#331 Maggie Freleng with Deborah Nicholls

The evening of March sixth, two thousand and three, was a typical Thursday for the Nichols family. That night, Deborah Nichols put her three energetic kids to bed. After her husband Tim got home, she left the house to interview an employee for their karaoke business. When she returned home, her world had been turned upside down that night.

I went from just needing to hire someone to fill a shift to losing my whole little family.

It was a mother's worst nightmare. And when it was over, all three of Deb's children had died in a terrible accident. She was so stricken with grief that she couldn't bring herself to attend their funeral.

I was trying to get ready to go to the funeral and my body was breaking down and I was shaking so bad, and I just had to sit down and give in and surrender. I can't go. I can't do it. I couldn't imagine seeing three, three caskets. It was too much. It was too much. My name is Deb Nichols. I'm currently serving three life sentences at Denver Women's Correctional.

Facility from LoVa for Good. This is wrongful conviction with Maggie Freeling today dead. Nichols Deborah Nichols was born May fourth, nineteen sixty seven, born Michigan. She grew up in a large, blended family.

Having seven brothers and sisters was a blast. We had a great childhood. Northern Michigan has beautiful weather. It's like the perfect four seasons, so we as children took full rain with all of it and did a lot of skating and skiing and swimming, or just going down to the end of the street to the bay and playing in the water all day, all summer long. We had so much fun.

So can you tell listeners about Zebra? What's she like? What was she like growing up?

Well, as you probably gathered talking to her, she's a pretty strong girl.

This is Deb's father, Doug bamb Gardner.

Pretty strong will and has no problems doing things her way and trying to tat what she's headed for. She was always that way all of her life.

Her family later moved to Colorado, but for college, Deb carved her own path and moved out to California. After studying at San Diego for a year, Deb left the West Coast and joined her family in Colorado. When Deb was twenty four, she gave birth to her first child, a son. They called him JJ.

JJ's nickname was Peanut, and he was just absolutely beautiful, like he was my little buddy, my little man, and we did everything together.

Deb went on to have a second son, Spencer, but tragically, when he was three months old, Spencer passed away from sudden infant death syndrome, also known as sid's. Despite her loss, Deb continued to try and be the best mom she could JJ. By nineteen ninety three, she was living in a suburb of Colorado Springs, working two jobs and going to school. One night, she went out to a local bar to let loose and indulge in one of her passions,

I really liked What's Up with four Non Blonde?

I do love that song.

Yeah, yeah, it's a good one.

When Deb walked in, a man was already at the mic. She recognized the song right away.

You Are My Shining Star, which is one of my favorite songs in like eighth grade. And he was really cute and he was new and I had never seen him before, and I was like, hey, that's one of my favorite songs, you know, come sit by Me.

His name was Tim Nichols, and they hit it off.

We talked all night long and we basically never left each other's side after that.

Yeah, described him to me, what what does he like?

Tim is a lot of powerhouse and a little guy. He's like five nine. He had integrity, which is something that was so hard to find. It such a rare quality nowadays. And because he's just such a good guy through the right thing no matter what. And I that was the kind of guy I wanted to be with forever.

Tim and Deb were best friends, and Tim loved JJ like his own son.

Tim and JJ were just like so bonded that Tim adopted JJ and we got married and started our family. I have to say it, I loved getting married. I loved being married. It really does take your relationship to a different level.

Soon after that, in nineteen ninety seven, their daughter Sophia was born.

She was absolutely amazing. She loved people to be happy, she was always smiling, She was she was the essence of joy.

Two years later, their second daughter, Sierra came. They nicknamed her Rara.

That little girl was just so calming and so peaceful. And she would just like go around the room and check everything out. She was just so little and delicate and beautiful. Jg was my passion, Sophia was my joy, and ra Ra was my peace. They were my absolute world. I was so blessed.

The family was thriving. Deb was working on getting her real estate license. They had started a construction business and even bought a house. They were busy, but they found time for each other too.

You know, once I have was done nursing, we started going out, you know, on date nights, and we went to a karaoke bar, and like it was so fun, like soul food.

Deb and Tim decided to start a side business together, doing something they loved, the thing that had brought them together, a karaoke business.

We took the plunge and started our own and got really good equipment and you know, I got all those songs like the Gries duets and stuff. It was just really fun. It was for pure enjoyment, just go be able to let loose and enjoy yourself.

Deb, Tim and their family had everything going for.

Them, living the American dream basically.

But that dream soon came to a crashing halt. On the evening of March sixth, two thousand and three, Deb was home with her three children, getting them ready for bed.

JJ was going to a birthday party on Friday, which this lady was taking ten little twelve year old skiing. So I got a bunch of you know, chips and stuff and bought the girls some sparkly tattoos, old temporary tattoos, because you can't get one kid's stuff without the other kids getting stuff too.

She says. The kids were really hyper that night.

I had to put them back to bed like three or four times, because you know, the girls were excited about these sparkly tattoos, and JJ was excited about his birthday party excursion.

The next day, the kids finally fell asleep, which gave Deb time to catch up on some chores around the house. Tim got home from work around eleven that night, and he was tired.

I knew he'd worked really hard all week, and I told Tim, you know, I'd cleaned the house, I lick candles for the ambiance, and I literally had dinner in the oven and his favorite beer in the freezers so he could just have a beer in dinner.

Deb had an appointment to go meet a new karaoke jockey for their business.

And I was like, you know, I have to go to this kJ interview. Make sure you blow up the candles and I left.

After the interview, DEB hung around the bar like she usually did. She had a few drinks and sang some karaoke, and.

Because I had a drink or two, I didn't want to drive.

So when the bar was closing around two am, DEB asked one of her employees, Carl, for a ride home. Everything was business as usual until they turned onto deb Street.

You could see the emergency lights as we were coming up the street, and the closer we got to my street, the more emergency vehicles that we could see. And so I started a panic and I just asked Carl to stop the car, and I got out of the car and started running around the corner and saw it was my house and it was on fire. And the closer I got, you know, there's probably two hundred people in front of my house. And I kept hearing everyone go, you know, that's her, that's the mom, and you know,

Officials told her she needed to go to the hospital, but they weren't telling her what was going on.

It looked really bad. But if the only way I could get information was to go to the hospital, it was like fine, And so I went. And the whole ride to the hospital, like the policeman didn't tell me anything.

This episode is underwritten by AIG, a leading global insurance company. AIG is committed to corporate social responsibility and to making a positive difference in the lives of its employees and in the communities where they work and live. In light of the compelling need for pro bono legal assistance, and in recognition of AIG's commitment to criminal and social justice reform, the AIG pro Bono Program provides free legal services and

And he walked in and she said, JJS is dead. Good night, remember saying dead. It no no one anything about dead. And then he said sar May the youngest. She died off, and.

I felt my mind leave my body and the adrenaline and my body took over, and I.

Ran out of the hospital and my only thought was I just.

Need to go.

We'll go, I mean walk to the Pacific Ocean and that's it doesn't make any sense that I now look back and like that was the.

Adrenaline and the panic and where I always feel the safest, on the beach by the water.

It turns out Sophia was still alive, but she didn't have long to live.

And I went back in the hospital and they led me to Sophia's room and she was had tubes everywhere. There was a little clear spot on her little chest, and I was able to put my head on her chest and put my ear to her heart, and I could hear her heart beating, and it was beating so fast.

Tim was also in critical condition. In the process of trying to save him, the doctors had taken Tim's wedding ring off. Deb asked if she could keep it, and then she was confronted with more agony.

And then they asked me to say goodbye to Sierra, me my baby girl that we called raw Rah. And I got told her and say goodbye, and she didn't look hurt or burned or anything. She just looked like she was sleeping. Raba was a real big daddy's girl, and she loved her daddy so much. And I looked at the wedding ring in my hand as Kim's, and I decided to put that on her so this could be buried with it.

Sierra and JJ had both died of smoke inhalation. Sophia was still hanging on for dear life, and Tim had been transferred to a burn unit in Denver, and Dev's family and friends were starting to arrive at the hospital.

They all wanted to help me, but there was no helping me. I was devastated. I was terrified, this panicked, and I didn't want anyone to touch me. I was just so sick of everyone trying to hug me, like, you know, I have to figure this out.

By morning, DEB was informed that Sophia had also died.

And I put my wedding ring on Sophia's little finger, and I got to say goodbye to Sophia, and then I went right to the hospital up in Denver and was with Tim and my family and we just we sat vigil with Tim.

Tim's injuries were serious, but eventually he was able to leave the hospital. With no home to go back to, the two of them lived out of a motel room. Deb's father and stepmother stayed close to help. Tim was still recovering from his injuries, and Doug took charge of his care, tending to his burns and changing his bandages.

I was the only one that could take care of the burns without pulkit and getting sick. So anyway, that was my job for the rest of the time we were there.

But Doug was also having a hard time. His daughter had lost her children and he had lost his grandchildren.

Can I show you a picture of the kids? Have you ever seen one?

Show me?

I got to reach it up there, I see. And anyway, this was the last picture of them. This was taken just before they all died.

When was that Christmas?

Just after? Yeah, in March, I guess, but they had little halos on even.

I went from just needing to hire someone to fill a shift to losing my whole little family.

Deb and Tim had lost their children, their home, and everything they owned, and as they struggled with their grief, their marriage was deteriorating.

We weren't doing well at all. Actually, our souls were broken. We weren't He wasn't the same man, I wasn't the same woman. We were fighting constantly in it was horrible. We were in different places with the grieving, you know, like he would want to remember the kids and I would be like in denial, and we just couldn't get on the same page. And we were actually doing more damage to each other than we were helping. None of any of it made any sense. I was not thinking clearly.

She ended up coming home here with us, and she was still basically in trauma. I mean we're talking months after the fire, and you know, me and her were going down to her bedroom till she cried herself asleep.

And it was about to get a lot worse because Tim was the sole survivor from inside the house. Fire, police were suspicious. One day, the police called him into the station, saying they needed him to pick up some property from the fire, but Deb says it was a ruse to get her alone.

As soon as he left, the doorbell rang and it was Derek Graham and another detective and they were like, you know, oh, we need to talk to you. We think your husband did this. And I remember telling them absolutely not. They didn't know what they were talking about. My husband loved his children more than his own life. They said, well, well, we have evidence. I said, no, you don't, and if you do, it's wrong. And then I asked them to leave, and I thought that would be the end of it, but it wasn't.

Detective Graham was also scrutinizing Deb's behavior, particularly at the hospital.

And then he put like his notes that I wasn't crying properly or whatever. And I'm thinking, you didn't think I was crying properly. I couldn't even remember to breathe or close my mouth, and you're judging me like that.

But the way Detective Graham saw it, these two parents had something to do with the deaths of their children. After a two year investigation, on July twenty first, two thousand and five, the grand jury indicted Tim Nichols for the murders of eleven year old Jj, five year old Sophia,

And according to the prosecution, that would include killing their three children to get more methamphetamine, and there was very little evidence to support that at all, but that was their theory.

This is Kathleen Lord. She's a staff attorney at the Cory Wise Innocence Project at Colorado Law, Kathleen says that while Deb did do drugs occasionally.

There's not evidence that she was a meth addict. She was first turned on to meth by one of the state's witnesses as a way to lose weight, and there was a lot of speculation on the prosecution's part.

The state had one major problem with its case. Deb wasn't home the night of the fire, so the state argued she had to have an accomplice. They said she planned it with Tim, who had already been convicted.

There's something that we're uncomfortable with, and I think that we're uncomfortable with the fact that there was a father at home with his children and he escaped the fire and his children didn't.

Anne Marie Moyas is the director of the Corey Wise Innocence Project. She says that right from the beginning, the police focused on Deb and Tamas suspects.

There's a real impulse to blame him and to embrace narratives that put him at fault for what happened, and so I think that was the kernel that started all of this, and then the confirmation bias sets in, and then every piece of evidence is seen through this lend of that expectation.

Here's how the state's case began.

Somewhat early in the investigation, they led an arson dog through the fire scene and the dog was trained to alert to the possible presence of an ignitable liquid, and the dog did alert at multiple locations in the living room, in the stairway at the house. They said, okay, well we found xilenes, and xilenes are a chemical compound in a nightable liquids.

Xilens are also commonly detected when furniture and other household items burn in a fire. Yet, the prosecution argued that the presence of xilenes showed that the fire was deliberately set using an ignitable liquid.

They had an expert whose name is John Dehan, and he testified that he was able to determine that only a fire set at multiple locations simultaneous in the living room could have grown large enough to engulf the entire room. So it was beyond dispute that the living room did go to flashover, meaning that the entire room was engulfed in flames. But his theory was that only a deliberately set fire could have produced that result.

And to further bolster this theory, the state brought in a jailhouse snitch. When Tim was in jail, he was placed next to a notorious informant named Hiram Church.

With in a day or two of being in custody. Mister Church claimed to have heard Tim confess to him, and then they were able to use the jailhouse snitch to tie it together because the jail house snitch said that Tim had admitted to him to using an ignitable liquid called goof off to start the fire, and xilenes are a primary ingredient of goof off.

The state said that Tim put goof off, a household cleaning product all over the furniture and had the kids sit on it that evening. Then when the fire ignited, the children would already have the flammable substance on them them.

And what was critical is that mister Church, the jail house informant, said not only that Tim had confessed, but that he had implicated Deb in the crime.

The state also criticized Deb's behavior following her children's deaths. They called in an insurance adjuster to testify that when she showed up at their office. She had on a white track suit with freshly manicured nails, implying that she was dressed inappropriately for a bereft mother. The state relentlessly picked apart her grieving process.

I get it because I didn't know how to do it either.

I don't know.

Things like that come in waves like you just can't you sob uncontrollably, and then you can't think for a sob or do anything for a while, and then it'll hit you and I don't know, it's like a cycle of denial and devastation.

They also brought up the fact that deb didn't attend her children's funeral. How come you didn't attend the funeral.

I had lost my second son, Spencer, when he was three months old, and I had to have a funeral. It's a little tiny casket and I barely made it through that, and I just I was trying to get ready to go to the funeral, and my body was breaking down and I was shaking so bad. And you know, my daughters loved to me get ready in the morning, and they would be like, you know, mom, we went pretties, and I was trying to get ready for the funeral, but I just had to sit down and give in

Deb's defense attorneys were Deputy Public Defender Cindy Jones and Jeffrey Schwartz. They called multiple witnesses to refute the prosecution's idea that deb wasn't grieving properly, and as Anne Marie Moyas explains, they also called in the prominent fire expert John Lntini.

He disputed all of the prosecution's evidence and their interpretation of the evidence, but at the end of the day, it was his against multiple experts on the prosecution side, and the prosecution did a pretty good job of characterizing Lentini as some sort of hired gun that the defense had paid. It wasn't a fair characterization, but it was a success. They were successful in portraying him that way.

Over a month later, on November twenty fourth, two thousand and eight, Deb Nichols was convicted of three counts a first degree murder. She was sentenced to three consecutive life terms in prison. Deb has passed her time in prison trying to come to terms with what has happened in her life.

I try to do the things that I know will help, like journaling and singing, and working out, and going to church at Red Rocks God behind bars, and keeping my heart open so that I can feel that pure love with my children, and fighting to clear our aims because we had nothing to do with that fire.

In twenty twenty, Kathleen Ann Marie and the Corey Wise Innocence Project joined experienced criminal defense lawyer Janine McCabe in taking on Deb's case.

So the main thing that we've done is brought on new leading experts in fire science to explain the changes in fire science that have taken place since the time of trial.

And not only that, in the time since the trial happened, the state's expert, John Dehn, has been discredited.

He for many years was considered one of the leading experts in fire science in this country. But what we know now is that he acted unethically in other cases, and in fact, the American Association of Forensic Science voted to expel him from membership because of that unethical conduct.

Dehn, who passed away in twenty twenty two to continued to stand by his testimony. This is him speaking in twenty nineteen about the case.

I've read, examine the data and the findings a number of times over the years, and I still hold my conclusions expressed in the Tim Nichols trial as well as Deborah Nichols, that fire was deliberately started in the living room of the residents.

However, the science to Han was touting has also been discredited. The defensive trial expert John Lntini also maintains his trial testimony and emphasizes these changes in science. To this day, he defends Debra's innocence.

It's not up to Timothy or Deborah to prove what caused that fire. What we have learned about the behavior of fire since the Nickels fire is that the patterns that we read after a big fire like the are not reliable evidence.

We can now say definitively that the samples that were taken from the Nichols living room show that they were just the natural byproduct of the fire, that they did not come from an ignitable liquid. So there's absolutely no evidence anymore that there was an ignitable liquid present at the fire scene, and that new science just exposes the prosecution's case for what it is, which is just a house of cards that just doesn't stand up under any sort of inspection.

The jailhouse informant, Hiram Church, has also been discredited.

We see that in cases of wrongful convictions that sometimes when these jailhouse informants are used, what we find out about their history is that they miraculously have heard confessions in a number of other high profile murder cases, and that was true of mister Church.

The Corey Wise Innocence Project submitted a motion for a new hearing to the courts in October of twenty twenty two. If accepted, there will be an evidentiary hearing where Deb can present this evidence to the court. In the meantime, she tries to keep healthy and stays in touch with the family she has left. Although Deb and Tim are divorced, they've remained friends and write letters to each other in prison.

We're both just trying to grieve and heal and get our names cleared and get the truth out and take it day by day. At this point, it's hard to talk about trauma. It's hard to talk about losing my babies. But I was just hoping that people, especially women that get wrongly convicted, can find some type of strength, seet through it, and keep fighting.

Deb thinks back to the night of the fire, often remembering her kid's rambunctious energy at bedtime. Now she thinks of that night in a new way.

I'm so glad that I got to put him back to bed four or five times, because I didn't realize that would be the last time I got to kiss him good night. And I'm really really grateful I got a bunch as her kisses.

In that night.

If you want to help Deb and the Corey Wise Innocence Project, go to the links in our bio. Next time, un Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling Ashley Jordan.

He was about to say he did it just so I can go home and won't go to jail, and I looked at him and I grabbed his hand and I said, no, you're not you will not lie for these people. That's because we didn't do anything wrong.

Thanks for listening to Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling. Please support your local innocence organizations and go to the links in our bio to see how you can help. I'd like to thank our executive producers Jason Flamm and Kevin Wurtis, as well as our senior producer, Annie Chelsea, producer Lyla Robinson, and story editor Sonia Paul. The show is edited and mixed by Annie Chelsea, with additional production by Jeff Cliburn and Connor Hall. The music in this production is by