Nearly 20 years ago, a house fire in Colorado Springs, Colorado, claimed the lives of Deb and Timothy Nicholls' three children: Jay, 11, Sophia, 5, and Sierra, 3. Deb wasn't home at the time, and Timothy was found injured outside the house. He says he remembers a piece of ceiling falling on him, then trying to open a window before losing consciousness. He maintains that he woke under the window outside the home with no memory of how that happened. The fire confounded investigators, writes Robert Sanchez in 5280. In their view, it burned too hot and too fast to be accidental. Deb told them she left candles burning before she left to go out, and asked her husband to extinguish them before he went to bed. But that didn't seem to jibe with the evidence, and the upshot is that Deb and Timothy Nicholls are now serving life sentences for murder.
Sanchez's story, however, raises the troubling question of whether the pair were convicted on the basis of what he describes as bogus fire science. The case relied partly on the testimony of John DeHaan, at the time "perhaps the most famous fire investigator in America." DeHaan insisted accelerants were used, but Sanchez points out that DeHaan was wrong about that in a 2001 case that saw a woman wrongfully imprisoned for four years. The story makes the case that fire science can be surprisingly bad, and that many of the investigators in the Nicholls case (including DeHaan) were veterans trained in the '60s and '70s when hunches superseded science. Read the full story, which notes that lawyers for Deb Nicholls are pushing for a new trial, which raises the possibility that Timothy Nicholls could get one, too. (Or check out other longforms.)
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