Nicholas Firkus, who found guilty of his wife’s murder 13 years after it happened, was sentenced to life in prison without a possibility of parole on Thursday.
Firkus was charged with Heidi Firkus’s 2010 murder in May 2021 and was found guilty by a Ramsey County jury of premeditated 1st-degree and 2nd-degree murder on Feb. 10.
The case had gone cold for over 10 years before the St. Paul Police Department and FBI agents put a “fresh set of eyes” on it.
The Star Tribune reports Firkus’s life sentence could be appealed by the 40-year-old. In addition, the case may also be reviewed by the Minnesota Supreme Court.
Heidi Firkus was shot in the back in her St. Paul home on April 25, 2010. Nicholas Firkus called police to report that an intruder had broken into the couple’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 home, 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.”
Firkus maintained his innocence at his sentencing on Thursday.
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