Nothing Was Packed

She called 911 to report someone breaking into her house. Less than a minute later she was dead, and the only person who could say what happened was her husband.

On the morning of April 25, 2010, Heidi Firkus dialed 911 from her home in St. Paul, Minnesota and reported a break-in. The call ended in a scream. When police kicked the door in, Heidi was dead on the kitchen floor, her husband Nicholas Firkus had a gunshot wound to the leg, and he had a story about a hooded intruder who had forced the front door.

For eleven years that story held.

What nobody knew that morning was that the couple was one day from eviction. The house was in foreclosure. The sheriff was due at noon. Heidi had signed nothing, had been told nothing, and had packed nothing.

Nothing Was Packed is the full account of a cold case that took more than a decade to charge, built from trial testimony, the criminal complaint, and the 108-page opinion of the Supreme Court of Minnesota. It follows the staged burglary theory, a crime scene that refused to match the story, the neighbor whose account shifted for thirteen years, the second marriage that began while the case sat open, and the eleven-day murder trial that ended in a conviction for first-degree premeditated murder.

Featured on Dateline and 48 Hours. In February 2026 the Supreme Court of Minnesota affirmed the conviction and used the case to set the standard every trial judge in the state now applies. The Chief Justice dissented and would have reversed it.

A true crime story drawn entirely from the public record, with nothing invented and no reconstructed dialogue. Where the record is silent, this book says so.