A Colorado Springs woman convicted of murdering her three children in a house fire nearly 20 years ago is asking a judge to throw out her convictions on the grounds the case against her relied on flawed forensic evidence and false testimony from a jailhouse informant.
The University of Colorado Boulder’s Korey Wise Innocence Project is backing Deborah Lee Nicholls, 55, in her latest effort to overturn her 2008 convictions for the first-degree murder of her three children, who died when the family’s house caught fire in the middle of the night on March 7, 2003.
“We believe it is a case of wrongful conviction,” said Anne-Marie Moyes, executive director of the Korey Wise Innocence Project.
Nicholls and her husband, Timothy Nicholls, were both sentenced to life in prison for the deaths of their three children, Jay, 11, Sophia, 5, and Sierra, 3. Prosecutors argued during the parents’ separate jury trials that Deborah and Tim Nicholls killed their children in an attempt to collect insurance money to fund their methamphetamine addiction. The parents were accused of spreading a highly-flammable cleaning fluid around the house — and on their children’s pajamas — and then intentionally setting the home on fire.
Tim Nicholls allegedly confessed the murder plot to another prisoner while awaiting trial, and that man then became an informant and a key witness for the prosecution. Deborah Nicholls was not home when the fire started; her husband escaped the blaze with burns and injuries after jumping out a second-story window.