How was the Heidi Firkus case closed after more than a decade? Meet the trio who pushed for justice.

Mara H. Gottfried, Pioneer Press
·11 min read

For the first time since Heidi Firkus was killed 13 years ago in St. Paul, some of her parents’ sadness this year was replaced by a sense of relief on the recent anniversary of her killing.

Less than two weeks earlier, Firkus’ husband had been sentenced to life in prison after a jury found him guilty of premeditated murder in February. After years of waiting for answers and justice, Linda and John Erickson said they “are filled with gratitude for the many people who worked and prayed for truth and justice on behalf of Heidi and everyone who loved her.”

At the center of the case is a trio of women who investigated and prosecuted Nicholas Firkus — St. Paul police Sgt. Niki Sipes, and prosecutors Elizabeth Lamin and Rachel Kraker. It was the most high-profile case of their careers, and the two prosecutors said they’ve never brought a homicide to trial so long after it happened.

Though it was unusual in those regards, Lamin and Kraker said there are lessons in the Firkus case for any prosecution or investigation: Not being afraid to take a difficult case forward if the evidence supports a charge.

“The last moments of someone’s life shouldn’t be like they were for Heidi or like they were for so many victims we have,” Lamin said.

Firkus attorney will file appeal

On the morning of April 25, 2010, Nicholas Firkus told police he heard an intruder trying to break into his and Heidi’s home in St. Paul’s Hamline-Midway neighborhood. She was 25 and he was 27, and they’d been married since 2005.

Firkus said he armed himself with his shotgun, and he and Heidi went downstairs to try to escape out the back door. He said the front door burst open and he and the intruder — an unknown man — struggled over his shotgun. Firkus said the gun went off twice, fatally striking Heidi in the back and wounding him in the thigh. He said the intruder ran away.

At his sentencing last month, Firkus, now 40, said in court: “I do maintain and will maintain until my dying breath my innocence of this crime.” His attorney, Robert Richman, will be filing an appeal.

RELATED: Nicholas Firkus gets life sentence for wife Heidi’s murder he blamed on intruder

“We think the jury got it wrong,” Richman said. “We think there was a reasonable doubt.”

A commitment to Heidi’s parents

After several St. Paul police investigators worked on the case, Sgt. Sipes took over in 2019. It had been more than nine years since Heidi was killed, though the police department never classified it as a cold case.

Sipes sought to have every piece of evidence analyzed — some of which hadn’t been reviewed before — along with collecting more information, re-interviewing people and talking to others who hadn’t spoken to the police before.

At the start, Sipes said she made a commitment to Heidi’s parents “to see this through, one way or the other.”

“I felt that everyone deserved answers in this case or whatever answers we could provide,” Sipes said. “The idea of stopping before reaching a conclusion was unacceptable, whether it was that we’re going to be able to charge it, or someday sit down and explain to John and Linda why it couldn’t have been charged if we hadn’t been able to gather the evidence.”

Making sense of key evidence

On the day that Heidi died, Nicholas Firkus told homicide investigator Sgt. Jim Gray that their home had been foreclosed on and they were due to be evicted the next day. He said he and Heidi both knew about it, and hadn’t told other people.

But Lamin and Kraker aimed to show at trial that Heidi Firkus was unaware. “Nick was desperate, ashamed and had run out of time, and reality was going to come crashing down on him,” Lamin said during opening arguments.

Richman said the prosecutors’ theory of a motive never made sense.

“That a loving husband kills the person who everyone agreed was the love of his life, to spare himself from momentary embarrassment about a foreclosure?” Richman questioned recently. “He would have survived that embarrassment far more easily than the death of his wife.”

Additionally, there was no financial gain for Nicholas to kill Heidi, and he immediately told Gray about their financial circumstances, Richman said.

Before the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office reached the point of charging Nicholas Firkus, Lamin said a major factor “was really understanding the financial picture. For years, we needed that put together in a way that we could understand and then turn around and present that” to a jury.

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Sipes had tried to make sense of the Firkuses’ financial records that police obtained in 2010, but it wasn’t her area of expertise and she turned to the police department’s financial crimes unit. Then-St. Paul officer Kevin Sullivan, who specialized in financial crimes, analyzed the records.

When the house was foreclosed and the Firkuses’ insurance agent received notification that their home insurance policy was canceled, he asked Nick Firkus what was happening. Firkus told him they’d fallen victim to identity theft and there’d been fraud on their bank account; he also said someone was stealing his paychecks.

Initially, there wasn’t a way for police to verify what Nick had said was true. But after Sullivan went through all the records in the couples’ accounts, he was able to testify, “Absolutely not, there’s no fraud on this account,” Kraker said.

What they gleaned from eviction proceedings

Sipes said a critical piece for her was interviewing attorneys who handled the foreclosure and eviction proceedings. In their paperwork, “we could see that Heidi had never signed anything,” Sipes said.

Sipes also thought information from an attorney who handled a March 2010 eviction hearing was important. The attorney talked about how he remembered Nick Firkus because he attended the hearing without his wife. The attorney told Sipes that Firkus had signed an agreement that said if they hadn’t removed all their personal property by the time of eviction, it could be destroyed.

“That was in exact opposition” to Firkus’ statement to Sgt. Gray that they were going to leave their big things in the garage to move later, Sipes said.

But Richman said there was a stack of empty boxes in the kitchen that Heidi had brought from work.

“So Nick Firkus is serving a sentence for first-degree murder because they had procrastinated in starting packing,” Richman said.

Another “big question mark” through the years was the communications between Heidi and Nick, Lamin said. Sipes reviewed every email and text message that police had obtained through search warrants and she highlighted key conversations.

It was that work that allowed police and prosecutors to show “there’s absolutely no communication between Heidi and Nick where there’s any indication about foreclosure, eviction or moving,” Lamin said.

Richman, however, said documents outlining the entire foreclosure and eviction process were in the couple’s house and in the car, “where anytime Heidi was in the car, she would have seen. It was obviously not being hidden from her.”

As happens in any case, jurors don’t get to hear everything that prosecutors know. Nicholas Firkus had remarried in 2012 and divorced in 2019. Prosecutors wanted to have his second wife testify, but they weren’t surprised that Judge Leonardo Castro ruled in advance that he wouldn’t allow it. Jurors aren’t allowed to hear evidence that can “unfairly persuade” them, Kraker said.

“If they had heard that he had a subsequent wife who didn’t know that he was keeping financial information from her, it would have been nearly impossible for the jury to have a clean slate and judge this evidence,” Kraker said.

At a pre-trial hearing, Firkus’ attorney established that Firkus and his second wife had agreed he’d be in charge of the finances. He said her name was also on the bank account and there was nothing stopping her from accessing the account or opening their bills.

Attorney: Evidence didn’t disprove intruder

Richman said his appeal will hinge on the standard in Minnesota law in circumstantial evidence cases.

“The circumstantial evidence has to be sufficiently strong as to negate every reasonable hypothesis other than one of guilt,” Richman said. “In our view, that means that it was up to the state to prove that there was no intruder, which was Mr. Firkus’ account to the police, and we don’t think that the evidence was sufficient to negate that possibility.”

The prosecutors said there was also direct evidence in the case, including Nicholas telling Sgt. Gray on April 25, 2010, that he’d loaded his shotgun with two shells, and saying his finger slipped onto the trigger during the struggle and the gun went off.

The shotgun’s safety would have automatically been on, the prosecutors said.

“We heard very clear testimony that you would never take that safety off unless you’re about to shoot someone,” Lamin said.

There were “absolutely no signs of any physical struggle or any break-in in that house,” Lamin said. “No one sees an intruder, there’s no evidence of anyone coming into that house.”

What happened April 25, 2010?

With Firkus maintaining his innocence, no one can say for certain what unfolded the morning of April 25, 2010, but those who worked on the case have theories.

“There are still and there always will be questions that will remain unanswered,” Kraker said. “One of the things that we wanted the jury to know is, ‘We cannot answer every single question that you might have.'”

Had Nick told Heidi about the eviction the night before or during the night and they argued about it? Lamin and Kraker said they don’t believe that happened because, in talking with Heidi’s family and friends, they said she would have reached out with that information quickly — even if it was late at night or early morning.

If she’d known, “I don’t know that she would have gone to bed,” Kraker said.

“I think she would have spent the night packing,” Lamin said.

Firkus reported to police that he woke Heidi up and told her someone was trying to break into the house.

“We absolutely believe that he told her that someone was breaking into the house to get her up at a very early hour and to get her startled and to get her downstairs,” Kraker said. “We believe that’s the genesis of how this all happened.”

Firkus also informed police that he told Heidi to call 911, but Kraker said they believe it’s possible Nick didn’t tell her to call and was caught off guard to find her on the phone with 911.

“His narrative is not supported by the contents of either of the 911 calls,” Kraker said, in that no background noise is heard during Heidi’s brief call, which ended with the sound of a gunshot, and police could be heard entering the home when Nick called 911 after the shooting.

RELATED: Evidence from Nicholas Firkus trial made public

In their work as prosecutors, Lamin and Kraker listen to a lot of 911 calls that are placed during active emergencies and they said it’s common to hear people in a household communicating in the background, saying things like, “You run, you get out of here, you go,” Kraker said. “It’s just not common to not hear what’s going on in the background.”

Firkus also told police that he was behind Heidi as they walked down the stairs, but a theory of Lamin’s is that Nick instead told Heidi he was going to check out what was happening and she didn’t know where in the house he was.

“She goes down to see what’s going on and he’s waiting for her,” Lamin said.

Verdict brings relief to family

Kraker is now a senior assistant Hennepin County attorney who leads the office’s domestic violence in the adult prosecution division, but she used to be a Ramsey County prosecutor. She and Lamin worked together on the Firkus case years earlier, and Lamin stayed on the case when Kraker went to Hennepin County.

In an agreement with both county attorneys’ offices, Kraker was allowed to work as a prosecutor on the Firkus trial.

“There are cases that stick with you and this one obviously did,” said Kraker, who specializes in complicated domestic violence cases. Lamin, an assistant Ramsey County attorney, usually works on cases involving gang shootings and complex homicides.

Lamin said they knew it was going to be “a long, hard-fought trial.” Judge Castro noted at sentencing that Firkus’ attorneys, Joe Friedberg and Robert Richman, were “some of the most skilled criminal defense lawyers in the state.”

Jurors deliberated for less than three hours before finding Nicholas Firkus guilty of first-degree, premediated murder.

FIRKUS JURORS: How they decided in hours that Nicholas killed Heidi

After the verdict, Kraker, Lamin and Sipes got in a courthouse elevator with the Erickson family. There were “a lot of tears,” Sipes said.

John and Linda Erickson said they expect April 25, the day their daughter was killed, will always be a hard day for them.

But now, “instead of grief overshadowing our every memory, we believe it will now take its proper place alongside all the goodness, joy and beauty God brought into our lives through the gift of Heidi,” they said.

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