. The parole board cited it every time they denied her release, lack every morse, lack of acknowledgement, lack of anything, resembling understanding of what she'd done. She served every day that sentence and walked out in December of 2016, got in a truck with South Dakota plates and disappeared free. Bobby Curly's last words were a warning that no one needed. His sister spent five years fighting to prove what Bobby had already set out loud with his dying breath. The truth was spoken in that hospital room and still took half a decade for anyone to act on it. If you've ever known something was wrong in a relationship and couldn't prove it, if you've ever felt gaslit, crazy, paranoid for noticing things that didn't add up, you know the prison, Bobby Curly was in. It's not a physical prison, it's worse,

14:27it's the prison of not being believed of knowing the truth and having no one take it seriously. Of watching your own destruction happen in slow motion while the person causing its smiles and holds your hand and tells you everything is going to be okay. Eric Richens saw something after Valentine's Day 2022. He said it out loud, wrapped in a joke because that's how you say things that are too horrifying to mean, I think Corey might be poisoning me. His friends probably laughed. He probably laughed too. Then he went home to the same woman, the same kitchen, the same drinks. She made him. One month later, he was dead. Bobby Curly said it without laughing. He grabbed a nurse's arm and spoke the words clearly desperately with everything he had left and he died too. Both men saw the truth. Both men spoke it. Bobby spoke it to a medical professional in a hospital. Eric spoke it to friends as a dark joke. Neither one could make anyone act in time.

15:32That's the horror of this pattern. It's not that the victims are blind. It's that seeing isn't enough. You can know exactly what's happening and you can still be unable to stop it because leaving means accepting that the person you married wants you dead. It means blowing up your entire life based on a suspicion you can't prove. It means telling people something they don't want to believe, something that sounds paranoid, delusional, like something a crazy person would say. My wife is poisoning me. How do you say that out loud? How do you walk into a police station or a doctor's office or a friends living room and speak those words? You can't. So you make it a joke. You tell yourself you're being ridiculous. You take the drink she hands you because what else are you going to do? Refuse it. Accuser blow up your entire marriage based on a feeling and then you drink and then you die. And then it turns out you were right all along. Bobby Curly was right. His body knew his gut knew. And when he finally trusted that knowing enough to speak it out loud, he had 12 hours left to live. Eric Richards might have known to that joke after Valentine's Day

16:35suggests he did something in him connected the violent illness to its source, something in him new. But knowing isn't enough. Not when the person you're accusing is the same person who shares your bed. Not when believing your own instincts means accepting that your entire life is a lie. The victim who sees is still a victim. As a brutal truth of this pattern, you can be smart. You can be observant. You can put the pieces together and say the words out loud. And you can still die in a hospital bed 12 hours after telling someone exactly who killed you. Because the person killing you is the last person anyone wants to suspect. And by the time they believe you, it's already too late. Your thoughts in the comments section on Substack and YouTube. The links are in the description. We'd love for you to weigh in. Have you ever been in a situation like this? Love to hear your story. We'll continue that conversation there in those comments. Be sure to press subscribe wherever you're getting podcasts,

17:35Apple podcast, Spotify, iHeart, wherever it may be. Hit subscribe. So you don't miss any of our reporting. We do greatly appreciate that. Until next time, my name's Tony Bursky. We will talk again real soon.