They were grieving a great deal and there was a lot of pressure on the police department to try to figure out who did this. In

2012, two years after Heidi's murder, Sergeant Jake Peterson became the third police officer to lead the investigation. Even though that sketch hadn't yielded any results, he thought it was still the best way to keep Heidi's case alive.

I wanted to continue running with that and that's one of the things that I did over the course of the next couple of years was try to get that sketch out into the public. And is this a person in our community that we could be looking for? So you guys really put a lot of effort in trying to get that sketch in front of as many eyes as you could at this point. We did. We met with the news media regularly and we did frequent news releases with our local newspaper.

He says every year, a few tips would trickle in. None panned out. In 2015, on the fifth anniversary of Heidi's death, Peterson, his expectations low, once again released the sketch to the media. And once again, his phone rang.

I remember it pretty clearly.

This time, the caller told Peterson she knew the man in the sketch. It appeared Nick's detailed description of Heidi's killer was

about to pay off.

It was fantastic. We thought maybe this was it. Maybe this was kind of that one puzzle piece that we were missing.

It was 2015,

five years after Heidi's murder, and for her family, five years of a tortured existence.

Nobody has been arrested, nobody's been charged, nobody's been found at fault for killing your sister. What are these days like for

you? The not knowing? Yeah. It felt helpless and frustrating, kind of altogether.

I think there was just a low-grade anxiety about it, too, just the unfinishedness

of it.

But I also feel like, you know, our faith really helped us along.

Sergeant Jake Peterson and his team were still working the case. All they had was that intruder sketch, the one based on Nick's description. One day, Peterson got a phone call from a woman.

And she said, are you the detective that's working on this case? Said yes. She says, well, I know who is in that sketch. I know

who that is. What did you say when you heard that?

I was a little bit shocked at the time, but of course I grabbed my notepad and said, well, who are you? You're madly scribbling. Absolutely.

This is the first time in five years that you've gotten any sort of tip. This is really the biggest tip you've gotten at this point. Yes, it was. And what did she tell you?

I met with her and she said, I know who's in the sketch. His name is Michael Pie. I know him from the downtown St. Paul area. She had very great detailed information, and she was very certain of it. How groundbreaking was this for you and for this investigation? It was fantastic. We thought maybe this was it. Maybe this was kind of that one puzzle piece that we were missing.

Finally, some good news for Heidi's family.

And I remember calling to say, hey, we got a good tip. Like, I couldn't wait to share it with them that the newspaper article had worked, and maybe we had something.

Now, Peterson had a new mission to find Michael Pie. Did you

go after this with everything that you had?

We started to immediately figure out who is Michael Pie and where is he and where can I find them and where can I talk to him? What do

you learn about him?

We have a database that shows us where people are at, what kind of crimes they've been convicted of, what they look like, and it was perfect. He looked identical to the sketch, and he'd been convicted of violent burglary crimes. He had a pretty long rap sheet. He did, and we went to talk to him so that we could find out all about him and what he was doing on the morning that Heidi was killed. Where did you find him? We found him in the Department of Corrections. He was locked up in jail, and I went to interview him as soon as I could.

Pie was serving time for three counts of burglary and one count of kidnapping when the officers came to visit. And

how did that play out? I think he was shocked to have a visitor. We came unannounced, and I'm sure that he had no idea why we were there. And here we're wearing suits, and we identify ourselves as homicide investigators from St. Paul. So I think he was reeling from the get-go of why are these people here talking to me? He heard homicide. Absolutely. So he was a little bit taken aback, I think, by it. And we introduced ourselves and told them that we were investigating a case that happened in 2010 and started to learn a little bit about him.

Peterson's has pie gave him a rundown of his criminal history, his burglaries, and how he did them. In

2009, 2010, around that time period, he was breaking into homes when the people were there, and he would pound in the doors and he would charge them and attack them, and it was eerily

similar to... Almost identical. Almost identical to what had happened

to Heidi.

Almost identical, except no one was killed in those robberies. Even so, the more Peterson talked to Pie, the more he believed he had found his man, so he decided to try a little test.

During the interview, I pulled out the sketch. I had brought a copy with me, a full-size copy with me, and I showed it to him.

What did he say when he looked at that picture? He

said, that's me.

Did that stop you in your tracks?

It was fantastic. It was just a lift of hope that you're on the right track here, and this is what you live for as a homicide detective. You look for these moments and these clues and these opportunities that now you can charge forward. So you're sitting in the cell with this

guy who is a dead ringer for this sketch.

Are you thinking, we did it. We got him. Yeah.

Did they have him?

You've broken in homes. You've committed crimes. Have you ever killed anybody?

When

Sergeant Peterson first met Michael Pie, he thought he had finally found the man who killed Heidi Firkus. We went to meet him. I

was born and raised in Detroit.

Pie told us he grew up in a big family there with a fairly happy childhood. But his life of crime, he says, started early. From age 11, he was in and out of juvenile detention.

By the time you were 17, 18 years old, what did crimes look like for you then?

Yeah, it was a armed robbery. A robbery? Yeah. I only snatched the purse one time. A snatched the purse and got caught.

Pie served time for that robbery

and others.

He says when he got out of prison and moved to St. Paul, he stayed on the right side of the law for about 15 years. But by 2009, he was in his early 50s. Times were rough.

I lost my apartment. I lost my car. And it was wintertime on the streets. And I just went back to what I knew. I hollered you. You know, that was home in the Asian. So

describe to me what that looked like. I

would go up to the door and if it had a screen door, I would cut the screen and unlock the lats and close the screen door back and then ring the doorbell. So they would open up the front door thinking that the screen door is locked. And I would just rush in there and tie them up and rob them.

Would you ever bring guns in when you do this? No, never.

Pie was in the middle of serving a 10 and a half year prison sentence when the officers came to visit. Now this

is familiar to you. Yeah, that's

me. Is that you? When

you saw that sketch back in 2015, the police laid that down in front of you. What did you think? When they

put it on the table, I said, that's me boo. What y'all trying to do? Give me another case or something? But there's no denying that that was your face. No, no doubt. No doubt. No doubt. Them eyes, them eyes just look. And that's crazy. And

your nose is spot on. Yeah, yeah. Did you think that they were talking about another home invasion or something that you

had done in the past?

I didn't know, but I knew it was something that I hadn't did because they said it was a murder involved. And I said, well, I ain't kill nobody.

That's exactly what he said. He said, that's me, but I didn't kill anybody. I never killed anybody.

But Peterson wasn't convinced. He couldn't ignore the sketch or pie's criminal history.

We started to dig more into Michael and find out more about him and we discovered a major problem. He was locked up in jail the day that Heidi was killed. He couldn't have done it. He couldn't have done it. And I remember we actually wanted to double check with the jail records because I just couldn't believe that he was really locked up at that time. He really had the perfect alibi. There was nothing we could do about it. He could not have done this.

So in an ironic way, the fact that he was in prison in April of 2010, possibly saved his life. Absolutely. Absolutely

it did. And kept him from being blamed or wrongly accused or wrongly charged for this crime. Do

you think about what would have

happened if you were not

in prison when that murder happened? Yeah. I'd have

been locked up and everybody would be talking about, you know, Mike did that.

So yeah. You think he'd still be in prison today?

Yeah, and it wouldn't get out. I'd probably be in the

rest of my life. Instead, when Michael Pie walked out of prison in 2017, he never looked back. He says he looked to God, joining a Christian ministry in St. Paul and turning his life around. Do you

feel like a whole new person? Oh, I am a new person.

Peterson felt terrible that the wrong guy almost took the fall. And the whole Michael Pie episode was a tough setback for his investigation. It was

really disappointing. It was really sad.

But it did lead to a sort of breakthrough, as he started wondering more and more about the person who led them to Michael Pie in the first place.

Why does somebody release a sketch that looks identical to somebody committing crimes in the community? Why would you do that, or where would you get that sketch from? So that kind of opened up a whole new door. Your mind shifted

to Nick? Correct. The Sergeant Jake Peterson was at his wit's end. He had just seen his best lead in Heidi's murder case fall apart.

I know that the guy in the sketch was locked up at the time of this. He wasn't involved in this crime in any way.

Peterson's thoughts turned to Nick.

You released a sketch of a innocent black man who was locked up at the time of this killing.

Nick still wasn't talking, but Peterson learned something interesting. It turned out in the months before Heidi's death, Pie's crimes had been in the news. The investigator suspected that Nick saw those stories and Pie's mugshots and hatched a plan to frame Pie. Did you feel that Nick had led you down this five-year path to

nowhere? I

think that's what we all thought, is we were chasing a ghost that didn't exist, and so now our efforts need to change and go a different direction.

But as Peterson shifted his focus to Nick, he found himself hitting the same roadblocks.

We had all the physical evidence that we were always going to have. We had no contact with Nick. We had no contact with his family. And we were still left holding

nothing. Peterson

worked on the case for four more years until he was promoted out of the homicide unit to Commander. A new lead investigator was brought in. What I

hoped to do was bring it to a conclusion. That

was Sergeant Nicky Sypes.

You are the fourth detective to take this case. Correct.

Three others had been working this for almost a decade. Did you

think that you could solve this case? To be

honest, I always thought the case was solved.

So you thought you already knew who did it? I believed I did. Who?

I believe Nick Firkus killed his wife.

She wasn't alone. Both Gray and Peterson thought the same thing. They just hadn't been able to prove it.

You really felt a personal connection to this case.

I did. I really had a problem with the idea that there was no justice in this case and that someone could do this and just be walking around and living their life. It became very important just for the sake of giving the family a sense of closure.

When Sergeant Sypes went to speak with Heidi's family, they told her they'd had questions about Nick from the beginning.

I think what we've been taught our whole lives of thinking the best of people. We didn't want it to be Nick.

But you already had your suspicions. We had our suspicions.

And Heidi's family had some advice for the investigator. Follow the money or the lack of it. Remember, when Nick spoke to police, he told them about the financial problems he and Heidi were having. It's a hard place for us. We fall in close to our house. Not only that, they were due to be evicted at 12 noon the day after Heidi's murder. Nick told police he and Heidi were embarrassed and kept the news from their loved ones.

None of our parents are none of our friends. No one knows about this except you and Heidi. And Heidi, that's right.

Heidi's family told Sergeant Sypes that when they learned about the foreclosure after Heidi's death, it was a huge red flag. Superjocken.

When

you heard that,

did that change your thoughts of Nick? Yes.

That wouldn't be something that she would be able to keep to herself. She would have told

you,

her parents, family, somebody. Correct.

That was a line in the sand

moment for sure. A line in the sand.

What's more, they say if she knew about the eviction coming the next day, Heidi the planner would have packed everything up to move out. But nothing was packed. All their clothes were still in the closet. Sypes says she went through Heidi's texts and emails to Nick in the days before the murder.

When you examine that and you see that between a husband and a wife who are losing their home, that there is no communication about moving. Moving is not something you do on a

whim,

right? So we were looking for even these tiniest little

of clues to say, well, did she know something was up?

And we just couldn't find them. What we could see is that she had knowledge. There was something wrong financially with their bank account. We could see that.

But we could also see

her asking him to take care

of it over and over.

And what did that tell

you about their relationship, about the way that they interacted? It told me everything I needed to know in the fact that Nick was handling the finances. He was telling Heidi what he wanted her to know. And she believed him. He was her

husband. They were young.

They were in love. She had no reason to doubt him.

No reason to doubt him.

Once you got all of that information, what did that tell you? How did that impact your investigation? It confirmed

to me that Heidi did not know about the mortgage and the foreclosure in the eviction.

And this just pokes holes in Nick's story. Correct.

Sypes was just getting started. And then in 2020, barely a year after she took on the case, the investigator heard some big news. Nick and his second wife Rachel had recently divorced.

What do you decide

to do? Oh, I want to talk to Rachel. Immediately. I want to do that more than breathe. Yes.

Talk to her. What did she have to say?