Nearly 13 years after Heidi Firkus was fatally shot in the back in her St. Paul, Minnesota home, her husband has been found guilty in her murder.
A Ramsey County jury returned the guilty verdict against 39-year-old Nicholas Firkus on Friday evening, just hours after closing arguments wrapped up.
He was arrested and charged with second-degree murder in May 2021, after FBI agents and a “fresh set of eyes” from the St. Paul Police Department revived the cold case.
On the morning of April 25, 2010, Firkus called 911 to report that an intruder had broken into the coupe’s home and shot Heidi.
When police arrived, Heidi was unresponsive in the kitchen and Firkus was beside her on the floor still talking to the 911 dispatcher. Firkus was “highly emotional” and had a gunshot wound to his upper left leg, the charges state.
Firkus told police at the scene that one or two people broke into the house, so he grabbed his shotgun and attempted to escape out the back door with his wife. He said that while they were running to the detached garage, the suspect grabbed the shotgun from him and shot both him and Heidi.
Heidi was pronounced dead at the scene, while Firkus was taken to the hospital and released after about three hours.
Police found no signs of an intruder in the home, nor any unidentified DNA evidence on the gun, the door or in the house, the charges say.
Firkus later admitted to detectives that the couple’s house was in foreclosure, and that they were due to move out the day after the shooting.
Investigators believed that Firkus never informed Heidi about the foreclosure.
Firkus was found guilty of both first-degree and second-degree murder.
The prosecution argued that Firkus killed Heidi because he was “running out of time” and “refused to accept the fact that he was going to be exposed as a fraud,” per the Pioneer Press. “He took Heidi’s life and saved his reputation.”
As the paper notes, the defense disputed the claim that Heidi did not know of the foreclosure, with Firkus’s attorney calling the prosecution’s arguments “psychobabble.”
“The courtroom was so packed, that people were sitting on the floor,” WCCO reports.
The station says he’s scheduled for sentencing on April 13.
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