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Moments before she was shot to death in her home in St. Paul, Minnesota, Heidi Firkus placed a frantic 911 call.
“Someone’s trying to break into my house,” Heidi can be heard telling the dispatcher in a call replayed on Dateline: Unforgettable.
“What city are you in, St. Paul?” the dispatcher asked.
The 25-year-old confirmed her location just moments before a gunshot went off and Heidi screamed.
About a minute later — or “65 seconds” to be exact, as the Dateline: Unforgettable episode on the case is titled — Heidi’s husband, Nick Firkus, placed his own call to 911, saying that he and his wife had both been shot by an intruder.
“Please. Please. Somebody just broke in the house and shot me and my girl,” he said on the call.
Nick survived an injury to his leg, but his wife did not survive. The years-long investigation into her death revealed dark secrets and led detectives to conclude that not everything was as it seemed in those harrowing 911 calls.
Who were Nick and Heidi Firkus?
Nick and Heidi first met as teens while volunteering with their church. Their faith served as a central part of both of their lives.
Heidi was described by those that knew her best as bubbly, caring and outgoing, with a maturity beyond her years.
“She brought a lot of joy everywhere she went,” her brother Pete Erickson recalled.
Nick, the son of a successful local businessman, was considered a kind-hearted people person, who loved the outdoors.
The couple tied the knot when Nick was 22 and Heidi was 20, and they eventually settled down and bought a house in an up-and-coming St. Paul neighborhood.
But friends said that Heidi was worried about crime in the area.
The day Heidi Firkus was killed
It initially seemed that her worst fears had played out on the morning of Sunday, April 25, 2010. Nick would later tell investigators that he woke up that morning at around 6 a.m. and was trying to go back to sleep when he heard the couple’s screen door open on the floor below.
He said he woke Heidi up and told her someone was trying to break into their house, then got his shotgun from the closet and followed her down the stairs as she placed that call to 911.
According to Nick’s account, just as he was passing through the entryway of the home, the intruder pushed open the front door and the two struggled for control of the shotgun.
“He pushes it up against my chest… and… the gun went off,” Nick told a detective later that day. “I know it hit Heidi.”
Nick said the gun went off a second time and hit him in the leg. Nick described the intruder as a Black man with a dark hooded sweatshirt pulled up around his head, who had run off before police arrived.
Nick talked to investigators from the Saint Paul Police Department for hours that first day, but his attorney later advised him not to grant any further police interviews. However, Nick did agree to provide police with samples of his DNA and fingerprints and worked with an independent sketch artist to create a drawing of the man he said broke in that morning.
Police quickly circulated the image to local media, but no viable tips came in to help identify the supposed intruder. Authorities were also unable to find any DNA or fingerprint evidence at the scene to lead them to a suspect, and the case quickly stalled.
Nick Firkus gets remarried
Within three months of Heidi’s death, Nick had moved on. Friends introduced him to Rachel Sanchez, a woman just getting over a nasty divorce, and the two quickly fell in love.
They couple eventually got married and welcomed three children together.
Puzzling clues in Heidi Firkus case still baffle investigators
Meanwhile, detectives were still trying to piece together Heidi’s murder. From the beginning, there were details of that morning that didn’t sit right with investigators.
Nick told authorities that the couple was getting evicted from their home at noon the day after the murder because they were struggling with financial issues and had foreclosed on their house. He said they were both too embarrassed to tell their family or friends.
Yet, authorities were unable to find any evidence that Heidi knew of this predicament. None of their belongings had been packed and none of the documented conversations or texts between the couple mentioned anything about moving.
Items on an entryway table just inside the home’s front door had also been completely undisturbed, although Nick had claimed that was the spot he’d struggled with the alleged intruder.
Authorities also carefully analyzed Heidi’s 911 call and were struck by the fact that no struggle could be heard in the call either before or after the fatal shot was fired.
Detectives get break in Heidi Firkus case
On the fifth anniversary of Heidi’s death, Jake Peterson, then a sergeant with the Saint Paul Police Department, re-released the sketch of the alleged intruder and this time, he got a hit. A caller identified the man as Michael Pye, a man with a long history of breaking and entering.
“He looked identical to the sketch and he’d been convicted of violent burglary crimes,” Peterson said.
Pye was even known to break into occupied homes by forcing his way inside the front door — but there was one problem. At the time of the Heidi’s murder, Pye had been in the county jail, making it impossible for him to have carried out the crime.
In the months before the murder, however, his photo had been in news articles that described his crimes, leaving investigators to wonder whether Nick had tried to frame an innocent man.
Police believe Nick Firkus killed wife
Detectives believed Nick had killed his wife, then shot himself in the leg, to cover up their dire financial situation and that he created the intruder story as a cover. But they didn’t have enough evidence to charge him.
Sgt. Nichole Sipes eventually took the lead on the case and finally caught the break she needed after learning that Nick and his second wife had recently divorced.
Sanchez agreed to talk with police and told them she began to question her husband’s truthfulness not long into the marriage.
“I started to see lying consistently happen,” she later told Dateline’s Blayne Alexander.
While the lies started out small, eventually Sanchez learned that, much like in his first marriage, Nick had gotten the family into significant financial trouble, all of which he’d hidden from Sanchez.
Sanchez went as far as to even secretly record herself confronting Nick about the lies and questioning his past.
“I do not want to think these things. I don’t. But the — your actions have caused me to just distrust you completely… Makes me think,” she said at one point in the recorded conversation.
“That I could murder my wife?” Nick asked.
“That you could lie about something,” she replied.
“That I could murder my wife,” he insisted.
“Yes,” Rachel then agreed.
Who killed Heidi Firkus?
Sanchez was hoping Nick would try to convince her that he hadn’t killed Heidi, but while he never admitted to the killing, he didn’t seem to deny it either.
With investigators now having enough evidence in the case, Nick was arrested on May 19, 2021.
He went on trial two years later and was found guilty of first- and second-degree murder. He is currently serving out a life sentence and has appealed his conviction.
