An heiress accused of trying to kill her estranged boyfriend with rat poison had two children from an affair with a plumber during her previous marriage.
Kristen Hogan, 33, was charged with two counts of attempted murder for allegedly sneaking into their home in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and spiking a bottle of wine with antifreeze.
She was on Thursday ordered by the Danbury Superior Court to undergo a psychiatric evaluation before being released on a $1million bond.
Hogan was living with her parents at their $4million, four-acre rural estate in New Canaan since she ‘fled’ the Ridgefield home on May 30.
Her father is Frank W Hogan III, general counsel and executive vice president of $6.2billion packaging giant Silgan Holdings. He did not post her bail.
Hogan allegedly spiked the wine amid a bitter custody battle with her boyfriend Timothy Scott Lacouture, 34, over their son Ryan, who turned two on Friday.
And the Daily Mail can reveal an equally messy incident in Hogan’s past, as the alleged poisoner previously had two lovechildren with a plumber named Nicholas Van Houten.
Kristen Hogan with her childhood sweetheart Nicholas Van Houten (left), a plumber whom she had two children with during an extramarital affair. After her husband divorced her, she started dating finance worker Tim Lacouture (right) – only to allegedly try to poison him
Hogan was on Thursday ordered by the Danbury Superior Court to undergo a psychiatric evaluation before being released on a $1 million bond
Hogan has two children – Emma, 5, and Luke, 3, – born around the time of her previous marriage to schoolteacher Anthony Abraham, 34.
Abraham filed for divorce in December 2020, just months after their March 22 wedding, likely after discovering she was having an affair with her childhood sweetheart Van Houten.
Abraham ordered paternity tests as part of his divorce filing and the results showed he was not Emma’s biological father.
Instead, both Emma and Luke were the product of Hogan’s affair with Van Houten.
The pair dated from 2012 with an engagement announced in September 2012 and a June 2019 wedding planned.
The announcement said Van Houten got a certification in plumbing in 2015 and worked as a residential and commercial plumber.
Hogan graduated Bates College in 2014 after studying psychology and chemistry, and at the time was a senior development coordinator with the Women’s Business Development Council.
Blue-collar Van Houten was an odd match for the daughter of a wealthy, upper-class executive and they broke up in 2019.
Hogan was living with her parents at their huge estate (pictured) in New Canaan since moving out of her home with Lacouture on May 30
Hogan’s father is Frank W Hogan III (far right), general counsel and executive vice president of $6.2 billion packaging giant Silgan Holdings
But Van Houten claimed they ‘reconnected’ and had sex in January 2020, which resulted in Emma’s conception.
He also claimed that after an over-the-counter paternity test in January 2021 showed he was the father, he began paying child support. This increased after Luke was born and he had visitation with both children.
But Van Houten claimed his child support payments were returned without explanation from March 2022 onwards and that Hogan banned him from seeing the children.
Hogan later claimed in court that she stopped having sex with Van Houten in December 2019, before Emma was conceived.
She admitted they had sex again in January and February 2021 but claimed Luke was conceived in March 2021.
Hogan said she knew who Luke’s father was but refused to name him.
Van Houten launched a paternity suit on February 17, 2023, which was granted, but the tests not only found he wasn’t the father – Hogan wasn’t their mother.
Hogan was accused of doctoring the sample after the lab tasked with establishing paternity said there were multiple inconsistences that suggested Hogan herself was not the children’s mother.
‘These inconsistencies indicate the possibility that a sample was collected from an incorrect person(s) for one or more of the tested parties,’ the September 2023 letter read.
Anthony Abraham (pictured) filed for divorce from Hogan in December 2020, just months after their March 22 wedding, likely after discovering she was having an affair
Hogan’s parents Frank and Kim Hogan bought the four-acre rural estate in 2006 for $3 million
Despite the alleged tampering, Van Houten’s petition was denied by the probate court due to the many inconsistencies, leaving him confused and heartbroken.
Then he developed a sinister theory: Hogan was bringing her niece and nephew to the DNA testing instead of her own kids.
‘I had very little knowledge of what the children physically looked like’ when he filed his 2023 petition, he wrote. ‘The mother relied on this fact to try to dupe me throughout the probate process of bringing the wrong children to the testing.’
He eventually won an appeal and yet another DNA test was ordered.
Swab samples of ‘Luke’ were taken on April 23, 2024, but Van Houten wrote in a subsequent legal filing that the boy who was brought for testing was ‘wearing large headphones and didn’t speak’.
Van Houten said the boy Hogan claimed to be Luke was not his son at all and instead a different, younger child she was using in a fresh bid to disguise her son’s paternity.
He made the claim after hiring a private investigator to follow Hogan, which suggested she’d used her sister’s son in place of Luke to cheat the test.
Sure enough, the DNA tests again showed neither Hogan nor Van Houten were the biological parents of either child.
Hogan claimed at a November 2024 hearing that both children were conceived through IVF and that was a reason for the result, but gave no medical evidence.
Hogan has two children – Emma, 5, and Luke, 3, – born around the time of her previous marriage to Anthony Abraham, 34, but actually from her affair with Van Houten
Then at a December 5, 2024, hearing Van Houten produced the video evidence the investigator took.
Judicial authorities responded by making an unannounced visit to Hogan’s home in January 2025.
Photos taken of the children looked markedly different to both images Hogan previously shared with the court that she claimed were her offspring, and with the children who were brought to the DNA testing.
The probate court found on July 17 that the evidence showed Hogan was bringing children that weren’t hers for testing.
‘The court finds that Hogan has intentionally sabotaged [Van Houten’s] efforts to obtain DNA evidence identifying him as the father of the minor children,’ it ruled.
Van Houten was finally declared the father of both children, and filed for sole custody on July 31.
‘I have missed out on all my children’s lives. [Hogan] has completely alienated me from fundamental early years of my children,’ he wrote in that filing.
Hogan sued to overturn the paternity ruling on August 15, 2025, and to prevent custody until the appeal was resolved.
She claimed the children would be confused and harmed by spending time with Van Houten should he turn out to not be their father.
Lacouture was poisoned at a house (pictured) the couple bought on Shadblow Hill Road in Ridgefield for $980,000 in September 2023 and lived until May 30 this year
Hogan admitted spiking the wine but claimed ‘she never wanted to kill him but just wanted to make him sick as payback for being mentally abusive’
Van Houten mysteriously withdrew his petition six days later on August 21, and the issue remained unresolved when Hogan was arrested on October 3. He could not be reached to clarify why.
This was just days after Lacouture drank a small amount of the allegedly spiked wine on August 10.
Lacouture and Hogan bought a house on Shadblow Hill Road for $980,000 ahead of Ryan’s birth little over a week later.
Hogan ‘fled’ the house on May 30, claiming Lacouture subjected her to psychological abuse and she and the children were terrified of him.
The warring couple were supposed to appear in court as part of their custody battle on August 7, but Hogan was a no-show.
Instead, she sneaked into the house for the first time in months while he was in court, where she allegedly poured the antifreeze into a half-drunk bottle of wine.
The day after he drank the wine, Lacouture began to vomit, according to documents released by the Connecticut State Police.
Lacouture called his mother, who arrived to find him slurring his words, staggering, and vomiting.
He was rushed hospital, where doctors initially thought he was having a stroke.
The Hogan family estate in a rural part of New Canaan where Hogan spent her teenage years
Hogan (center) with her brother and sister at her daughter Emma’s christening in 2020
They soon came to realize he was suffering from ethylene glycol poisoning, an ingredient in antifreeze.
He was admitted to the ICU and placed on dialysis with renal failure. Doctors asked him what he had consumed, and he told them about the wine.
Ridgefield Police detectives seized the wine and submitted it to the Connecticut Forensic Laboratory for testing.
Lacouture immediately suspected Hogan was the culprit because he was notified while he wasn’t home that she had connected to his Wi-Fi.
When detectives asked him why he believed it was her, he said Hogan would become the owner of the house and gain full custody of the couple’s son Ryan.
Lacouture had filed a lawsuit on July 22 seeking to have the house sold and the proceeds split between them.
Police allegedly found internet searches on Hogan’s phone that included potassium cyanide, potassium ferricyanide, citrate-cyanide, potassium thiocyanate, and monoethylene glycol.
She denied knowing what the chemicals were during initial questioning.
Additional searches for how much of these substances a person would need to ingest to die were also found, police alleged.
Lacouture with his brother and sister
Hogan initially claimed she’d bought monoethylene glycol on Amazon just to clean her mother’s carpets.
She later admitted spiking Lacouture’s wine but claimed ‘she never wanted to kill him but just wanted to make him sick as payback for being mentally abusive’.
Hogan said she didn’t know how much of the chemical she poured into the bottle.
Detectives told Hogan that the child she shared with Lacouture may have consumed some of the poison, which she denied being possible.
Ryan was also rushed to hospital and spent two weeks there, according to an emergency custody motion Lacouture filed on Monday.
Police wrote that before Hogan’s arrest, she began acting with an unusual friendliness towards Lacouture, even offering to come over to cook a meal.
Hogan was charged with two counts of attempted murder and one count of interfering with an officer.
‘This case is not what it seems,’ Hogan’s lawyer Mark Sherman said outside the courthouse on Thursday.
‘There’s a lot more to this story… Kristen is a loving mother. She cares about her kids more than anything and she’s looking forward to keeping this case moving and resolving it.’
