Woman sentenced to 25 years for poisoning boyfriend wrongly thinking he’d inherited $30 million

A North Dakota woman was sentenced to 25 years in prison for poisoning her boyfriend after mistakenly believing he had inherited $30 million and planned to break up with her, officials said.

Ina Thea Kenoyer, 48, was convicted for the murder of Steven Riley Jr., 51, who died last year from ethylene glycol poisoning, the same toxin found in antifreeze.

Stephanie Gonzalez, Riley’s sister, told Kenoyer at the court hearing in Minot that she was lucky to get such a lenient sentence, KXMB reports.

“As so many other families of victims often feel, the punishment should fit the crime,” Gonzalez told her brother’s killer. “But lucky for you the Department of Corrections doesn’t serve antifreeze in your iced tea.”

State District Judge Richard Hagar sentenced Kenoyer to 25 years last Wednesday after she pleaded guilty in May, with an additional 10 years of supervised probation and $3,455 in restitution paid to Riley’s family, according to court documents.

But in a tragic twist, there was likely no inheritance in the first place.

Officials said Kenoyer poisoned Riley just hours after she found out from an email he had received that he was supposedly going to inherit $30 million.

But Ryan Riley, the victim’s 21-year-old son, told The Post that the couple had unwittingly fallen victim to an online scam and there never was any money.

When meeting with the so-called estate lawyer on Sept. 3, 2023, Riley became ill, with paramedics arriving at his home the next day to find him unresponsive. He was declared dead on Sept. 5.

Kenoyer told police Riley had been drinking alcohol all day and suffered a heat stroke in the days leading up to his death, according to the affidavit.

She told police she planned to split Riley’s alleged $30 million inheritance with his son, claiming she was entitled to a portion of it as his common-law wife. North Dakota, however, does not recognize such relationships.

The case was one of several in the US at the time surrounding spouses accused of poisoning their partners.

The same month as the Riley case, Dr. Connor Bowman, a poison specialist and former doctor at the famed Mayo Clinic, was charged with poisoning his wife amid marital difficulties.

He allegedly tried to have her body cremated immediately while planning to cash in a $500,000 life insurance policy.

Five months before those cases, Utah mother Kouri Richins was accused of slipping her husband a deadly fentanyl-laced Moscow mule the day before cashing in on a $2 million mansion she hoped to flip.