Did Bad Fire Science Send Tim and Deb Nicholls to Prison?

Did Tim and Deb Nicholls conspire to set their house on fire, murdering their three children, or were they victims of a shoddy probe, led by John DeHaan, the pre-eminent expert who literally wrote the book on forensic fire investigation? Worse yet, could DeHaan be behind a string of wrongful convictions? For 5280 Magazine, Robert Sanchez attempts to find out.

Even so, Tim, the only person who survived the fire, became a suspect. “We did not want to believe this was intentionally set,” CSPD detective Rick Gysin told the Colorado Springs Gazette in 2008, five years after the blaze. “You don’t want to think of humanity like that.”

However, investigators eventually came to the conclusion that the fire was a triple homicide. CBI tests on the carpeting, on Tim’s sneakers and jeans, and on pajamas belonging to both Sophia and Sierra had come back positive for xylenes—colorless, flammable liquids that could be used as accelerants in fires—which gave investigators reason to believe the fire was intentionally set.

On top of that, Tim’s recollection of the fire changed with each retelling. At one point, he said he’d walked to the garage and returned to a living room filled with fire; in another, it was heavy smoke. In one, he ran to a bedroom window to get air; in another, he was lining up his children to get out of the house. “What Tim Nicholls said didn’t make a lot of sense,” Derek Graham, part of the police homicide investigation team, told the Gazette in 2008. “That was a big red flag from the beginning.”

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Is It Okay to Like Chik-fil-A?

Chik-fil-A has been a political lightning rod nearly as long as it’s been a phenomenon—and in recent years, has achieved the dubious distinction of getting blowback from both ends of the ideological spectrum. But as Clint Rainey details, the company is in the midst of a tightrope walk: listening and learning, while still preserving the customer-first approach that has set it apart from the fast-food fray. An image-rehab piece? No question. But here’s what matters: it’s smartly structured, well reported, and strong enough to make you question your own stance toward the company.

Through the years, Christian companies have varied widely on where to set boundaries between their businesses and their values. For every Tom Monaghan, the Domino’s cofounder and devout Catholic who donated so much money to anti-abortion groups in the 1980s that he triggered a pizza boycott from the National Organization for Women, or the Green family, who got the Supreme Court to carve out a right to religious freedom for Hobby Lobby by suing to overturn the Obamacare contraceptive mandate, there is a more subtle player. Take the Snyder family, owners of In-N-Out Burger, who for 40 years have done little beyond stamping Bible verse references onto various food and beverage packaging items. “There are lots of ways to be a Christian business,” says Jonathan Merritt, author of several books about Christianity, including A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture Wars. “And some are riskier than others.”

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Ride Sounds

Joe Lindsey has been writing about cycling since Jonas Vingegaard was using training wheels. When hereditary hearing loss turned into something even more incapacitating, he was forced to re-engage with the sport and pastime he loved—an interior upheaval that continued even after all his senses returned. A lovely, meditative read.

Last year, Bicycling magazine published a short video about a blind bike mechanic in Iran. In it, Reza Alizadeh explains how he uses touch to replace his sight when working on a bike. “The majority of the work for a blind person relies heavily on a sense of touching,” he says at one point. Like Alizadeh for his sight, I used touch to replace sound. And even after regaining my hearing, those techniques stayed with me.

When I tune a drivetrain, in addition to using my sight, I now place a finger on the back of the rear derailleur; I can turn a limit screw or the barrel adjuster (or press Di2 buttons in the micro-adjust setting) and as I hand-turn the cranks I can sense the change in the chain’s vibrations as the pulley cage moves. When truing a wheel, the whispered scrape of rim on caliper is, for me, felt in the stand as much as heard. A creak in the bottom bracket? A subtle vibration through the crankarm and pedal, to the strain gauge that is the nerves in my foot, exquisitely more sensitive than the most-accurate power meter on the market.

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Our Top Reading Lists

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

The Longreads editors love to curate the best nonfiction stories on the web for our readers, but we are always happy to have some help! 2023 has been another year where we have published reading lists from outside contributors—on eclectic topics that range from Taylor Swift to neuroscience.

We have been lucky enough to have garnered some regular reading list authors, but we are always happy to welcome first-time listers into the fold. Our top 10 most popular lists of the year include curation from both veterans and new authors, and we are delighted to remind you of their many fantastic recommendations—get comfortable before you dive in, you may be here awhile. 

We’ll continue to commission and publish reading lists in 2024. So, if you’ve got a great idea for a list, please pitch us.

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1. A Reading List About the Neurology of Reading (Melanie Hamon, February 2023)

Seven stories exploring the surprising neuroscience behind the mutability of language and the reading brain.

2. Paging Dr. House: A Medical Mysteries Reading List (Lisa Bubert, March 2023)

In the spirit of TV’s Holmesian healer, enjoy these diagnostic digressions.

3. The Parent Dilemma: Should I have a Child? (Clare Egan, August 2023)

Clare Egan doesn’t know if she wants kids. Will this reading list help?

4. Working on the Edge: A Reading List About Extreme Jobs (Chris Wheatley, June 2023)

A livelihood is not a life—yet many risk the latter in order to create the former.

5. Not Serious People: A Succession Reading List (Chloe Walker, May 2023)

Great writing begets great writing — and the commentary around the HBO smash hit is some of the best around.

6. There She Goes: A Reading List on Women Adventurers (Ailsa Ross, April 2023)

The women you’ll find on top of the world.

7. Librarians on the Front Lines: A Reading List for Library Lovers and Realists (Lisa Bubert, September 2023)

Increasingly, being a librarian is less and less about books and more and more about community survival.

8. From Identity to Inspiration: A Reading List on Why We Run (Sheon Han, February 2023)

Sheon Han built a running habit during lockdown. In this collection, he highlights six writers’ insights on the sport.

9. Read ‘Em and Weep: A Reading List for Criers (Rachel Dlugatch, July 2023)

Grab your handkerchief and get ready for the waterworks.

10. Imperial Eras: A Taylor Swift Reading List (Jill Spivey Caddell, October 2023)

How Taylor Swift reflects every possible version of ourselves.

Explore our Best of 2023 lists

You can also browse all of our year-end collections since 2011 in one place.

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The Librarian Who Couldn’t Take It Anymore

Tania Galiñanes, a librarian at Tohopekaliga High School in Kissimmee, Florida, loves books. But with the spread of book bans across public schools in the state, she decided she’d had enough—and quit. For The Washington Post, Ruby Cramer reports on what’s happening in school libraries across the U.S., like this one, and recounts Galiñanes’ last day at work.

She was tired. Her husband was always reminding her: Tania, you have no sense of self-preservation. She had thought about pushing back against the district, had imagined putting up posters all over the walls from the American Library Association celebrating “freedom to read,” a final act before her last day on Friday. But even if she did put up the posters, who would be there to see them once she left? The library would be closed after this week, until they found someone to take her place.

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How Sandra Hüller Approached Playing a Nazi

One of Germany’s most celebrated actresses probes characters with unusual depth. But to portray a Fascist wife, in “The Zone of Interest,” she reversed her usual method—and withheld her empathy. Rebecca Mead talks to Hüller about her craft:

When Hüller was approached to play Hedwig, she was initially skeptical. “I always refused to play Fascists—which, of course, especially in international productions, come your way from time to time as a German actress,” she told me over lunch at a restaurant in Leipzig, where she lives with her twelve-year-old daughter. (Hüller is not with the girl’s father.) The neighborhood was filled with galleries and restaurants, and the pavement of its main street, Karl-Heine Strasse, was studded with Stolpersteine—memorial plaques outside buildings whose former residents were murdered in the Holocaust. We sat in a pleasant outdoor area, and Hüller’s dog, a Weimaraner mix, rested beside her on a blanket that Hüller had brought from home. (The dog appears in “The Zone of Interest” as the family pet.) “I didn’t like the idea of putting on a Nazi uniform like that, or using language like that—to get close to the energy of that, or to discover there would be fun in that,” Hüller went on. “I have seen colleagues that actually have fun doing it. Maybe it’s still in their bodies from former generations. They like to change their language and speak like that”—the tone of her voice changed, her usually soft-spoken, careful speech becoming harsh and rat-a-tat. Reverting to her own voice, she asked, “Why do they do it? They could speak like a normal person.”

Hüller also disapproves of projects that use the Nazi era as a canvas upon which to paint a dramatic story that has little to do with Fascism. (Netflix’s recent soapy drama “All the Light We Cannot See” could be considered a prime example.) She was therefore attracted to the pointed absence of drama in Glazer’s screenplay: nothing much happens beyond what we know is happening offscreen, as the murderous apparatus under Höss’s command becomes ever more efficient. She told me, “Jonathan and I had a lot of conversations about the traps in this kind of story we wanted to tell—which is not really a story. There is a couple, and one wants to leave, and the other doesn’t.

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What Happens to a School Shooter’s Sister?

Twenty-five years ago, ninth grader Kip Kinkel shot and killed his parents and then opened fire at his school, Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon, killing two teenagers and injuring 25 students. This was in 1998, before the rise of school shootings and gun violence had yet to put places like Columbine and Parkland on the map. While Kip has been in prison, he has stayed in close contact with his older sister, Kristin; she is his lifeline and the reason why Kip is still alive today. How has the tragedy affected Kristin? Has she been able to create an existence distinct from her identity as Kip Kinkel’s sister? Jennifer Gonnerman tackles a tough story.

I was surprised by her willingness to be so candid with a stranger. It seemed that part of her decision to speak with me had to do with timing—this year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of her brother’s crimes. In the past, she had worried that anything she said publicly might bring more pain to the families of the students Kip had shot, but now that a quarter century had passed she hoped this was less likely. I also sensed that her decision to tell her story was driven in large part by a desire to help her brother. He remains in prison, but they are still in close contact.

We sat down at a table together, and I asked Kip what his life would have been like if his sister had not stood by him. He answered without hesitating. “I probably wouldn’t be here,” he said. “If I didn’t have her love and support, I probably would have ended things a long time ago.”

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