COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KOAA) — A Colorado Springs woman who was convicted of killing her three children in March 2003, following a house fire, may have a chance at a new trial after an El Paso County Court found the prosecution at the time participated in Brady violations during the trial.
Deborah Nicholls and her husband at the time, Timothy Nicholls, were convicted of three counts of first-degree murder for intentionally starting the fire that killed their children. At the time of her case, the prosecution stated that Nicholls and her husband started the fire for insurance money to help fuel a meth addiction.
Since that time, the Korey Wise Innocence Project at the University of Colorado Law School took up Mrs. Nicholls ' case in an effort to exonerate her.
Watch Our Previous Coverage from when the Innocence Project took on the Deborah Nicholls Case
The group presented evidence to an El Paso County District Court, which issued an order siding with the defense that the prosecution at the time violated Nicholls' right to a fair trial by "suppressing critical scientific evidence" that directly contradicted the prosecution's arson theory, ruling that with reasonable probability, if this discovery had been disclosed properly, it would have changed the outcome of her 2008 trial.
Among the main pieces of evidence the group says the prosecution used to tie the Nicholls to their children's deaths was the presence of Goof Off in fire debris, on the children's pajamas, and on Timothy's clothing classified as xylenes. The prosecution presented this as the scientific grounding for their arson theory in the case.
The Innocence Project found communications and analysis from Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI) Tom Griffin, who reviewed the data from all three laboratories at the time and concluded that CBI's own 2003 testing in the case found no ignitable liquids, and was likely contamination from Western labs at the time. This opinion was never turned over to the defense team and was hidden, according to the Innocence Project.
A second piece of discoverable information found was an email from the prosecution team at the time acknowledging that Tom Newtal, a CBI chemist on the case, and the prosecution's sole testifying lab analyst, admitted he would not have reported xylenes at all had he known that a can of Goof Off was submitted with the samples.
The prosecution built its entire case on the claim that science had confirmed arson using an accelerant. What the prosecution suppressed was the fact that its own scientist did not agree. Deborah Nicholls has spent more than eighteen years in prison because the government hid evidence that could have set her free.
The Innocence Project states that Tom Griffin also consulted a nationally recognized chemist, Reta Newman, over the lab results at the time of the case, who found that the presence of xylenes in the samples was likely just the natural burning of materials in a process known as pyrolysis, not evidence that a fire had been intentionally set.
The suppressed materials made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the prosecution to credibly present any evidence of lab confirmation that an ignitable liquid was used to start this fire. The only reason the prosecution was able to present those lab results with any credibility was because it had suppressed the evidence contradicting them.
So how did Deborah Nicholls get tied to the case?
During her husband's trial in 2007, a jailhouse informant testified that Timothy had confessed to starting the fire with Goof Off, a flammable stain remover. The informant also testified that he confessed to planning the fire with his wife, Deborah, tying her to the case.
Now the Innocence Project says that the informant's testimony, which was uncorroborated and apparently shifting, was used by the prosecutor at the time of the trial because Goof Off was on the children's clothing.
When defense lawyer Janene McCabe took the case to the appeals courts back in 2022, she stated that there was no evidence of the chemicals from the stain remover at the scene.
"Chemical debris analysis shows that Goof Off was not used in the fire, in the starting or the setting of the fire, or the accidental fire," said McCabe. "There is evidence that a candle was lit and that it, in fact, could have burned down, and it could have been the start of the fire."
She also said that the prosecution's lead expert during Deborah's trial in 2008, Dr. John DeHaan, provided an inaccurate analysis of the cause of the fire. In 2015, Dr. DeHaan was expelled as a member of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences because investigators said he made wrong calculations and fabricated test results in a different arson trial.
Now, following the new evidence and court ruling, a status conference will be held on May 27 to determine where the case goes from here. While the Innocence Project says they are working for a full exoneration in Ms. Nicholls' case, they did not mention anything about looking into the case against Timothy Nicholls.
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